Review: Va Savoir / Who Knows (2001)

After three years' absence, stage actress Camille Renard (Jeanne Balibar) returns to Paris to perform in an Italian play. The company's director and her lover, Ugo Bassini (Sergio Castellitto) frets that the season would be a failure. Between performances, the two drift apart. Camille visits her ex-lover, Pierre (Jacques Bonnaffé), a philosophy lecturer who is still working on his thesis on Heidegger. She finds him rather cold towards her, and he is now married to Sonia (Marianne Basler), a ballet teacher. Meanwhile Ugo spends his time visiting libraries looking for a missing manuscript by an 19th century playwright, where he meets Dominque (Hélène de Fougerolles), a delectable graduate student. Ugo later discovers that Dominque's family may have a copy of the manuscript he is looking for. The circle of relationships between the characters closes when we find that Dominique's half-brother, Arthur (Bruno Todeschini), a gambler, is seducing Sonia with the intention of stealing her ring.

Director and co-writer Jacques Rivette constructs a refined farce where the characters search for something that is right under their noses, and their story is reflected in the (uncredited) Pirandello play that Camille and Ugo are staging. It's a slow-paced film (the version I watched is 154 minutes long, and there's an even longer version!) and while I was not bored, this film is probably aimed at viewers more literate in theatre and literature than me.

French and Italian with English subtitles.

3 out of 5 stars.

Review was originally published in Morva House.

Review: Bitter Medicine by Sara Paretsky (1987)

During a hot August month in Chicago, private detective V. I. Warshawski investigates a murder which may have been triggered by a tragic event. In the course of her work, she runs into street gangs, pro-lifers, her ex-husband and the shady side of private medical care.

In this novel, the fourth featuring VIW, Paretsky has an accomplished, no-nonsense style befitting her tough-as-nails protagonist. Paretsky's style does make VIW seem a little cold blooded and sometimes a bit petty. It also makes VIW appear to be inordinately concerned about dressing correctly, which probably makes sense given that she usually relies on other characters' preconceptions to gain evidence.

One weakness is that the villain hardly features in the novel and, given what we are told, it makes the motivation for the crime a little far-fetched. Still, the pages turn quickly, there's some suspenseful moments and all loose ends are tied up in the end.

Stars: 3 out of 5

Review was original published in Morva House

Review: Cowboy Bebop – The Movie (2001)

The crew of the spaceship Bebop, cowboys (bounty hunters) Spike Spiegel, Jet Black and Faye Valentine, and their companions computer hacker Edward and enhanced dog Ein, who previously appeared in a TV series that ran from 1998 to 1999, return for another adventure in this animated film. This time, an ex-soldier, Vincent Volajo, threatens to unleash a biological weapon to wipe out the people of Alpha, a Martian city. As the police and Spike hunt down Vincent, Spike meets Electra, an army investigator and Vincent's ex-lover.

The film takes place somewhere mid-series but the back story doesn't matter much, though newcomers might wonder why the future looks like a mashup of high-tech metropolises and the wild west. Director Shinichirô Watanabe has a bigger budget for this film than in the TV series, and the higher art, animation and production values are obvious. The fight sequences between Spike and Vincent are quite amazing without the motion capture technology available for later anime films. The series is well known for its strong jazz soundtrack, and in this film, the jazz-pop music by Yôko Kanno doesn't disappoint.

Too bad that the screenplay by Keiko Nobumoto, based on a story by Hajime Yatate, doesn't actually make sense. The film also suffers, just a little though, from the dreaded anime mid-film sag when characters ruminate on life in the most boring way possible for minutes.

For fans of the series, it's fun to watch the characters in action again.

3 out of 5 stars.

Review was originally published in Morva House.