Reviews

Films

Le Serpent

Directed by Eric Barbier, starring Yvan Attal, Clovis Cornillac

Superior thriller adapted from a novel by Ted Lewis, the Get Carter man, seamlessly relocated to contemporary France. It's very much in the neo-Hitchcockian mode, with Yvan Attal as a flawed-but-innocent photographer fending off the vengeful stratagems of a former schoolmate (Clovis Cornillac). It's slick, efficient, tough-nosed film-making, enmeshing our hapless hero more and more tightly in its narrative coils. Only a matter of time, surely, before Michael Douglas shows up in the remake.

In the Hands of the Gods

Directed by Benjamin Turner, Gabe Turner, starring Sami Hall Bassam, Mikey Fisher

Five impressively skilled freestyle footballers embark on a trip from the UK to Argentina in this documentary, to meet their idol, Diego Maradona, using nothing more than their talent and charm to cover traveling expenses. The countless hours they've spent kicking a ball aren't conducive to building social skills, so this trip rapidly becomes more about how they interact rather than their gravity defying ball.

The Yacoubian Building

Directed by Marwan Hamed, starring Adel Imam, Nour El-Sheri

Marwan Hamed's version of the bestselling novel by Alaa Al Aswany is a portmanteau account of a handful of characters living in an apartment building in Cairo in 1990, just before the first Iraq war.

The story is garrulous, unreflective stuff, much like a TV soap opera, and the interweaving narrative strands give us a broad sketch of a cosmopolitan Egyptian capital uneasily poised between the present and the past, and between Islam and the West, particularly Francophone Europe. The film's view of gay male sexuality is dated and shallow, but it is watchable, seems far shorter than its three-hour running time, and boasts a splendid central performance from Adel Imam.

Legacy

Directed by Gela Babluani, Temur Babluani, starring Sylvie Testud, Stanislas Merhar

Here, sadly, is a big disappointment. Georgian director Gela Babluani's last movie Tzameti, or 13 (2005), was brilliant: a mystery thriller about a secret game of death. At first, this looked as if it might be just as good: a film co-written and co-directed by Babluani and his father, Temur, himself an award-winning film-maker.

Three young people from France (Sylvie Testud, Stanislas Merhar, Olga Legrand) journey across Georgia because one of them has inherited a ruined castle there. On their way they chance upon a young man (played by George Babluani, the star of 13) and his grandfather (Leo Gaparidze), bizarrely carrying a coffin: The old man intends to sacrifice himself to gangsters from a neighboring village to end a blood feud.

Just as in 13, innocents have stumbled across a death cult, and become fatefully involved. But there just isn't any satisfying ending. The film stumbles into a blind alley of its own making. If you haven't seen 13 yet, get the DVD pronto. This is all too miss-able.

The Guardian

(China Daily 09/18/2007 page20)