Capsules

Brick Lane, Hellboy II: The Golden Army and The Last Mistress

New Releases

If it offers nothing else of note, Sarah Gavron’s take on Monica Ali’s 2003 bestseller bequeaths what may be the most cartoonishly awful husband in film history.

Brick Lane follows a beautiful Bangladeshi woman (Tannishtha Chatterjee) ripped from her picturesque home to live in a miserable arranged marriage in East End London. Played by Satish Kaushik, in the film’s only credible performance, this husband is in a more perverse league of emotional abusers than, say, Danny Glover as a rapist/wife-beater in The Color Purple. He’s an arrogant, selfish, sexist, wildly self-delusional tubby hubby who pumps his disproportionately attractive spouse for loveless coitus when he’s not forcing her to routinely trim his corns. (And he snores!)

What takes him from character to caricature is that his tyranny is carried out with a certain childishness, with Kaushik playing him more like Little Lord Fauntleroy than your usual spousal oppressor. Believe it or not, Brick Lane ultimately wants us to sympathize with this lout, which wouldn’t be so offensive if it didn’t spend nine-tenths of the running time painting him as a monster worthy of the Grimms.

Ali’s novel is reportedly rich with Dickensian characters and life, and it’s hard not to imagine what fellow South Asian Mira Nair—who directed The Namesake, an infinitely more complex flick about arranged marriages—would’ve done with Brick Lane’s script. In Gavron’s hands it becomes a lifeless slog with Chatterjee oppressed, oppressed and oppressed until falling into an affair with a progressive-minded hunk (Christopher Simpson).

That’s not the happy ending, though. Simpson’s dashing piece of hotcha eventually becomes one of those unsavory Muslim activist types, at which point the asshole back home who complains his wife is giving him nothing but daughters doesn’t look so loathsome anymore.

Brick Lane never completely comes around on the patriarchal system it spends most of its time decrying, but it also never captures its heroine’s roiling passions. It’s simply too busy making familiar points on tradition and modernity to convey what happens when a kept woman finally gets some serious cock.

A couple years ago every blockbuster sported not-so-subtle allusions to Iraq. This summer it’s the environment. The last couple weeks have featured tsk-tsks in The Happening, Wall-E and now the bigger, busier and sort of unnecessary sequel to 2004’s so-so-performing Hellboy.

Early on, the Edgar Winter-looking villain explains his mission to vanquish humanity for the havoc it’s wreaked upon the planet. But going green is just one of the many, many items on Hellboy II’s ADD-addled mind. In fact, what initially appears to be the film’s central quandary—whether the big red guy (Ron Perlman) and his partners, pyrotechnic Liz (Selma Blair) and fishy Abe Sapien (Doug Jones), should spare humanity from destruction—is raised only to be forgotten in the next scene.

Instead what’s most consistently on the mind of director Guillermo del Toro, following up his award-gobbling Pan’s Labyrinth (and prepping for The Hobbit), is creatures—and plenty of ’em.

Literally every couple minutes a new jaw-dropping beast appears on the screen. A bear-thingie with porcupine spears on its back. Hungry pixie-ish “tooth fairies.” A belligerent beanstalk. An angel with a phalanx of eyes on its wings. And on and on. By the time the film gets to what should be del Toro’s own Star Wars cantina scene—an honest-to-God “troll market”—he’s all but exhausted himself.

Del Toro’s smart enough to give his best creation—a gas spirit who inhabits a robot husk and is voiced, with a ridiculous German accent, by Seth MacFarlane—a major supporting role. But more often these marvels of design are on-screen for a few fleeting moments. Is del Toro so cocky an inventor of coolass creatures he can waste even a dude with a cathedral for a head?

It would seem so, or else he’s just covering up for a sloppy, unfocused screenplay, not to mention a central trio who have already worn out their welcome in the first sequel. Del Toro has always sacrificed rigor for a constant upchucking of visuals; even Pan’s Labyrinth feels pretty slapdash till the last few devastatingly focused reels.

Hellboy II is all visuals. With little attempt to organically implement them into the plot, it’s essentially nothing more than one awesome creature after another. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Is The Last Mistress the first Catherine Breillat film one can recommend to their grandma? Maybe. It sure is strange that a film from such an unfailing provocateur takes a full 40 minutes to give us a flash of flesh—and then it’s just a naughty drawing on a matchbox.

The rest of The Last Mistress is less chaste, but it still never offers anything in the same universe as a worm dangled over a lady’s private parts (A Real Young Girl), unsimulated porking (Romance) or any of the various unmentionables in Anatomy of Hell.

What it does share with other Breillat films is what really matters about them: an almost nihilistic portrayal of the damage people to do to each other, in the bedroom and elsewhere. Adapting a scandalous 19th-century novel from Jules-Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly, Mistress finds the director in period fixings for the first time. There, among the covert psychological and emotional game-playing, she’s surprisingly not so snug.

Unfolding on simmer, Mistress quietly depicts the vicious battle of wits between the titular paramour, played with smoldering vampishness by Asia Argento, and her longtime younger lover, dashing libertine Fu’ad Aît Aattou. When Aattou announces he’s going to wed a younger, richer, blonder specimen, Argento puts up a fight—a battle that eventually pits both of them against Aattou’s pert bride and a galley of snickering society dames.

The bulk of Mistress is actually a flashback revealing Argento and Aattou’s unexpected history, itself another prickly battle of wits. Argento’s Spanish mistress is a modern woman, for the 18th century and ours as well: a cigar-chomping, sexually voracious creature who mumbles her dialogue like Brando and likes to tell her lovers she’ll make them her slave. It’s the role Argento was born to play, and she doesn’t disappoint when, after Aattou is wounded in a duel, she charges in and hungrily licks the bloody wound.

Mistress, like all Breillats, is steeped in radical feminism, but she doesn’t shy away from doting on Aattou, who delivers a performance every bit his co-star’s equal. Pretty and he knows it, his self-satisfaction barely masks inner anguish—he’s like Louis Garrel with a soul. Watching him slowly deflate is galling stuff, proof that Breillat is as comfortable dealing in real emotions as she is dreaming up stuff like Anatomy of Hell’s infamous teacup scene.

Not Reviewed

A hot chick deals with some personal problems while Prague gets flooded. (Opens Fri., July 18.)

The best part about this animated monkeys-in-space flick starring Andy Samberg is that it reminds us how long it’s been since we last YouTubed “Dick in a Box.” (Opens Fri., July 18.)