Four Nights With Anna (Jerzy Skolimowski, Poland/France): 39

Having already seen this basic lovelorn-stalker scenario realized to devastating effect by both Patrice Leconte (in Monsieur Hire) and Krzysztof Kieslowski (in Decalogue Six, only one of the greatest films ever made), I quickly grew impatient with Skolimowski's lumbering, faintly comic variation, which takes its protagonist's essentially infantile nature an unnecessary step further by actually making him borderline retarded. Imagine this harmless perv as a maladjusted teenage boy, which he more or less is, and you can see a certain affinity with the director's superb 1971 coming-of-age tale Deep End -- but there the similarity ends, alas. Both Deep End and the equally terrific Moonlighting (1982) are endlessly nuanced, constantly lobbing little hand grenades of unexpected but entirely credible human behavior. But 17 years away from the camera seems to have badly rusted Skolimowski's hinges, comeback ballyhoo notwithstanding. Here, his only means of distracting us from the poverty of his imagination involves truly dumbass misdirection: the opening scenes work overtime to persuade us that we're witnessing the story of a deranged serial killer, and the screenplay's overall structure is so stupidly contrived that even Guillermo Arriaga will likely slap his forehead in frustration. Really, the only interesting thing about Anna is its unusually aggressive score, which is refreshingly unashamed of its mood-enhancing function; at a time when most international art films revel in silent austerity, those shrieking violins seem downright avant-garde, even though that's exactly what you'd expect from the Hollywood equivalent. If only there were bold, striking images and/or ideas for them to complement.

Posted on 10/08/08 by: dangelo 11:55 AM