Cinema
Guttural
Peter Ackroyd
The Moon in the Gutter (`18', Lumiere Cinema)
The last film made by Jean-Jacques Beineix, Diva, was so odd that it Pro: yoked a great deal of favourable comment, by combining opera, organised crime and (as far as I remember) a garage mechanic it proved that even the most silly film, if it has faith in its own silliness, can retain the attention of an audience. But, to adapt some of the lines from Beineix's new filth, `twelve months had passed: many moons had risen in the black sky and we had gr001, weary'. On a set that looks like the stage 01 the Hammersmith Palais, but is meant to be an area of dockland, Gerard Depardieu air pears. M. Depardieu now makes at least three films a year, and even his particular brand of bovine charm can wear a little, thin: he is a stevedore here, the object 0; practically anyone's passion, but he carl° find rest until he discovers the man vill.°t raped his sister and left her to con1011, suicide. He stumbles from bar to bar, oeca sionally glancing up at the moon and of course often ending up in the gutter hence the picturesque if not unfamiliar title of this picture. And then Nastassia Kinski moves for- ward, wearing a diaphanous gown. She ap- Pears to be smiling but the back-lighting, and the soft-focus lens used to extract her essential mystery, make it difficult to tell. When she talks — 'Shall I call an ambu- lance?' are some of her first words — the music melts and slides. She is the 'poor little rich kid' (in other words, she spends most of her time in a red sports car) who cannot wait to take the lachrymose stevedore away from all that squalor. Miss Kinski may have wanted to become the new Garbo, but to j,kidge by her recent performances she will be lucky to end up as a house model for Jaeger. It is not her fault entirely; she has a certain presence on the screen, but she in- variably picks the wrong films in which to appear. Only a few months ago she had What was by any standards a rough time in the ludicrous Exposed, and before that it Was Cat People; and now this. Perhaps the curse of Polanski is upon her, doomed Forever to wander from one bad 'art' film to another. Her role in The Moon in the Gutter is that of the femme fatale who will rescue the stevedore from his obsession with his dead sister. As the lights in the cinema come up, not a moment too soon, they have em- braced and have found a new life together. It is, in other words, the kind of 'romantic' Picture which MGM or Paramount would have manufactured some years ago. But Beineix clearly wants us to believe that he is doing more than simply dressing up the old Cliches in new costumes. There are a number of rather cryptic conversations and Pregnant silences which are meant to impart an air of calculated lyricism and discontin- uity; these are combined with fussy direc- tion and cinematography in order to lend significance to material which in its raw state does not possess any. The result is „merely ridiculous, where it is not porten- tous.
Asa result, the film staggers from one ',lanai effect to another, and after the first 'tour the narrative ceases to make any sense. A black woman appears from time to time and screams in bad French — or Perhaps they were just bad screams — and °me drunken hags roll about on the floor obligator a 'dive'. There is, of course, the i;
"gatOrY sex but one understands now `_gat, when explicit sex is shown on the
it is an indication of the fact that the _irector has quite run out of ways to amuse derived entertain an audience. The plot has been merived from a novel by David Goodis, an American who according to the publicity Material 'remains ... one of the darkest dearest Most despairing writers, and one of the 4earest to the hearts of French readers'. Another Edgar Allen Poe, despised in his native country and worshipped by the French? Perhaps, but not if this script has anything to do with it.
Those who admire such work explain
that narrative and characterisation are not important: one just has to sit back and allow all those gorgeous images to work their own magic. It is true that Beineix seems most competent when he is creating visual effects — he has an especial fondness for dominant shades of blue or green, shiny surfaces, contrasts of light and shadow. But these effects are really no different from those used in the more 'sophisticated' forms of television advertisement — the ones that sell hair-spray or perfume — and in fact the studied 'glamour' in which he wraps his films suggests that advertising is his proper home. And in any case it is not enough for a director to rely upon light and colour: it suggests a paucity of imagination, and an inability to work in anything other than a local and superficial manner. Cer- tainly Beineix has no coherent vision of his own; all of the images he employs — cur- tains blowing in the wind, eyes peering through keyholes, sunrises, broken bottles — are derivative, and there were times when The Moon in the Gutter resembled an anthology of all the worst moments in the contemporary European cinema, with ex- tracts from Fassbinder, Antonioni, Fellini and even Bunuel tied together with tinsel and old rope. His is one of the few cases of a film director who would be better off working in practically any other medium: opera, perhaps, or the more popular forms of theatre, might provide him with a con- text for his derivative and sentimental im- agination — that is, of course, if J. Walter Thompson decide not to hire him.
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