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Indie flix
Movies in limited release:
By Times staff
© St. Petersburg Times,
published July 26, 2001
It's all in the perception
[Photo: Miramax]
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The Closet (NR) (84 min.) -- French director Francis Veber revives a character from his art house hit The Dinner Game for a brisk poke at political correctness. Daniel Auteuil plays Pignon, an accountant on the verge of being fired. Pignon starts a rumor that he is homosexual, believing his bosses will keep him instead of facing discrimination charges.
Hollywood Reporter film critic Judith Prescott wrote: "In the hands of a less subtle director, a film like this risks degenerating into a grotesque parody of how a straight man plays gay. Veber's talent is in leaving Pignon completely unchanged. As one character says to Pignon, it's not what you are that matters but what you are seen to be.
"Auteuil excels as the self-effacing Pignon, who gradually comes out -- of his shell, that is. But the rest of the cast members, particularly Gerard Depardieu, seem uncomfortable.
"Depardieu plays Santini, an unreconstructed homophobe forced to befriend Pignon to keep his job. Through his friendship with Pignon, the tough nut discovers that he has a soft center and more. As the macho bigot, Depardieu is good, but the big actor is less convincing when required to show a more sensitive side."
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Opens Friday at Tampa Theatre.
-- STEVE PERSALL, Times film critic
The life of a muse
Bride of the Wind (R) (99 min.) -- Alma Mahler periodically surfaces as a figure of cultural significance, but not as an entirely serious one. Though distinguished as a writer of diaries, letters and memoirs and as a composer of songs, she is mainly remembered for being the muse of great artists.
Alma was married, in succession, to the composer and conductor Gustav Mahler, the architect Walter Gropius and the writer Franz Werfel, not to mention her affairs with other notables from turn-of-the-century Vienna, such as the painter Oskar Kokoschka and the composer Alexander Zemlinsky. Her many loves were brilliantly spoofed in Tom Lehrer's song about "the loveliest girl in Vienna."
Now there's a movie by sometime opera director Bruce Beresford (Breaker Morant, Driving Miss Daisy) that seeks to take Alma seriously as a composer. Bride of the Wind is a biopic that turns on the question: What would have happened if Alma had continued composing?
Mahler made her give it up for the sake of his career, their home and family. "Would it be possible for you to think of my music as yours from now on?" Gustav (Jonathan Pryce) asks Alma (Sarah Wynter).
However, except for occasional dreamy scenes of Alma at the keyboard, the movie has trouble sustaining interest in her slim output as a composer. Instead, Marilyn Levy's screenplay goes from one lover to the next in numbing literal-mindedness. Portraying Alma as a thwarted artist must have seemed like a good idea, but it doesn't hold up. She had only 14 songs published, and most were composed before she married Mahler.
Still, soprano Renee Fleming, playing Frances Alda, a great diva of the time, makes Alma's Laue Sommernacht (Balmy Summer Night) sound lovely indeed in the movie's last scene, a recital in Brahms Hall of the Musikverein in Vienna.
Opens Friday at Channelside in Tampa. B
-- JOHN FLEMING, Times performing arts critic
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