A season of good film remakes electrify Hollywood

A season of good film remakes electrify Hollywood

By Parvathi Nayar Narayan

JAKARTA (JP): Remakes of good films are usually accompanied by
a tug-of-war between being faithful to the original yet departing
from it enough to justify it being remade at all. In terms of
relevancy, what made perfect sense in the past often seems quite
dated in the modern context. To change it too much, however,
could destroy what was so good about the film in the first place.
And possibly upset die-hard fans, not to mention critics!

In the light of these dilemmas, it seems somewhat surprising
that showing in town currently are not one, but two Hollywood
remakes of two French films. Each of the originals was considered
a classic of its genre. Twelve Monkeys draws its inspiration from
French film essayist Chris Marker's 25 minute piece La Jetee
(1962); it's catastrophic future tale unfolded apparently through
black and white photographs, edited brilliantly, sequentially and
poetically, with the aid of a voice-over. Diabolique on the other
hand is based on Henri-Georges Clouzot's suspense thriller Les
Diaboliques (1955), which became quite a fount of inspiration
with its plot complexities, nasty twists and turns, and
characters to match, for films inhabiting a dark but
interestingly amoral universe.

'Twelve Monkeys'

Terry Gilliam's meticulously planned, wholly gripping, often
thoroughly weird other worlds have made for compelling viewing in
the past -- disturbing yet blackly funny in Brazil, fantastical
in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, and internalized in The
Fisher King. The mechanics of his world in Twelve Monkeys are
certainly constructed with the same loving attention to detail
and off-center vision. As with most futuristic tales, the future
Earth in Twelve Monkeys is a decidedly grim place, where a fatal
virus has annihilated most of the world's population. In the year
2035 the survivors live underground in a dark and grungy world
seemingly put together with "found objects" from the past.

James Cole (Bruce Willis) is a brutal con in a cage-like
prison, the visual imagery strangely reminiscent of lab animals
in cages, waiting to be experimented with. His chance for parole
is to "volunteer" to travel back in time and find the source of
the contagion. His only clues are that it is linked with a group
called "The Army Of The Twelve Monkeys".

Cole's time trip whisks him to the wrong year where violent
behavior has him questionably shut up in a psychiatric ward.
There he meets Jeffrey Goines (Brad Pitt) who unquestionably
belongs there. Widely accused of ostentatious preening and
chewing up the scenery, Pitt nevertheless gives a compelling
performance. He delivers his delusional ravings -- tics, jerks,
cross-eyes and all -- with energy and verve. Their psychiatrist
is Dr. Railly (Madeleine Stowe). Her field of specialty quite
appropriately turns out to be madness, prophecy and the Cassandra
syndrome, or the gift-curse of foresight coupled with the
impotence of being able to do anything about it. Still it is hard
for her to believe in Cole's predictions of doom and time-
traveler persona.

Time travel. Now that is a subject treated in some manner by
every sci-fi author or filmmaker worth his salt. That doesn't
make it any less difficult a conundrum to deal with, even if Cole
is quite clear that he does not seek to change the "past" but to
use it to help give his "present" a "future". (One can almost
hear Einstein chuckle in his relativistic heaven.) Twelve Monkeys
does tend to stagger under the weight of this and other
structural detail.

Structure in a film should be just that, the framework of an
edifice that supports without being intrusive; in Twelve Monkeys
the effort is too visible, as Gilliam labors to give us future
shock, technical brilliance, offbeat characters in strange
situations, atmospheric ambiguities and a love story all
entwined. A more convincing development of the last idea -- does
a love found in the past have a chance to beat predestined odds,
and live on into any kind of future? Perhaps given the emotional
underpinning the story needs? Willis to his credit does not act
out Cole as a further sequel to Die Hard, but unfortunately he
and Stowe have very little on-screen chemistry.

Twelve Monkeys has at its heart an intriguing concept with a
marvelous twist thrown in. It has its beautiful moments, such as
the haunting quality of Cole's boyhood dream and its eventual
resolution or the surreal opening sequence of Cole above ground
in a deserted cityscape "peopled" by stray animals. If Gilliam's
is a somewhat labored vision, it is nonetheless a passionate one
that stubbornly remains non-mainstream and non-commercial; if
only for that, his dystopian creation is worth a visit.

'Diabolique'

Director Jeremiah Chechik's Diabolique opens to a somewhat
familiar sounding triangle of man-wife-mistress, but it is
quickly apparent that all is not, er, as it seems. Tucked away in
the outskirts of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is St. Anselm, a
school for disturbed boys run by the infinitely more disturbed,
almost-sociopathic Guy Baran (Chazz Palminteri). Mia (Isabelle
Adjani) is his timid, long-suffering wife, who was once a nun and
now teaches French at the school. She lives in terror of her
husband but is attached securely to him by bonds of inarticulate
lust as well as fear. Among the public insults she suffers at the
hands of Baran are his string of infidelities. The latest being
Nicole (Sharon Stone) who also teaches at the school. She is
everything that Mia is not, cynically assertive, overtly sexy,
and a woman in control. Except that she is bound to Baran with
more or less similar chains as Mia.

The two women forge an unlikely alliance. They decide to do
away with the source of their misery, and do it comprehensively
-- Baran is drugged, beaten and drowned, and the two women
dispose of his body in the pool at the school. As they wait and
wait and wait for the body to be discovered, their well-laid
plans seem to go awry. Kathy Bates turns up as the very butch,
private investigator looking into the disappearance of Baran, and
as usual, more than holds her own in this brief role. The
relationship between wife and mistress deepens and the plot
conscientiously if predictably, moves from one twist to the next,
all the way to the surprise (ho hum) ending.

Chechnik's chief attempt at contemporising the plot seems to
consist of the more marked lesbian overtones in the Stone-Adjani
relationship; one expected more from the director of the quirky
Benny and Joon in the nature of a plot dust off. Chazz Palminteri
as the addictive object of passion of the vampishly gorgeous
Nicole and the vapidly beautiful Mia, stretches our credulity.
The strongest performance comes from Stone as the brittle Nicole.
The photography by Australian cinematographer Peter James is very
evocative, playing subtly with the theme of water through the
film. Ultimately though, the movie flounders from lack of
direction; neither Stone nor the carefully filmed scenery can
save it from sinking along with Baran's body into mediocrity.