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.