L'illusionnist

The Illusionist is absolutely lovely.

The film concerns an aging French stage magician.  He practices an art that has gone out of vogue in a world that has passed him by.  What happens to him is, well, lovely.

The Illusionist, not to be confused with the very fine Edward Norton movie of the same title, has little dialogue.  It could have been a Chaplin film, with that Chaplinesque combination of comedy and pathos, all told with movement and photography and music.  In this case, however, the film uses a style of animation (it was nominated for Best Animated Feature in 2010) that recalls watercolors.  This gives it a soft and pleasing aesthetic, and it helps evoke a world just a little bit past, just a little bit mysterious.  The film’s music complements its visuals, accentuating and playing with them, giving The Illusionist a life beyond the screen.

My mind keeps coming back to the same word: lovely.  Lovely animation, lovely music, lovely everything.  I love it.

The Memory of a Killer

It's an old story: someone doublecrosses an assassin, and before long the bodies start piling up. You've got your good guys and bad guys trying to find the killer, and you've got your principled hit man working his way to the top, exacting revenge for the doublecross and bringing down The Man. THE MEMORY OF A KILLER, a Belgian picture from 2003, hews to this template, and it works as a character study and a police procedural. The character in question, Angelo Ledda, is a contract killer with early-stage Alzheimer's. The police procedural revolves around the detectives on his trail; and the genre-standard close calls, tantalizing clues, and conflicted detectives all play their parts seamlessly. It's a fine movie, but it's hampered by a head-scratchingly poor aesthetic choice.

TMK uses quick-cuts, flashing lights, and disorientation to indicate lapses in Ledda's cognition, but they do more than that. They annoy the the viewer. Additionally, it uses the hurry-up technique of cutting parts of footsteps and intermediate body language out of everyday events. I suspect that this is supposed to lend a sense of urgency to the proceedings, but it just gave the impression that the filmmaker's weren't sufficiently interested in the characters to let us settle in with them.

Don't get me wrong. THE MEMORY OF A KILLER (The Alzheimer's Case, in the original language), is a perfectly fine movie. But these choices relegate it to the second tier. Too bad.

Pusher

If LAYER CAKE is a movie about a genius trying to survive in a world of morons, then PUSHER (1996) is a movie about a moron trying to survive in a world of morons.

The movie follows Frank, a guy on one of the lower levels of the multi-level marketing scheme known as the Danish narcotics trade, through what may well be the last week of his life. PUSHER uses the industry-standard pattern of high life and decline, but it does so with two important deviations: it's shot with an improvisational style, using ambient light and (mostly, it seems) handheld cameras; and it doesn't give us anyone to root for. Frank is an idiotic scumbag surrounded by idiotic scumbags, and the succession of lousy decisions to which the movie bears witness does nothing to endear us to him or anyone else.

So, why bother with PUSHER? First, it puts us viewers right in Frank's increasingly uncomfortable shoes, and it takes us places where glamorous crime movies never go. Second, it manages to make us root for Frank, even as we despise him. It slowly ratchets up the tension until we find ourselves fully invested in his predicament, and its payoff is both unexpected and perfect.

That said, watching PUSHER was not a particularly pleasant experience. I respect this movie, but I don't necessarily like it. There's a PUSHER II and III out there, but I think I've spent about all the time with these people that I'm willing to spend.