Vincent Cassell

A Dangerous Method: “Look! There’s Keira Knightly spazzing out and writhing and grunting!”

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A Dangerous Method is David Cronenberg’s telling of how Carl Jung became first Sigmund Freud’s disciple and then his rival.  It’s an interesting story, chiefly because Jung was treating a patient who then became his lover and a psychoanalyst herself.

What keeps A Dangerous Method from being a really good movie is that Michael Fassbinder really can’t find a way to play a reserved and repressed character in a way that is really interesting (even when he has strapped Keira Knightly to the bed for a good spanking).  Fassbender isn’t bad, he just plays Jung as a stick-in-the-mud who reacts those around him.

And there’s plenty to react to.  Who knew Viggo Mortensen could be so funny as a sly Freud? Vincent Cassell is hilarious as a psychoanalyst-turned-patient who espouses having sex with many many people as possible, even one’s own patients.

And then there’s Keira Knightly, whose uninhibited performance as a patient of Jung’s has gotten much attention, some positive.  I’m not sure what she could have done differently, given that she plays a character initially afflicted with hysterical seizures and finally able to relish a heavy dose of masochistic sex.  But a viewer tends to sit and say, “Look!  There’s Keira Knightly spazzing out and writhing and grunting!”.

Still Cronenberg kept the story moving along, and it’s worth a viewing just for Viggo and Vincent (and voyeuristically for Keira).

DVD of the Week: Black Swan

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Natalie Portman won the Best Actress Oscar for playing a ballet dancer who competes for the role of a lifetime.  Her obsession with perfection  is at once the key to her potential triumph and her potential ruin.  Barbara Hershey brilliantly plays what we first see as another smothering stage mother, but soon learn to be something even more disturbing.  Vincent Cassell (Mesrine) captures the charisma of the swaggering dance master who pushes the ballerina mercilessly.  Portman’s dancer has the fragility of a porcelain teacup, and, as she slathers herself with more and more stress, we wonder just when, not if, she’ll break.  The tension crescendos, and the climactic performance of Swan Lake is thrilling.

Fresh from The Wrestler, Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan is another directing triumph.  In fact, parts of Black Swan are as trippy as Aronofsky’s brilliant Requiem for a Dream.

Black Swan is also on my list of Best Movies of 2010.

Black Swan

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Natalie Portman plays a ballet dancer competing for the role of a lifetime.  Her obsession with perfection  is at once the key to her potential triumph and her potential ruin.  Barbara Hershey brilliantly plays what we first see as another smothering stage mother, but soon learn to be something even more disturbing.  Vincent Cassell (Mesrine) captures the charisma of the swaggering dance master who pushes the ballerina mercilessly. Portman’s dancer has the fragility of a porcelain teacup, and, as she slathers herself with more and more stress, we wonder just when, not if, she’ll break.  The tension crescendos, and the climactic performance of Swan Lake is thrilling.

Fresh from The Wrestler, Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan is another directing triumph.  In fact, parts of Black Swan are as trippy as Aronofsky’s brilliant Requiem for a Dream.  I expect Aronofsky, Portman and Hershey to be nominated for Oscars.

Mesrine: Killer Instinct

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This is the riveting real life tale of Jacques Mesrine – a French criminal with a portfolio of audacious heists and even more shockingly daring escapes.  He became intoxicated by – and addicted to – his own notoriety, which he embellished with some left wing political posing.  He saw himself as a modern Clyde Barrow and positioned himself that way in the media (without thinking too much about the final scene in Bonnie and Clyde).  At the end of the day, Mesrine was just a vicious thug, although one with an unusual amount of bravado and luck.

Vincent Cassell brings Mesrine to life in a brilliant performance that does not glorify Mesrine, but inhabits a countenance that shifts  instantaneously from jokey charm to cold-blooded hatred.  American audiences may remember Cassell as the psycho Russian gangster in Eastern Promises and the suave Francois “The Night Fox” Toulour  in the Ocean’s movies.

Director Jean-Francois Richet showcases Cassell’s performance with a series of outstanding artistic choices.  The harsh violence is shown for what it is but not stylized.  Richet makes strategic use of split screen that enhances the story without distracting from it.  And when Mesrine meets his new girlfriend (Cecile De France) and she says that she’s up for anything, the movie immediately cuts to the two of them robbing a bank.  Point made.

Richet and Abdel Raouf Dafri (screenwriter of A Prophet) adapted the screenplay from Mesrine’s memoir.  Dafri has had a spectacular year in crime and prison dramas.

The entire cast is good, particularly Gerard Depardieu, who summons all his hulking menace to play a gang leader who is at least as dangerous as Mesrine.

Richet and Cassell return later this year with the second part of the story, titled Mesrine: Public Enemy #1.