jürgen fauth’s muckworld

This vehicle for aging Peter O’Toole dances around places Lolita and Harold & Maude boldly went decades ago. Jodie Whittaker plays the sassy, underage object of an aging actor’s affections, and after a few dirty jokes and a drinking binge, there isn’t anywhere to go for Hanif Kureishi’s strangely timid screenplay. And so we wait for the inevitable as the movie succumbs to a fatal case of sentimentality.

Venus. Roger Michell, 2006. **

“One day, they won’t say ’speak French to me,’ they will say: speak to me in the language of Molière!” Says Molière, played by an exuberant Romain Duris, waving his tankard before he falls of the tavern table, much to the amusement of the assembled Parisians. But we all know it’s true. And once a country’s Greatest Writer has been canonized, it’s only a matter of time before he gets a movie that conflates his life with his work in the style of Shakespeare in Love and Factotum. Unrestrained by fact, the liberties taken by this approach are more shapely and palpable than the usual flabby biopic. Molière turns out to be an especially endearing attempt at the budding subgenre.

The film uses an undocumented period in Molière’s life to imagine the genesis of his play Tartuffe–which allows writer and director Laurent Tirard to have fun with the classic comedy. The story begins in 1658, when the actor is offered a deal he can’t refuse: Monsieur Jordain (Fabrice Luchini), a wealthy merchant, will pay off Molière’s debt if he trains him as an actor to impress the haughty widow Célimène (Ludivine Sagnier). For this task, Moliere takes the name of Tartuffe, pretends to be a priest, and moves into Jordain’s house–which leads to all sorts of farcial and amorous hijinx involving Jordain’s wife (Laura Morante), daughter (Fanny Valette), dog, and scheming society friends.

Accomplished and witty, the film even manages to wring morsels of truth out of the highly entertaining complications: who knew Jean-Baptiste Molière was the artistic forebear of Preston Sturges’ Sullivan, endlessly distraught over the value of comedy? Molière is scheduled to open on July 27.

Molière. Laurent Tirard, 2007. ****

• The official site has the trailer

There’s a host of reasons why I make my modest living on the Internet and at the movies, but here’s one of the better ones: offices give me the creeps, and not just since the slapdash zoning violation filled with generator fumes and world-class drunks where I failed to catch a whiff of irrational exuberance. My aversion to soul-deadening cubes goes so far that I wasn’t able to stomach either version of The Office past the first few minutes.

But when Lars Trier makes a movie, I go. The Boss of It All is his first comedy–and his first Danish film–since The Idiots. Jens Albinus (also of The Idiots) plays an actor hired to impersonate the mysteriously absent CEO of a company about to be sold to Icelandic investors. The fish-out-of-water setup results in three kinds of humor: actor jokes, office jokes, and Icelandic jokes.

More on About.com when The Boss of It All opens next week.

Direktøren for det hele. Lars von Trier, 2006. ****

• The Five Obstructions
• Manderlay
• Dogville
• Dancer in the Dark

I bought this book as a joke, an afterthought, just because I’d already spent twenty minutes in the dusty Prenzlauer Berg used book store where the salespeople were playing Warcraft in the corner. “Kinski’s always good for a laugh,” I figured, and forked over my three Euros. Little did I know that the joke would blossom into a full-fledged obsession. I’d grown up with an idea of Kinski based mainly on the German TV shows I saw during the 80s: Gottschalk, talk shows. Whenever Kinski was on (and he seemed to be on a lot), he could be counted on to rave and rant and make a public spectacle of himself.

We watched Woyzek in high school, and it freaked me out. Since, I’ve seen Aguirre, Fitzcarraldo, Nosferatu, and countless of the two hundred B pictures, Edgar Wallace and Karl May adaptations he appears in, and Herzog’s mean-spirited My Best Fiend. Still, Kinski’s artistry seemed to consist of Kinski just being Kinski, a megalomaniac who could outcrazy everybody on screen because he was a madman offscreen, too.

No longer. I can’t say that I understand him after reading his outrageous, boundless autobiography, but at least it’s possible now to imagine what the world looked like from inside Kinski’s head. As he puts it, everything about him was too too: he felt too much, loved too intensely, reacted too quickly, fought too viciously; a raging, fucking, screaming beast of a man whose emotions were too close too the surface, whose appetites where too ravenous, who had no sense of proportion. Put him in a TV studio and ask him idiotic questions about his international success or the endless bad movies he appeared in, and he would show his disdain, question the intention of the hosts and refuse to answer. He talks too quickly and he pounces too early, but you can’t deny that he has a point.

Rewatch his films, and you can see it there, right on the surface: every twitch of his soul is written on an unbearably intense face, threatening, seductive, almost too alive. The agony, the joy, the madness–if our senses weren’t so dull compared to his, we would appear mad, too. It’s no surprise that before the backdrop of mid-20th century German mainstream culture, a creature as fearless as Klaus Kinski should seem completely nuts.

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Thomas Mann’s gay son Klaus wrote this outrageously bitter, funny, and hate-filled portrait of an opportunistic actor who rises to fame and glory during the Third Reich in 1936. Nineteen-fucking-thirty-six. There’s a lot of talk about the coming catastrophe, blood, death, and evil, even though the bastards had only been in power for three years. As vicious and merciless this book is, it gets even better when you find out that Hendrik Höfgens, the ambitious main character who “walks on corpses” to get where he wants to be (and is memorably portrayed by Klaus Maria Brandauer in the Oscar-winning movie), is closely based on a real figure, the actor Gustaf Gründgens. It gets freakin’ outrageous when you find out Gründgens used to be not only a friend of Mann’s, but his brother-in-law. But even without any of the real-world complications (which led to the book being banned in Germany even after the war; technically at least, it is still verboten today), this is a fascinating study in evil.