The Good Thief

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Crime/US, UK/English (Japanese subtitles)/109 minutes
Starring: Nick Nolte, Tcheky Karyo, Nutsa Kukhianidze
Director: Neil Jordan
Fox Searchlight

Bob is a good guy and loved by all. He even rescues damsels in distress in his spare time. He is also a drug addict, a failed gambler, and a multi-faceted petty criminal who is planning a very big robbery indeed.

The Good Thief is based on the 1955 French noir classic Bob le Flambeur by Jean-Pierre Melville. This remake is directed by Neil Jordan who will be familiar to you from Mona Lisa and The Crying Game. The story is set on the French Riviera where we find Bob — the good thief of the title— son of an American father and French mother at rock bottom and slumming through Europe’s seedy underbelly, rubbing shoulders with a new breed of gangsters imported from the world’s nastiest trouble spots in the Balkan’s and Africa. Penniless and wracked by addiction he decides on an audacious theft of a major work of art.

Cue the art jokes. Bob justifies the theft by pointing out that Picasso stole ideas from everyone and weirdo art thug (Ralph Fiennes) gets to wave a knife and say : "If I don't get my money back by Monday, what I do to your faces will definitely be Cubist". Local cop (Tcheky Karyo) gets to hear about the job Bob is planning, but instead of arresting him, tries to turn him away. Bob being the good thief, even the police are trying to save him from himself. The plot is elegant and ironic and there will be no spoilers here.

Bob is played by a career-best Nick Nolte who is a natural for the role. Nolte is known for his own walks on the wild side and possibly didn't have to reach too far inside to find Bob. The actor admitted to journalists at the Toronto film festival that he took a little heroin every day of shooting the film ‘to get in the mood’.
Mood is the right word for this stylish, thoughtful and unconventi-onal film.

Dogville

03/06

Drama/ Denmark, Sweden, UK, France, Germany /English (Japanese subtitles)/177mins
Starring: Nicole Kidman, Paul Bettany, Lauren Bacall
Director: Lars Von Trier
Special Presentation

Grace is on the run from gangsters when she comes upon a small town in the Rockies. It is not your usual town: there are no buildings and the houses and streets are marked out with chalk lines on the floor of a huge sound stage. There are precious few things in the town, only the odd chair, the occasional mop to break up the space. No it is not some kind of corny ghost town, this is the deliberate stagey set of Lars Von Trier’s latest film Dogville.

The film is an experiment in filmed theatre — the characteristics of a stage play brought to the big screen. The actors mime their interactions with the inanimate world: they mime opening a door and we hear the sound effect of a handle turning and so on. Brechtian artifice, or what? And it could be very trying but as the story unfolds and as the actors show their stuff, the staginess begins to make sense.

Von Trier is the director who brought us Dancer in the Dark and Breaking the Waves so you know in advance that it is going to be about suffering and cruelty inflicted upon an isolated, vulnerable woman.

When Grace arrives at the small town, the townsfolk take her in and give her refuge. They are all the models of Christian compassion, listen with sympathy to her plight and arrange for her to work doing chores around town for a modest wage. However when it becomes apparent that Grace is sought also by the police, and that her presence in the town is a threat to its citizens’ attitudes change. They double her chores and halve her money, the bullying starts and escalates to sexual abuse. This is a truly bleak vision of humanity and when it dawns on you that the town is not a remote abstraction of human nature but a certain nation the vision becomes even scarier and darker.

The last word goes to the wealth of acting talent in this film, which brilliantly catches the shifting nuances of suspicion and cruelty.

Film Reviews: Chris Page

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