Mongol, Sparrow, Hotel Des Ameriques, Assembly, Classe Tous Risques, and Boarding Gate—all atypical films that are well worth tracking down.

MONGOL (In U.S. theaters, June and July, 2008)
The year’s most memorable coming-of-age story arrives in the form of an epic actioner:  who knew?  Yes, this first installment of a triptych of Genghis Khan biopics is apologist in the vein of similar strong-man-of-history movies such as HERO (2002), which validated China’s unification without questioning the first emperor’s personal ruthlessness too much.  Still, MONGOL is the kind of flat-out bursting-at-the-seams screen entertainment that you can see with anyone—it’s got romance, Shakesperean-flavored intrigue, and, once it gets going, plenty of swords-a-flyin’ battle scenes.  Indeed, director Sergei Bodorv works with such a sure hand regardless of the widely varying scale and tone of the subject matter that in a way he recalls past masters such as David Lean—but obviously without Lean’s nuanced appreciation of both heroism and history.  Bodorv and co-writer Arif Aliyev somehow keep the ideas bigger than life but avoid oversimplification, and the result is pop-culture mythologizing of the grandest sort.  Catch this one on the big screen if you can (or, down the road, on the largest TV screen you can find) since Bodorv uses the open spaces and the widescreen compositions to great effect, catching you up in the swirl of events and immense vistas of Mongolia despite yourself.  And let’s not forget that at the heart of the movie is Tadanobu Asano, a great star at the height of his powers.  In short, MONGOL is the foreign language film that you take your friends to who don’t usually enjoy foreign language films.

SPARROW (Screened at NYAFF, July 2, and in Montreal at Fantasia, July 7, 2008)
The densest movie made out of fluffy ingredients you may ever see, and therefore a not-to-be-missed experience.  This is a confection all right, but a dazzlingly thoughtful one:  think of it as one those chocolate soufflés you must order an hour in advance—the simplicity of the final result belying all the technique and experience that goes into it.  So stylized and so rich both aurally and visually that SPARROW could be the best sheer movie-lover’s movie since MOULIN ROUGE (2001).  Johnnie To has filled his film with gorgeous set pieces as well as “set moments”—startling close-ups that feel like landscape shots—but perhaps the real stars are Fred Avril and Xavier Jamaux, who contributed the wonderfully eclectic and evocative score.  Simon Yam leads a gang of pickpockets in a kind of update on the old Howard Harwks’ male-bonding pic; and, as per usual in such movies, a woman enters the scene and upsets the applecart of their lives.  The pickpocketing scenes, by the way, are about as far from Bresson as one can get:  they’re actually To’s way of working martial arts sequences into the story.  MAD DETECTIVE ’s Kelly Lin plays an elusive beauty (in the title role?) whose physical brittleness makes Audrey Hepburn look like Uma Thurman.

BOARDING GATE (on DVD from Magnolia, June, 2008)
Kelly Lin is on hand again, this time as a dour wife who has good reason to be so dour.  If that makes BOARDING GATE sound like a domestic drama, you’d be right—and wrong.  One of the best genre bender/blenders working today, writer-director Olivier Assayas has a style that may be an acquired taste, but which I’d argue is one worth acquiring.  Paced more like orchestral music than film, and with storytelling often more novelistic than cinematic, his work could easily be off-putting.  But my advice is to settle in to enjoy it as a kinetic painting or an evening of twisted theater.  If you do, you’ll be treated to a transporting experience as Assayas keeps text and subtext suitably nasty while massaging the images by slipping in and out of focus and bathing much of the interiors in an ultramarine glow.  Like his wonderfully original DEMONLOVER (2002) there’s somewhat of a Russian dolls narrative structure at work here, with elliptical drama hiding inside psychological thriller, which is in turn hiding inside a crime thriller and a doomed romance.  So genre enthusiasts will either be delighted by the way BOARDING GATE swings from semi-erotic psychodrama to HK actioner or be utterly appalled.  And of course there’s a fascinating performance from Asia Argento, whom I’ve rarely seen paired with a role that plays to her natural strengths like this one.  In fact, the DVD extras help underscore the similar approaches she and Assayas have to filmmaking, which goes a long way to explaining the success of their collaboration here.  Let’s hope they team up again soon.  And, yes, since so much of this film is in English, it’s a complete cheat to categorize it as “foreign language,” but I really just wanted an excuse to convey my enthusiasm for this title.

HOTEL DES AMERIQUES (on DVD from Lionsgate—in both the Catherine Deneuve Collection, June 10, 2008, and in the André Téchiné Box Set, July 22, 2008)
What might first seem like an offbeat love story is perhaps really about the madness of the internal stories we tell ourselves about love.  Or another way to look at Téchiné’s thematic concerns is that our motivations regarding romantic love are so fraught with meanings of which we're ignornat that we just can’t handle it when we finally do experience it.  Actually, I’m just being self-serving here, saying “we” when it’s specifically Patrick Dewaere’s lead performance that’s capable of making any male viewer squirm—in a good way.  That’s how true it is in all its self-defeating desperation.  As for Deneuve, nominated for a Cesar for her role, she’s nothing less than tremendous every moment that she’s on screen.  Yet despite her immense talent, I want to continue heaping praise on her director for it’s clearly Téchiné who gets the entire cast to deliver note-perfect work that provides dimensionality to virtually every character we meet.  In fact, for more than half the film I found each scene to be diamond-cut lean and sparkling with intelligence—and the remainder isn’t too shabby either.  As in Téchiné’s most recent work with Deneuve, the fearlessly romantic drama CHANGING TIMES (2006), the characters are complex, the script is both literary and gripping, and there is no selling out to the audience at any point.  Of course we’re so used to films selling out that we may at first feel like we’ve been shortchanged by Téchiné’s work even when what it really provides is the opportunity to feel reinvigorated:  HOTEL DES AMERIQUES is what I expect every well-reviewed American indie drama to be but rarely is.


ASSEMBLY (Released in China in 2007; Screened at NYAFF, Summer, 2008)
During a trip to China earlier this year I actually caught parts of ASSEMBLY on TV and was immediately captivated by the cinematography and the acting.  I had no idea what I was watching, only that it involved military men in some kind of mid-twentieth century period piece (yes, there were subtitles, but I came in more than halfway through).  So I was quite excited when I discovered that I had serendipitous chance to catch the complete film courtesy of the New York Asian Film Festival.  In a towering performance that combines both humility and a fire-in-the-belly grittiness, Hanyu Zhang plays a career soldier whose life we follow at war and at peace.  As a result, we get both a memorable character study and a compelling history lesson à la THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP (1943).  But then on top of all this, throw in state-of-the-art battle scenes reminiscent of TV’s BAND OF BROTHERS, SAVING PRIVATE RYAN (1998) or TAE GUK GI (2004), and you’ll have a sense of the range of famed director Xiaogang Feng’s skills.  And just so you know, I’m not afraid to admit that by the end of this movie, I was bawling like a baby.

CLASS TOUS RISQUE (Released on DVD by the Criterion Collection, June 17, 2008)
Don’t rent this one if you expect slam-bang action even though some is definitely to be found here.  Neither is this a tour de force or a work by a major stylist like other notable Lino Ventura films such as TOUCHEZ PAS AU GRISBI (1954) or ARMY OF SHADOWS (1969).  CLASSE TOUS RISQUES is more like a psychological portrait of a criminal class that, strangely, never gets too psychological.  In fact, with a young Belmondo radiating casual cool in a key supporting role, it might be easy to dismiss this 1960 almost-thriller as simpleminded, but that assessment itself would probably be an oversimplification.  If you go into this film knowing that its story arc is intentionally broken, that you’re only going to get a downward trajectory, then you’ll be fine.  In a sense, CLASSE TOUS RISQUES is too existential to be real; for example, Ventura’s character has kids but they’re more important for being absent from his life rather than for living and breathing in our presence.  So in the end the movie becomes a hazy tragedy, an aborted revenge flick, a halfway morality tale, and a boxed-in character study.  So what’s so special about it?  Well, namely, the film’s refusal to fall into a type or to make the protagonist suffer more for our sake—or to mount a comeback, also for our sake.  Think of one of the top TV crime dramas—the sensational THE BROTHERHOOD or perhaps THE SOPRANOS—and then imagine an episode during Season X where our star has a particularly bad day and maybe the entire series abruptly ends:  that’s the territory that CLASSE TOUS RISQUES stakes out.  The journeyman-like quality director Claude Sautet brings to the material is well-suited to the tale he tells and lends an understated gravity to the proceedings; besides, let’s note that he was a “journeyman” only in the context of the monumental French directors of the time.  So if you’re a fan of gangster films, this is one you’ll want to become familiar with as a kind of quiet milestone in the genre.