Code Unknown / Code Inconnu (2000)

It doesn’t really have an ending. And it confounds all expectations. I think the black kid is going to die. I figure, that’s what the scene with him and white girl in the restaurant is all about. To show that he can be mellow, non-confrontational, sweet, etc. – so that when he is killed, we will care.

Then, the horrible prolonged scene on the subway where the Arab insults and eventually spits on Anne. I figure, she will react to that hysterically, causing her boyfriend to kill the next dark-skinned person he sees – who will just happen to be that guy we have learned to like. But that isn’t what happens. Nothing happens. As we go along, I make up several different endings, none of which is the one provided by the movie.

The other remarkable thing is, it shows the ordinary routine of being smuggled into France and then deported, an everyday occurrence for the Romanians.

Juliette Binoche can look so plain, and also so luminously beautiful. She’s an unparalleled physical actor. The body as instrument, to the nth degree. All the set pieces show her off.  Movies often have those, as actor bait. Write something a real actor would love to sink teeth into, and a real actor with a name will do it for union scale. It happens. It happens the other way, too. The clever producer or director or writer gets with a huge name actor and says, “What do you want to do on the big screen? Sing, tap dance, drown, masturbate? You name it, and we’ll write it into the script.”

For a film, that can be a disaster. But not here. However they came about, these amazing scenes show off so well the genius of Juliette Binoche. The one where she’s listening to a kid being abused in the building. And at her acting job, the locked-in-a-room-by-a-twisto scene. And that off-the-scale scene, more literally a tour de force than many others given the label, where alone on the stage she stomps around being a total uninhibited madwoman, with large awkward movements like Mountain Girl in Intolerance. The viewer is far, far back in the theater. What the hell is that? Is it from an actual play that already existed, or was it created for the purpose of this film?

Boxcar Bertha (1972)

My top ten reasons why Boxcar Bertha immediately was a favorite the minute it came out, and stayed in the “I Heart This” category:

• Memorable love scene
• Horrible death scene
• Released in what was for me the thick of the “Sixties”
• Symbolizes the “Sixties” very adequately
• Grandpa was a union organizer
• Great-grandpa was an abolitionist
• I love David Carradine because of “Kung-fu” on TV
• In this role, Barbara Hershey reminds me of a girl I knew in Venice, CA
• I adore Barbara Hershey
• “Life made her an outcast. Love made her an outlaw.”

Bertha Thompson’s daddy is a crop duster, and a rich guy makes him fly even though the plane is in bad repair. Now she’s a homeless orphan, a real survivor with both guts and luck, caught in the Great Depression. She keeps running into union organizer Bill Shelly, who is characterized as a “nigger lover,” among other things. Bill is always getting the shit beat out of him by people who disagree with his politics.

They both ride the rails. Using her feminine wiles, she helps Bill and his friends escape from a chain gang. The set a car on fire on the railroad tracks so the train has to stop. They take all the money and steal the train. There are plenty of fights, car chases, crashes, fires, robberies. A newspaper story about their criminality offends Bill. To show that he’s a revolutionary, not a common crook, he decides to take his share of the loot to the union hall. Bertha amuses herself by holding two well-dressed men at gunpoint, ordering them to stand up, sit down, etc. This may have been Hershey’s finest cinematic moment, and I mean that in all sincerity.

Hershey and Carradine have both said that the sex was unsimulated, as in, they were really doing it. The movie was made at the peak of their real-life love affair, and it shows.

Bill’s sore spot is poked when people keep reminding him he’s no longer a union man, but now a common criminal. They get caught trying to kidnap a raiload tycoon. Bertha escapes, Bill is sentenced. He’s back on a chain gang again, still getting shit beat out of him.

Bertha is picked up by a woman who turns out to be a madam. An anthropologist rents her time and asks a bunch of questions. She’s reunited with Bill. They kiss, the G-men break in and capture him and nail him to side of boxcar. They put writing over his head, obvious Christ symbolism, you know, like the scroll at the top of some crucifixes. A black guy surprises them and shoots all of Bill’s enemies. The train starts to move, and he’s still nailed to the boxcar. Bertha runs alongside, “Don’t take him, don’t take him.” It’s an unforgettable image, like in Rabbit Proof Fence where the mothers run after the government goons who take their kids away.

Given the Jesus analogy, it’s kind of weird that Barbara Hershey later portrayed Mary Magdalene in The Last Temptation of Christ, which, come to think of it, was also directed by Martin Scorsese. Boxcar Bertha has been called “Scorsese’s exploitation flick” and he played a small part it in, as a john in a brothel. It was produced by Roger Corman, who taught Scorsese what a $600,000 budget can do. The script was loosely based on a book, Sister of the Road, which was loosely based on the life of a real person, but apparently didn’t have much in common with her at all.

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Things We Lost in the Fire (2007)

Things We Lost in the Fire is rated R “for drug content and language,” but it starts out with such saccharine goo, I’m about to puke. I spent a couple of months looking forward to getting the DVD through inter-library loan – and now, these cornball scenes. Fortunately, it gets better.

Audrey (Halle Berry) and Brian (David Duchovny) are a happily married interracial couple. Also happily, race has absolutely zero relation to any of the issues in this film, and is not even referred to. But Brian is always running off to spend time with heroin addict Jerry (Benecio Del Toro), his oldest friend, when he could be making love to Audrey or hanging out with their kids. Brian is the only person who’s never given up on Jerry, but the price of being his support system is a certain amount of stress on the marriage. However, there are lovely non-corny episodes that show a deep understanding of the ways in which two people accommodate each other to keep their thing going on.

Then Brian intervenes in a domestic dispute between strangers, and gets killed. Audrey sends her brother Neal to tell Jerry about it, and bring him to the gathering of mourners. Audrey tells Jerry how she’s hated him for years, but there is no real good explanation for why she suddenly quits hating him. He gives up his apartment and moves into a methadone clinic where he works as a handyman. Grieving and at a loose end, Audrey seeks him out

After a fire, the Burkes’ garage had been partly remodeled into a living space, so Audrey invites Jerry to move in. She alternates between needing his presence for comfort, and lashing out at him for not being Brian. It especially upsets her that Jerry gets along great with the kids, which is a particularly true-to-life detail. It’s amazing how people can loathe you for relating well to their loved ones. Then Audrey recruits Jerry to be her teddy bear, cuddling her at bedtime. Though she has no interest in having sex with him, she wants him to do what Brian used to do, to soothe her to sleep, namely, pull on her earlobe. She says, “Faster, harder,” an unnecessarily pointed reminder that they’re having some weird kind of surrogate non-sex. This was, in my opinion, way over the top.

Jerry used to be a lawyer, and family friend Howard encourages him to take the mortgage broker test and accept a job in his company. Jerry’s going to Narcotics Anonymous meetings and making a nice return to straight life, when Audrey gets a wild hair and asks him what heroin is like. Says she wants to know how it feels to escape. She seems to be working up to asking him to score for her. Luring a junkie back to junk is truly evil, and it’s a measure of how totally fucked up and conflicted this widow is.

Royally pissed off because Jerry knew where to find her daughter Harper, who was playing hooky from school, Audrey tells him to pack up and leave. He heads straight for the bottom, skid-row junkie style. Then Audrey decides to rescue him, takes him back to the converted garage adjoining her house, and assigns brother Neal to be his minder, while he goes through a hellacious withdrawal. (How did he manage to get so heavily re-addicted, so quickly?) Then she demands that he sign into a rehab clinic, which is pretty damn arrogant, when you consider that she removed him from a rehab setting in the first place, then tried to tempt him back into a habit, then threw him out when he was had succeeded in cleaning up with the help of Narcotics Anonymous. She’s really been jerking this poor guy around, and one can only hope that, once rehabbed, he steers clear of her.