Cutting to the Chase

Rarely has a feature debut had such a seismic impact. And yet it boasted a scenario that wouldn't have been out of place in a bargain basement programmer.

Small-town hood Michel Poiccard - alias Laszlo Kovacs (Jean-Paul Belmondo) - steals a car in Marseilles and casually kills a cop with a gun he finds in the glove compartment. He heads for Paris to collect the unpaid debts that will enable him abscond to Italy with Patricia Franchini (Jean Seberg), a Sorbonne student who makes ends meet selling the New York International Tribune on the Champs Elysées.

As the dragnet closes in, the couple leave the Hôtel de Suède and hide out at a friend's house. But, having interviewed famous author Parvulesco (Jean-Pierre Melville), Patricia is struck by his words on immortality and her desire to become a journalist prompts her to betray Michel when she is threatened with arrest and deportation.

The pulp fiction that became a cornerstone of arthouse cinema was inspired by a newspaper article spotted by François Truffaut, who was working on his own full-length debut, Les 400 Coups (1959). But Hollywood Bs like Joseph H. Lewis's Gun Crazy (1949) proved just as significant, as Godard set out to break with traditional concepts of characterisation, structure and narrative causality.

But rather than simply rejecting conventions that had held since the 1910s, Godard mischievously subverted them. Bypassing such standard practices as establishing shots, transitions and shot-reverse-shot sequences, he used a lightweight, handheld camera to shoot in long takes, which he periodically disrupted with jump cuts. Such a nonchalant approach adhered to the idea of the caméra stylo (one of the many theories that Godard picked up while reviewing for the influential journal, Cahiers du Cinéma), which proposed that a director became an auteur by utilising the camera as a pen.

This individualism was reinforced by the use of digressions, in-jokes and filmic references, such as the fact that Michel models himself on the iconic Humphrey Bogart, that Seberg's performance echoes her own in Otto Preminger's Bonjour Tristesse (1958), and that the shot through the poster tube recalls one by Samuel Fuller down a rifle barrel in Forty Guns (1957). The film is even dedicated to Monogram Pictures, one of Hollywood's Poverty Row studios that subsisted on cheap Westerns and the kind of crime and noir flicks that Michel seems to believe he's inhabiting.

Yet for all its nostalgia, the film is relentlessly modern, thanks to the raw immediacy of Raoul Coutard's location shooting and the plethora of cultural ephemera with which Godard specks the screen. Indeed, he anticipated the 60s mindset and the slogan, `To Live Dangerously to the End', was a clarion call for both his fellow new wavers and the generation whose political awakening was to transform global society.

The enduring influence of films like Les 400 Coups and A Bout de Souffle can be felt in Benoît Jacquot's Villa Amalia, which makes more thrilling use of elliptical editing than any picture in recent memory. With Luc Barnier's fragmented juxtapositions creating an exhilarating sense of narrative momentum, while also helping to convey the enigmatic heroine's confused state, this adaptation of a novel by Pascal Quignard is Jacquot's fifth collaboration with Isabelle Huppert and it's easily their best.

The action opens on a rainy windscreen, as Huppert follows lover Thomas Beauvois to a rendez-vous with his mistress in the Parisian suburb of Choissy-le-Roi. However, just as she is about to return to her car, Huppert bumps into Jean-Hugues Anglade, a long-lost friend from her Breton childhood, who recognises her distress and offers her a drink to calm her down. They reminisce uneasily about his recently deceased mother before Huppert returns home for a showdown with Beauvois that causes her to realise that she has had enough of her supposedly idyllic existence as a pianist-cum-composer with an international reputation and a luxurious apartment.

Ordering Beauvois to leave, Huppert cancels her engagements, puts her property on the market and begins the complex process of dispensing with everything she owns and vanishing into anonymity. Anglade offers her a cosy room adjoining his country home, but she only wants his support in facilitating her disappearance by allowing her to bank her savings in his account and open a shared PO box for urgent mail. With all her transactions completed, Huppert takes a train and embarks upon a journey south that sees her change clothes and hairstyle, as she slowly leaves her old self behind.

Eventually landing in Naples, Huppert spots a villa on the brow of an incline while swimming in the bay and persuades elderly owner Clara Bindi to let her move in. Retaining the simple décor, she is soon joined by Maya Sansa, a free-spirited younger woman who had rescued Huppert from the Mediterranean after she got a cramp, and Anglade is surprised to discover that they have become an item when he pays a visit.

However, Huppert's retreat from reality is temporarily thwarted by the death of her mother, Michelle Marquais. She returns to the northern French coast for the funeral, only to encounter Peter Arens, the father who encouraged her to play the piano before abandoning her when she was still a small girl. But the reunion only confirms Huppert's conviction that she has made the right decision.

Capturing the changing colours as Huppert crosses the continent, Caroline Champetier's crisp photography consistently locates the fugitive in the diverse environments that bring her closer to her true self. Jump-cutting their way through the frustrating bureaucratic processes of starting again, Jacquot and Barnier impart an irresistible energy that is provocatively contrasted with the close-ups of Huppert's impassive face, as she passes through majestic landscapes in Germany, Switzerland and Italy to the accompaniment of Bruno Coulais's emotive score.

Nothing is explained, whether it's Huppert's sudden rejection of success, the one-night stand with a stranger in transit or her lesbian dalliance. Yet, even though she treats Marquais, Anglade and Sanya with blithe indifference, she manages to remain eminently empathetic during her uphill struggle to the peace that the villa provides (which has been shrewdly compared to Ingrid Bergman's road to redemption in Roberto Rossellini's 1950 drama, Stromboli).

Few will raise eyebrows at Huppert's relationship with Sansa, but you can bet your bottom dollar that there will be protests aplenty at Larry David's age-gap romance with Evan Rachel Wood in Woody Allen's Whatever Works. Derived from a screenplay written 30 years ago, this is an astute blend of Manhattan and Curb Your Enthusiasm, with a dash of Broadway Danny Rose and The Purple Rose of Cairo slipped in for good measure. Yet, it will be the Pygmalion element that will infuriate the Allenphobes, as yet another of his intellectual nebbish anti-heroes somehow manages to charm a vibrant younger woman into his bed.

Adding a touch of barbed misanthropy to the usual Allen alter ego, David plays a Jewish quantum physicist, who is persuaded by his coffee shop cronies to retell the story of his marriage to a beauty queen from Mississippi. Much to the bemusement of his pals, David turns to the camera and begins speaking directly to the audience that he alone can see.

He recalls the unhappy liaison with a well-heeled wife that prompted the failed suicide leap that left him with a limp and the need to move to a crummy apartment on the edge of Chinatown. He also laments that he has to make a living teaching chess to small kids. But he shruggingly opines that life is a series of disappointments and frustrations and that, in order to survive, it's sometimes wise to settle for whatever works. And that's how he became involved with Wood, whom he found cowering on his doorstep after she had left the Deep South in the hope of making it in New York.

Against his better judgement, David agrees to let Wood stay and soon comes to find her ignorance a challenge and her habit of regurgitating the concepts that he spoon feeds her endearing. In return, Wood cooks for him and calms his nocturnal panic attacks with Fred Astaire movies. But, shortly after their unexpected nuptials, Wood's deeply conservative, God-fearing mother, Patricia Clarkson, arrives in the city and faints dead away on catching sight of her unprepossessing son-in-law.

Clarkson sets herself the task of pairing off Wood with handsome actor Henry Cavill. But she's also swept away by the Bohemian spirit and moves in with two of David's academic buddies for a ménage that results in an exhibition of Clarkson's nude collages at a chic gallery. It's then that her husband, Ed Begley Jr (a short-fused Republican member of the National Rifle Association), shows up to demand that his womenfolk head home.

Unsurprisingly, a drunken session in a dingy bar shows Begley the errors of his wasted life and the action ends on New Year's Eve, with everybody paired off with someone new - including David, who is romancing Jessica Hecht, the woman he landed on when his second plunge from an upper window failed to bring about his demise.

As always with Allen, there is plenty of plot and it's exceedingly satisfying watching the pieces slot into place. Some of the situations are convoluted, but that is part of their charm. There are also more laugh out loud moments here than in Allen's last dozen pictures, with David, Wood and Clarkson delivering their lines with evident relish. David, who is a master of improvisation, takes a while to settle into the rhythm of Allen's writing style. But he soon takes possession of a role originally devised for Zero Mostel. Following in the footsteps of Diane Keaton and Mariel Hemingway, Wood is also magnificent, with the toe-curlingly gauche gushings of her early scenes giving way to homespun sagacity, as her lively curiosity responds to David's intemperate promptings.

Back on familiar territory after his prolonged European odyssey, Allen exploits Wood's tourist eagerness to pay sardonic visits to Grant's Tomb and the Statue of Liberty. But he and cinematographer Harris Savides also make splendid use of the bustling street markets and traditional food stores of the Lower East Side. Moreover, Allen also captures Wood's guileless beauty in a series of exquisite close-ups that suggest, three decades on from the magisterial Manhattan, that he has never forgotten the line about Hemingway's face that ended his lovesick character's long litany of the things he likes most about his home town.

Finally, another mother goes in search of a missing child in Gabe Ibáñez's Hierro, a Spanish chiller that flatters itself with teasing allusions to Michelangelo Antonioni's L'avventura (1960). However, this feature debut by a veteran commercials director is much closer in tone to Juan Antonio Bayona's The Orphanage (2007), although it is never as controlled or disconcerting.

Travelling by ferry to the Canary island of El Hierro, at Europe's southernmost point, Elena Anaya loses sight of five year-old son, Kaiet Rodríguez. All attempts to find him prove fruitless and Anaya is plunged into paralysing grief that sees her develop a phobia of water. However, six months after the disappearance, she returns to the island to identify a body discovered by the police. However, in the three days she has to wait for a DNA test to be run, Anaya convinces herself that she has seen Rodríguez playing on the beach and her conviction is reinforced by the revelation that another boy vanished around the same time following a tragic car accident.

A sense of anti-climax afflicts this atmospheric, but superficial picture from the outset. Javier Gullon's scenario is just too neat and it's not too difficult to spot the twist once Anaya begins loitering around a trailer park. Moreover, Ibáñez's signposts the jolt and struggles to present the locals as anything but caricatures. Nevertheless, Anaya is suitably unhinged and cinematographer Alejandro Martinez makes moody use of the landscape's black volcanic ash and such exotic locations as a vast greenhouse and a penguin enclosure at the ocean theme park. The sound effects are also occasionally creepy, but they are too often drowned out by Zacarias M.De la Riva's booming score, which eventually proves intrusive, as it keeps setting the tone for thrills that simply never arrive.