Coping With the Ever-Present Past

Parisian Isabelle Carré discovers she's pregnant at the same time she learns that she survived the adulterated batch of heroin that killed boyfriend Melvil Poupaud. Disowned by his haughty parents (Claire Vernet and Jean-Pierre Andréani), Carré heads for a villa on the Basque coast, loaned to her by a former lover. However, she is tracked down by Poupaud's younger brother, Louis-Ronan Choisy, and, as he had attempted to be kind to her at the funeral, she allows him to stay.

Initially, Carré (who is taking syrup methadone for her addiction) is frosty towards her taciturn guest. But encounters with a woman (Marie Rivière) on the beach and a café lothario (Nicolas Moreau) convince her that she needs his company, both to come to terms with losing Poupaud and the imminent arrival of her child. Indeed, she becomes so possessive of Choisy that she fires errand boy Pierre Louis-Calixte for starting a romance with him. However, she realises the depth of their passion after she sees them kissing at a disco in the nearby town and feels even more drawn towards Choisy when he reveals that he was adopted and is, thus, as much of an outsider in his family as she is.

A few nights later, Carré helps the intoxicated Choisy undress and they end up sleeping together. However, he heads for Spain the next morning and they don't meet again until Choisy visits Carré in hospital and she asks him to keep an eye on her daughter while she slips outside for a cigarette.

Evocatively contrasting Mathias Raaflaub's luminous seascapes with the sombre interiors, Ozon sensitively conveys Carré's sense of confusion as she comes to terms with so many life-changing incidents. Indeed, by refusing to make a drama out of their situation, Ozon succeeds in letting the characters find their own way of dealing with the unexpected emotions that arise from their enforced proximity. But while Carré (who was pregnant for much of the shoot) ably captures the strain of re-learning to trust her feelings, the debuting Choisy (who is a singer rather than an actor) relies on a placid surface charm that scarcely suggests much psychological depth.

Nevertheless, the pair achieve an affecting chemistry that makes Carré's impulsive denouement decision seem entirely credible rather than a melodramatic contrivance. Thus, this remains as engagingly low key as Choisy's discreet piano score.

The pace is also judged to perfection in Juan José Campanella's The Secret in Their Eyes, which won this year's Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film. Adapted from a novel by Eduardo Sacheri, this is a far cry from the episodes of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and House that allowed Campanella to follow up the impressive Son of the Bride (2001) with the little-seen Moon of Avellaneda (2004). But while it didn't deserve to beat Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon to the Oscar, this is still a meticulously made drama that owes as much to cinematographer Félix Monti's exceptional close-ups and Lucila Robirosa's ageing make-up as the compelling performances of Ricardo Darín and Soledad Villamil.

Darín has just retired, but he keeps thinking back to his time as a Buenos Aires court investigator in the mid-1970s. One case has always disturbed him and he decides to re-examine the evidence in order to write a novel. Touched by the devotion of widowed bank clerk Pablo Rago, Darín had always suspected that the immigrant workers who were charged with the brutal rape and murder of newlywed teacher Carla Quevedo were beaten into confessing and, while going through some old photographs, he becomes convinced that he has found the culprit - as his eyes give him away.

Busting Javier Godino proves more difficult than Darín and long-time assistant Guillermo Francella had anticipated, however, and even when they get their man, the newly installed military dictatorship is prepared to cut a deal if he becomes a government agent.

While revisiting the facts, Darín decides to call on judge Soledad Villamil to show her his manuscript and ask for some advice. The Cornell-educated Villamil had made no secret of her affection for Darín when they were younger, but his insecurity at romancing a superior had driven her into the arms of another. But, even though Villamil urges Darín to find another subject for his book, it's quickly clear that old feelings linger and the story becomes as much a romance as a thriller.

In fact, the frequent flashbacks to the 70s also give this a political edge, as the sins of the Junta are once again exposed for censure. But the regime's tyranny and corruption matter less for Campanella than the difficulty of securing justice across the decades and the ease with which bureaucracy can obscure the truth. He even comes up with a dazzling metaphor for this, as Darín and Francella search for Godino in a packed football stadium, with the brilliance of the technique reinforcing the concept of conspiratorial evasiveness.

This sequence would grace any Hollywood blockbuster. But Campanella also excels at more intimate set-pieces, whether it's Francella providing some bibulous comic relief, Rago reliving his loss or Darín and Villamil flirtatiously discussing the capriciousness of passion and recollection. Yet, for all the surface polish, structural slickness and earnest sincerity, this always feels rather calculating and simplistic. Campanella strives to make points about the Argentinian mindset that allowed the March 1976 coup, but only fleetingly captures the actual state of the nation. Moreover, he fails to make sufficiently revealing contrasts between the country on the cusp of a CIA-inspired calamity and the imminent Millennium.

Nevertheless, Darín makes a compelling protagonist, whose banter with Francella is eclipsed only by his crackling chemistry with Villamil. One suspects that without the specificity of its backstory, this would be ripe for a Hollywood remake. Maybe they could set it in the days before the stolen election of 2000 and stage the climactic chase amidst the chaos of 9/11 instead of a football match.

Finally, Park Circus continues its excellent sequence of reissues with Bob Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces (1970), which serves not only to remind one what a fine actor Jack Nicholson once was, but also of the quality and maturity of New Hollywood cinema in the brief period between the collapse of the Production Code (1968) and the start of the blockbuster era (1975). Despite being a promising pianist in his youth, Nicholson elected to work on a Bakersfield oil rig after rebelling against the elitist parents who raised him in intellectual isolation on an island in Washington State. Content to spend his nights bowling and commending waitress girlfriend Karen Black on her Tammy Wynette impression, he drifts through life with no sense of ambition or responsibility. However, soon after best buddy Billy Green Bush breaks the news that Black is pregnant, Nicholson learns from sister Lois Smith that their father is dying and he decides to make a last trip home.

Accompanied by Black, Nicholson picks up opinionated hitchers Helena Kallianiotes and Toni Basil and has a humdinger of an argument with testy waitress Lorna Thayer over an omelette and a chicken salad sandwich. But things get no easier when Nicholson falls for brother Ralph Waite's piano-playing fiancée, Susan Anspach, and their tempestuous affair only convinces him to abandon Black at a desolate truck stop and seek pastures new in Alaska.

Whether carousing with Green Bush or bickering with Thayer, climbing on to the back of a flatbed truck to play Chopin's Fantasy in F Major or deflating Anspach's adulation with an insouciant rendition of the same composer's Prelude in E Minor, Robert Eroica Dupea is one of the iconic anti-heroes in American blue-collar cinema. Nicholson plays him with the dangerous glint in the eye that would eventually become a caricatured trademark. But he also invests him with a barely suppressed contempt for the America he experienced on both sides of the tracks.

The chauvinist indifference to the loyal Black and the smitten Anspach root Nicholson's character in a macho society that had yet to be emasculated by defeat in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal. But there is just a hint of self-awareness in his farewell speech to mute father William Challee and it's as much this unwillingness to accept himself as the prospect of having to shoulder his responsibilities that persuade him to head to the nation's last wild frontier.

Photographed by László Kovács's with an outsider's keen eye for the giveaway details in a decaying landscape, this is the kind of uncompromisingly critical road movie at which Hollywood once excelled. It also contains the sort of intense and fearless performance that Nicholson has pretty much ceased giving since The Shining (1980). But what's perhaps most telling (and tragic) about this demanding, difficult and occasionally dangerous picture is that this was a studio release and the chances of the modern corporate system producing anything as thoughtful, truthful and trenchant are almost non-existent.