National Review: Double Dealing. - Review

I have not been a great admirer of the films of Britain's Mike Hodges, whose Get Carter is considered a masterpiece of the noir genre. Some of them, like Damien: Omen II and Flash Gordon, I bypassed. The original Omen was bad enough to make a sequel counterindicated, and films made from comic strips, though hugely popular, strike me as slumming. I also avoided Morons from Outer Space; we have enough homegrown ones.

So I am late getting around to Croupier, Hodges's very interesting latest, with a screenplay by Paul Mayersberg. This is the story of Jack Manfred, a writer struggling with his first novel, whose father helps him get a job as a croupier at London's Golden Lion Casino, the kind of work Jack once did in his native South Africa. Jack is uneager, but needs the money; besides, the job might yield material for his novel.

The film, indeed, shows him as both Jack, the real-life croupier, and Jake, the croupier-hero of his novel, which, eventually published anonymously, becomes a bestseller. Jack also acts as narrator of the movie, sometimes briefly editorializing in the middle of an action sequence, which produces a kind of Brechtian distanciation.

It is hard to write about this somewhat contrived and ultimately opaque film, which nevertheless leaches into one's brain. It is full of wiggly twists like an earthworm, but can also uncoil and strike like a cobra. Though it looks like a mere action flick, a commercial thriller, it is more than that. It is a thinking-man's genre film: not King Lear downsized into a comic strip, but a cartoon upgraded to the neighborhood of Lear.

Jack himself, as played by Clive Owen, has a sullen, phlegmatic, morally passionless quality that makes the dealer's cold-blooded superiority to the anxious punters (British for gamblers) appear smug, almost inhuman. Owen looks inauspiciously like Nicolas Cage, but is auspiciously a more complex actor. So he becomes subtly different in his relationships with three diverse women. Marion (Gina McKee) is a department-store detective and Jack's steady mistress aiming at marriage; she reflects his ideal self. Jani de Villiers (Alex Kingston) is a glamorous mystery woman and experienced punter; she represents Jack's temptation to do the unthinkable for a croupier-gamble, and crookedly at that-and instigates what may be his downfall. Bella (Kate Hardie), ex-prostitute and failed fellow croupier, stands for ambiguous reality, the mixed bag with which most of us must learn to make do.

All this is rightly overshadowed by the gambling inferno, the roulette and blackjack tables. Not since Robert Bresson's Pickpocket has a film so reveled in manual dexterity as an art form unto itself, though this time within the law, if only just. Hands in close-up dazzle us with their acrobatic, faster-than-the-eye dealing out of cards and raking in of chips, in a dance of destiny for few winners and many losers.

There is a corrupt fellow croupier, there are scarcely less questionable millionaire punters, and there are violent fights with cheaters. The casino has a supervisor with the power to hire and fire, who surveys everything on multiple screens in the control room, yet is sometimes fooled, or dispenses less than impartial justice. As superbly played by Alexander Morton, he is a confounding symbiosis of God and the Devil.

But Croupier does not bog down in metaphysics. The casino may be hell in some ways; in more ways, it is the world: different things to different people, even as the film must affect different viewers differently. Strikingly shot by Mike Garfath, with intelligent music by Simon Fisher Turner, and tautly written and directed, it commutes between damnation and redemption, displaying a sophisticated irony that sees the double bottom in all things.

-- In his late-middle period, Andre Techine managed to make a couple e of decent movies, notably My Favorite Season with Catherine Deneuve and, perhaps, Wild Reeds with the remarkable Elodie Bouchez (later of The Dreamlife of Angels). And, to his credit, he launched the career of Juliette Binoche in the otherwise undistinguished Rendez-vous.

Now he offers Alice and Martin, in which he hurtles back to his old pretentious and inept ways. He co-wrote the screenplay with his usual collaborator, Gilles Taurand (late of Raul Ruiz's Time Regained), and the uneven filmmaker Olivier Assayas. There is much nervous rushing about in short scenes with sudden cuts; young Martin races around especially crazedly during three weeks on the lam after escaping from home for seemingly no reason. But if Martin seems to suffer from dromomania, so does the camera, which finds it equally unendurable to remain still.

What is particularly annoying is that the reasonable explanation for Martin's driven and erratic behavior is withheld till quite late in the film, when, without warning, it is confusingly sprung on us as a flashback, in the guise of a confession to his girlfriend, the worried Alice. Still, chop an important scene out of any film and stick it in somewhere near the end, and presto, you've got yourself Art, or so Techine appears to think. Alice is a young violinist with higher aspirations reduced to playing in a cheesy tango orchestra in louche Paris nightspots where half-naked men dance with one another. She lives in a dingy apartment just off the metro tracks, which she shares with Benjamin, the youngest of Martin's three half-brothers, a homosexual actor. He and Alice have a wonderful rapport while going sexually in opposite directions. When Martin, escaping from provincial Cahors, comes to them in Paris, they put him up. He finds a job as a male model, which soon makes him more affluent than the two of them combined, and able to find his own digs.

Martin is lusting after Alice in what, at 20, is his first passion for a woman. She tells him that she likes him but absolutely doesn't want him. A little later on, for no ostensible reason, she suddenly throws herself at him. That is the way most things happen in this movie. At the beginning, Martin's single-parent mother decides quite arbitrarily that her ten-year-old son must now go live with his far-off remarried father, whom the boy hardly knows and doesn't like. The father turns out to be a strict disciplinarian, which promptly spells trouble.

Ten years later (we skip forward), we get brief scenes involving Martin's two other half-brothers, one of whom works in a factory, where he suddenly hangs himself. The other is a small-town mayor running for higher office, who, when Alice, desperately anxious about Martin, seeks him out, receives her with extraordinary coldness. It is almost as if the three screenwriters had worked isolated from one another, in the end splicing their labors together in whatever cockamamie order.

There is a long section where Alice and Martin, rapturous new lovers, go off to Spain on holiday. They end up in a little seaside hostelry, remote and picturesque, where their love should prosper. But while Alice watches agonizedly, Martin merely swims and sulks. Of course, he has that unconfessed secret, and, as it arbitrarily turns out, no more money in the bank, even though he earned much and seemed to spend little. He takes everything out on Alice, which she, the former free spirit, endures like a humble drudge. Martin is played by the handsome but totally untalented Alexis Loret; Alice, by the supremely womanly and greatly gifted Juliette Binoche. If that is enough for you-and it may be-see the movie, but concentrate on Alice and ignore Martin.