Beyond the Multiplex

A ripe French take on "Lady Chatterley." Parker Posey plays crazy. Plus: Sheep run amok ... with murder in their eyes!

By Andrew O'Hehir

Read more: Andrew O'Hehir, Movies, Movie Reviews, Arts & Entertainment, Reviews, Beyond the Multiplex

Photo: Maia Films

Marina Hands and Jean-Louis Coulloc'h in "Lady Chatterley."

June 21, 2007 | It's the middle of summer -- or, actually, it's the beginning of summer yet it's also Midsummer's Day, go figure -- but these art-film people don't want to let us go to the beach, let alone study up on the legendary history of the Silver Surfer (is he good, or evil, or what?) and read that 1977 Sidney Sheldon novel Aunt Patty left under the sofa. No!

It's not enough that distributors keep churning out these piles of serious movies, week after week, but then they turn out to be puzzling. You're supposed to think about them, and I -- well, I don't know about you, but that's a lot to ask this time of year. Summer makes us all dumber, and please remember that I spent three weeks in Cannes, which has documented effects on intelligence, pigmentation, pretentiousness and the propensity to refer to famous people one has met once by their first names. (Harvey's a sweet man, I don't care what anyone says. And Sharon? Still gorgeous!)

That's a roundabout way of reporting that I feel confused about this week's two marquee offerings, although it's just possible the confusion lies in the material. Pascale Ferran's French-language adaptation of "Lady Chatterley" is an odd and volatile mixture, portraying literature's most famous coupling at a leisurely pace. More sensuous than sexy, and more claustrophobic than explosive, this film is often sharply realistic and at other moments plodding and unfocused. It's a profoundly thought-out picture about a love affair that blooms organically and spontaneously.

Zoe Cassavetes' romantic comedy "Broken English" seems to have the opposite problem. This is an itchily neurotic film that fights its genre to a draw, with a female protagonist so steeped in pharmaceutical despair she's one short step away from a Jacqueline Susann novel or an early Pedro Almodóvar movie. "Broken English" is interesting exactly to the extent that Cassavetes can't control it; I doubt she realizes how repellent and terrifying her main character really is, or that the pair of female best friends depicted in the film can't stand each other and just haven't realized it yet.

I know exactly what to think about "Black Sheep," a horror-comedy from New Zealand that's one of this year's film-festival fave raves. (Since last fall it's been seen at Toronto, South by Southwest, Tribeca, Brussels, Amsterdam, Seattle and Newport, R.I.) Jonathan King's film is an intentionally moronic mash-up of horror clichés bound to delight all fans of grade-Z entertainment. It answers the question "Can sheep actually be scary?" with a resounding maybe.

If you really want terror, you won't see anything all year as profoundly scary as Jennifer Baichwal's "Manufactured Landscapes," a magisterial tour of the world's most devastating and devastated industrial zones with Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky. Purely as a pictorial experience, it's an amazing film, but your mind will barely be able to process the Joseph Conrad-scale horror of what Baichwal and Burtynsky show us.

Next page: Love and liberation in an English garden