Beyond the Multiplex

"Dans Paris": Jazz, beautiful women, a would-be suicide and the ghosts of the New Wave
Come to think of it, Christophe Honoré's "Dans Paris" might be a crazy film about Paris too, but its craziness is of a darker, subtler sort. It's a completely different movie from Delpy's in terms of aesthetic and spirit, but there are some odd similarities. "Dans Paris" also begins with a narrator, as a character named Jonathan (Louis Garrel, supernally handsome son of the underappreciated director Philippe Garrel) extricates himself from an overcrowded bed -- which has both a woman and another guy in it -- and wanders out to the balcony of a cluttered suburban apartment to address the camera.

"Dans Paris" also takes quite a while to get going, after Jonathan apologetically introduces the main characters and then explains that he's going to turn back into one of them, and will no longer be omniscient. Big early chunks of it are not in fact set in Paris but somewhere in the countryside, where Jonathan's brother Paul (Romain Duris) has decamped with his girlfriend, Anna (Joana Preiss). They make a handsome, exasperating couple -- Duris with his tensely coiled frame and quiet half-smile, Preiss with her bony, feral sexiness -- but Honoré gives us only a few narrative shards of their decomposing relationship.

When the story leaps back to that cluttered Parisian apartment, where Paul has holed up, three days before Christmas, with a bad case of the lovesick blues and several days' growth of beard, the movie gradually begins to make sense. The place belongs to Jonathan and Paul's father, Mirko (Guy Marchand), a crusty worrier with a perpetual cigarette. In their hapless fashions, Jonathan and Mirko are trying to stop Paul from killing himself. But as each wanders through his day -- Jonathan navigating an endless series of angry ex-girlfriends and new conquests (sometimes these are the same thing), and Mirko just trying to buy a Christmas tree and cook some chicken soup -- they may be making matters worse rather than better.

There's an improvisational quality to Honoré's directing that is often endearing and occasionally maddening. He sets much of the film to an invigorating jazz score, and he seems to be trying on different aspects of French cinema's 1960s and '70s heritage like thrift-store clothes, and then discarding them. If the early scenes with Paul and Anna suggest Godard, the bittersweet sexual comedy later in the film feels more like Rohmer or Jacques Rivette. For that matter, the spirit of Agnés Varda, one of the least-appreciated figures of the French New Wave, hovers over the whole enterprise. One of my favorite scenes involves nothing more than Paul, locked up in his bedroom, singing along to a cheesy pop single from the past he's just dug up. (It's Kim Wilde's "Cambodia," from 1982.) That's a Varda touch if I've ever seen one.

When Paul finally summons up the courage to call Anna, their conversation is rendered in song, as a Michel Legrand-style duet (the music is by Alex Beaupain). This is clearly a nod to the great Jacques Demy (of "Umbrellas of Cherbourg"), and it's also the trail Honoré has followed more recently in his musical "Love Songs," which premiered at Cannes this year. Like his higher-profile countryman François Ozon ("Swimming Pool," "5x2"), who's about the same age, Honoré is figuring out how to make new films in what look like the sunset years of French movie history.

Also like Ozon, who has relied repeatedly on Charlotte Rampling, Isabelle Huppert, Ludivine Sagnier and Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Honoré is building a revolving repertory company with some of the finest French actors. Garrel and Preis have each appeared in three of his films -- both were in "Ma Mère," his debauched fable of incestuous mother-son love among Parisians run amok in the Canary Islands -- and Duris was previously in his 2002 picture "Seventeen Times Cécile Cassard."

It's possible that Honoré is still finding his way toward a mature style, and it's also possible that what you see in "Dans Paris" is what you get: a wistful, wispy tale about a group of wounded men trying to heal themselves, gamed up with a certain amount of self-referential artistry and genuine intellectual daring. I'll take it. There's a vivid comedy to this family's emotional state of siege, an easy confidence to Honoré's camerawork, and plenty of beautiful bodies.

"Dans Paris" is now playing at the IFC Center in New York, with wider release to follow.

"Descent": The lustrous Rosario Dawson, as a college girl gone to the dark side
I'm not big on recommending bad movies just for "the performances," but ever since emerging in Larry Clark's 1995 "Kids," Rosario Dawson has been one of those actors who can shine through almost any material. Her luscious lips and wry, intelligent eyes are the only thing I can remember about Edward Burns' 2001 "Sidewalks of New York," and the only good thing I can remember about Ethan Hawke's "Chelsea Walls." She was terrific in more decent fare like Spike Lee's "He Got Game" and "25th Hour," and Quentin Tarantino's "Death Proof" segment of "Grindhouse." I bet she was good in "The Adventures of Pluto Nash" and "Josie and the Pussycats" too, although I may never know for sure.

It's long past time for Dawson to find dramatic roles that go beyond playing the striver-chick from the projects in one earnest indie after another, and I guess she accomplishes that with Talia Lugacy's lurid rape-revenge drama "Descent" (which Dawson produced). I know movie producers aren't going to let a multiracial, cappuccino-complected New York woman play a Jane Austen heroine, or one of Chekhov's "Three Sisters," or Goneril. Maybe Dawson wouldn't want those parts. But come on, writer-directors: When you've got somebody this luminous, this capable of lighting up a movie from within, your responsibility is to create roles that fit her.

Not that "Descent" isn't intriguing, on its own level. It's a lot like a '70s exploitation movie, with its determination to seduce and shock the viewer with alternating currents of electrical stimulus, and its weird combination of arty arch-decadence and neo-Victorian moralizing. In other words, count me in! Dawson plays Maya, an ambitious college undergrad who hooks up with the wrong frat brother, a narrow-eyed surfer type named Jared (Chad Faust) who spins a line of romantic bullshit. On their second date, he rapes her, and if this isn't as brutal a rape scene as the one in Gaspar Noé's infamous "Irreversible," it's still plenty harrowing and shot close to real time.

As beautiful as Dawson is, I'm not sure she should be playing characters 10 years younger than her age; Maya is much more convincing as a coke-snorting nightclubber in the aftermath of the crime than she is as a newly scrubbed coed. She cuts her hair, starts wearing lipstick and gets sucked into an underworld presided over by the faintly criminal and undeniably charismatic Adrian (Marcus Patrick), who seems to be a club DJ, a dealer, a pimp and perhaps Mephistopheles as well. Eventually Maya plots gruesome revenge against Jared, with Adrian's help, and the movie descends into gruesome, improbable fantasy.

It's on the way to the nightmarish final scene that Lugacy's film finds some truly interesting things, maybe by accident. Doing coke with Adrian and making college boys suck her toes empowers Maya and restore some sense of self-confidence; it's as if the film is too focused on its plot to cast judgment on her allegedly immoral behavior. There's a mysterious, powerful, erotic moment that happens almost by accident when Maya is dancing to a throbbing dance number in Adrian's club. She's caught in a spotlight, seemingly lost in thought amid a writhing mass of bodies. That's Rosario Dawson, beautiful and alone. She doesn't fit in with the college girls or the homegirls. Even in a crowd, she's on her own.

"Descent" opens Aug. 10 in New York and Los Angeles, with more cities to follow.

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