Offbeats

Erick Zonca, Louis Prima, Elián

Why don't Americans go to European films any more? A theory thrown about (by the New Yorker's David Denby, for one) is that we (at least, we men) used to attend these films because of the sexy stories and unrobed babes, but now the almost-X stuff can be found abundantly in our own movies. Why venture into subtitled territory?

There's a teensy truth to this vantage. Yet in a more fundamental way, today's American film narratives and European ones still don't overlap in the slightest; in no way are they duplicate aesthetic experiences.

"Serious" Hollywood movies (and the bulk of American indies) tend to be character-driven, with speeches, psychologizing, and overdetermined back story. The shooting style is as simple as TV; the audience sits back and enjoys. "Serious" European art movies are subtext-driven: minimalist, about what's not said, with emphasis on the formal side of storytelling. The audience is required to be an activist participant, figuring things out from subtle visual clues, and swimming about in a world of moral ambiguity. A mood of pessimism and limited possibilities prevails (class is a definite factor), as opposed to the "Go for it!" optimism of American cinema.

As for sex: the soft-focus, screwing-is-beautiful tone of "adult" American movies (especially when movie stars are involved) is replaced by raw, blunt, not-always-pretty carnality. Sex as it actually is.

Alone (1997) and The Little Thief (1999), two short films by France's Erick (The Dreamlife of Angels) Zonca that are screening this weekend (August 11 and 12) at the Brattle Theatre, are paradigmatically European arthouse works. Forget revelatory flashbacks and epiphanic oratory. We know nothing, and are offered nothing, about the two marginal, low-on-money protagonists -- Alone's young woman, The Little Thief's young man -- except the tiny actions that we observe unfolding on screen. Each has a brief conversation with someone of the opposite sex; then there's a quick cut to a bed. One couple copulate on screen, the other have finished. Both protagonists are shown being fired from jobs -- waitressing, working in a bakery -- and both make impulsive decisions that lead them to venture into petty crime. We don't know in either case whether the firing is fair or unjust; the information simply isn't offered.

And Zonca makes no judgment on their criminal lives. We aren't guided into rooting for these principal characters, or given any help in deciding whether they're "good" or "bad." What keeps us watching is Zonca's expert filmmaking, the way he makes us privy to curious, subterranean worlds.

Alone is the lesser film, an apprentice piece with too many histrionic, shouted scenes, as ex-waitress Amelie (Florence Loiret) sinks low, loses her rented room, has her pocketbook stolen, becomes a panhandler, and threatens a taxi driver with a gun. This 30-minute work is most interesting for the section where Amelie hangs out with a foul-mouthed shopping-bag post-adolescent (Véronique Octon). Here's a rough draft of the female friendship at the center of The Dreamlife of Angels, Zonca's international breakthrough.

The Little Thief, Zonca's latest, swings into life when the protagonist, "S" (Nicolas Duvauchelle), becomes embroiled with a pack of lowlife thieves in Marseilles. Here's the obverse of classic American gangster films, in which Jimmy Cagney or Edward G, Robinson rose quickly through the mob. The "rise" of "S" means he gets to pimp for a gaggle of prostitutes and then become the personal driver for the gang's meanest member, who viciously sodomizes him. Although he barely speaks in most of the scenes, "S" becomes almost "Americanized," eliciting audience sympathy and the wish for a feel-good ending.

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A film about Louis Prima? If anyone remembers him, it was for his corny song-and-dance pitter-patter on the 1950s Ed Sullivan Show, something for the old folks who couldn't handle rock and roll. Don McGlynn's Louis Prima: The Wildest (August 11, 13, and 18 at the MFA) makes the best case that Prima was more than just a sweaty mainstream entertainer. This affectionate movie shows the New Orleans native as one hell of a jazz trumpeter, with a creamy, slurred, pre-Dino crooning voice that prefigured the self-conscious ethnicity of other Italian-American singers. And we get to enjoy whole songs, the best of which are Prima's duets with his one-time wife, Keely Smith, whose stage persona was to stand Buster Keaton-stonefaced while smily Louis hopped wildly about.

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How did the bummer box-office finale -- Elián returning to Communist Cuba -- affect Israeli director/entrepreneur Menahem (Delta Force) Golan? He'd been in production on the $3 million Elián: The González Boy Story, utilizing a screenplay by Timothy White with a tabula rasa conclusion. "The film will be ready for delivery in September," he announced at Cannes, if anyone really cares. Golan also shot in Moscow a $20 million Crime and Punishment, with weirdo Crispin Glover as Raskolnikov. "It's a two-hour movie or, if you wish, a four-hour mini-series," Golan described his market-driven Dostoyevsky.

Gerald Peary can be reached at gpeary@world.std.com

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