Maelstrom

The 24th Montreal World Film Festival

Gene Hackman and Morgan Freeman chose to hold their Under Suspicion press conference at 10 p.m., the exact same time the film was being screened. ("Oh, those American movie stars!" said an exasperated Quebec publicist.) Chinese actress Gong Li almost missed a much-anticipated tribute, arriving at the last minute because of visa problems. Film-star headaches aside, the 24th Montreal World Film Festival earlier this month was a decent one that included some important North American premieres.

Such as, from Poland, The Big Animal. The late Krzysztof Kieslowski's friend and oft-used actor Jerzy Stuhr (White) adapted an incomplete Kieslowski script; he also directs and stars in this walking, talking James Thurber fantasy cartoon. A middle-aged couple look out of their dining-room window and see a camel on their front yard. The delighted man (Stuhr) adopts the camel, taking it for strolls as if it were a family dog. Soon he runs into resistance from disapproving neighbors and the town bureaucracy, who want the benign camel to disappear. An allegory about conformity, about the rejection of the Other? Or simply a Kieslowski romp? Whatever, The Big Animal is an arthouse crowd pleaser and sure to get American distribution.

On the competition front: Denis Villeneuve's Maelstrom was much applauded by a home-town Montreal audience -- it's the first Quebec-produced film in years to create a genuine "buzz." A talking fish (built by the Canadians who do David Cronenberg's surreal creations) tells the story of a screwed-up young Habitante (dashing Marie-Josée Croze) who after accidentally running over an old man finds herself falling in love with the old guy's son -- who has no idea she's the murderer. The romance is strangely winning, and the characters float in and out of water in an appealingly mythic way. Will we see Maelstrom in Boston? American distributors are loath to take on Canadian films, especially those in French, but this one has "cult" trappings and appeal for twentysomethings.

The biggest disappointment for me was David Mamet's State and Main, an intentional throwback to the George Kaufman/Moss Hart plays of the '30s and '40s -- The Man Who Came to Dinner-type entertainment. This one is very thin, underwritten by Mamet and complacently acted by several of our best thespians (Philip Seymour Hoffman, William H. Macy). There are too many one-liners that don't work, too many elaborate joke set-ups that aren't carried to punch lines. The plot has a movie company taking over a New Hampshire town (actually Manchester-by-the-Sea) after having had to leave its previous place of shooting. The problem is that the leading man (a funny Alex Baldwin) has a propensity for underage girls. "Everybody's got a hobby," is how he rationalizes it.

Macy plays the film's director, Julia Stiles is the new jailbait temptation for Baldwin, and Hoffman is the screenwriter, who finds himself falling in love (a lack-of-chemistry coupling) with local bookseller Rebecca Pidgeon, Mamet's real-life wife. I should mention that other American critics at Montreal concluded that State and Main is dandy and extremely humorous. (Sigh!) Yet all agreed that Pidgeon's nice-girl part is much too much on screen.

My surprise pleasure at Montreal was the offputting-sounding The Lifestyle: Group Sex in the Suburbs, a documentary about committed swingers made by David Schisgall, a one-time undergraduate film student at Harvard University ("Alfred Guzzetti's intense, quiet devotion to the highest form of cinema, documentary, gave me my calling"). He put in crazy years of dues working in Cambridge as Errol Morris's assistant -- a job that included, he admitted to me, entering Fred Leuchter's house and coming away with the at-Auschwitz tape that's the horrendous centerpiece of Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.

Shooting The Lifestyle, the 32-year-old Schisgall, said, "I was immediately engaged in an Oedipal struggle with Errol, attempting to make an X-rated Gates of Heaven." Indeed, Schisgall's lower-middle-class white-and-overage swingers are not far afield from Gates of Heaven's blue-haired pet-cemetery people. "It's the same self-created utopian vision, which to outsiders seems at best banal but is beautiful from their perspective. Errol had fully covered death. I covered sex, what's left?"

But the group sex has kept The Lifestyle out of Boston so far, though the film has had successful runs in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Schisgall explained, "One Boston exhibitor said my film was `disgusting.' It would be a great personal disaster not screening in Boston, but there's a 400-year-tradition of avoiding cutting-edge portraits of sex."

Meanwhile, Schisgall is getting married this month to Eugenia Peretz, a writer for Vanity Fair. His connubial thoughts: "My movie shows swingers who teach you that a good marriage shouldn't inhibit you but should open both people to new experiences and incredible adventures they could never have as individuals."

PS: The Lifestyle will play at the Harvard Film Archive in November, according to associate curator John Gianvito, who's a fan of Shisgall's film.

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

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