Indie Rites

Jesse Peretz's impressive debut

I've been a major fan of ex-Bostonian Jesse Peretz's First Love, Last Rites (which opens this Friday at the Janus and the Coolidge Corner) since I viewed it as a member of the international critics' jury at January's Rotterdam Film Festival. We awarded it our grand prize, and our citation praised the movie "for its challenge to the dominant American narrative through its unexpected concentration on mood, atmosphere, and sexual mystery."

Precisely. A brilliant adaptation (screenplay by David Ryan) of a subtle, affecting Ian McEwan short story.

This is about it for story: in backwater Louisiana, a college-age boy, Joey (Giovanni Ribisi), and girl, Sissel (Natasha Gregson Wagner), sequester themselves in a single-room house on stilts, where they are consumed by lovemaking. A very steamy movie! Sometimes the couple start to talk, the tilt of each conversation dependent on Sissel's ever-shifting moods. The girl's young brother, Adrian (Eli Marienthal), visits and exhausts them with his monkeying about.

Occasionally Joey leaves the room and hooks up with Sissel's crazy dad, Henry (Robert John Burke), who lives in a motel room, thriving on a diet of overcooked scrambled eggs and a single slice of toast. Henry takes Joey hunting in a pea-soup swamp and gets him involved financially in an eyebrow-raising business operation, whereby they catch eels in traps and sell them at market. "Eels are special, a smart animal," Henry waxes enthusiastic. "In Vietnam, they love eel over there."

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Also: Brett Milano's interview with Jesse Peretz in "Cellars by Starlight."

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There are no Vietnamese in this Louisiana bayou locale.

But most of the movie stays in that Women in the Dunes-like room, Joey and Sissel's love shack. It's Joey's first affair, and he's totally hooked, away from the world, far away from his home in Brooklyn. There's something undeniably creepy, vampiric, about the way Sissel has sucked him in. She's in control, deciding when, and how, they climb together, and she's certainly a late-teen version of the Mysterious Woman. Sissel asks Joey blunt, probing questions about his childhood, but she answers inscrutably about herself and her family.

Joey: "What does your dad do?" Sissel: "Business." Joey: "What kind?" Sissel: "Different kinds."

Sissel, describing to Joey her job at a sugar factory: "I make sure that sugar gets into a bag."

The lead performances are just terrific. Giovanni Ribisi, currently on screen in Saving Private Ryan, is a sympathetic nice kid as Joey with a giggly, uncertain laugh, sensing himself over his head in this whirlpool Louisiana. Natasha Gregson Wagner's Sissel shifts moods on a dime, from sullen to insolent to sort of loving to madly sexual. She's a pouty post-Lolita, always barefoot and in her undies, keeping Joey on a tight rein. Wagner is the daughter of actor Robert Wagner and the late actress Natalie Wood, and here she's so much the reincarnation of her Rebel Without a Cause mom: the same fabulous nose and mouth.

Kudos to talented filmmaker Jesse Peretz, ex-Lemonhead and former Harvard film student (and the son of New Republic editor Martin Peretz). Along with Smoke Signals, First Love, Last Rites breathes real life this summer into the American independent film.

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The screenwriter of the new, notorious Lolita (airing this month on Showtime) is Stephen Schiff, whom old-timers may recall was the Phoenix's film editor and chief film critic in the late '70s and early '80s. Schiff, never one to underestimate his talents, told Variety recently that "I wrote a script I was very proud of and surprised myself with -- and people who read it were surprised."

Certainly Lolita has led to a pile-on of Hollywood employ. Variety has listed five major studio projects to which Schiff's screenwriting is tied, including an adaptation of Carl Hiaason's Stormy Weather; True Crime, in production with Clint Eastwood directing; The Deep End of the Ocean, starring Michelle Pfeiffer; and Gangster Rock & Roll, starring Robert De Niro.

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My favorite period of filmmaking? Hollywood in the 1950s, the last hurrah of the big studios, and where many of America's greatest filmmakers -- John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Nicholas Ray, Otto Preminger, etc. -- made their best pictures ever. This Monday, August 17, the Brattle Theatre has a delicious '50s double bill: in-color and big-screen 35mm prints of Some Came Running (1959) and Artists and Models (1955). Both feature Shirley MacLaine and Dean Martin, and I promise you a great nostalgic evening from the era when movies were MOVIES!

Also at the Brattle, a delightfully nutty, visually eye-popping double feature of Sam Fuller's The Naked Kiss (1964) and Shock Corridor (1963) on August 14 and 15. And at the Coolidge Corner on August 19, director John Huston's dazzling adaptation of Carson McCullers's Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967), with an enormous performance by Brando as a closeted gay Army officer.

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Finally, news from the Coast: the San Francisco Bi Film Festival, earlier a one-day event, expands to three days, July 24 through 26. Five features and shorts will be shown focusing on bisexual characters and themes: "Bi-Bi Love!"