Light in August

French film rebounds with Assayas

Even true fans of French cinema think "golden oldies" when considering directors, as the old-timer New Wave names -- Godard, Rohmer, Resnais, Chabrol, the late Truffaut -- remain the ones that everybody knows. It's a shame, because France is exploding with talented young cinéastes who (unlike the USA's embarrassingly arrested post-collegiate cinema class) make dense, mature films that capture the texture, and the complexities, of everyday life in the late 1990s.

The very best, and most consistent, of these filmmakers (everyone learn his name!) is the 44-year-old Olivier Assayas, veteran of seven features, whose marvelous new Late August, Early September opens this Friday at the Coolidge Corner for a two-week run. Assayas, in line with the New Wave elders mentioned above, began as a critic for Cahiers du Cinéma, and he was the first in France to write seriously about Hong Kong and Taiwanese national cinema. His adoration of the Hong Kong action movies starring Maggie Cheung precipitated her employment in France (playing herself) as the lead in his 1996 Irma Vep. Amazingly, they are married, she the beautiful, graceful international star, he a babyfaced kid with a geeky giggle and inevitably appareled in blue jeans and punky tennis shoes.

I interviewed Assayas once, and what a nice guy! It was in Thessaloniki, and because he was going to be late for our hotel-lobby appointment, he ran through the streets (those tennis shoes helped!) to get there at a reasonable time. Imagine that of the imperious Godard!

Late August, Early September is about the interconnected lives of a group of Parisians mostly in their 30s. It's about the sickness, the period of remission, and then the sudden death of one of the group, Adrien (François Cluzet), a novelist. It's how the lives of the others are affected and, for a moment, derailed by Adrien's fatal illness. It's just as much, and more profoundly, about how these lives plod on: love affairs continue, as do worries about work and success. Paralleling Adrien's tale is that of an apartment once shared by two lovers, now split, and how that apartment gets bartered, sold, remodeled, yuppified.

Assayas's strategy in Late August is a philosophical one (an Eastern one? Ozu-like?): to endow all scenes in his movie with equal weight; and the concerns in these vignettes, whether monumental or petty, also get equal consideration. As he has explained when interviewed, he strives to be ethical but not to preach morals. Whether his characters choose the right or wrong lovers (they are often precariously in between relationships) is not for him to judge, and neither are the ways they love. Adrien's final entanglement is with a 15-year-old girl. Anne (the great French starlet Virginie Ledoyen), compulsively mixed up, gets embroiled in an S&M threesome. Assayas's camera watches all, with compassion instead of condemnation.

"Everything happening in this film belongs to the common experiences of most people, in one way or another . . . grief, love, desire, regret," Assayas has said. "They're very basic things. . . . It's egotistical to say whatever you're doing will be recognized and stay on. Who cares? It's very vain. Somehow it makes sense to feel that . . . you are expressing something with your time. . . . You see some painting or photographs, and you feel the world at that time vibrating."

That's why I love Late August, Early September: Assayas's ephemeral Paris feels strikingly like my world: Boston 1999, middle August.

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A reported highlight of the Boston Rock Opera's recent show at the Middle East was Gary Cherone's belting of the 1970s Alice Cooper schlock anthem "The Ballad of Dwight Fry." Cooper couldn't spell the name; neither could the Globe in two articles about the concert: it's Dwight Frye, thank you. Worse, Cherone had no idea, said the Globe, that Frye was a real person. Get real yourself, Gary, we're talking about the immortal film actor who played Renfield, the bug-eating lackey of Bela Lugosi, in the original Dracula (1930), and who came back in James Whale's Frankenstein (1931) as Fritz, the humpbacked helper of Dr. Frankenstein, gleefully torturing Boris Karloff's monster.

The story's in Dwight Frye's Last Laugh (Midnight Marquee Press, Baltimore), an adulatory 1997 biography written by Dwight D. Frye, the thespian's son, with two others. What I learned is that Frye acted in 60 movies, cast often as servile gnomes, though he had one cool role, as the fall guy, Wilmer, in the 1931 version of Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon.

In the '20s, he actually had been a Broadway star, praised for both comedy and tragedy by the finest drama critics, including Alexander Woollcott and Stark Young. One critic called him "a future Barrymore." In Hollywood, he was known as a bizarre Method actor long before its time, getting too deep into his groveling, sadistic roles. Actress Mae Clark said that, on Frankenstein, Frye was "sometimes more frightening than the Monster."

Away from movies, Frye was a churchgoing Christian Scientist and a family man. He died of a heart attack at age 44. You can find his grave ("Dwight Iliff Frye, 1899-1943") at Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Glendale, in a section called "Graceland."