Leap Year

Leap Year, dir. Anand Tucker, 2010.
Starring Amy Adams and Matthew Goode.


What a waste of Amy Adams.  How could she go from her luminous, affecting, authentic performance in, say, Junebug, to this forced cliche?  She tries her best to carry the film, since her co-star, Matthew Goode, is just good looks and fumbled, mumbled Irish accent.  The camera lingers on the curve of her cheek and the sheen in her eyes, but in the end it's hopeless.

This movie adheres pretty slavishly to the classic romcom roadtrip plotline (spoiled rich girl meets cynical laconic man who falls for her during the course of numerous plot twists and reversals).  Since It Happened One Night there have been probably dozens of retellings, including in Bollywood.  Some of them felt quite fresh at the time (such as A Sure Thing, in 1985, with John Cusack at the height of his ragged, boyish charm).

Perhaps the only thing different here was that the female lead gets most of the screentime.  But otherwise predictable, boring, and uninspired.   In fact, it seems Matthew Goode went on record as saying that he reckoned this film was the year's worst, and he took the part only as it allowed him to fly back to London on weekends.

What a waste.

1*
2015
 

Tokyo Fiancee

Tokyo Fiance
Amelie Nothomb, 2007.
Trans. from French (Ni d'Eve, Ni d'Adam) by Alison Anderson.

A small colossus of modern Orientalism, of modern prejudiced outsider interpretations of the East.

Amelie is a young Belgian woman in Tokyo, teaching French to Rinri, a Japanese university student a couple of years her junior.   She finds him kind, charming, sweet, genuine and very attentive.  She embarks on an affair; accepts his engagement proposal although she has little intention of following through with marriage; and when the affair has run its course, tells him that she is leaving the following day to visit her sister in Belgium, although she has no intention of returning.

Oh, how liberated she feels, despite all the anguish she causes!  Oh, how easy it is to brush aside his gentle, implied entreaties to return when he calls her in Belgium!  Oh, what a liberated, "strong", "honest", "intelligent" woman she is!  (Quotes are taken from admiring reviews in the Western press).

This is truly a novel where glibness has obscured soullessness.  The book is about how easily a pretty, manipulative, self-absorbed young white woman can wrap her fingers around a dazzled Japanese boy.  Yes, she calls him "the boy", which is patronizing at best, and at worst as if he were her houseboy in a colonial African household.  He has no depth whatsoever, except as a vehicle to explore Amelie's fairly standard and stereotypical observations about Japanese society and gender relations.   (I myself have visited Tokyo over a dozen times, including stints over 2 weeks in length, and thus have some perspective on this.)

Rinri has been awfully good for Amelie -- he is rich, feeds her vanity, and serves as cultural interpreter as well as a vessel to be filled with her naive, superficial views of Japanese culture.  (And of course, provides material for a book.)  But Amelie herself has learned nothing by the end of the book -- no deeper insight into her own cultural prejudices, privileges, and petty narcissism -- ultimately making her own sojourn in Tokyo a waste.

This book is existential proof that a quick turn of phrase, some snappy observations, and lyrical exoticism cannot hide self-indulgence, self-absorption, ethnic stereotyping and borderline racism.

It is simply breathtaking to see the praise heaped on this pile of ethnocentric vanity by the Western press and mainstream reviewers.  Since so much of the book is a paean to French culture and Francophilia, it is unsurprising that it was published by the support of the French Ministry of Culture, or that it has garnered so much praise in France.  But it is hard to understand the rest.

June 2015
1*

Into the War

Into the War

Italo Calvino, 2014.

A slight, slim collection of 3 interlinked stories set in 1940, at the start of Italy's involvement in WWII, describing an Italian adolescent's hesitating steps at the threshold of manhood.  

The war is just an intriguing artifact to him, more a symbol of all he longs for and is afraid of, rather than the brutal reality to follow.  He is more concerned with fitting in, emulating his friend who seems more experienced and worldly-wise, and to a lesser extent, girls.  

The writing is clear, precise, and confident.  The boy's intelligence, perceptiveness and innocence -- or perhaps, lack of world-weariness -- are skillfully sketched.  And it is made clear, in a wonderfully subtle way, how little he knows of himself, particularly of his own weaknesses and self-delusions.  

By the third story the protagonist is beginning to doubt the friend he admires, and beginning to suspect that the friend's supposed experience and sophistication is a sham.  This is the first step to him becoming his own person -- or as Dickens put it (in the opening line of David Copperfield), he is starting to become the hero of his own story, so that that station is not held by another.  

But in the end the collection disappoints.  It is obviously told from the vantage point of adulthood, and what we feel cheated of is the full narrative arc of the adolescent's transition to adulthood, with all its attendant confusion, pain, disillusionment -- and wonder.  Without that, the stories feel like little more than prologue, sketches for a memoir, perhaps.  Would these ever have been published were they by a different author?  Probably not, as they wouldn't have sold.

2.5*

Apr 2015