Hex Ed
Bewitched
Every time you see Nicole Kidman's mug on a magazine cover, think: hegemony. This lovely-looking yet only moderately talented woman has won blanket media approval despite no proven box-office popularity and without giving so much as a single credible performance. It's both funny and scary that she also has such an uncanny knack for fake art. From lousy films like To Die For and Moulin Rouge, to the half-bad Eyes Wide Shut; from pretentious, enervating films like The Hours, Dogville and Birth, to the recent, racist The Interpreter-all have made her the darling of gullible critics and the wannabe intellectual set who get revved up with each new marketable release. Kidman does it again with Bewitched, a peculiarly uninspired updating of the 1960s television series into a pop-art meta-film.
Treating 60s junk culture as a paradigm of the pop experience is less than clever. It's the smug approach of a lazy hack. Yes, this Bewitched is written and directed by Nora Ephron, perhaps the most inept director in Hollywood today. The original series concerned a centuries-old witch, Samantha (played by Elizabeth Montgomery), marrying a mortal man and struggling to restrain her dark powers-and wacky relatives-in exchange for the joys of normal life. Ephron dares a "complicated" plot in which the old series is revived as a vehicle for a vain, modern actor (Will Ferrell) who unwittingly hires an actual witch, Isabelle (Kidman) for the Samantha role. Ephron scuttles her own gimmick when Isabelle complains about the mindless remake: "This is supposed to be about a real marraiage and real problems, like what color to paint the kitchen."
I was reminded of Ephron's 1993 appearance on The Charlie Rose Show, bragging about hiring Sven Nykvist-the cinematic equivalent of what color to paint the kitchen. In Bewitched, label-conscious Ephron has no idea other than to emulate The Truman Show and Ed-TV. (Piran-dull-o.) Those heavily ironic movies pretended to be media-savvy but merely congratulated audiences on their idiotic familiarity (and comfort) with tv-making and showbiz routines. This false sophistication is tv-trite (no surprise, Penny Marshall shares producer credit with Ephron). Bewitched has the same facile Happy Days?style phony sentiment that makes Ron Howard's movies inane. (How does Garry Marshall occasionally advance past it, achieving acceptable sentiment in Overboard, Flamingo Kid, Raising Helen?) Ephron has learned to reprocess romantic comedy (When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle and You've Got Mail), crafting schlock movies that trivialize male-female relations into clichés supposedly ratified by their cabaret soundtracks.
Bewitched repeats that formula yet fails its aim at Hollywood satire because it starts out idolizing Isabelle for her witch's privilege. ("Every woman wants to be a witch," she says. She snaps her fingers for home-and-garden furnishings not unlike the rewards of evil at the end of The Player.) In a sequence working a lawn sprinkler, microwave oven and a light switch, there's ease on top of privilege. So lucking into an insipid tv job and falling in love with her co-star is a bimbo's vision of life. It relates to nothing except, maybe, the fact that like Kidman, Ephron's industry connections have given her undeserved carte blanche. The daughter of Hollywood screenwriters, she married into power and socialized profitably. Thus, you come out of a Nora Ephron romance knowing less about love than when you went in. Similarly, you come out of a Nicole Kidman film with your sensitivity stunted and your taste insulted. (Moulin Rouge is one of the rare films that, by the time it's over, makes you tired of cinema.)
Thanks to Ephron, you'd never guess that the tv series had legitimate antecedents-the 1958 James Stewart?Kim Novak Bell, Book and Candle, a comic flip of Vertigo about a witch longing to be human (critic Dennis Delrogh compared it to A.I.); and Rene Clair's 1942 I Married a Witch, a comedy based on social opprobrium and sheer cinematic rhythm. Ephron pilfers the tv series, not bothering with style or thematic coherence-just accidental post-modernism, some contempt for pop taste (as in Nurse Betty) and a reliance on Kidman's sham histrionics. Isabelle isn't smart and conflicted like Samantha; she's an imbecile who just wants to fall in love. Speaking in a Marilyn Monroe dingbat voice, Kidman uses her vacant placidity to contrast Will Ferrell's klutziness. But they're not in sync; after Mr. and Mrs. Smith this is the second screwball catastrophe this month.
And here's the hegemonic part: Both Nicky and Nora, celebrity cineastes, consistently make movies that distort and misrepresent human behavior, leaving viewers content with the Hollywood status quo. They operate under the guise of "entertainment" and "art," but their collective films couldn't be more dishonest and unenlightening if they had deliberately conspired to deceive. Kidman and Ephron, the queens of kitsch, are a match from hell.
The Story of a Love Affair
Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni
5x2
Directed by Francois Ozon
Lucia Bose, the intimidatingly beautiful star of Antonioni's first film, the 1950 The Story of a Love Affair, was the epitome of bewitching loveliness. At Visconti's urging, Antonioni cast the unknown Bose to play the working-class girl who married a rich man and out of boredom took up with her blue-collar ex (Massimo Girotti). In crude hands, Bose would be a "femme fatale," but Antonioni made her a figure of tragic dissatisfaction. From the start, Antonioni probed space and faces for existential depth. Girotti looks at Bose with fear and longing. Their plot to murder her husband recalls Visconti's Ossessione remade not as a classic but perpetually modern. It's a cosmic romance-everything Bewitched is not. The new DVD company No Shame has made this rerelease a rediscovery. It evokes the era when cinematic pleasure was not determined by fools and no-talents. Special features include a great Italian critics round-table and an interview with Antonioni's co-screenwriter Francesco Maselli discussing "the bliss of camera movement." Bliss-what Bewitched is not.
Bad marriage is also the subject of Francois Ozon's 5x2-a backpedaling look at a couple (Valerie Bruni-Tedeschi and Stephane Freiss) from divorce to first meeting. Ozon's cruel psycho-comedy defies sentiment; this break-up breaks down into five discrete shorts with moments nearly as piercing as Ozon's first films. It's his best hetero movie (Bruni-Tedeschi flashes an emotional rainbow as Charlotte Rampling, Ozon's previous token, never could). Yet there's no sense of discovery when love has already failed. As a teasing fatalist, Ozon mixes the tragic and the insipid but still hasn't achieved a breakthrough.
-A.W.