Review
THE HOURS
Starring Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore and Meryl Streep
Directed by Stephen Daldry
Opens Friday, January 17
Check listings
Review
TALK TO HER
Starring Javier Cámara, Darío Grandinetti, Leonor Watling and Rosario Flores
Written and directed by Pedro Almodóvar
Opens Friday, January 17
Uptown Screen
An elegantly structured and well-acted film, The Hours takes Michael Cunningham’s novel, adapted by playwright David , and renders it as a meditation on the roles women play in society, either by choice or by circumstance.
This focus is not surprising considering that one of the film’s central characters is the British writer Virginia Woolf. Long a favourite of feminist scholars, but also renowned outside the academy, Woolf is played here as a mixture of curiosity, melancholy and madness by Nicole Kidman. The Hours chronicles Woolf as she writes the now-classic stream-of-consciousness novel Mrs. Dalloway in a suburb of London in the early 1920s
Still, the true intelligence and complexity of The Hours lies in the ease with which it also incorporates the stories of a 1940s Los Angeles housewife (Julianne Moore) and a socialite (Meryl Streep) living in New York more than two decades later.
I haven’t read Cunningham’s book, but I’m assuming the film’s novelistic structure – with its parallels between the lives of three extraordinarily different women living so many years apart – originated there. Kidman, Moore and Streep all turn in credible performances, and Kidman’s in particular is worth noting for the way she gives credence to the fictionalization of one of the 20th century’s great writers.
The direction of The Hours is capably handled by Stephen Daldry (Billy Elliott) up until the end, where the film falters slightly by resorting to "choose life" bromides. That fault may also lie with the source material, but a picture that strives to do justice to the ideas of an iconoclastic literary figure like Woolf should at the very least avoid clichés in its dialogue. Despite this flaw, The Hours remains a very good film and is worth seeing mostly for the palbable way it renders its characters’ alienation from those they desire to be closest to.
TALK TO HER
Both more subtle and more flamboyant is Pedro Almodóvar’s Talk to Her, which, oddly enough, seems much like a companion piece to The Hours from a male point of view. Almodóvar has long been concerned with the status of women in society, a preoccupation that reached its apex in his previous feature, the Academy Award-winning All About My Mother.
While Talk to Her still deals tangentially with themes surrounding the roles of women (including such diverse characters as a ballerina and a female toreador), it is predominantly a perceptive look at loneliness, alienation and perversity in contemporary relationships.
The film is about two men, Benigno (Javier Cámara) and Marco (Darío Grandinetti), each of whom has, literally, a girlfriend in a coma (apologies to Douglas Coupland). But the film gives several unusual twists to the stereotypical male-female dynamics that we often see in movies. For one thing, a couple of the characters are brain-dead. For another, Almodóvar poses some surprising ethical questions in the context of these offbeat love stories.
Most of all, though, the film walks a fine line between melancholy and melodrama while maintaining its sense of humour. Like The Hours, it leaves us considering the difficulty of overcoming alienation from those closest to us, but it does so with a much lighter hand and a more refined sense of cinematic style.
Unlike The Hours, Talk to Her incorporates moments of inspired cinematic poetry without ever losing its focus. Almodóvar includes a pair of dance pieces by Pina Bausch that bookend the film, a sublime "live" rendition of "Cucurrucucú Paloma" by Caetano Veloso, and even "excerpts" from a hilarious fictional silent film called Shrinking Lover, but these diverse elements only serve to make the film resonate more deeply.
Finally, there’s a shot in which we see a copy of Las Horas (a Spanish translation of Cunningham’s book) sitting on a night table in the background. Perhaps this was a particularly fortuitous accident on the part of the set designer, but given how little seems accidental in Almodóvar’s film it might also be an entirely intentional detail.
Either way, comparisons between The Hours and Talk to Her are bound to be made, and while the former may be prepping to collect a few Oscars, the latter at least deserves to be recognized for its poetry, originality and sheer cinematic beauty. |
