Copyright Statesman and Nation Publishing Company, Ltd Apr 11, 1997Bits and Pieces ( 15);
The People vs Larry Flynt (18)
This week's major release is The People vs Larry Flynt Milos Forman's biopic of the flamboyant American pornographer. Some of its legal and constitutional aspects were discussed in these pages by Marcel Berlins last week, but a small aesthetic footnote is called for. The film is unmissable. This is less for the number of issues it manages to raise (and fudge) than for the visceral magnetism of Courtney Love, who brings to the part of Flynt's wife, Althea, an energy, intensity and casual eroticism that light up the screen.
As with Madonna's role in a vastly inferior film, Body of Evidence, it's hard to account for the unembarrassed physicality of her performance: either this is just a rock chick bending over backwards (literally, some of the time) to make her mark in Hollywood, or it's someone who invests everything of herself in her work and genuinely doesn't give a damn.
In Love's case I'd go for the latter, and it's not too much to say that she carries the film. Woody Harrelson's Oscar nomination for his far-too-lovable-portrayal of Flynt himself can be put down to the fact that he spends much of the movie in a wheelchair, and the academy can never resist anyone who tries to play disabled.
It's slightly misleading, by the way, to think of The People vs Larry Flynt as a Milos Forman film. It has a wit, pace and agility not readily associated with the director of the elephantine Amadeus. Its real auteurs, I would suggest, are the screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski. Once you remember that these are the people who wrote Ed Wood, everything falls into place. For this is really just another skewed, affectionate portrait of an American visionary. The fact that his vision happens to be worthless merely seems, for this mischievous duo, to make the subject all the more intriguing.
It is, of course, a godsend for the media when a screenplay like this takes the wellremembered details of a recent life and telescopes them for artistic effect. Dozens of column inches can be consumed with controversy over omission and faults of emphasis. We had all this with Michael Collins, and we're getting it again with Larry Flynt, because people can't seem to accept - or understand - the shaping and editing process that goes into the creation of any screen narrative. To insist that a biopic should be accurate is to wish for maundering, formless cinema; a wish that happens to be granted, in spades, by another of this week's releases, the Italian feature Bits and Pieces.
This is Robert Altman's Short Cuts trimmed down and relocated to Rome. An appealingly ambitious debut from the young director Antonello Grimaldi, it ditches the conventions of classic, linear narrative in favour of a loose montage of intertwined anecdotes: there are about 30 plot-lines in the film, performed by an ensemble of 65 actors.
Grimaldi's brief is really nothing more complex than to provide a snapshot of one day in the life of his capital city, starting off with some familiar shots of the tourist landmarks and then zooming in on quirkier, less recognisable territory. We follow an armed raid on a Chinese restaurant, the pitiless work of a laconic traffic warden, a contract killing, the unexpected death of a mother at the hands of her young, perhaps schizophrenic son. All of these stories, and a couple of dozen more, are watched over by a jogger, who by the end of the film may or may not have committed suicide.
The exteriors are wonderful, and the dusk-to-dusk time scheme allows the opening and closing scenes to be bathed in the same grey, melancholy light. Once we get indoors, however, and start visiting the characters in their homes and offices, Grimaldi's visual style turns flat and anonymous.
You could argue that this very flatness is, like the lack of structure, part of the film's commitment to hyper-realism. I'm not convinced. There's nothing especially realistic, for instance, about the morbidity that pervades the film: at least half of its stories involve sudden or violent death. Grimaldi has played just as fast and loose with reality as Alexander and Karaszewski, the difference being that while their film offers all the pleasure of a fine narrative, all that Grimaldi can serve up is the mild but undernourishing fun of watching 30 barbed, whimsical shorts in rapid succession.
Both films open on 11 April
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