JUSTINE ELIAS

Belle de nuit

JUSTINE ELIAS — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 20:36:56 GMT

Secret Diary of a Call Girl on Showtime
Belle is, as she introduces herself right up front, “a whore.” Or, if you please, “prostitute, call girl, escort, hooker, courtesan.”

FIRECRACKER: But Belle is sometimes less Darling than My Little Pony.

In Secret Diary of Call Girl (Showtime, Mondays at 10:30 pm), the lady of the hour is Belle (real name Hannah). She is, as she introduces herself right up front, “a whore.” Or, if you please, “prostitute, call girl, escort, hooker, courtesan.” Belle confides to her new best friends — us — in her many to-the-camera asides: it’s “just a job, it’s not the real me.”

Who is she, and how did she start high-end hooking, rather than some other career? “I love money, and I love sex,” says the 27-year-old university graduate (politics, philosophy, and economics; she has a good mind, a posh flat, and no other income). “I’m not an addict of anything, except maybe of the fourth season of The West Wing. I’m just . . . really lazy.”

Hardly. Over eight half-hour episodes (bought from Britain’s ITV2), Secret Diary’s pace captures the brisk, bold-as-brass tone of the pseudonymous Belle de Jour’s popular blog and bestselling books. Where the literary Belle’s voice has been compared to Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, the television version is more naive, even as she cruises from one £1000-and-up assignation to the next. As embodied by the delightful Billie Piper (best known to US audiences as plucky Rose Tyler, Dr. Who’s sidekick), Belle is a firecracker — and not just because she drops the f-bomb so often.

Episode #1 hit the ground fucking: Belle, already on the game, ricocheted between two johns. The sex scenes are frequent and generally playful. And, as in so many shopping-and-fucking extravaganzas, the costumes are a hoot. At times, Belle’s armor includes pastel warpaint and a floppy blond forelock. She’s less Julie Christie circa Darling than My Little Pony circa 1987. (Unfair? Wait till Belle, dressed in mock-equestrienne gear, surprises a client by saddling and straddling him. Tally-ho!)

More intriguing than the sex, though, is the way Belle’s trade forces you to think about the commerce of favors between men and women, about what happens before and after sex — with and without affection. Like Kenji Mizoguchi (Street of Shame, The Life of Oharu) and Lizzy Borden (Working Girls), Secret Diary presents an outlaw living beyond the rules. Belle can comment on the unsalted romantic lives of men and women. Shocked by a nasty on-line review, she muses on what johns, in general, want in the GFE — “girlfriend experience.” She smirks, “Not being moody and making them work out what’s wrong. The idea of being exclusive, being the only one.” Sure, Belle’s got it all figured out. That one little word — idea — will sting later on, when she gets dumped by a favorite client.

OSS 17: Le Caire nid d'espions/OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies

JUSTINE ELIAS — Wed, 14 May 2008 17:26:51 GMT

A hot, tight, seductive, vaguely bisexual James Bond
Imagine a blithe, covertly bisexual James Bond swanning around pre-Suez Cairo in a send-up directed by the early Zucker brothers.

Amazing Grace

JUSTINE ELIAS — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 23:18:05 GMT

Polite under fire
Michael Apted’s stirring if conventional bio-pic of 18th-century British abolitionist William Wilberforce offers rum, funneled into anti-slavery PM William Pitt the Younger, and sugar, in the form of the hero’s adoring wife, Barbara.

The Messengers

JUSTINE ELIAS — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 22:22:25 GMT

Imagine Oklahoma! done as an tuneless pastoral spook show
Twin directors Danny Pang and Oxide Pang Chun explored the supernatural downside of cornea transplants in The Eye ; in their first non–Hong Kong horror movie, they unearth ghosts of the Northern Plains with stylish but unfrightening results. Watch the trailer for The Messengers (QuickTime)

Le Petit Lieutenant

JUSTINE ELIAS — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 21:18:24 GMT

Emotions over procedures
The title character in this moody French policier is not little but young and inexperienced — he’s a police-academy standout who earns a job on the Parisian homicide squad.

No plain Jane

JUSTINE ELIAS — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 18:23:23 GMT

PBS's hot Bronte
Every generation leaves its fingerprints on Jane Eyre .

TRUE GOTH: The four-hour mini-series restores the novel’s emotional breadth.

Every generation leaves its fingerprints on Jane Eyre. The new two-part, four-hour Masterpiece Theatre version of Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 novel (January 21 and 28 at 9 pm on WGBH) might even leave a few fingernail scratches. There’s more to this story than doomy love talk and long walks across England by a governess in love with her rich, unavailable employer. Director Susanna White (Bleak House) and writer Sandy Welch (BBC America’s North and South) perceive so much humor, darkness, and eroticism that even those who’ve studied the book or seen any of the dozen or so TV and film adaptations will wonder how — or whether — the forthright Jane Eyre will get out from underneath her moral dilemma . . . Wait! She’s underneath him? Rochester is on top of Jane Eyre? Did that really happen? Which chapter was that in? In October, seven million BBC viewers tuned in to find out: how hot is this going to get?

Sahara-hot, if not Hell-hot. How thrilling and right to begin the tale of this castaway not with the same old recitation of the novel’s famous opening line (“There was no possibility of taking a walk that day”) but with 10-year-old Jane (Georgie Henley, Lucy in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe) already on the march. Here’s a solitary figure, swathed in red silk, exploring desert dunes, her eye on the horizon. Our heroine, sitting “cross-legged like a Turk,” has dreamt herself into an illustrated book. Then Jane’s real life, with all its denials, intrudes — a moment that neatly explains why people gravitate to great fiction and drama. As Jane grows up, there’s no voiceover narration; instead, a subjective camera suggests her attitude toward the world. Ruth Wilson, who is just 24, makes a cool, watchful adult Jane — a mysterious beauty in the Emily Watson/Isabelle Huppert mode.

Many adaptations, like the 1944 Joan Fontaine/Orson Welles expressionist soap opera, shave away minor characters and side journeys — along with any sense of Jane’s questing, non-romantic life. This four-hour mini-series allows her years to live through her scrapes and recover. Little Jane, as always, faces the schoolmaster’s trick question: “What happens to disobedient, deceptive girls?” The answer — Hell — foretells the fiery fate of Bertha Rochester, who lives with demons in her mind. Here Jane reconciles herself with her Aunt Reed (Tara Fitzgerald), who had exiled her to Hell-on-earth Lowood.

Lady Jane

JUSTINE ELIAS — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 17:08:18 GMT

Helen Mirren’s last bow as Detective Tennison
When Detective Jane Tennison made her 1992 debut on PBS’s Mystery! , she wasn’t the first female cop on television to stare down murderers.

THERE: To the end, Mirren’s Jane Tennison gives us what we wanted.

When Detective Jane Tennison made her 1992 debut on PBS’s Mystery!, she wasn’t the first female cop on television to stare down murderers. Angie Dickinson’s toothsome Police Woman and CBS’s groundbreaking Cagney & Lacey had put women on the force. But Prime Suspect, written by Lynda LaPlante as an answer to the many all-male police procedurals on British TV, finally put a woman in charge. Fifteen years and seven telefilms on, Tennison is now a detective superintendent on the verge of retirement, but the job has been hard on her soul. Even so, she doesn’t seem ready to quit.

Prime Suspect: The Final Act (airing in two parts, November 12 and 19, on WGBH Channel 2 at 9 pm) begins with the discovery of not a dead person but a semi-conscious one: the heroine herself, hung over and disheveled, waking in a strange place that turns out to be her own house. Ever the professional, she staggers to the office — after downing another drink. Like many high-functioning addicts, Tennison looks fine. At 60, she’s got a personal style (and a stylish, no-iron blouse/skirt set) that works double overtime. But look closer: her long-time habit is in her bloodshot eyes and unsteady hands. That her junior staff lets it slide speaks to how respected (or feared) she is. Or perhaps it demonstrates how youth tends to avoid those with a one-way ticket to Florida. “Where all the old coppers go now,” she says bitterly.

What a change from when we first met Jane Tennison and she was all sharp elbows and crackling nervous energy. Charging after pedophiles, drug kingpins, and serial rapist murderers, she was usually on the right track even if she rattled a few cages along the way. Mirren has said that she’s always enjoyed playing Tennison’s “unlikability.” And Jane is certainly difficult to get on with: she alienated one lover, a fame-seeking forensic psychologist/author (Stuart Wilson), and another, a junior detective (Colin Salmon), became “a distraction.”

LaPlante, who wrote the first three installments of Prime Suspect before moving on, has said that she’s disappointed in how her most famous character turned out: “I just find it very sad that for the end of a great character, female, somebody has to say, ‘Make her a drunk.’ ” In truth, it’s Tennison’s struggle with alcohol that gives The Final Act its power. It was LaPlante herself who originally wanted realistic, hard-driving, hard-drinking, chainsmoking cops. It figures that there’d be a few casualties. And Tennison’s not alone: one of the finale’s grace notes is the reappearance of DS Bill Otley (the late Tom Bell), the snide sexist who nearly shipwrecked her first murder investigation.

The Prestige

JUSTINE ELIAS — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 15:42:31 GMT

A movie with a few tricks of it own
Postmodern turns out to have been the wrong word, and world, for the Nolan brothers (director Christopher and screenwriter Jonathan) of Memento fame. Watch the trailer for The Prestige (QuickTime)

The Quiet

JUSTINE ELIAS — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 15:41:09 GMT

Idles in the dark
Deaf and mute since the age of seven, teenage foster kid Dot is more than just the loner/loser of her upscale Connecticut high school; she’s a sounding board for all who imagine that she can’t hear their secrets. Watch the trailer for The Quiet (QuickTime)

Wired

JUSTINE ELIAS — Wed, 05 Jul 2006 22:30:54 GMT

The Brotherhood brings cable crime to Providence
Providence has turned up on television as a cartoon ( The Family Guy ) and as a randomly selected backdrop for a sentimental, filmed-in-Toronto drama ( Providence ).

STREET LIFE: Imagine the brothers Bulger moved 50 miles south — and 40 years younger.

Providence has turned up on television as a cartoon (The Family Guy) and as a randomly selected backdrop for a sentimental, filmed-in-Toronto drama (Providence). Now Showtime has put down roots in the Rhode Island capital for Brotherhood (debuts this Sunday, July 9, at 10 pm), and Providence has never looked so rough — or so real — as a setting for fictional political machinations, crime and punishment.

Although Brotherhood’s gangland tales have drawn preliminary comparisons with The Sopranos, the show’s creator, Western Massachusetts–bred Blake Masters, says he was inspired by the Corleone clan and the brothers Bulger. That William grew up to be a statehouse kingmaker while Whitey became a notorious (and still at-large) mobster seems the stuff of airport bookstall fiction. For Brotherhood, imagine the Bulgers moved 50 miles south — and 40 years younger. Nominal “good son” Tommy Caffee is a rising state representative looking after a blue-collar neighborhood referred to as “The Hill.” (The script is cagy about exactly which hill; every ethnic group seems to occupy its own high ground.) Jason Clarke has the perfect face for an ambitious pol: the righteous fire in his eyes, the little lying mouth. Tommy’s rise to power gets interrupted by the return, after seven years’ mysterious absence, of his elder brother, Michael (Jason Isaacs), a criminal enforcer who says only that he “fell down a hole” for a while.

These siblings are near-strangers, and they spend most of the season’s 11 episodes circling each other like wary wolves. Tommy guns for a Speaker’s seat by circulating rumors in the State House men’s room. Michael has a chest full of scars and tattoos (Celtic and Far Eastern) and a violent homophobic streak and is tethered to his worried ma via cellphone. Isaacs, who’s portrayed a series of charming villains (beginning with The Patriot), plays down Michael’s deadly charisma, and he and Clarke both do creditable Roe-Dyeland accents. The bit players too are authentic — check out the city mayor who elbows Tommy out of the way to offer his condolences to a local family.

The Lake House

JUSTINE ELIAS — Wed, 14 Jun 2006 22:17:08 GMT

Too wistful, not supernatural enough
Despite an ominous setting and its South Korean pedigree, Argentine director Alejandro Agresti’s film reveals its wistful romantic intentions early on. Watch the trailer for The Lake House (QuickTime)

Cars

JUSTINE ELIAS — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 16:01:59 GMT

Pixar's rise of the machines is slow death in the fast lane
This noisy animated paean to NASCAR and Route 66 gets mired in the middle laps on a grippy track.

Take the Lead

JUSTINE ELIAS — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 15:34:44 GMT

To Sir, With Tango
Liz Friedlander’s pleasant but unsurprising film is a fictionalized Mad Hot Ballroom with rude but redeemable teenagers substituting for the 2005 documentary’s wide-eyed children.