Kathryn Bigelow and Catherine Breillat are veteran fighters in the male-dominated world of filmmaking. Never-say-die artists, they make movies that are powerful Rorschachs of their own distinctive psyches - no matter how controversial or commercially challenged the subject matter. Both are adrenalin junkies, Bigelow in the action milieu of self-defining physical threat, Breillat in the equally hazardous arena of sexual passion.
This year's SIFF features Bigelow's "The Hurt Locker," a superb men-in-war film, and "Bluebeard," Breillat's highly stylized fairy tale about gender combat and the power of fiction.
On Breillat's carnal battlegrounds, each gender struggles, skin to skin, to infiltrate and overcome the Other. No other filmmaker so powerfully expresses the primal, uncensored energy of a woman's libido, a path to self-knowledge but also self-immolation.
Breillat's "Bluebeard" ("La Barbe bleue") is a startling departure from "My Last Mistress," the torrid saga of sexual obsession showcased in SIFF 2008. This grown-up translation of the Charles Perrault fairy tale is cool to the eye, each austerely composed frame almost a still life.
As two sisters explore an attic, the younger child emerges as a fearless adventurer unwilling to be reined in by rules, while the older girl hangs back. We've already met the similarly named siblings who will figure in Bluebeard's quest for a new wife by the time the modern-day kids find a dusty book of fairy tales and begin to read the story we're witnessing. This Freudian fiction about a bearded ogre who demands that little girls repress their minds and bodies isn't a benign bedtime story: it becomes a matter of life or death.
In Breillat's adaptation, hulking Bluebeard (Dominique Thomas) is a prisoner of his own unlovely flesh, anxious to please the lovely child-bride (16-year-old Lola Créton) who demands a tiny bedchamber of her own - "too little for you to come in." Sneaking a peek at her unclothed husband, the curious virgin calculates his measure as she did her once-intimidating dad on his deathbed - and then beats a hasty retreat to "her secret place."
Despite the danger that we sense threatening this delicate beauty - we share the irresistible lure of that locked room Bluebeard has forbidden her to enter - there's something opaque about Marie-Catherine, as though she might shelter hidden powers of her own.
Painting, in the most minimalist style, pretty pastel pictures of past and present storylines, Breillat wires every placid scene to hum with uneasy tension, as though fraught with impending fate. When the fall from innocence comes, the two narrative lines intersect fatally ... but not at all where and how we expected.
Nearly every shot in "The Hurt Locker" thrums and jitters with a different kind of nerve-wracking tension. From the get-go, Bigelow puts us in the very belly of the beast, locking us into the POV of men who defuse IEDs on the hot, dusty streets of an Iraqi city. There's always an audience, unfriendlies on the roof line fingering cellphones, viddying the proceedings, maybe about to trigger the bomb. Armored up in helmet and heavy Kevlar suits, we gulp air and sweat buckets, waiting for the world to blow up. When it does, there's a terrible beauty in the slo-mo waves of destruction that flow outward from the IED.
In one well-nigh unbearable set-piece, Bigelow follows hotdogger William James (a first-rate Jeremy Renner) up to and into the rusted carcass of a car identified as the site of an IED. As metal ticks in the heat, James doggedly searches for the source of the wires that will ignite a trunk full of explosives, the camera cutting faster and faster from car to nervous back-up soldiers to potential enemies. Then, the thwump! thwump! thwump! of bullets. Breathe easy, it's just wipers pounding back and forth on the dusty windshield. It's as though Bigelow had jacked us directly into William James's nervous system, providing the kind of powerful rush the virtual reality junkies craved in her 1995 "Strange Days."
Watching, in closeup, James' muscular arms flex as he works, Bigelow honors the beauty, strength and awful vulnerability of flesh, contrasting corded veins and arteries with the IED's lethal plastic lines.
It's an emblematic image, because for Bigelow's addicted heroes, life - indeed, bedrock identity - is at its richest and most meaningful when challenged by annihilation. There's nothing like it in peacetime or quotidian existence.
In one surreal firefight, Renner and his partner (Anthony Mackie, excellent) fuse into a single killing machine, their senses totally attuned to each other and their distant targets, barely recognizable as men until a painterly spray of red signals a hit. There's something like Tantric sex in what's almost a rapturous merging, stillness stretched to the breaking point, later released in body-to-body rough-housing. This appreciation of ecstatic action as source of existential identity and camaraderie is heady stuff, a fresh breeze in the airless climate of Hollywood's CGI'd comic book mayhem.
"The Hurt Locker"'s battleground is Iraq, but the fatal glamour of living on the edge isn't confined to this or any other war. Bigelow's heroes, like Hemingway's, are hooked on the kind of dangerously transformative experiences that play out in badlands - where outlaws on speed court death.
[[In-content Ad]]
