JET LAG, with Juliette Binoche and Jean Reno, Is Refreshing!
Written: Jun 26 '03 (Updated Jul 03 '03)
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Pros: Performances by Binoche, Reno, Sergi Lopez. Daniele Thompson's direction from script with Son Christopher.
Cons: Some lovers of French Film hate it, haters of French Film may also. See it!
The Bottom Line: JET LAG is a French romantic comedy subversive to the American Way of Life. It suggests Daniele Thompson and Son, at least, may make American pictures better than we can!
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| macresarf1's Full Review: Jet Lag |
Most of us have been there. A large terminal of some kind. It is midwinter -- raining, sleeting, or snowing -- and you have to go somewhere (to Mexico) or you have an obligation (a funeral), perhaps. You've missed a connection, everything has closed up, there's been a strike declared, or the schedule has broken down. You are tired, miserable and worried. In such an extreme situation, you begin to have thoughts that perhaps you would not have ordinarily in your everyday routine. A haggard but attractive woman who asked you for a light, or the shaggy guy whose cell phone you borrowed. What do they really mean by their responsive looks, well after midnight, in a strange town? Did they mean anything at all? That's the question in the minds of Felix (Jean Reno) and Rose (Juliette Binoche), when they become trapped within the cavernous confines of Roissy -- Charles de Gaulle Airport, outside of Paris, one damp afternoon.
[In my most vivid and amusing memory of such a situation, the incident revolved around a train which became stuck in a huge snowdrift, somewhere east of Pittsburgh, Pa. My pal and I, on our way back to University after Thanksgiving, missed our connecting train and were herded into a cab, after 1 a.m., by an agitated New York Central official, in freezing downtown Akron, Ohio; to be taken to a hotel, where we would be put up until the line was cleared, come the morning. In the cab were two coeds, two years younger than ourselves, from our hometown -- also stranded. Although we hardly knew them, they were all agiggle with our former theatrical and other high school exploits, and we were soon conversing, literally giving off sparks to the frigid air. We stood on the frozen sidewalk, outside the hotel, breathing steam at each other, all alone in a pre-Christmas World. I shall always remember the sleepy clerk, who matter-of-factly asked us if we wanted to register as couples, his cynical-eyed hesitation, and how he gave us adjoining rooms anyway. Jeanie, a minister's daughter, had carrot-red hair and wore a pink cashmere sweater. They knocked on the bathroom door later and asked us if we wanted "to talk," but Dryden and I were really tired . . . and maybe not very bright.]
Before the opening titles, Rose begins to tell us about her childhood, which has been extended into her thirties. Her parents, she barely hints, were Communists, and she, while a dutiful good French daughter, has been trying make a life (unsuccessfully) in reaction to them. Becoming a renowned star in the ["frivolous"] field of cosmetology is as far she has gotten. As the credits flap over like changing schedules on the Airport's arrival/departure board, she confesses that if Andy Warhol predicted everyone would have her/his 15 minutes in the future, she "wants a whole day when my life would be like an American movie."
JET LAG (Decalage Horaire), the first-directed of veteran writer Daniele Thompson, is THAT MOVIE, but unlike recent French efforts to make films which will appeal to American audiences [the dastardly BROTHERHOOD OF THE WOLF curdles in my mind], this French romantic comedy really works! In fact, it is better than the last half dozen bloodless, mindless "meet-cute" farces Hollywood has tricked younger audiences into rolling out for.
When France begins to beat America at its own game, watch out.
How is JET LAG better than standard Tinsel Town boilerplate romantic comedy? Let me count up the thumbs. JET LAG is about two real people, with mysterious, like our own, barely hinted at lives, different, iconic perhaps, but recognizable. They are beautiful or handsome, in French way, of course, but sticky, sweat-soaked, fatigue-ridden, as we would be in approximate straits. After the initial plot device, their relationship develops in a down-to-the-tarmac, back and forth fashion most of us can appreciate. The necessary complications are so wrapped up in good story telling that, by the time the picture has run an 81 minute course to its Hollywood wish-fulfilling end, we are inclined to say, "Yes-yes, it's a tropical heatwave! Cool!! I don't want my bout of JET LAG to end!!!"
At least, I didn't.
Rose the meticulous suburban beautician, you see, has left her demanding, controlling, slightly psychopathic Spanish anarchist boyfriend, Sergio (Sergi Lopez), to fly off to Acapulco for a desperately needed break. But the plane has been held back. [Familiar?] Completely re-doing her makeup, one more time in an Airport restroom cubicle, while cell-phoning both her alarming girlfriend, Sabine, and her lonely mother, she accidentally, on news that Sergio is on his way to their flat, nervously drops the phone into one of those self-flushing toilets which exist, seemingly, only in facilities serving in-or-around jet aircraft.
Where, given the shrinking numbers of crowded and complicated public phone booths today, will she find another way to learn if Sergio is descending like a vengeful terrorist upon her?
Meanwhile -- oblivious, depressed, harried -- gaunt, kinky-haired Felix (Reno) is wandering a parallel universe, within the massive shimmering dome of Charles de Gaulle (like some other locations here, a good setting for a remake of BLADE RUNNER). Felix is a chef, who had a falling out with his Three Star Father at the family restaurant in Burgundy, cooked on cruise ships for a time, and raised the big souffle when he opened a little French bistro in New York City. But the City fees and protection money to the Mob bummed him out, and now, Internationally known, he is using his Top Toque Name to front for a line of Gourmet frozen foods. Currently, he is trying to introduce to the American Market that most undiscovered and sinful of all Haute Cuisine: English Shepherd's Pie. For reasons not explained, he is having a hell of time! On his way from New York to Munich for his Mother's funeral, he has just learned that a mechanical problem will ground him in Paris for an indefinite period.
"Merde!" Felix needs to pay his respects to his estranged family -- and get back to America -- to sell. Sell. SELL!!
He is on his cellphone constantly, in several languages, to his family and his partners.
To make his discomfort worse, his blood pressure medicine is out of adjustment on account of Jet Lag. He is suffering dizzy spells and must flop down in a cold sweat on one of those long, sterile banks of seats in the Terminal. Shortly, who should appear before his bleary eyes but Rose, in her fur-topped leather coat, her elaborately coifed hair, pancake makeup, blush, eyeliner, mascara and lip liner. Would he mind if she borrowed his phone for a local call? just one!
Felix takes the opportunity to consult the perfunctory Airport Medical Services. By the time he has been shooed out with an emergency supply of new medication to stabilize the blood pressure, one call has led to another, and Rose has involved his phone with several people close to her. Rose and Felix begin to exchange information about themselves as strangers do, without half-meaning to. She finds his mix of Chef-power and temporary weakness attractive. He, bad tempered, feeling ill, and preoccupied, cannot keep his eyes off the red silk blouse she wears under her coat.
His flight is called, and he leaves Rose diffidently and politely, never expecting to see her again. She turns, full of businesswoman panic, to await her jealous lover of 12 years. But a sudden cloudburst requires all the Munich-bound passengers to exit their jet in a driving rain to return to the Terminal. Soaked, sleepy, dizzier than ever, Felix idly scans the food facility, perhaps to purchase "a cafe and a piece of fruit." There is Rose. He approaches her but, too late, realizes that she is with a man whom she must know. The man, Sergio, insists that Felix sit with them, and it is not long before the volatile Spaniard is smashing glass tabletops and accusing Rose of unfaithfulness in the most ungentlemanly language.
Her excursion flight for Mexico is called, and she bolts. But an air controllers' work stoppage almost immediately strands both her and Felix. Because he is flying First Class, he is offered an accommodation at the Roissy Hilton.
[If you believe that something like this situation doesn't happen often, I can assure you that it happens at major airports nearly every day. In fact, I experienced something roughly similar several years ago, without ever having left home(!!), at San Francisco International Airport, trying to fly to Mazatlan, Mexico. And anyone who has taken that superhighway of moving sidewalks at Charles de Gaulle, outside of Paris, will remember the gaping web of signs and bays leading to the lobbies of the Roissy Airport Hilton, which is attached to the Terminal.]
Discovering Rose curled up, disheveled and tortured-looking, on a bench of seats where he first saw her, hours before, he contemplates her plight for a moment. It's getting late evening, and he wakes her to offer, in a very proper suggestion, one of the large, comfortable beds that will undoubtedly furnish his free room.
The first of a number of "forbidden" adventures.
How Felix has a spell and passes out on the bathroom floor, how Rose takes the opportunity to look over his passport, and he hers later, how they dance to and fro between distrust, exhaustion and interest, I'll let you discover. Let me just say that the terrors of Hilton room service for a top Chef -- He shouts in exasperation, when it comes down to a Ham Sandwich, "The pig died in vain!" -- leads him to use his name and a hundred Euros to rent a portion of the Hilton kitchen to prepare for Rose, Mignonettes de veau au Felix, the dish he once dared to offer his imperious father. That Juliette Binoche, with all her makeup off, even accidentally drenched with vinaigrette, looks just as good to Felix (and us) as she did when we first saw her. (Well, a dumb man would say, "almost). And then, there is the scene in which, to cover a lack of ease with each other, they watch the room TV. He can't somehow keep the remote from finding the Porn Channel, and she can't tearfully get enough of old 1930's newsreels of the French Popular Front (celebrating the great Communist martyr, Rosa Luxemburg, for whom she was named). It creates about as poignant, human and funny an experience as an intelligent moviegoer will see this year. Finally, how the prodigal Felix reunites with his Father in Burgundy, and how Rose has the "peace" of her Acapulco and Felix, too, are little gems of moviemaking.
[Nothing you haven't seen before, you understand, but prepared, like a good meal, in an elegantly personal French manner.]
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Juliette Binoche and Jean Reno have reputations as heavy, indeed ponderously heavy dramatic actors, in both French and International Films. A painter in her own right, the highest paid actress in French Movie History, often declared the finest actress, and most beautiful actress, in French Cinema, she has starred in films, such as THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING (Kaufman, 1988), Les Tres Couleurs (Kieslowski, 1992, 1993, 1994) and THE ENGLISH PATIENT (Minghella, 1996). Reno, a Moroccan-born Spaniard, with his sad, shadowed eyes and hawk nose, has essayed somewhat lighter stuff -- for instance, LA FEMME NIKITA (Besson, 1990) and MISSION IMPOSSIBLE (De Palma, 1996) -- but he has never been described as a matinee idol.
Here, in JET LAG, however, the pair show themselves excellent romantic comedy actors, with a slight gravity of experience which gives Rose and Felix a reality that nice young Hollywood things may never attain.
Writer Daniele Thompson (COUSINE, COUSIN, Tacchella, 1975), now Director Thompson, has used her 30 years of scripting, much of it in French TV, to craft a beautiful script with her Actor/Writer Son, Christopher Thompson (Actor: JEFFERSON, 1995; Writer: THE LUZHIN DEFENSE, 2000). One can only imagine what a kind of collaboration this one must have been, but it is entirely successful. Madam Thompson marshals their plot and dialogue with Patrick Blossier's camera, keeping everything on the move in the Airport Terminal, cutting often in the hotel room scenes, giving us frequent close-ups of the inchoate expressions on the faces of her uncertain lovers.
[Aside from Sergi Lopez (Sergio the Boyfriend), none of the thirteen other speaking parts have more than a shot or two.]
Eric Serra (THE FIFTH ELEMENT, Besson, 1997), a present master of French Film Composers, provides an assertive but emotionally perfect score. [The homage to John Barry's music from MIDNIGHT COWBOY for Felix, to take one example, is witty and brilliant.]
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There appear two kinds of critics who don't think much of JET LAG: some who hate French Films, and others who love them. The former, of course, recognize that the Thompsons have made a small revolutionary picture here: a French Movie, in the belly of the beast, Americans might love (very subversive, almost treasonable today), while maintaining all the elegant virtues of French film making. The latter critics, it is equally clear, dismiss JET LAG as not being a French Film at all, but one derivative . . . and entertaining . . . without the Weight of Culture.
They are wrong.
Rose and Felix engage in elfin wit throughout JET LAG; they just don't punch their lines through much; and when they have nothing to say, they just stop talking and look at each other (or at TV, or at Food, anything else which turns them on, or can at least alleviate their misery). It is a virtue which my favorite French director, Claude Chabrol (RIEN NA VA PLUS/THE SWINDLERS, 1997), learned long ago, and other French directors might take note of.
[If that is bourgeois, so be it.]
Daniele Thompson extends the keen French penchant for noting how France hates things American but also loves them, or if only appreciating their utility, tries to adapt them to French uses. Everyone in a French International Airport seems to have a cellphone; speaks colloquially in several languages, American English in particular; is in danger of falling victim to . . . Frozen Foods (!) and American TV. But she makes her observations amusing for us. We can understand the point made, without feeling ashamed of our provincialism and technical obsession.
Meanwhile, hie thee to a theater to experience JET LAG, sit back to enjoy a wonderful example of La Comedie Humaine, and don't listen to the six Francophobe Critics or half a dozen Francophile Critics. You'll be very glad you followed my advice.
BTW, keep your eye on the closing credits, and lay in a case of Calon-Segur '96 for someone you love. You'll be very glad about that, too.
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BROTHERHOOD OF THE WOLF --
http://www.epinions.com/content_50850074244
THE LUZHIN DEFENSE --
http://www.epinions.com/content_20481281668
THE SWINDLE --
http://www.epinions.com/content_29284798084
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If you wish to explore a majority of Macresarf1's reviews, indexed by title and category, many with URL's, go to the following hyperlink --
http://www.epinions.com/content_2514526340
Recommended:
Yes
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macresarf1
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