Friday 10
th
November 8.00pm
The Cider House Rules
Dir: Lasse Hallström, 1999, USA, cert 12, 126 mins,
Simple movies are very difficult to make. For all that we
yearn to see something exciting and different, for all the
times we cheer innovative and original filmmaking, the
old-fashioned well-crafted drama -- a picture that's
emotionally straightforward yet compelling, with a story
that leaves you wondering what will happen next -- is an
increasingly rare creature. In that vein, Lasse Hallström's
"The Cider House Rules" breaks all the rules simply by
following them. Its simplicity is almost shocking. What
makes it work is that Hallström makes choices that are
traditional in a sense, and yet never exactly obvious. The
picture moves with a grace and clarity that never wobbles
into predictability. And no one in the ensemble of actors
ever missteps: There's nothing overdone or overwrought.
Friday 8
th
December 8.00pm
Brief Encounter
Dir: David Lean, 1945, UK, cert PG, 86 mins
This misery can't last," thinks Celia Johnson in an
exquisite English trance of unhappiness, "not even life
lasts very long." David Lean's 1945 drama of a couple
committing adultery in their hearts is superb and Noël
Coward's crisp script is a classic of passionate reserve.
Trevor Howard was never better than here - his tendency
to frazzled cynicism is absent - and Celia Johnson is
outstanding as the suburban housewife with no outlet for
her repressed emotional life other than listening to
Rachmaninov on the walnut-veneer record player and
peeping over into the unthinkable abyss of infidelity. A
must-see.
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Friday 19
th
January 8.00pm
De Battre Mon Coeur S'est Arrete (The Beat
That My Heart Skipped)
Dir: Jacques Audiard, 2005, France, cert 15, 107 mins
American pulp novels by the likes of Jim Thompson,
David Goodis and Cornell Woolrich have frequently been
adapted by French filmmakers. But French remakes of
Hollywood films are rare enough to border on the unique.
Such a film is The Beat That My Heart Skipped (aka De
Battre Mon Coeur S'est Arrete), Jacques Audiard's
excellent version of Fingers, James Toback's 1978 debut
as writer-director
In transposing the film to Paris, Audiard has stuck fairly
closely to Toback's plot, though he's dispensed with both
the transgressive sex and the fascination with macho
black culture. Audiard's film is altogether smoother, less
raw and more coherent than Toback's. As in Audiard's last
film, the dark thriller, Read My Lips, the background has
become the shadier side of the real-estate business, and
the new film can be seen as something of a companion
piece to A Self-Made Hero (Un Heros Tres Discret). In
that masterly 1996 movie, a young Frenchman
reconstructs his identity in the confused final days of the
Second World War.
Dark, handsome Romain Duris, who played the fin-de-
siecle gentleman-thief in the recent costume blockbuster,
Arsene Lupin, is a charismatic presence as the hero Tom,
a confident, sharply dressed, chain-smoking, real-estate
man who by day attends meetings with his shifty
employer's clients and by night unleashes sacks of rats
into unwanted tenants' apartments.
The Beat That My Heart Skipped is a work of authority,
maturity and intensity that improves on Toback's original
film without appearing to patronise or despise it.