Screen Scene
SCREEN SCENE
By John Carlos Cantú
SEVEN
[1995. Directed by David Fincher. Cast: Brad Pitt, Morgan Freeman, Kevin Spacey. New Line Cinema. 107 mins.]
[Acting, Cinematography, Editing]
Seven might as well be nicknamed "The Misbegotten Son of Dirty Harry." By resorting to the crudest provocation, Director David Fincher flirts with state authoritarianism. As the film unravels, it becomes the kind of movie that might make Mark Fuhrman's day.
How Seven gets to this point is quite disappointing.
Screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker has concocted a genuinely chilling premise in this imaginative variation on the urban serial murderer. Seven is one of those rare films whose premise and initial delivery is flawless. In fact, it is so flawless, Walker's ingenious who-done-it is ultimately this much more bewildering because its climatic choke is totally unexpected.
The single most interesting critical question about this film is whether or not the director and or screenwriter were aware that their film was limping into the gate. One wonders if they were pleased to lay such an ideological rotten egg on the last page of their narrative. Perhaps they were striving for notoriety to bolster the film's commercial take. But it seems unlikely that any of these considerations (except possibly the last) ran through their minds as they completed their project.
There is, however one simple clue as to how this exceedingly clever film could have taken such a drastic wrong turn. Fincher's debut film of a couple of years back. Alien 3, managed to take the box office steam out of what at that time seemed to be an unbeatable science fiction series. It was difficult to determine whether that film 's odd pacing and narrative flatness was due to his hand orthe script's conventions with which he had to wrestle.
Seven leaves us with no such convenient excuse. Fincher simply isnt a very insightful filmmaker. Walker gives him one of the most fiendish scripts in recent memory, but Fincher's lack of re asonab leness botches what could have been a cinematic all -timer.
Frazzled detective William Somerset (Morgan Freeman) is one week away from his much needed retirement His feisty replacement, David Mills (Brad Pitt), comes on board just as an unusually brutal murder has taken place in their precinct. What Mills and Somerset have tossed in their laps is an obese man who was frightened into stuffing himself with canned spaghetti until he literally burst at the seams.
The follow up is a chain-link of repulsive murders whose gruesome ruthlessness ratchets the tension as the body bags build up. It takes all of Somerset's investigative skills to unravel the clues leading to the unmistakable conclusion that a maniac who calls himself "John Doe" is carrying out St Thomas Aquinas' seven deadly sins upon urban dwellers whom he considers the most appropriate victims. Mills' first impulse is to get ready for a collar, but the more cautious Somerset wants instead to corner their quarry. Little do they know they're both being manipulated. The villain wants to get caught.
And it's upon this unexpected twist that Fincher manages to lose his film. Walker has handed him a plot worth its weight in box office gold. But even if Seven manages to earn a bundle, Fincher has still managed to lose something more important his film.
Much of the lack is related to Fincher's need to draw attention to his visual technique; consequently, the narrative suffers. But the stylistic tics that marred his earlier science fiction film havent advanced a single step. This movie, like the last one, is draped in an oppressive darkness that is both pretentious and surpri singly monotonous on occasion. By making the unnamed city where the crimes have been committed unrelievedly murky, he's left the film with no objective ballast with which the audience can identify. Mills and Somerset inhabit a faceless, dreary shadow-filled landscape that's merely a terrestrial substitute for the director's Kafkaesque Alien3 underground passages.
Still, these flamboyant visual shortcomings as an auteur could be overlooked if Fincher had any narrative common sense. For Seven's conclusion is a failure of diabolical proportions. And this responsibility lies solely at the feet of the director. At one point, the conscience-ridden Somerset tells the hot-tempered Mills that their case is not going to have a happy ending. He recounts the seven deadly sins of antiquity: gluttony, greed, sloth, envy, wrath, pride, and lust. But his hell-bent younger partner brushes the old-timer off.
Unfortunately, Mills, like Fincher, has forgotten the eighth (exquisitely modem) deadly sin: fascism.
THREE COLORS: BLUE
[1993. Directed by Krzysztof Kieslowski. Cast Juliette Binoche, Benoit Régent. Miramax/Miramax Home Entertainment. French with English SubtiUes. 98 mins.]
[Acting, Cinematography, Directing, Editing]
Kieslowski's first entry of his trilogy based on the French tricolors s a meditation on appreciating - and thereby acknowledging - what one has lost.
We catch a quick glimpse of Julie's (Juliette Binoche) backstory when the Mercedes she's traveling in crashes into a tree killing her husband and child. We watch her come to grips with the sudden loss of her family while she's convalescing at a hospital. But it's only after she comes home that Blue gets under way.
Julie's grief is so complete, she renounces the life she has previously led. She instead seeks to remake her identity and character. In doing so, the past reveals its secrets. Julie uttimately finds out that her husband had been conducting a long-standing affair with a lawyer who is now pregnant with his child.
At the time of his death, Julie's husband, Patrice, was allegedly composing music to be played as part of an upcoming European unity celebration. We ultimately learn that Julie has been writing her husband 's music and this is why her husband's best friend, Olivier (Benoit Régent) has been seeking to track her down in time for its premiere. Only through the stumbling romantic prodding of Olivier does Julie feel the pull back into the life she has abandoned.
What Kieslowski does with this sparse story is remarkable. Stitching the strands of Julie's life together - with additional short detours to visit her mother and the making of a new friend - he illustrates how trauma slips us out of our everyday identity and replenishes us through our spirit's rejuvenation. This isn't exactly the easiest subject matter to film (much less write) and the fact that he's successful makes Kieslowski's achievement triumphal.
Julie's faltering half-steps at reclaiming herself are fascinating. Binoche's impassivity underlines Julie's hesitant moves towards recovery by subtly telegraphing her understanding of her options. By contrast, Kieslowski's conclusions in Blue seem ambivalent. Perhaps this is because he's acknowledging the psychological depths of Julie's mental condition. Or then again, perhaps it's merely because he as a male is writing about the feminine psyche.
Whatever the circumstance, Kieslowski's clearly addressing the fact that the heavy mental chains of our past is the human condition. After studying Julie with all of the attention that a scientist might muster for a special specimen, Kieslowski carefully bundles the strands of his character's story from her personal perspective to the wider social world she reluctantly lives in. With a sure-handed musical overture and equally handed thematic understatement, Blue ends with a majestic quizzical ambiguity.
Even as Julie reconciles herself to her self, Kieslowski leaves the possibility open that she's no longer whom she seems. He seems to want to tell us that memory is a most fearsome beast.
RATING KEY
Acting
Cinematography
Direction
Editing
Narrative
Sound
Special Effects
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