By Troy Ribeiro
FILM: Grace of Monaco
CAST: Nicole Kidman, Tim Roth, Frank Langella, Paz Vega, Parker Posey
DIRECTION: Olivier Dahan
‘Fairytales’ and ‘women of substance’ have always been desirable subjects for filmmakers across the world. And Grace of Monaco has both; an actress marrying her Prince Charming and then sticking to her commitment for life.
Though the life of the award-winning US actress Grace Patricia Kelly was “like a fairytale”, this biopic captures only four years of her life as the Princess of Monaco, revealing that the “royal life” hadn’t turned out to be as she had imagined. The film portrays her fascinating human side that reflects tension in her personal life and social scenario.
Director Olivier Dahan’s narration picks up its threads from December 1961 in Monaco. Five years after her marriage and retirement from movies, Grace is frustrated with life for being an ornamental wife to Prince Rainier III and a doting mother, tied down to the tradition and customs of a land alien to her American upbringing and lifestyle.
A ray of hope to escape this drudgery comes in the form of her friend, director Alfred Hitchcock, who offers her a role of the psychologically-scarred kleptomaniac in Marnie. She is tempted. And much of the first half of the film concerns with her desire to return to Hollywood, despite the open misgivings of her husband and the not altogether inaccurate intimations of the tabloid press that her marriage must be on the brink.
And this is intertwined with the political tension brewing within the Principality of Monaco. They are at loggerheads with France over taxation laws. France ominously threatens Monaco with embargoes if Rainier doesn’t start taxing its business houses and paying the money to France.
At this crossroad of her life, Grace is advised by her priest and friend, Father Francis Tucker to devote herself to her husband and family to help solve the crisis. And this she does in her own personal way and charms the world, which forms the crux of the film.
Grace of Monaco is Nicole Kidman’s film all the way. She gracefully slips into Grace’s skin, portraying the self-sacrificing anguish, anger and anxiety, as well as the determination of a go-getter with ease. She is aptly supported by; Tim Roth as her supportive, but occasionally indecisive husband, Frank Langella as her priest and confidante Father Tucker and Parker Posey as the mysterious frown-faced lady in waiting.
The rest of the cast: Robert Lindsay as Aristotle Onassis, Paz Vega as the socialite horse-riding Maria Callas, Jacobi as her etiquette guru and Roger Ashton-Griffiths as Alfred Hitchcock in supporting roles, just help to take the narration forward.
Made on a moderate budget, the tone and texture of the visuals captures the picturesque locales and era with aplomb. Unfortunately, packed with intriguing drama, Arash Amel’s script toils on an even graph. The glorification of the princess is done sans drama. There’s no high-pitched performance and the histrionics are marred with amateurishly handled camera shots. This is very evident in a crucial scene, when Grace is asked, “Do you love the prince?” At that decisive moment, the viewer is distracted by the jerky movement of the camera which later zooms in for a close up. The momentum of the scene is lost.
Similarly, a good part of the visuals is layered as a montage with non-diegetic dialogues, thus making the biopic a dispassionate, uninspiring, generic fare.
Overall, the zing is missing in the film and grace is lost! — IANS
DVD courtesy: Kings Electronics, Doha
Sweet, cute … and weepy
By Roger Moore
FILM: The Fault in Our Stars
CAST: Shailene Woodley, Ansel Elgort, Laura Dern, Willem Dafoe
DIRECTION: Josh Boone
Shailene Woodley, who can do no acting wrong, brings a welcome reality to The Fault in Our Stars, a perfectly serviceable teen date picture. Sweet, cute to the point of cutesy, it’s a weeper about doomed teenagers who meet in a cancer patients support group and dare to fall in love.
Adults can be forgiven for rolling their eyes at any movie about cancer whose narrator mocks the conventions and cliches of the genre and then declares, “This is the truth”. Because what follows are almost always those very cliches she was ridiculing.
Hazel (Woodley, of Divergent) is 17, and totes an oxygen tank around with her, a byproduct of the experimental drug that keeps her cancer at bay but fills her lungs with fluid from time to time.
Hazel is leery of the new guy at the support group her ever-smiling/ever-positive mom (Laura Dern) makes her attend. Gus (Ansel Elgort, Woodley’s Divergent brother) gives her the playboy’s smile and the playboy’s stare. He charms her and the group with his bubbling personality.
“I’m on a roller-coaster that only goes up!”
Hazel isn’t buying it, but is won over by his wit, his bad driving, his habit of calling her by her first and middle name: “Hazel Grace!”
Thus begins a chaste but adorably sweet romance between two people who have that one thing in common, and are just old enough to know better than to let this happen. But they can’t spend all of their energy worrying about their parents’ worrying about them, trying to be brave for the grownups’ sake.
One cliche of such movies is how healthy the sickly look — up until that moment that we know is coming, when they do actually look sick. Another familiar touch: Hazel forcing her favourite book on her new beau, and them communicating with the author (Willem Dafoe), who turns out to be how authors in such scenarios always are.
The cancer jokes keep it light - “I love it when you talk ‘medical’ to me.”
And the stars hit it off well enough. Woodley, dazzling in The Descendants and The Spectacular Now, is merely a convincing lure for Elgort, who lifts his game to hang with her, though not quite enough to make the literary locutions of Gus come out sounding natural. Dern took the role for one or two good scenes; the rest of the supporting cast makes little impression.
But this long Josh Boone (Stuck in Love) film based on a John Green novel isn’t meant to be a movie for people who remember when TV had “disease of the week” weepers. It’s for teenage girls, and the boys they can wrangle into seeing it with them. — MCT
Journey of discovery
FILM: Barbie and the Secret Door
VOICES: Kelly Sheridan, Brittany McDonald, Ashleigh Ball
DIRECTION: Karen J Lloyd
Alexa is a very shy princess who discovers a secret door that opens to a magical land. When the shy Princess Alexa finds a secret door hidden in her kingdom, she is unexpectedly transported to another world filled with strange and magical creatures.
In this curious land, Alexa discovers that she has magical powers and meets two new friends: Romy, a mermaid, and Nori, a fairy, who tell her that the selfish Malucia is stealing all the magic from the land.
It’s up to Alexa and her new friends to restore the magic into this wonderfully whimsical land – saving everyone who lives there.
Barbie stars as Princess Alexa, who must overcome her shyness and find the strength to stand up to those who only intend to harm this mysterious place. It is fun to watch Alexa making her journey in her search for courage. In the process she discovers the true meaning of friendship.
This musical is aimed squarely at fans of Barbie.
DVDs courtesy: Saqr Entertainment Stores, Doha