European Cinema

Nelly and Monsieur Arnaud

Nelly (Emmanuelle Béart), a young married woman disillusioned with life and her self-unemployed husband, meets Monsieur Arnaud (Michel Serrault), an older, retired judge and businessman, through a mutual friend. The two begin a subtle, undefined relationship that leaves them in the end changed a little more profoundly than either expected. Monsieur Arnaud offers Nelly a considerable sum of money to pay her debts, no strings attached. Along with the money she accepts a job assisting Arnaud in writing his memoirs. As the writing progresses, Nelly comes to know the morally ambiguous past of her employer, and Arnaud contends with awakened feelings of longing. It ends abruptly when Arnaud and his ex-wife decide to tour the world on their way to Seattle, where he will see his estranged son. The French seem to have a talent for ambiguity and subtlety that this film shows off at its best. The relationship between the young woman and the older man is wonderfully intriguing in the way it plays out and changes each of them, and even more wonderful in that they never wind up in bed together. Béart and Serrault give flawless, nuanced performances as two people caught in each other's longing. A quiet and deeply satisfying film. --James McGrath

City of Women

Orfeu

Carlos Diegues's Orfeu brings the Orpheus myth (by way of the Vinicius De Moraes play, which also inspired Marcel Camus's gorgeous Black Orpheus) into the modern world of laptops and hip-hop, cell phones and street crime. Orfeu (Toni Garrido), Rio de Janeiro's samba king and a kind of god to his neighbors in the labyrinth of slums on Carioca Hill, is humbled by his love for Euridice (Patricia França), a sweet and stunningly beautiful girl from the provinces. Shot on location at Rio's fiery Carnaval celebrations and on a dynamic recreation of Carioca Hill's slums, Diegues's dazzling mix of musical extravaganza, romantic tragedy, and gangland crime drama drops the myth into the poverty and violence of slum life. The drama gets stifled in silly romantic entanglements, but Brazilian pop star Garrido and lovely França have charisma to burn, and the stunning canvas of exploding color is never less than enthralling. --Sean Axmaker

Nico and Dani

In America, two boys at the beach with no parental supervision leads to dumb, artificial sex comedies; in Europe, the same material can turn into something genuine and sweet. In a small seaside town near Barcelona, Nico comes to visit his best friend Dani, whose parents are away for the summer. They have the typical male teenager obsessions with masturbation and girls--but Dani is just beginning to realize that he's more interested in Nico than the local girls they've been flirting with. The setup isn't unusual, but what is remarkable about Nico and Dani is the unforced naturalism of the acting and the way the story unfolds. All the young actors give simple but nuanced performances, capturing in detail the charming awkwardness of adolescence, with frank sex scenes that are more clumsy and hopeful than erotic. Winner of the Prix de Jeunesse award at Cannes. --Bret Fetzer

The Cement Garden

A bizarre and compelling story of family secrets based on the novel by Ian McEwan (who also wrote the novel upon which The Comfort of Strangers is based), this British film tells the complex tale of four children who conspire to hide their dead mother's body to avoid being split apart and sent to an orphanage. Their deception works for a while, as they become a self-sufficient family unit. Soon, however, mistrust and a deeply antagonistic relationship between the older siblings rife with sexual overtones, as well as a snooping suitor with designs on the older sister, threaten to destroy their well-constructed facade. Adapted and directed by Andrew Birkin, this offbeat film is disturbing but a riveting find for anyone interested in new discoveries from the world of international film. --Robert Lane

Mon Oncle d'Amerique

Following a pair of films (Stavisky, Providence) that were more conventionally narrative than his explosively experimental early works (Hiroshima, Mon Amour, Last Year at Marienbad), French New Wave pioneer director Alain Resnais began a cycle of films beginning in 1980 (all written by Jean Gruault) that delved deeply into his philosophical and aesthetic concerns again. The first of these was Mon Oncle d'Amerique, starring Gérard Depardieu as one of three middle-class characters undergoing great degrees of personal stress. Presented as a docudrama of sorts with some pulp-fiction qualities, these parallel tales don't really resolve themselves within their own borders but gain another dimension of subjective resolution when Resnais ushers in a real-life scientist to discuss certain kinds of behavioral triggers in humans. The results are actually very satisfying and witty for viewers who can see the overt psychological elements not as a smug commentary on the action but a means of opening the action to a viewer's subconscious experience. Resnais takes the bold step of creating a new kind of filmed story here, and largely succeeds. --Tom Keogh

Loulou