American teenager Aurore (Lizzie Brochere) gets her parents to agree to leave her alone in Paris while her father heads back to the States on business. The rebellious teen soon meets Chris (Pierre Perrier), a wanderer who gives her life a bit of excitement. They embark on a passionate affair that quickly turns into an all-consuming passion. Chris is a dangerous proposition though, who gets violently jealous if Aurore speaks to other men, but she’s smitten.

Chris has a secret though, he likes to pick up rent boys. While Aurore doesn’t seem sure about this, she goes along with it, allowing her boyfriend to go into his van with a trick he’s picked up. When she returns something terrible has happened and the rent boy is dead. Chris insists it was an accident and Aurore agrees to help him cover it up. Soon though it becomes apparent that this wasn’t a one off, but Aurore has been drawn in so deep, will she even want to get out?

Co-directed by Jean-Marc Barr, star of the likes of The Big Blue and quite a few Lars Von Trier movies, American Translation is an intriguing but rather strange film, which seems to both embrace and reject the US movie idea of a pair of lovers on a crime spree. As with many French movies since the New Wave, it is fascinated by Hollywood even while it tries to suggest something new and different. However its main problem is something that affects much film from around the world, a difficulty creating a fully rounded female character.

American Translation goes deep into Chris, and while some of its suggestions about how he got to be the way he is aren’t 100% convincing, he’s an interesting character even if he isn’t a very nice one – indeed much of the time he’s a complete bastard, not to mention a serial killer. You certainly want to know more about him though, with the movie dissecting his strange predilections, complicated sexuality and amoral behaviour. The problem is Aurore, as the movie never finds a reason for her to behave the way she does.

You’d need a pretty big impetus to just go along with it when you found out that not only does your boyfriend like picking up rent boys, but he also enjoys murdering them. However Aurore just seems to accept it. Yes she’s in love and she wants to rebel, but she’s left so blank compared to Chris that her reasoning seems impenetrable. It’s tough not to come to the conclusion that the film doesn’t understand women, and so doesn’t really know what to do with her.

Chris doesn’t understand English, so American Translation just gets Aurore to bluntly speak her thoughts in English, explaining it by saying that Chris likes the sounds even if he doesn’t know what she’s saying. It basically feels like the movie is admitting it has no clue how to present a fully rounded, complex female character who would believably get involved with the multiple killer, and so resorts to the cheap trick of getting her to essentially address the camera and say ‘This is what I’m thinking and how my mind works’. Even so it fails to get under her skin and her motivations remain inexplicable. Sure she wants to rebel, but the film doesn’t take her on a journey where it feels believable she’d go as far as she does.

It’s a shame as the Chris side of the movie is extremely good, as while he’s pretty horrible he’s also complex and enigmatic. Perhaps if the film had spent more time allowing him to seduce Aurore it might have worked, but she knows he’s potentially dangerous pretty much from the start and just blithely seems to go along with everything. Aurore could be some sort of statement about how passive and underwritten female characters often are in American films, but it doesn’t quite work here.

It’s a shame really as much of the film is very good and certainly keeps you watching. With a fair amount of skin and an intense performance from Perrier, it could have been so much more if it had paid as much attention to Aurore as it does to Chris.

Overall Verdict: An intriguing thriller that certainly gets under the skin of its murderous protagonist but undermines itself with a female lead who seems too passive and inexplicable.

Reviewer: Tim Isaac

Writer/director JC Calciano follows up his popular Is It Just Me? with eCupid, a rom-com looking at the gay seven year itch. Marshall (Houston Rhines) is about to turn 30, has been with his boyfriend for years, is stuck in a dead-end advertising job and feels like life has lost excitement. He’s yearning for a bit of fun and hotter guys in his life, especially as his boyfriend is so busy with his struggling business that it feels like they never have sex.

While surfing the web one night, Marshall finds a site called eCupid, but little does he know that agreeing to its terms and conditions will result in it completely taking over his life. Before he knows it, his boyfriend has moved out and eCupid is providing a succession of guys who are perhaps a bit more than Marshall can handle. Soon he begins to realise that the grass on the other side may be filled with hot guys and endless parties, but he may have been completely ignoring the joys of what he had already.

Bright, breezy and more than a tad silly, eCupid is the kind of film that makes for a decent hour and a half, even if it’s so lightweight it might fly away at any moment. Essentially it’s a fable, but the platitudes it wants to extol are obvious from a couple minutes in and then it’s just a case of watching each mildly amusing turn of events until we get to the inevitable resolution. The film has a lot to thank Houston Rhines as Marshall for, as it would undoubtedly have been a lot worse without his charming and rather cute presence as its centre. He pretty much carries what could otherwise have been an interminably trite movie.

While the rise of commercial gay movies, most of which go straight-to-DVD, is a good thing, there’s undoubtedly a tendency to put ticking the boxes ahead of a well-constructed plot and dialogue. Sometimes it’s almost as it someone specified the amount of shirtless guys and/or nudity – as well as how generally mild the overall tone is – and then wrote something around that. While eCupid is better than some, there’s still a feel that ensuring commercial appeal was more important than making it good. Admittedly you can’t blame someone for making a movie that’s designed to have as wide an appeal as possible, but there has to be a happy medium.

It might sound like I’m saying eCupid is bad, as it isn’t. It’s just that it never aims very high and so was never going to be more than mild entertainment.

Overall Verdict: eCupid is kinda fun and Houston Rhines is a bit of a charmer, but it’s difficult not to feel this rom-com should be better.

Special Features:
Morgan Fairchild Interview
Actor Interviews
Actor Auditions
Outtakes
‘Always With You’ Chadwich Music Video
Trailer
Photo Gallery

Reviewer: Tim Isaac

 

Like Stephen King and William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens is one of those authors who has captured filmmaker’s imaginations almost as much as the general public’s. Without wishing to be snooty, it’s probable most of us are more familiar with Dickens through films rather than his books. Dickens is still widely read, it’s true. But how many of us can honestly say we weren’t disappointed when we first realised the novel of Oliver! didn’t actually have any songs in it? Or that the description of Mrs Havisham in Great Expectations doesn’t particular resemble The X Files actress Gillian Anderson? Or that A Christmas Carol did not actually feature any Muppets at all? Exactly. All of us.

In fact, this Ealing version of Dickens’ third novel suffers a little simply from the misfortune of having come out so close to David Lean’s excellent version of Great Expectations, even now still widely regarded as the best Dickens adaptation ever made.

It’s not just that though. Nicholas Nickleby is actually a surprisingly accessible Dickens novel (and don’t let anyone tell you that they are all surprisingly accessible! They’re really not). This charts the progress of the impoverished main character (Bond) as he travels to Yorkshire to take up a position as a tutor in an appallingly run public school overseen by Wackford Squeers (Drayton), a man who, like Boris Johnson, pulls off the difficult feat of being both simultaneously hilarious and evil.

The main problem is that the film attempts to cram a very long novel into a very short running time. This is perhaps unfair as if it was actually about four hours long, I‘d be complaining too. I’m also tempted to make the unfair complaint that this is “dated”. But it is. The fact is there have been better Dickens adaptations (or indeed better films) made before and since. Maybe a few Muppets might have helped. Although in fairness the same could be said of Die Hard 2.

The extras actually aren’t bad starting with two new interview s with Dickens experts. Both are dry but not uninteresting. There’s also a stills gallery and one of the two Nickleby adaptations brought to the screen before the advent of sound.

Overall Verdict: Unexceptional Dickens from Ealing. An old curiosity now, but little more.

Special Features:
Interview with BFI Dickens Season Curators Adrian Wootton and Michael Eaton
Interview with Dickens biographer Michael Slater
Nicholas Nickleby: 1912 Silent Film directed by George O Nichols
Behind the Scenes Stills Gallery

Reviewer: Chris Hallam