The Wedding Song: Grade A

A
The Wedding Song (2008)

Lizzie Brocheré, Olympe Borval, Najib Oudghiri; Writer-Director Karin Albou. (Arabic and French; subtitled).

The Nazis have occupied Tunisia in the early 1940’s and have begun rounding up the Jews. In Tunis, two young women have formed a deep friendship, one an Arab Muslim (Borval), the other a Sephardic Jew (Brochere). The middle class but economically stressed, French-speaking woman is betrothed to an older, wealthy physician, a refugee from Nazi-occupied Paris, but she hates him. The servant-class Arabic woman carries on a torrid sexual affair with her fiancé, but marriage is forbidden by her father until the young man gets a job, which he finally does, as a Nazi informer on the Jews. Can the girls’ friendship survive the stresses of matrimony, religion, social class, colonialism, and wartime occupation?

In addition to the compelling story of friendship, the movie is highly instructional about Tunisian Arabic and French colonial culture, especially with regard to the tribulations of female sexuality in both cultures. Naked females are starkly exposed on screen but the nudity is neither glamorized nor prurient. Rather it is used to make intimate and disturbing comments on the plight of the women and on the meaning of marriage in general.

Writing and directing (Albou) are both excellent in this zero-budget film, but the cinematography suffers from what is probably low budget technology, so many of the movie’s images are dark and muddy, to the point of being difficult to see. Nevertheless, individual scenes and sets are well-composed and photographed, when you can see them. Acting is very strong by all the players, and overall, the complex, intimate, and emotional story line will keep you glued.

The Women: Grade B

B
The Women (2008)
Meg Ryan, Annette Benning, Eva Mendes, Debra Messing, Jada Pinkett Smith, Candice Bergen, Cloris Leachman; Co-writer & Director Diane English.

The dialog is still funny in this update of the 1939 classic comedy. Meg Ryan learns that her husband is having an affair with a shop girl (Mendes). Her girlfriends, especially Benning, give her copious advice. Now on her own (although still wealthy) she discovers that she doesn’t have to be a wife to be a person, so she starts her own fashion business. She resolves to get a divorce but can’t sign the papers. It turns out she wants to be married after all. Who could have guessed that?

The original film was fascinating for showing idle rich women in the midst of the Great Depression, and also because back then, women really were little more than wives, so breaking free to be a female person was a radical character development. All that context is gone in this movie, leaving only witty dialog, and it’s witty in a jokey, sitcom way, without the acerbic tones of the original.

The modern characters are brain-dead and the story a catalog of banality. Despite its ostensible celebration of women’s independence, this film does the cause a disservice by stereotyping its characters’ concerns around clothing, food, children, babies, marriage and domestic matters. There are no men in the movie but a male definition of the world is built-in, whether in ogling Eva Mendes’ butt or by having men and marriage be the psychological hub of life.

The acting is nothing special although it is fun to see so many big names. Bette Midler’s cameo is a high point. Jada Smith’s performance is seriously grating. There are some nice directorial touches. The silly dialog and cheap sentimentality make this light, empty-headed comedy an amusing diversion.

Going Shopping: Grade B

B
Going Shopping (2005)
Victoria Foyt, Lee Grant, Mae Whitman. Cowriter and director: Henry Jaglom.

This extremely low budget indie explores shopping obsession among women. The owner of an upscale clothing store in Beverly Hills (Foyt) discovers she is broke and about to be evicted from the shop. Her boyfriend apparently stole her money, but that topic is not explored. The point is she is broke, so she plans a big Mother’s Day sale to raise money to make rent and postpone eviction. She is also a single mom and her preteen daughter (Whitman) is rebellious, but nevertheless steeped in the culture of fashion, clothing, and lookism. The shopkeeper's mother (Grant) is a California granny determined to look 20 years old forever, who hassles her but eventually helps out in a surprising way that should have been the narrative theme of the movie, but is only a throwaway.

The women shoppers are California youth-worshipping, age-denying, more-money-than-brains stereotypes. Foyt tries to borrow from a very nice but utterly ruthless mobster, in one of the most entertaining scenes, and tries to enlist a capital partner, among many ploys to raise the cash. Liberally interspersed are dozens of 60 second interviews with women who explain various aspects of their shopoholic obsession directly to the camera. These are well acted and the women have interesting faces, but since we know it is all scripted, it is not particularly convincing or revealing. There are pathological shopping obsessions, but there is no reason to believe they look like this. As a psychological exploration, a documentary approach would have been better. As it stands, the social commentary about female shopping verges on misogyny. The movie has no narrative drive so feels much longer than its 106 minutes. The big sale is a success, the shopkeeper pays the rent, but now has no inventory, and still no money, so the McGuffin remains essentially unaddressed. The film thus fails as a narrative and as a social commentary, leaving only good acting, satirical visuals and dialog, attractive actors, and bright sunny California colors, all of which are enjoyable in a mindless sort of way.

Seven Days of Grace: Grade F

F
Seven Days of Grace (2006)

Ria Coyne. Director Don E. FauntLeRoy

A thirtyish woman (Coyne) inherits a “ribs” restaurant from her father but did not get the recipe for the secret sauce. Oh, no! She and her girlfriends try to make a go of the restaurant before the landlord forecloses the mortgage. Grace is self-consciously cute and her five girlfriends are ostensibly “characters:” an unreconstructed hippie, a black leather-jacket tough, a dimwit, and so on. This is supposed to be a comedy but the humor escaped me. There is a slightly ironic, postmodern “arch” tone in the dialog that could be construed as funny, except it’s really just mind-numbingly banal. The premise lacks dramatic tension (how hard would it be to buy a cookbook?) and there is no story line. Performances are like a high school theater class, which must be a stylistic device, because professional actors could not really be that bad, but whatever effect it was trying to achieve, it didn’t.