Emmanuel Mouret’s Shall We Kiss? delves into an affair
French director Emmanuel Mouret’s romantic comedy Shall We Kiss? explores emotional entanglements with no escape.
A pair of relatively recent and landmark performances by Anthony LaPaglia lead the roster this week. In director Ray Lawrence’s 2001 drama Lantana (Sunday, 11,30pm, SBS One), he’s the policeman who juggles a murder investigation with an at-risk marriage. Fine in support are Geoffrey Rush, Kerry Armstrong, Barbara Hershey and Rachael Blake.
The film swept the 2001 AACTA awards and is one of the better movies Australia has sent into the world this generation.
Titles close behind for that designation would have to include director Robert Connolly’s 2009 war drama Balibo (Sunday, 11.25pm, ABC), in which LaPaglia plays journalist Roger East, sent to investigate the killing of five journalists just before the 1975 invasion of East Timor by Indonesia. This was the first feature film to be shot there, and David Williamson’s screenplay allows LaPaglia to shine as a man who rediscovers his dedication in the midst of martial stress.
“I’ve got a railroad to build,” barks Johnny Munroe (John Wayne), who has been tasked to tunnel under a mountain in the Andes by South American kingpin Alexander (Cedric Hardwicke) even as he falls in love with the boss’s daughter (Laraine Day). This is the basic plot of hardworking yet undistinguished American director Richard Wallace’s 1947 RKO Technicolor adventure Tycoon (Monday, 12.25am, ABC). A pedestrian program this may be, but it is always a novelty to see Wayne in mufti and outside the Western genre. And film tragics — not to mention insomniacs — will rejoice at the venerated Technicolor processing.
A deft blend of Woody Allen and Eric Rohmer, French director Emmanuel Mouret broke out of his country’s borders with the 2007 romantic comedy Shall We Kiss? (Sunday, 1.40am, SBS Two). With a unique narrative structure and gentle analysis of social mores, this is a film for anyone who has ever entered into an affair against their better judgment and for those who’ve found themselves enmeshed in emotional entanglements from which there seems to be no escape.
Though much better known for directing the entire first season of the HBO hit True Detective, Cary Fukunaga first came to international attention as the writer-director of the independently produced 2009 Mexican-American co-production Sin Nombre (Monday, 10.35pm, SBS Two).
A pair of teenagers attempt to cross from Mexico to the US and must endure a harrowing and perhaps doomed journey to do so. The film won the director and cinematography prize at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. Fukunaga’s strength as a filmmaker is his refusal to be tied to one genre or style; between this and True Detective he made a version of Jane Eyre that is as impressive as its bookends.
Balibo (M) 4.5 stars
Sunday, 11.25pm, ABC
Lantana (M) 4.5 stars
Sunday, 11.30pm, SBS One
Shall We Kiss? (PG) 4 stars
Sunday, 1.40am, SBS Two
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