Bill & Ted Face the Music; Daughters steal the show

The dopey dudes are back and now they are dads.

Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter in Bill and Ted Face the Music

Bill & Ted Face the Music (PG)
Limited release
★★★

Fans of the dopey dudes who first appeared in 1989 in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure and who returned two years later in Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey will be pleased to hear the bodacious pair are back, still played by Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter, with Bill & Ted Face the Music.

The original writers, Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon, have returned with some new adventures in which B&T learn from a visitor from the future that at a concert due to take place at 7.17 that very night they have to perform a number that will unite all of humanity and save reality.

Knowing they haven’t composed such a song as yet they decide to use the now famous telephone kiosk to go forward in time to encounter their future selves at various stages of their later lives, resulting in some sobering encounters.

Bill and Ted's daughters played by Brigette Lundy-Paine (left) and Samara Weaving (right)

Meanwhile their daughters, deliciously played by Australian Samara Weaving and Brigette Lundy-Paine, go back in time to select an ideal group of musicians to perform the number, starting in London in 1967, where they enrol Jimi Hendrix (DazMann Still) and continuing to New Orleans in 1922 to find Louis Armstrong (Jeremiah Craft) and Vienna in 1782 where Mozart (Daniel Dorr) signs up.

Add to the mix a death-dealing robot named Dennis McCoy (Anthony Carrigan) and Death himself (William Sadler), who plays a mean guitar, and you have an amiably dopey but infectiously enjoyable time-travel romp.

The friends are still fun, but their daughters, who have inherited a great deal from their fathers, steal the show. Stay until the credits have entirely ended for the final scene.

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The Translators (Les Traducteurs) (M)
Limited release from Thursday
★★★★

To combat the piracy of their product, film distributors have been taking stringent precautions for some time. At advance preview screenings, mobile phones are confiscated and rather ominous men in black stand by the screen watching the audience. I imagine that the process of subtitling a film such as, say Tenet, for international audi­ences is carried out with maximum security. But it never occurred to me before that similar precautions are taken in the publishing industry.

Olga Kurylenko in a scene from The Translators

That’s the basis for French thriller The Translators, a tasty, twisty suspense movie that keeps you guessing throughout its taut running time. These days when international bestselling books often appear in series over several years — Harry Potter, for example, or the Millennium trilogy of Swedish thrillers featuring the formidable Lisbeth Salander — the risk that the latest entry in a popular series may be hacked is, I imagine, very real.

Eric Angstrom (Lambert Wilson), the head of the Angstrom Publishing House, is a control freak. As he announces at the Frankfurt Book Fair, his company is about to publish the third book in the Dedalus trilogy, the super-successful series of thrillers written by a mysterious and reclusive author named Oscar Brach who no one — except Angstrom — has ever met.

Rumours abound as to the author’s identity: maybe, the speculation goes, Brach is a woman. Or twins. Or maybe he is Angstrom himself. The forthcoming book is titled The Man Who Didn’t Want to Die and a worldwide publication date in March is planned.

But first it has to be translated into the most important languages.

Nine translators are assembled and transported to Manoir de Villette, a chateau in the French countryside. Their guide is Rose-Marie (Sara Giraudeau) who supervises the confiscation of their phones and tablets. Within the chateau is a virtually impenetrable bunker, built by a former owner, a Russian billionaire who worried that the world was coming to an end. This is where the nine translators will work.

Katerina Ansinova (Olga Kurylenko) is a beautiful Russian who, it is remarked, bears some of the features of Rebecca, a key character in the books. There are also a young Englishman, Alex Goodman (Alex Lawther), who won’t be parted from his skateboard; the Portuguese Telma Alves (Maria Leite), a punk with closely cropped hair and tattoos; Dario Farelli (Riccardo Scamarcio), a quick-tempered Italian; Helene Tuxen (Sidse Babett Knudsen), a Danish wife and mother; Konstantinos Kedrinos (Manolis Mavromatakis), a middle-aged, bearded, cynical, left-wing Greek; Chen Yao (Frederic Chau), a cheerful, pragmatic Chinese; Ingrid Korbel (Anna-Maria Sturm), a no-nonsense German; and Javier Casal (Eduardo Noriega), a rather nervous Spaniard with a stutter. Armed Russian guards will oversee them at all times.

Angstrom himself addresses the group. They will be given two months to write and correct their translations of the 480-page book. They will be given only 20 pages a day, so they are not allowed to know how the book ends when they begin their work. They will have no access to the internet and will not be allowed to leave the chateau until the work is completed.

At this point the director of The Translators, Regis Roinsard, unexpectedly throws in a curveball. He moves the story forward two months in time to what appears to be a prison.

Angstrom is talking to an unseen person who remains silent. “I must understand why you did it,” he proclaims. “I’ll find out in the end.” There follows a scene set in a bookshop in the small town of Barfleur in Normandy, where Angstrom is discussing publication of the third book in the trilogy with an elderly man named Georges Fontaine (Patrick Bauchau).

Meanwhile, back in the chateau Angstrom receives a text message: there is a hacker in the room. The first pages have already been stolen and will be posted on the internet unless a ransom of €5m is paid. As time goes on the ransom rises to €80m.

Who is the hacker, and how did they manage to steal pages of the book in the face of such strict security? That’s the question posed in the tricky screenplay written by the director in collaboration with Daniel Presley and Romain Compingt. The result is a terrifically satisfying exercise in suspense.

Roinsard has concocted a melange of Agatha Christie (who is specifically referenced at one point) and Alfred Hitchcock; Christie for her mastery of the elaborate whodunit based on a richly drawn ensemble of suspect characters and Hitchcock, who was never a fan of the whodunit, for the ways in which the director leaks advance information to the viewer, drip by untrustworthy drip.

There are red herrings, unexpected revelations and then more twists before the film comes to its mostly satisfactory conclusion.

Although much of the film unfolds in enclosed spaces — the exception being a nailbiting sequence set on the Metro — the film is so well directed and photographed (by Guillaume Schiffman) that it’s never dull. Implausible, yes, perhaps, but few will probably care too much when the extravagant plot is so engagingly packaged.

There’s a flawless ensemble of actors on display, headed by the wonderfully suave and vaguely sinister Wilson as the ruthless publisher. I imagine this is the sort of film that its admirers will want to see more than once to work out just how cleverly they were fooled the first time around. I’ll certainly be back a second time!