12 & Holding, which opens this week and expands in arthouse venues across the nation in June.
A quirky tale centering around three 12-year-olds who lose a brother and friend at the hands of two older kids in an unfortunate bullying incident gone wrong, the movie examines the fashion in which these pre-teens cope with grief and other altered circumstances, especially as they run into parents who either suppress, discourage or can’t fully cope with the new ways in which they act out. Zoë Weizenbaum, who played the young Pumpkin in Memoirs of a Geisha, gives a memorably remarkable performance as Malee, a young girl who develops an inappropriate crush on one of the patients, Gus Maitland (Jeremy Renner), of her therapist mother.
“I had some apprehension about the movie just because of the things that (Malee) does,” admits Weizenbaum. But the director, Michael Cuesta (L.I.E.), “explained to me that she’s a really lonely and confused girl, going through all these changes, and her mother is really disconnected from her. It’s an emotional rollercoaster going through puberty and being a teenager, and when you don’t have support it makes it a lot worse. She doesn’t have a father figure (and) she looks to Jeremy as someone to talk to, but I guess she approaches it in the wrong way. She’s just really confused and lonely. It’s sad, what she does.”
What Malee does includes an awkward, attempted seduction — a scene difficult for any actress, but especially one only 14 years of age. “The disrobing scene was done really tastefully,” says Weizenbaum, “and working with Jeremy I basically didn’t have any nerves when it came to doing the scene because of how buddy-buddy we were and how professional he was.” Adds Renner: “Zoë is just so smart and giving, and it’s very easy to like and adore her. I didn’t have to be patient, which I thought I might have to be working with someone younger. She’s probably more professional than I am. She’s just a gem to work with, she felt like family.”
While the Malee-Gus arc is the film’s strongest, it isn’t home to the only interesting, naturalistic adolescent performance. Like Weizenbaum, Montreal native Jesse Camacho — who plays Leonard, a pudgy kid who attempts to reform his family’s eating habits when he loses his sense of taste — won his role after sending in scenes of himself on tape. Cuesta “said I was very natural,” relates Camacho. “I had done these sit-ups in one of the scenes, and apparently those really helped me land the role because they weren’t very good.” No worries — nobody will be saying the same thing about Camacho’s screen work, or that of any of his 12 & Holding peers.
Daily Archives: May 29, 2006
A Nos Amours
I’m off to a screening of The Devil Wears Prada shortly, but I endured some chilly, top-notch self-laceration late last night, in the form of director Maurice Pialat’s 1984 film A Nos Amours. The movie assays the cold, proxy comfort a young French girl looks for in the arms of numerous boyfriends. Craving the attention she’s denied at an unhappy home, Suzanne (Sandrine Bonnaire) flings herself into a destructive search for love and affection. Alternating fractured, dispassionate and clutchy encounters with long ruminative passages, the movie is at times slow going, but it succeeds in portraying in convincingly artistic strokes the manner in which serial adolescent alienation transmutes into destructive behavior.
As usual, Criterion does a bang-up job with its release of a new, restored high-definition digital transfer. Supplemental extras include the original theatrical trailer, a 2003 interview with Bonnaire and a 1999 documentary on the movie entitled The Human Eye. Interesting, too, are new video interviews with contemporary directors Catherine Breillat and Jean-Pierre Gorin on Pialat’s influence on French cinema. There’s also archival on-set interview material with Pialat and footage of some of the actors’ auditions. Rounding out matters are an insert booklet
including insightful essays by critics Molly Haskell and Kent Jones and
further textual interviews with Pialat and cinematographer Jacques Loiseleux. B (Movie) A- (Disc)