Shared Darkness

A gassy, self-satisfied adaptation of Guy de Maupassant’s 1885 novel of the same name, threadbare Parisian period piece Bel Ami purports to tell the rise from poverty to wealth of a savvy if caddish war veteran and self-made man — a sort of less sociopathic, more rakish Mr. Ripley, if you will. Instead, it merely bores and grates, in alternating fashion. Making up what it lacks in dynamism or attentive psychological detail with lots of love scenes with its hunky, tween-beloved pin-up star, Robert Pattinson, Bel Ami belies the erroneous notion that costume dramas automatically have a higher IQ than their contemporary dramatic brethren.



Georges Duroy (Pattinson) is but a penniless North African war veteran looking for enough money to score a prostitute when he crosses paths with a fellow ex-soldier, and accepts his invitation to dine with him the following evening. By the end of supper, he’s won a guest newspaper editorial spot, a sort of diary of a cavalry officer, from a powerful and influential publisher, Rousset (Colm Meaney), in part because his wife, Madame Walter (Kristin Scott Thomas), is kind of smitten with him.

Having little better to do, Madeleine Forestier (Uma Thurman) then takes it upon herself to basically pen all of Georges’ columns, while Georges seduces the married Clotilde de Marelle (Christina Ricci), with whom he promptly sets up a love nest. When his himbo status and near-illiteracy are almost outed, Georges manages to connive his way further into the good graces of those who ensure him continued access to the finer things in life, eventually even marrying Madeleine, who seems ill suited to conventional love.

Co-directed by Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerond, Bel Ami is a bundle of phony psychology and false motivations wrapped up in pretty, trite packaging. The costumes are nice and eye-catching, and the pompous, swelling orchestral compositions, from Rachel Portman and Lakshman Joseph de Saram, nudge viewers in the ribs, repeatedly, attempting to inject menace and substance into the proceedings, and letting the audience know what a Big Deal they’re watching unfold.

Except they’re not. Pattinson, pallid and sweaty throughout, seems in over his head, and never quite comfortable. He’s had success before at pulling off layered angst and agitation, but here he seems resolutely of modern times, and not at all believable in the context of 1890s France. With a cipher’s smile and that great sweeping hairdo, he fills a ruffled shirt, and little more. The other performances are, by degrees, much more engaging — Thurman is somewhat mesmerizing as the ahead-of-her-time Madeleine, and Thomas gets to have some fun as a society lady uncharacteristically gripped by hormonal fever — but given the degree to which Bel Ami rests on Pattinson’s shoulders, and the dearth of insight it possesses, the movie falters early on, and never recovers.

Most fatally, there is neither a sense of canny manipulation nor a honest occupational rooting of Georges’ social climbing in the status afforded him by his job as a newspaperman, the latter of which is a crucial component of the novel. Instead, there is only a series of thin contrivances and machinations through which various women throw themselves at Georges’ feet. His wit and seduction are evidenced less by anything manifest in the script and more by the apparent absence of any other (nominally) single lad willing to throw these women a (literal) bone. With a tip of the cap to fellow critic Tim Grierson, the hackneyed, yawning Bel Ami would have been more entertaining if it were about Bill Bellamy, or at least just starred the same. For my full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Magnolia, R, 104 minutes)

Modern-day American independent filmmaking, in such large measure, apes Hollywood product — or, alternately, movies made during the last great frontier boom of indie cinema, in the 1990s — in large part because the (perceived) reward seems to be informing the creative process. The increased democratization of film comes at the same time as a slew of TV reality show contests where “winners” are ushered inside the palace, and given a shot at all their professional and personal dreams.

Perhaps perversely, this seems to have seeped into the national well-water of the collective creative subconscious; would-be filmmakers so want to make films that they often make their first film with an eye on how it can be used to get them their next film. (This may be changing, but slowly; avant-garde and micro-budget movies like ¶ or Tarnation may have left their marks, in a way, but they hardly ushered in an era of widespread experimental cinema, or an army of Junior John and Johanna Sayles.) None of this aforementioned symptomatology, thankfully, is evident in Ultrasonic, a savvy, artful, well constructed little domestic drama of paranoia that builds its story around its limited production means but never sacrifices its thematic inquiry, its essence, its core.

Set in Washington, D.C., director Rohit Colin Rao’s movie centers around Simon York (Silas Gordon Brigham, above right), an aspiring musician with a pregnant wife, Ruth (Cate Buscher), and financial problems that are beginning to take their toll. When Simon starts hearing a persistent buzz that’s imperceptible to anyone else, Ruth tells him it’s probably work-related, but urges him to see a doctor. Simon does, and he learns that he can hear in lower and upper registers unlike any other patient the doctor has ever seen. As the ailment worsens, Simon’s brother-in-law Jonas (Sam Repshas, above left), an eccentric conspiracy theorist, peddles the notion that this is all the result of a strange government experiment gone wrong. Shadowy figures and mysterious black boxes posted on nearby lampposts trip the wires of Simon’s dark and panicked imagination. But is this merely a shared psychosis, his psychological vulnerability attaching itself to Jonas’ troubled mind, or actually part of something more sinister?

Rao, working from a script co-written with Mike Maguire, serves as his own composer and cinematographer, lending Ultrasonic a carefully manicured, just-so production package. The film is crisply, engagingly and digitally shot on a Canon T2i, its black-and-white hues only slightly sepia-toned and punctuated by but a few notable splashes of color. The framing, meanwhile, feeds Simon’s increasing sense of isolation.

The story? Well, it’s not dark or really edgy, per se, but there’s an often hypnotic and occasionally unsettling quality to Rao’s marriage of sound and image. Ultrasonic is a resolutely mid-tempo affair, one of the more difficult modes to sustain in feature-length filmmaking. Songs from two of Rao’s erstwhile bands, Tigertronic and the Translucents, open and close the movie, respectively, serving as nice bookends, but the electronic compositions in between give Rao’s debut a moody and sometimes frenetic feeling. Ultrasonic doesn’t really work if one is leaning forward constantly, in search of clearly delineated narrative markers. There’s an aura of mystery that hangs like an early morning mist, but the menace never manifests itself in overly hammy ways. Instead, Rao trusts in himself, and his collaborators. And he’s quite rewarded by his locally assembled talent.

Especially in its ambiguous ending, Ultrasonic slots in alongside an impressive recent spate of little film festival-minted diamonds in the rough — the biggest being  Sound of My Voice, starring Brit Marling; a couple others still awaiting or searching for distribution — that arrive at a place of tonal settledness without answering all of the big(gest) questions of their respective narratives. Does this indicate a barometric shift, a change in the creative appetite for the sort of distinct indistinctness that real life most readily provides? Maybe. One can hope. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the movie, including its playdates and VOD options, visit its website, why don’t you? (Garden Thieves Pictures, R, 90 minutes)