NYFF Diary: Bubble, L'Enfant

It takes a mimimum of three trains to get to Lincoln Center from Cinematical Headquarters in Brooklyn, and so on my trip uptown Monday morning for the first "real" day of NYFF press screenings, I had plenty of time to think about Steven Soderbergh.

I have a love/hate relationship with the guy. I love Sex, Lies and Videotape, Schizopolis, Gray's Anatomy, The Limey and (wait for it) Ocean's Eleven; I hate his Richard Lester book. I think Out of Sight is one of the best unclassifiable genre films I've ever seen; and yet, when on the morning of the Bubble screening Ryan calls his directorial output "wildly overrated", I wholeheartedly agree. But there was a run, right in the middle there - 1996-1999, from Spaulding Gray straight through to Terrence Stamp – where it looked like he might be on to something. Then came the truly puzzling flurry of attention over Erin Brockovich and Traffic, in the middle of which I will confess to having to lain awake one single, solitary night, worrying about Steven Soderbergh's career. Ocean's 11 didn't restore my faith that Soderbergh could again challenge and/or surprise me; it was more like a goodbye party, really. It was a splendid sendoff, but ultimately it was like permission to no longer care.


 
I'd heard two things about Bubble, Soderbergh's latest, before Monday's screening: that it was to be the first in his multi-picture deal with HDNet, and that everyone in Toronto had hated it. But I liked it. Like Soderbergh's best work, it feels like a genre film that can't find its genre. Bubble recycles certain tropes of film noir – we've got some semblance of a love triangle; we've definitely got a femme fatale; we've got a not-too bright male lead struck even dumber by booze and a certain whip-smart girl's pretty pout and saucer eyes – but Soderbergh cranks these elements through the mill of Middle American mundanity until the film starts to resemble a script-based remake of Gummo. Soderbergh is most in his element when it looks like he's magically grafting structure onto a situtation that's otherwise sort of a mess, and Bubble is most effective when the director has the confidence in his own editorial prowess to let everything bleed.

The script is by Full Frontal scribe Coleman Haugh, but Bubble is a far more successful effort than that so-called "experimental" celebrity picnic. It's slow going at first; Soderbergh's never been the most strident filmmaker when it comes to tone, and the first few collages of Middle American poverty porn are aggravating in their refusal to pass clear judgement on the characters that walk through them. Let's remember, for a second, that we're watching a film by a guy who's spent the last five years hanging out with Julia Roberts and George Clooney; in that light, Bubble appears at first glance to be either a violent attack on the white working poor, or not nearly aggressive enough in its critique of the cultural degradation of that social class. Either way, there's little room for an in. But there are a pair of moments about twenty minutes in that did it for me. I was first pulled in by a split-second lapse into dream logic that in retrospect smells like oblique foreshadowing; in the very next scene, the up-to-no-good ingenue (Misty Dawn Wilkins - like the rest of the cast, a first timer) is introduced, and from that point on, I couldn't look away. Bubble is certainly flawed, but it's up to something pretty interesting: if nothing else, for the first time in a long time, Soderbergh seems willing to risk mass-cultural insignificance.

Day two of the press screening grind brought on L'enfant, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's Palme D'or winning feature. It's an excruciating film, a true achievement in unpleasantness; those who are looking to make 100 minutes feel like twice that length will certainly get their money's worth.

I go for low-blows first because I see what's coming; I've already read more than one blog entry that labels the Dardenne Brothers as the Saviors of Cinema, and L'enfant the pinacle of the New Real. I'm not really trying to lead the backlash on this one; in fact, the more time I let pass after seeing the film, the more I feel like a cautious fan. But I'm wary of lavishing too much praise on this, an estimable work for sure, but one that I think never quite reaches the transcendant plane for which it's shooting. I never felt emotionally sucked in to L'enfant, and watching it, I wasn't even aware that I was supposed to. It's only afterwards that I've heard the testimonies to rapturous identification, which I find, frankly, a bit befuddling, This story of Belgium's stupidest criminal/casually callous new dad feels like it conducts its tragedy on a purely intellectual level. The press notes tell me I was supposed to watch the film and "feel the redemption of a human being"; I say,  L'enfant is admirable for a lot of reasons, but as a description of what happens in that film, every part of that phrase feels false. Did I misread L'enfant as a cold portrait of a cut-rate criminal mind? Is it, in fact, intended to be a lot more touchy-feely than that? Maybe I need more time to sit with it, to give it a good think; but, then again, maybe I shouldn't.