Bernard Rapp’s A
Matter of Taste ( Une Affaire de Goût ),
from a screenplay by Mr. Rapp and Gilles Taurand, based on the novel by
Philippe Balland, bears a curious resemblance in its
one-sided power struggle, in which one male manipulates another, to Joseph
Losey’s The Servant (1963). But
whereas in The Servant , Dirk
Bogarde’s malignant manservant is the victimizer of James Fox’s rich, young,
weak-willed employer, in A Matter of
Taste , the class alignment is reversed, making Bernard Giraudeau’s paranoid
industrialist the Svengali influence on Jean-Pierre Lorit’s handsome but
somewhat aimless waiter, who accepts a demeaning job as the industrialist’s
food-taster in exchange for a huge salary. Faust and
Mephistopheles, anyone?
In both A Matter of
Taste and The Servant , the
victim’s attractive girlfriend tries vainly to disrupt the process of
psychological seduction. Their failure in both instances leads to a hip
audience’s inference of homoeroticism at work. Mr. Rapp and Mr. Taurand are
less explicit about the potential deviance than Mr. Losey and Mr. Pinter. For
one thing, the characters in A Matter of
Taste are mirror images of each other, while the characters in The Servant -played by the dark-haired
Bogarde and the fair-haired Fox-are visual contrasts.
Indeed, there is something almost vampirish in the way
Frédéric Delamont, the industrialist, tries to suck out every last vestige of
his taster’s diminished ego to feed his own tortured psyche. It all starts
amiably enough with the taster, Nicolas Rivière, sampling Delamont’s food to
make sure there aren’t any traces of fish or cheese, two of the industrialist’s
many phobias. But it’s not enough for Delamont that Rivière simply monitor the
food-the taster must be conditioned to hate fish and cheese as much as Delamont
does. This involves employing a gourmet cook to feed luscious-looking fish and
cheese dishes to Rivière with a hidden emetic agent, causing the hapless taster
to upchuck a storm until he is permanently cured of his predilection for the
foods.
Delamont wants his
employee to in fact share his tastes. His reconditioning of Rivière extends to
clothes, cosmetics, savoir faire and cynical business practices. Rivière is
made to share Delamont’s contempt for an American client with an inexplicable
passion for Napa Valley wine. This modish Gallic joke ignores a recent wine-tasting contest in
which California wines fared surprisingly well in comparison with
their French counterparts.
The proceedings would become monotonously unpleasant if Mr.
Rapp and Mr. Taurand had not hit upon the clever stratagem of breaking up the
linear narrative of the book into flashback segments involving a murder (a plot
development that does not occur in the book), so that we know the ending of the
Delamont-Rivière relationship very soon after the beginning of the film. As
Rivière tells his story to a judge, a doctor and a psychiatrist, we find him
trying to explain how he submitted willingly to the humiliations imposed on him
for so long by his boss. A subtext emerges of people who imagine they can sell
out for a short time and emerge with their dignity and integrity intact as they
count their riches. Then again, it is much easier for a master to corrupt a servant
( A Matter of Taste ) than for a
servant to corrupt a master ( The Servant ).
Yet, by telling the story backwards and forwards as they do,
Mr. Rapp and Mr. Taurand make us focus on the why of the situation rather than
the what. Just as Delamont is conspicuously attracted to Rivière’s good looks,
Rivière is entranced by Delamont’s style in exercising his power over other
people. And we, too, become accomplices in Delamont’s ruthlessness, as long as
we know he will eventually get his comeuppance. It is hardly surprising that
the absolute power of the rich is something we not-so-rich moviegoers fantasize
about.
It is not that Delamont himself is exactly charming, but
that the intelligently observed details of his lifestyle and obsessions keep us
hooked. The acting, the pacing, the mise
en scène of the film all combine to create a feeling of inexorability from
the first shot to the last. With a few brushstrokes, for example, the bohemian
values of Rivière’s girlfriend Béatrice (Florence Thomassin) are expressed
through her free spirit as a newsstand dealer. Yet she, too, is initially
corrupted by the prospect of her lover’s economic and social advancement.
Still, even though she becomes completely disenchanted with Delamont’s
influence on Rivière and is temporarily estranged from him, deep down she
remains loyal to her lover-all the way to the moment she pleads his case with
the chief magistrate, played by Jean-Pierre Léaud, now shockingly altered by
age from the eternally youthful free spirit in the 60’s and 70’s film
rhapsodies of Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut. In this context, A Matter of Taste is clearly post– nouvelle vague , postmodern and more
laconically analytical than lushly romantic. See it, but leave your illusions
at home.
They Call Him O
Tim Blake Nelson’s O ,
from a screenplay by Brad Kaaya, based on William Shakespeare’s Othello , was reportedly held up for
release because of presumed parallels in its prep-school plot’s violence with
the real-life Columbine massacre. One can argue that Shakespeare was no
stranger to violence-and furthermore, that the Bard was nothing if not
politically incorrect by contemporary standards, and perhaps even by the
shadowy standards of his own time. One could write term papers, if one were so
inclined, with the theses that Shakespeare did not like people of color ( Othello ), Third World savages ( The Tempest ), Jews ( The Merchant of Venice ) or women ( King Lear , just for starters-and let’s not forget his shamelessly
nationalist image of Joan of Arc as a strumpet in one of his early chronicle
plays centered around Henry VI).
Still, I am bemused by the skittishness with which many of
my colleagues have confronted the latest violation of the long-held screen
prohibition against interracial coupling. O
centers around the frankly sensual romance between a white prep-school girl named Desi (Julia Stiles) and the title character, Odin
James (Mekhi Phifer), an African-American basketball recruit, apparently the
only member of his race on campus. Ms. Stiles traversed this taboo-breaking
road earlier this year in Thomas Carter’s Save
the Last Dance . There, she was the only white girl in an
all-African-American student body; here, she is dating the only
African-American student in an otherwise all-white Southern prep school.
But then, the Venice of
Shakespeare’s Othello was no less
sociologically improbable in its toleration of Desdemona’s liaison with a
popular Moorish general who had won victories for the city-state. The problem
with O is that, in trying to
establish equivalents to the characters in Shakespeare’s soaringly poetic
original, the dialogue remains earthbound, and the acting is curiously
distanced by the barriers set up by an architecturally “busy” mise en scène . As Bernard Shaw once
observed, if you take Shakespeare’s poetic genius out of his plays, you’re
often left with some moth-eaten dramatic contrivance. In some ways the least of
Shakespeare’s tragedies, Othello has
been denigrated as the tragedy of the handkerchief (changed to a scarf in O , but to
little avail). The clumsy mechanics of a fatally misplaced jealousy remain
obtrusive, though the film’s Hugo (Josh Hartnett), representing the play’s
Iago-a character lacking a backstory in both versions-remains the most
compelling character, though losing his cool many times over before the final
bloodbath. In the end, the Shakespearean ideas collapse on film because of the
youthful callowness of the characters. Yet I found O interesting, though never stirring.
On the subject of violent films: The long nightmare of the
demolished twin towers of the World Trade Center goes on and on as I type my
weekly movie column, and I cannot help observing, as some commentators already
have, that after decades of watching the most artful simulations of massive,
earthshaking explosions on the screen, when the real thing came along, it
looked almost like a low-tech video game with toy airplanes by comparison. Some
bang-bang terrorist movies have already had their release dates postponed, but
sooner or later, with all the money Hollywood has invested in the male juvenile
market for the sake of the sacred bottom line, the boom-boom epics will come
trickling out-but, I hope, with diminished impact at the box office. Yet it may
be too much to hope that movies are on the verge of entering a more civilized
era.
