Taipei exchanges

The Mandarin title for Taipei Exchanges (Di 36 Ge Gu Shi) provides a better clue to the quilted nature of the 82-minute Taiwanese indie. In a chic but cluttered coffee bar, 35 bars of soap from cities around the world have tales to be told or exchanged; the final tale has not yet happened. The soaps are just some of the pretty props set in an artfully crafted little movie about young women's dreams and realities. Their "Daughter's Cafe" belongs to Doris (played by very busy and successful Lun-Mai Ocean Heaven/Parking/Stool Pigeon Kwai), her equally-angular sister is Josie (newcomer Zai-Zai Lin); both are charming, perky company, just like good coffees should be.

The offbeat, almost flaky, 2010 feature is writer-director Ya-chuan Hsiao's second; the first was Mirror Image (Ming Dai Zhui Zhu), a decade before, which collected several awards. It spun a similarly light (and even shorter) scenario about bizarre retail experiences, focused on a pawnshop where a young man and his girlfriend collect palm prints and vend unwanted pawned items. In the latest variation, one of the sisters is a business graduate who develops the attention-grabbing idea of getting customers to exchange unwanted collectibles or provide services (from singing to unclogging drains). The girls squabble, dream, get nagged by their divorced mother (in cute but repetitively themed settings), are attracted by the man and his soap bars, attract tourist groups, and prepare the daily cake specials.

It's no surprise to learn see that the real Taipei Tourism Board helped sponsor the movie, which shows the city in well-lit enticing light moods. The movie presumably gained much from its lead executive producer, multi-award-winner (including Cannes, Golden Horses and Venice top prizes) veteran director Hsiao-hsien (Flowers of Shanghai, Millennium Mambo, Three Times) Hou. The movie's slow-paced, but his usual tedious stylishness isn't overbearingly present.

Although it's a cinematographic delight, and is blessed with some delightful light jazz soundtrack music, and has been edited with panache (and cute mocumentary street interviews with Taipei residents), and is borne airily along by the actors, Taipei Exchanges is just a cute and pretty bauble, as substantial as a perfectly-cooked souffle.

Trip, the

It's exciting to watch a movie genre being developed, creating its own standards and challenges. There's one that lacks an officially recognised title so far, but might be named the "biocom" or "reality caper". It fictionalises comedic pseudo-reality in a bogus sitcom-style setting, and has primarily been a TV phenomenon in the past few years.

On TV, the concept has been used by Larry David for Curb Your Enthusiasm in the USA and by Ricky Gervais for Extras in the UK. There were precedents in cinema, where many of Woody Allen's New York-set films featuring his own persona were virtually autobiographical and/or wish fulfillment exercises. Various other comedians appeared in movies framing their stage or TV personalities, and Jim Jarmusch showcased a galaxy of comic actors playing "themselves" in Coffee & Cigarettes (2003), a delightfully mixed bag of short sketches.

Which, by the way, illustrates the movie industry's inability to operate beyond anywhere near as many as six degrees of separation. One of the cleverer sets in the Jarmusch compendium was a two-hander featuring Steve Coogan and Alfred Molina as a pair of English actors at opposite ends of the success scale (Coogan being cast as the top dog, even though he didn't get a big Hollywood breakthrough until the remake of Around the World in 80 Days was released the following year, in 2004).

Back in the UK, Coogan had been best known as TV comic character Alan Partridge since 1994 (a decade after his first TV work consisted of providing impersonations for the Spitting Image animated satire series). His first major movie acting role arrived in 2002, with 24 Hour Party People, directed by Michael Winterbottom, already a prolific and prodigious British talent. They worked together again in 2005 on A Cock and Bull Story, a partly-improvised depiction of a movie company attempting to film Laurence Sterne's classic, and supposedly unfilmable, fictional autobiography, Tristram Shandy (co-produced by BBC-TV).

Coogan's comic sidekick as a fellow actor in that movie forerunner of the Extras TV concept was Rob Brydon, a Welsh-born British TV comedian and character actor. (Other special ingredients in Winterbottom's beguiling experimental, mock-period drama included Michael Nyman's music, Marcel Zyskind's cinematography, and Jeremy Northam playing the director.)

A few years later, Coogan, Brydon and Winterbottom joined forces again, and BBC-TV backed their idea of a six-episode, buddy-cum-road-movie sitcom featuring a "Coogan" character commissioned to write newspaper reviews of gourmet restaurants in scenic northern England settings. "Brydon" joins him on The Trip for the meals, driving tour and the pair's love-hate friendly banter. It ticked a bonanza of boxes for an audience-friendly British TV series, blending photogenic cuisine and wry comic personalities, beautiful rural scenery and family dramas, semi-documentary and odd-couple sitcom.

Like The Thick of It, it was an addictive TV series that demanded concentrated viewing; one episode was never enough. Being a sequence of vignettes and sightseeing excursions directed by Winterbottom, it was also an above-average TV production with ravishing shots of exquisitely-plated food, quick-cut shots of each kitchen's chefs at work, and beautifully composed scenes of Yorkshire and Lakeland natural beauty. Every now and then, lines from Lakeland poets were recited, mostly in impersonated actors' voices, with serio-comic local history footnotes used as material for comic set-pieces and inter-play.

Ben Smithard was the series' very note-worthy cameraman, and he and Winterbottom achieved marvels of close-up filming in the cramped settings of a Range Rover and country hotels' dining rooms and bedrooms. Occasional side glances at the two actor's fictionalised families in London varied the pace and mood of each episode well, while serving to amplify the supposed character traits and flaws (especially egocentric Coogan's) of the comic leads. Throughout, of course, they are ad-libbing (or riffing on pre-scripted comic ideas), playing comic ping-pong across the dinner tables and their auto's front seats. Most memorable are their competitive impersonations of Michael Caine, Sean Connery, Billy Connolly, Anthony Hopkins, Richard Burton and other distinctive voices.

Unlike Larry David and Ricky Gervais, Coogan and Brydon don't rely on guest stars to add fun and frissons to their comic vignettes. Only one appears in the six episodes, and it's no surprise to see that it's Ben Stiller, who'd already visited one of Gervais's Extras sets for a delightful display of self-mockery. This time, he plays a cameo, as himself, being a Hollywood pal in a dream encouraging Coogan to grab the chance of a seven-year TV drama series contract.

Happily (one hopes), it's been reported that Winterbottom has created a feature film from the six episodes, to be released in 2011; it'll be interesting to see what ideas are thought best for the big screen. If it succeeds, will it help Coogan and Brydon to make a new series, if they want to? Or will they feel that one series of edgy self-teasing may be enough of a good thing?

[The second disc in the BBC's DVD set includes deleted scenes, and real documentary coverage of the six host restaurants' kitchens and exquisite dish presentations.]

I am love

Food is a favourite film fetish, as I Am Love (Io sono l'amore) reminds its audience fitfully.

A mansion-inhabiting rich Milanese industrialist's Russian-born wife (Tilda Swinton) meets her son's bearded friend, a chef (Eduardo Gabbriellini), during a grand Yuletide family dinner (he's baked a birthday cake for father-in-law's retirement day). The story moves to springtime, when an eggplant and elderflower appetizer convinces the son to back the chef's planned rustic restaurant near San Remo. Mother is soon excited by the chef's freshly blow-torched biscuit (for son's engagement party), and then cinematically and orally ravished by a luscious, artfully lit prawn dish (at the chef's city restaurant).

With one son engaged, her daughter's lesbianism suddenly revealed, and her marriage in a state of polite stupor, the mother is clearly primed for a full meal of sensuality. When she and the chef visit his farmland, the audience is only shown a quick blurred kiss, followed by a cut to black and Swinton portraying a feast of facial delight.

Her next course is a business dinner menu discussion (an excuse for the duo to have a day together in the wilds of close-up shots of insects and plants), which leads to a Russian fish soup (whose serving confirms the son's suspicion about his mother's fidelity, and results in his death in the family's swimming pool).

Highly symbolic Italian melodrama, the movie was reportedly a project in the minds of co-producers Swinton and writer-director Luca Guadagnin ever since they'd worked together on the 1999 London-set murder-docudrama The Protagonists. In 2002 the Sicilian movie-maker and Scottish actress made a documentary short, Tilda Swinton: The Love Factory. By then, Cambridge grad Swinton had her breakthrough role in fellow-Scot Danny Boyle's The Beach (2000). Sidestepping from UK art-house movies (honing her talent with Derek Caravaggio Jarman and Sally Orlando Potter) and European indies to the mainstream (the Narnia franchise), she won a Golden Globe (Best Actress, 2001, The Deep End) and BAFTA and Oscar Best Supporting Actress awards (Michael Clayton, 2008) and gained further recognitions for Julia (in France) and Burn After Reading (for the Coen brothers).

The redhead's distinctive chiseled features suited modern audiences' appreciation of bony beauty -- Cate Blanchett, Kristin Scott-Thomas and Gwynneth Paltrow among others following in the footsteps of such angular actors as Katherine Hepburn, Vanessa Redgrave, Mia Farrow and Helen Mirren. (In reality, maybe Monroe, Gardner, Bacall and other voluptuous beauties were exceptions rather than standard models.)

Swinton is, as always, a pleasure to watch, as are many of the movie's locations (particularly the family mansion). Some supporting roles are good (Pippo Delbono as the frosty husband, Maria Paiato as the loyal housekeeper, veteran Marisa Berenson as the matriarch); the second son is a redundant character and the Sikh Indian-American M&A financier is a ludicrous distraction. Saddest of all, food fetishists don't have enough on which to feast their eyes and imaginations.

La graine et le mulet

La graine et le mulet, lower-cased as titles are in France, was given an art-housey English-language title, The Secret of the Grain. The French words literally translate as "The grain and the mullet", and the movie's grain is that used to make Couscous, which was the film's alternative and more appetising title for foreign markets.

The documentary-style 2.5-hour saga shows the attempt by a gaunt 60-year-old Arab-French dock labourer and his extended family to create a specialty fish couscous restaurant on a dilapidated boat in the Mediterranean fishing port of Sete.

Its Tunis-born Abdellatif Kechiche writer-director has an excellent track record. He won seven awards (including two at Venice) for his debut movie, La faute a Voltaire (Poetical Refugee), in 2000, and another 15 (including 4 Cesars, for Best French film, direction, writing and most promising actress) for his second feature, L'esquive (Games of Love and Chance) in 2003. Couscous collected another 18 awards, including 4 more Cesars in 2008 (the same ones as in 2003) and 5 Venice 2007 awards, and it's a bewitching reason to try and catch up on the earlier works.

Only five of the complex movie's 15 lead roles had ever acted before, and most of them were non-Arab French. Yet the naturalism of the ensemble multi-ethnic (Arab, Russian and French) French-speaking cast is remarkable. They perform with overwhelming credibility in tight close-ups, individually and in clusters, among hand-held cameras, possibly improvising, compelling audiences to feel they inhabit a documentary. Clearly, Kechiche's skills include the abilities to identify and develop natural acting talents in photogenic people.

The central figure of the old man, Slimane (Habib Boufares), struggles with bureaucrats and bankers in his patient effort to create a legacy for his large family. His divorced wife is a master couscous cook, preparing a weekly feast for the extended family and it is her recipe on which unemployed Slimane builds his dream; his key ally is the strong-willed young daughter of his hotel-keeping lover's previous marriage. Towards the end of the movie, her passionate impromptu belly-dance saves cooking time and rewards diners' patience at the boat-restaurant's inaugural feast, threatened with failure when its cauldron of the special couscous goes astray. It's the role of a lifetime, winning newcomer Hafsia Herzi her Cesar.

In the beginning sequences, Kechiche's screenplay introduces the family while Slimane rides his scooter around the port city, dropping off fish for his ex-wife, children and beloved grandkids, and his lover's hotel. At the end, circumstances bring them together, but there are no easy happy endings in this enchanting family story, and Kechiche leaves his audience to imagine the future fates of Slimane and his family. It's unlikely that such a master movie-maker would indulge us with a Hollywood-style sequel.

Food, inc.

Robert Kenner, the creator of Food, Inc., probably sees himself as an organic documentary-maker rather than a big-brand producer.

His hour-and-a-half survey of American agri-business practices comprises a half-dozen small case studies. They are constructed to add up to a damning indictment, with chapter headings and final notes to guide consumers' comprehension of the evils being done by the capitalist top dogs in their food chain.

Chicken production houses akin to mushroom farms. A meat manufacturing cartel which cannot be given that name. Lobbyists and executives who run the industry's regulatory bodies. Chemical giants that control a whole crop, as Monsanto does through soybean patent laws. Industrial efficiencies that now lead quicker to disease and epidemics. The phenomenal cost to the US and the world of subsidising American corn over-production. One can almost hear subliminal boos in the folksy musical soundtrack.

Kenner does offer some balance, some cheering news. Ironically, it is Wal-Mart that emerges with pass marks, because it embraced organic products in its market-savvy way. We're also shown several ethical idealists, including the organic yogurt manufacturer who industrialised his production lines. He was bought out by Danone, a major conglomerate, and allowed to go on running his own profitable business. There is, or should be, the movie avers, a lot of room for organic products, for a return to hands-on small-scale farming.

Inevitably, there's little screen time for doubting Thomases, and the food industry giants were foolish to "decline" interviews for the film. Kenner doesn't wonder if Wal-Mart squeezes organic farmers' margins any softer than their industrial suppliers. He doesn't expose lobbyists and politicians who line each other's pockets. He doesn't query organic merchandising claims. By screening too much of a free-range farmer's hectoring overbearing style, Kenner actually made me want my food to be produced out of sight and out of mind, in places where I wouldn't see live chickens decapitated.

Animal rights activists have to ask their audiences facts of agri-life and -death. Do we care if our modern chicken gets twice as big-breasted as it used to, in half the time, by being reared in the dark and fed chemically-adjusted food? If it tastes almost as good as it used to, and costs less than it did before? Do we care if agri-business workers and supermarket consumers are also blindfolded, cloned, formatted and prepackaged? It's the whole system that needs radical reform, not just the food chain. After this movie, one can only put the latest Michael Moore in the DVD player, and hope for sharper insights.

Julie and Julia

Having watched Julie and Julia twice, I have decided that Nora Ephron, the film's writer and director, ended up disliking the thoroughly modern Julie Powell. I also believe that Ms Ephron wanted me to end up feeling the same way as she did.

The dislike didn't manifest itself after one showing, because it's very difficult to dislike Amy Adams. She is a very charming gamine, whose honeyed voice and twinkly eyes could seduce anything on two legs or four. Even a millipede would purr. It is impossible to watch her in Enchanted without purring with a giggle, and she was far from overwhelmed in her supporting role by the on-screen mastery of Ste Meryl of the Voices in Doubt. As Ms Powell, she conned me into respecting her at first sighting.

The second time around, the details can be examined matter-of-factly. And Ms Powell is/was, clearly, as her character admits towards the movie's end, a very self-centred psychologically needy bitch (and inadequate worker and wife). Ms Child, by comparison, is seen as a total lady, albeit a jolly giant of a gentlewoman no one could fault for anything, as Ms Powell acknowledges.

They do not meet, of course, and Julie gamefully tells us that the nonagenarian doyen of cookbooks didn't want to meet Julie, a 30-year-old blogger whose self-proclaimed claim to fame was creating in 365 evenings all 500-plus recipes in Julia's renowned 1960s cookbook of French cuisine. Julia told a reporter that Julie's blog antic was "disrespectful".

It also demonstrated changing times and ethics. Julia took at least eight years to co-create, translate, re-write and multi-edit her magnum opus. Julie took a more year to use it up in her blog, adding nothing creative. Julia happily received an advance of US$1,500. Julie's overly patient husband anticipated a jackpot of US$100,000-plus for the book of his wife's blogs in Salon.com. There were other comparisons that were not all that odious.

Ste Meryl should, in a fair Hollywood world, win yet another Best Actress Oscar. She captures the astonishing vocal range of Julia Child, and the unique ways she chorkled, smoked, loved her diplomat husband, adored food and coped with her childlessness and freakish height. Sandra Bullock was great fun in Speed, awfully screen-hoggish since then, and she'll have to bowl me over in The Blind Side so completely that I'd allow her to defeat Ste Meryl. I'm prepared to apologise to her. Movie critics, like boy scouts, should always be prepared. Even for absurd situations.

I'm sure Ephron is a fiery liberal. She slips three anti-Republican jibes into Julia's conversations. Julia and her adorable husband (Stanley Tucci shining in a role of modest passivity) were clearly liberals in the old-world sense. They were American aristocrats, and Ephron couldn't help revering them. The Powells are nouveaux riches, who never talk about politics or anything other than themselves, and Nora Ephron didn't admire them half as much.