film

Rip It Up, Issue 166, 1 May 1991, Page 33

film

GREEN CARD Director: Peter Weir Australian director Peter Weir has had a strange, almost offbeat career, a move suggested by his very first

feature, the bizarre Cars That Ate

Paris. He's made his best films in

Australia (The Last Wave, Picnic At Hanging Rock, Gallipol)), and less

individual ones in America (Witness, Dead Poets Society). A film that would combine the virtues of both (a sense of character and a box-office success) is all that is needed, but somenow Green Cardisn't quite tht movie. This comedy about a marriage of convenience that blossoms into true love is light and frothy, but doesn't delve much more deeply than that level. Weir's own script shows a culture clash between an earthy, blustering French type (Gerard Depardieu) who comes against a slightly precious

trendy-lißerral New Yorker (Andie

MacDowell) — a situation which, to be fair, got guffaws when | caught the film in New York a while back.

Of the two actors, MacDowell gives the more considered performance as the constantly miffed Bronte, while Depardieu doesn't project the warmth of sense of Gallic style that he shows in Cyrano de Bergeracc. There are some nice moments such as Departieu’s

crazed piano recital after a rather sedate dinner party, and the continual discomfort of MacDowell in a myriad of social situations. Peripheral characters register vividly, especially Bebe Neuwirth as the rapacious Lauren, although some of them are a little too broadly sketched for comfort or believability.

At the bottom line with such a modern-day fairy tale as this, is the requirement that it is believable. If the MacDowell-Depardieu partnership is a bit lacking in this respect, then it's almost made up for by the film’s other ‘star’ — the city of New York. There it is, in its many facets from the black street musicians in the opening scene to

those shambling apartments with their little patches of pampered green on the rooftop. WILLIAM DART

THE WITCHES Director: Nicholas Roeg “I hope nobody is going to make me cross today” rasps Anjelica Huston,

having just zapped one of her recalcitrant witches into a pile of ashes. With a gutteral middle European accent and a crone-like appearance that would make Margaret Hamilton look like glamour queen. Huston is one of the bewitching pluses of Roeg’s new film.

This Roald Dahl tale is something of a departure for one of today’s consistently stylish and intellectually engaging directors. And there is certainly plenty of style in The Wifches as young Luke (Jason Fisher) sets to — both before and after his transformation into a mouse — to dispose of a convention of witches, gathered at a Gothic English seaside hotel under the ironic banner of the Society for the Preservation of Cruelty to Children.

The opening scenes in Norway are enchanting, and the warm playing between Fisher and Mai Zetterling as his wise and plucky grandmother sets the tone for the film to follow. The tale of a young witch-napped girl who is banished into a painting to grow oldery and older until eventually she dies, is chilling. The problem with such a film | would imagine is mainly that of defining an audience level. A lot of The Witches would pass by youngsters, and the subject matter might preclude the interest of some adults, although there is some gifted comedy work from Huston, Rowan Atkinson and many of the minor characters. The Witches is a film on which a lot of care has been lavished. Roeg’s camera rushes around the floorin a mouse-eye view of proceedgins, performs a Dervish’s dance during the scene in which the witches are transformed into mice. It was the last project that Jim Henson was associated with before his death. It is a worthy tribute, indeed. WILLIAM DART