Salma Hayek — Film Noir Blonde

Entertaining ‘Savages’ wears blood and guts on its sleeve

Savages/2012/Universal/130 min.

Without giving too much away, Blake Lively’s character in “Savages,” Oliver Stone’s latest neo noir, is forced to, um, live rough for the sake of a business deal gone brutal. Still, this doesn’t stop the quintessential, sun-kissed beach blonde named O (short for Ophelia) from asking her keepers: “Do you think I could get a salad once in a while instead of pizza?”

O, with her lean limbs, long hair and dazzling smile, is a gorgeous if slightly vacuous pawn in this story, which she also narrates. The movie’s biggest strength is that Lively and the rest of the cast so effortlessly inhabit their characters.

The power brokers are her luscious boyfriends Ben (Aaron Johnson) and Chon (Taylor Kitsch); she’s involved with both of them and, even if she’s not the sharpest tool in the shed, she deserves a little credit for that nifty set-up. Ben’s a Buddhist who studied business and botany; Chon’s a baddist, as O puts it, and a former Navy SEAL. Together, they’ve built a thriving marijuana biz that catches the eye of a major Mexican cartel run by Elena (Salma Hayek) and Lado (Benicio Del Toro).

Lado is a badass assassin type with an abundance of fluffy hair and Elena puts her steely focus steadfastly on the bottom line. For Lado, that means bringing Ben and Chon on Elena’s board of directors, as it were. Ben and Chon don’t take kindly to hostile takeovers, however, and they aren’t afraid to fight back. (Not sure who runs the cartel’s IT department but it’s eminently capable of providing video footage of hideously violent acts with nary a glitch or file not found.) John Travolta plays Dennis, the corrupt cop.

Stone has lined up the perfect players (Hayek, Del Toro and Travolta have the meatiest parts) for an entertaining, extremely violent, sometimes-funny tale, based on Don Winslow’s novel, of savage “execs” and what they’ll do to keep making enormous gobs of illegal cash. (Stone co-wrote the script with Winslow and Shane Salerno.) Diced and sliced with kinetic editing, and drenched in the piercing bright light of Southern California, the story unspools with Stone’s trademark acuity and intensity.

But there are essentially two endings and the final “real” one strikes me as a mistake. I wish Stone, given his typical hard edge, had not felt the need to close on a sunny note when the bleaker, darker ending would have better fit this bold neo noir that throughout wears blood and guts on its sleeve.

“Savages” opens nationwide today.

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Poetic, mysterious ‘Americano’ lacks emotional resonance

Americano/2011/MPI Media Group/105 min.

“Americano,” Mathieu Demy’s first feature film, contemplates the passing of time and ghosts of memory, the grieving of a parent and letting go of the past. Poetic, dreamlike and visually compelling, the film has the makings of a personal odyssey meets noirish mystery but ultimately is undermined by a thin story that lacks emotional resonance.

Writer/director/actor Demy plays Martin, a real-estate broker who lives with his girlfriend Claire (Chiara Mastroianni) in Paris; he’s on the fence about raising a family with her. When his estranged mother dies, he travels to her home in Venice, Calif., where he spent part of his childhood before moving to France with his father (Jean-Pierre Mocky) after his parents divorced.

Returning to settle his mother’s affairs, with the help of a family friend named Linda (Geraldine Chaplin), Martin finds that in addition to the turmoil of pain, both raw and repressed, he is haunted by the recollection of Lola, a childhood acquaintance (Salma Hayek plays the adult Lola). She remained friends his mother while Martin was in France.

After learning that Lola was deported, Martin takes Linda’s red Ford Mustang convertible and heads to Tijuana (unfamiliar and dangerous territory that is all the more appealing in his grief) to find Lola and probe the relationship she had with his mother. There he finds the brassy, tough chick working in a strip club called Americano. It’s not exactly a happy reunion and Martin must decide whether he can trust this no-nonsense femme fatale.

Though a fictional film, “Americano” is also a valentine to Demy’s parents: French New Wave director Jacques Demy (he died in 1990) and Agnès Varda, who has been directing movies since the 1950s. Showing glimpses of Martin’s childhood in Venice, and simultaneously creating a more personal story, Demy uses footage of himself in Varda’s 1981 film “Documenteur.”

“I wanted the two films to echo one another, with 30 years separating them,” said Demy at a recent press conference in Beverly Hills. The desire to connect the films also prompted Demy to shoot “Americano” in super 16 mm cinemascope; “Documenteur” was shot in super 16 mm. And, of course, Hayek’s character name echoes Jacques Demy’s 1961 “Lola,” his first feature. Like Demy, Mastroianni (daughter of Catherine Deneuve and Marcello Mastroianni) and Chaplin (daughter of Oona O’Neill and Charlie Chaplin) are artists with prodigious legacies.

A.O. Scott, writing for the New York Times, notes, “As a director, [Mathieu Demy] owes less of a debt to his parents than to the American film noir tradition and, above all, to the melancholy romanticism of Wim Wenders, the German auteur whose love of scruffy North American locations, ambiguous quest narratives and the color red seems to resonate through much of ‘Americano.’ ” [Read more…]

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