ANOTHER AMAZING REVIEW FOR "THE POOL"

Chris Smith's THE POOL opened in Ottawa (at the Bytowne Cinema) this past weekend and received further glowing reviews seen below.

OTTAWA XPRESS - ONLINE
April 9th, 2009 Web exclusive!

The Pool
From Goa with love
Cormac Rea


Director Chris Smith's The Pool makes a splash at Sundance

Every now and then a film comes along that combines the simplicity of a well told story - nuanced symbolism, dynamic relationships, and "real" characters creating believable, familiar tension - with the vibrancy of cinematic perspective, evocative setting, and handpicked cast; The Pool, 2007 Winner of the Special Jury Prize at Sundance, is such a deceptively grand production.
Directed by the highly accomplished American, Chris Smith (creator of American Movie, The Yes Men, among others), The Pool takes place in Goa, India - more commonly the province of hedonism for the globe's Trance music brigade - focusing on a local native, Venkatesh, who works as a "room boy," cleaning at a local hotel.

Venkatesh (Venkatesh Chavan) spends his afternoons high in a mango tree, spying on A Secret Garden - esque paradise, complete with a tempting, azure-tinted swimming pool. His curiosity of the outside world is tempered somewhat by his lot in life; being poor and of a low caste in India, the teenage Venkatesh can find little opportunity for advancement or success - his possibilities appear dismally proscribed. Yet, when he is not working in the hotel or helping his best friend Jhangir (Jhangir Badshah), Venkatesh peers over the garden wall again and again, learning of the external through his witness of the complicated lives of its wealthy owners.

Although the plot initially untangles at a meandering rate, gathering steam about a third into the film, Smith's The Pool

is always enjoyable for its carefully measured portrayal of real Goa life. Like Venkatesh, our only glimpse of drug addled ravers is on a single bus-ride, a purposefully contrived scene which is telling in its understatement.

Off the cuff, Jhangir relates a local rumour about suspicious foreign men hanging about with young Indian boys. Venkatesh is skeptical, offering the opinion that many older Indian men also suffer from the same sexual proclivities. Of course, an audience of middle class western people will already have a set of preformed opinions about Venkatesh's Goa, its inhabitants and tourists, through the omnipresent moral eye presented by global media sources. The Pool offers an ironic interpretation of Goa from the proverbial other, the insider: the native son.

Aside from the beautifully developed characters, buoyant plotline and powerful conclusion, The Pool's greatest asset is its employ of subtle sociological commentary, both of western and eastern civilizations. A lingering, naturalistic tale, The Pool's symbols will be enduringly seared in to your frontal lobe long after the final credits roll.

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The Pool is deep
Lovely, languid tale of a poor Indian boy's friendship with a wealthy Indian girl and her family

By LIZ BRAUN, SUN MEDIA
http://www.ottawasun.com/Showbiz/Movies/2009/04/09/9065046.html

The Pool is a rags-to-riches tale of a young man who becomes obsessed with a swimming pool attached to an extravagant country house.

In Goa, a young man becomes obsessed with the swimming pool attached to a big country house. It's a symbol of wealth that he regards with longing.

He decides that the day will come when he'll swim freely in that water; how he gets there and how he changes along the way are at the centre of The Pool, a quiet, naturalistic drama about the unexpected ways in which people connect with one another.

Venkatesh (Venkatesh Chavan) is a 'room boy' of 18 who works at a hotel in Panjim, Goa. His work is scrubbing floors and toilets, and he makes a bit more money selling plastic bags to shoppers at the market. He has a mother who lives far away, and he has a best friend in Jhangir, a 12-year-old orphan. Venkatesh wants to find a way to get the money to go to school, but in the meantime, he and Jhangir like to sit up in a tree and spy on the house and swimming pool of a rich family. Neither boy can figure out how it's possible that someone could be rich enough to have a house he or she would leave empty.

One day, there are people around the pool. After seeing them a few times, Venkatesh finds a way to do a bit of garden work for the house owner. He also encounters the man's rebellious teenage daughter (Ayesha Mohan); in some of the most delightful scenes in the movie, Venkatesh and Jhangir ignore the huge social gap between themselves and this young woman, and simply bombard her with friendship.

The two boys tell her stories about their lives, they buy her lunch, they take her walking to an abandoned fort.

Slowly but surely, the rich man who owns the house (Nana Patekar) develops a paternal affection for Venkatesh. He wants to help Venkatesh better his life, and asks him to move to Bombay -- where he could both work and go to school. With his dreams about to come true, Venkatesh has to consider whether or not he can go that far away from his mother and from Jhangir.

Given its Indian setting and its rags-to-riches (sort of) theme, The Pool has been compared to Slumdog Millionaire, but other than being likewise transporting, it is a completely different film experience. The Pool is a slow, seemingly uncomplicated story that sneaks up on you and stays with you long after you've left the theatre.

Both Venkatesh Chavan and Jhangir Badshah are first- time actors, and both live and work in Panjim, where the movie is set. Nana Patekar, who plays the owner of the pool and Vinkatesh's mentor, is a legend in Indian cinema, and Ayesha Mohan has been involved in several other films. All the performances are extraordinary; by the end of the movie, you believe you know these characters well.

The Pool is beautiful to look at, and, for what it conveys about human nature, to experience. The movie is in Hindi with English subtitles.

LIZ.BRAUN@SUNMEDIA.CA
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THE POOL

1 HOUR, 38 MINUTES

STARRING: VENKATESH CHAVAN, NANA PATEKAR, JHANGIR BHADSHAH

DIRECTOR: CHRIS SMITH

Sun Rating: 4 out of 5

SHALL WE KISS? NOW PLAYING IN TORONTO, VANCOUVER and OTTAWA!

Here's a selection of reviews for SHALL WE KISS? presently playing in the following Canadian theatres:

. VARSITY CINEMAS, TORONTO

. PARK THEATRE, VANCOUVER

. BYTOWNE CINEMA, OTTAWA

Lip-locked lovers

Shall We Kiss? is a French romance about the dangers of attraction

By Jay Stone, Canwest News ServiceApril 10, 2009

SHALL WE KISS?

Starring: Emmanuel Mouret, Virginie Ledoyen, Julie Gayet, Michael Cohen

Directed and written by: Emmanuel Mouret

Running time: 96 minutes

PG: Nudity, sexual situations, adult themes.

(In French with English subtitles)

- - -

The French of our imaginations -- that is, the French of the movies -- are expert in all things to do with love, but the French of Shall We Kiss? don't seem to have the foggiest notion of how it works, how it doesn't, and what to do about it. Shall We Kiss? is a sort of romantic farce, a love story reminiscent of something Woody Allen would do: it's not wise about the complications of romance, but it's wise about how we view the complications. This isn't a movie about love as much as it is a movie about the audiences for French movies about love.

As such, it's beautifully dressed for the occasion. Writer-director Emmanuel Mouret, also one of the film's stars, uses a palette of white and beige, with minimalist rooms decorated with pictures of famous composers.

Tchaikovsky and Schubert score the film's long talks about love and even a man's meeting with a prostitute -- is that a bassoon in your orchestration or are you happy to see me? -- and everyone is tastefully fashionable. A man wouldn't even think of going outside without a scarf knotted in some complicated way around his neck.

The plot also has an impeccable structure. Emilie (Julie Gayet) is on a business trip to Nantes when she meets Gabriel (Michael Cohen). They both have partners in life, but they are attracted to each other. Gabriel tries to kiss Emilie; it would be a kiss without consequences, he tells her. But she refuses. Instead, she tells him a story of a friend who once kissed a man, and with dire consequences. Shall We Kiss? -- or, wonderfully, Un baiser s'il vous plait -- is the story of that kiss.

The film within the film concerns single man Nicolas (Mouret) and his married pal Judith (Virginie Ledoyen), platonic best friends until the day Nicolas reveals that he needs something more: he needs physical affection.

Their solution is a long seduction scene that comes to the screen as Woody Allen by way of Eric Rohmer: she sits on the bed and he sits beside her, awaiting instructions. May he touch her breast?, he asks. Now the other one? There is a small debate about a kiss: he finds it necessary, but she warns him that if there is no magic in it, the deal is off. "You run the risk of me being reticent later," she says. It's not so much passion as a clinical checklist, a romantic parody in which the formality of friendship runs right up against the surrender of erotic attraction.

Eventually Nicolas and Judith embark on an affair filled with guilt, which they try to assuage by having sex as frequently as possible "to take the mystery out." Predictably, this doesn't work. The problems are Claudio (Stefano Accorsi), Judith's loving and handsome husband -- Accorsi looks like an Italian Paul Rudd -- and Caline (Frederique Bel), Nicolas's sweet girlfriend. They're being betrayed, and the farce of Shall We Kiss? gives way to something more mournful as the lovers try to find away around this.

Alas, there doesn't seem to be one. This is just what Emilie is trying to tell Gabriel back in the present, but unfortunately, this is a location that is designed in much warmer and vibrant colours and therefore seems to be a place where a kiss would have a better chance. Shall We Kiss? seems to be telling us that such wine-fuelled thoughts are as foolish as they are irresistible, but the people are so removed from their passions that resistance feels possible, if not preferable. Un baiser? Non, merci.

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

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Shall We Kiss?: Sophisticated and witty

http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/article/616632

 by

JASON ANDERSON

SPECIAL TO THE STAR

Shall We Kiss?

(3 stars out of 4)

Starring Virginie Ledoyen, Emmanuel Mouret and Julie Gayet. Directed by Emmanuel Mouret. 100 minutes. At the Varsity. 14A

A romantic comedy that owes less to any Hollywood precedents than the traditions of Molière and Marivaux, Shall We Kiss? is a quintessentially Gallic sort of charmer. Applying a light touch to his cautionary tale of friends who become lovers against their better judgment, French filmmaker Emmanuel Mouret displays much the same finesse as his venerated forebears when it comes to presenting matters of the heart.

That's not to say the premise of Shall We Kiss? couldn't be repurposed for a Kate Hudson-Matthew McConaughey matchup down the line. It seems inevitable that some enterprising producer will believe it can be improved with shots of glistening pecs.

But any such remake is likely to lack the philosophical bent and theatrical manner of this fourth feature by Mouret, an actor and director who's made a string of successful comedies in his native France.

Here, he plays Nicolas, a schoolteacher whose nervous demeanour makes him anything but a ladies man. Despairing over the lack of "physical affection" in his life, Nicolas resorts to visiting a prostitute but flees when he discovers that he's not allowed to kiss her.

Out of a mixture of sympathy and curiosity, his happily married friend Judith (Virginie Ledoyen) agrees to alleviate Nicolas' suffering in what might be the most amusingly awkward love scene ever filmed.

Intended to be a one-time encounter, they are upset when they realize it meant something more. They resolve to make love again, only much more badly to kill off any attraction. "We'll do it on the floor," Judith helpfully suggests. "It'll be more uncomfortable."

That this doesn't work either isn't surprising, especially considering the story of Nicolas and Judith is actually being told by another character to a suitor in hopes of convincing him there's no such thing as a kiss without consequences.

The archaic nature of the storytelling and the characters' old-fashioned naivety both make Shall We Kiss? seem like it belongs in another century. But it shares its droll yet sweet sensibility with Woody Allen's most effervescent movies about romantic complications (especially Manhattan), as well as the gentlest films of French New Wavers like Eric Rohmer and François Truffaut.

And while it's hardly novel to see the lives of lovers thrown into disarray by a series of misunderstandings, missed signals and well-intentioned lies, Shall We Kiss? carries it all off with a rare degree of sophistication and wit.

Art Star still in the news!

The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins

A documentary by: Pietra Brettkelly featuring Vanessa Beecroft.

Madonna of the art stunt

Extraordinary documentary records artist's chaotic life, and controversial efforts to adopt Sudanese twins

By Katherine Monk

Canwest News Service April 3, 2009

 

****

Anyone seeking proof of the adage "truth is stranger than fiction" need look no further than The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins, easily one of the most bizarre non-fiction journeys ever recorded on film.

The film touches on everything from celebrity adoption of African babies, to chronic marital issues, mental illness and art's place in the political world. The documentary from New Zealand filmmaker Pietra Brettkelly moves from side to side like an ink-jet printer, spitting out small dots that only resolve once the job is done.

Frankly, even when the end-credits roll, there's more than one read on what the film means -- or even what it's all about -- and when it comes to making movies about art, that may be the only way to approach its inherent abstractions -- with a taste for chaos.

Certainly, that's the way Vanessa Beecroft approaches her art. One of the superstars of the European art scene, thanks to her many performance and conceptual pieces that use live models in various states of undress, Beecroft sees art as a dynamic force more than a static artifact.

The half-British, half-Italian creator embraces work with political edges. She's happy to shock and provoke, and when we first meet her in the opening frames of Brettkelly's film, she's painting a group of black women with black paint. A moment later, she's asking one of her assistants to help her: "I need more blood!" she says.

Eventually someone shows up with a bucket of sticky, bright red liquid that Beecroft pours over the women, who now lie naked and motionless on the floor of a Venetian fish market.

Brettkelly cuts in and out of this creation sequence for Beecroft's last Venice Biennale installation, VB61: Still Death! Darfur Still Deaf? over the course of the movie. At first, one wonders if the choice to move in and out of this jarring image was motivated by the sheer drama of the optics alone. Then, by the midway point, it's clear why Brettkelly chose to use the Darfur installation as the central artistic motif: the piece operates as a reflecting mirror to Beecroft's life and oeuvre, and came out of one particular experience she had in Sudan.

Shortly after Beecroft landed in Sudan for a different art project she encountered two malnourished, Sudanese twins. Beecroft was lactating because she'd recently given birth, and sensing a need she could fill, she offered up her mammaries to the supposed orphans.

For two weeks, she bonded with the two little boys. Then, she decided she wanted to take them home.
Beecroft's desire to play saviour to the twins is not surprising. Moreover, in these days of superstar adoptions by the likes of Madonna and Angelina Jolie, Beecroft's maternal urge is almost fashionable.

Yet, as the legal details begin to bubble to the surface over the course of several months, we learn the twins actually have a father and an extended family. Undeterred, though slightly guilty about the idea of "taking the children from their father," Beecroft perseveres.

She's used to being a bulldozer. Self-possessed and a self-confessed depressive, Beecroft says she's not the kind of person to back down, or shut up. She does what she wants, and when things don't go her way she actually seems stunned by the idea that the entire world isn't there to support her every whim.
Beecroft's monolithic ego is what makes her a great artist -- she is unafraid -- but it leads to problems in every other facet of her life.

She's a good person, and she's desperate to be seen as a good person, but she's also got mental health issues to deal with. We learn that she and her husband have had such terrible fights that police have been called. She talks about her bouts of depression and rage, followed by stints of pharmacologically induced numbness.

In the end, Beecroft chose to ditch the pills in favour of the roller coaster ride that inspires her art, and watching her spill buckets of sticky red ooze over sprawling bodies, she couldn't look happier -- or more at home.

© Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen

The Pool Opens With Great Reviews!

The Pool 

Director: Chris Smith 

OPENING APRIL 3rd at Cumberland Cinemas, TORONTO
OPENING APRIL 3rd at Ridge Theatre, VANCOUVER
OPENING APRIL 9th at Bytowne Cinema, OTTAWA

 

 

The Pool: The new home of plucky protagonists

Jay Stone, Canwest News Service   

Published: Thursday, April 02, 2009

*** 3 stars

Chris Smith's quietly humanistic drama The Pool concerns an illiterate teenager in a dead-end job who aspires to improve himself: He wants to go to school, and he wants the life of which he sees glimpses every day when he climbs out of his shabby, rundown world into the wealthy surrounding suburbs.

There, he climbs a tree and peers into a pristine swimming pool behind a luxurious villa that represents a life of privilege - complete with eerie silence, so unlike the bustling town - he can barely understand. Eventually, the boy will make friends with the owner of the villa and with his attractive daughter, and he will be offered a chance to flee to the big city and go to school to make his dreams come true.

The movie is based on a short story by Randy Russell, which was set in Iowa. Smith has transferred it to Goa, a former Portuguese colony in India: the boy, named Venkatesh, is played by a newcomer named Venkatesh Chavan; his young friend, named Jhangir, is played by Jhangir Badshah, another non-professional actor. The characters are based to some extent, on the actors' real lives.

In these respects, The Pool may remind you of Slumdog Millionaire, the Oscar-winning phenomenon that shows signs of becoming a model for the new Hollywood fantasy. Although less melodramatic and free of such Bollywood conventions as the closing dance number, The Pool joins Slumdog in expressing something new about 21st century cinema. Once, in the hardscrabble 1930s, such cinematic dreams - the poor but honest lad being rescued by good fortune or a rich benefactor - were set in the streets of big-city America. Today, when such ideas have been corrupted by the intervening years of knowingness, irony, entitlement and sophistication, they are set in India, a place where class divisions are still formalized and the magic of achievement can still be unexpected.

The Pool is a measured film that is rich in detail: Smith is a documentary filmmaker (American Movie) who is engaged with the everyday. A man might carve up a coconut while he gives advice to a boy to whom he is becoming a surrogate parent, and the act of carving - the way he chops off the skin, the careful movement of his machete - become as engaging as his words. It's filmed close to the ground, with few close-ups and little music, so that we can drink in the surroundings.

Venkatesh is a "hotel boy," who makes beds, cleans rooms (and toilets) and earns some extra cash by buying plastic bags and selling them in the market: a subsequent ban on plastic bags, a bit of environmental revival that cuts across The Pool at an oblique angle, costs him dearly.

Working up his nerve, he approaches the non-nonsense owner of the villa (veteran Indian star Nana Patekar) and becomes his assistant and later, his project. He also is intrigued by Ayesha (Ayesha Mohan), the man's spoiled daughter, who is always reading a book and who has vulgar, middle-class arguments with her father. Their life is the melodrama of the film - the reason for the empty pool is part of a family secret - but it is presented in passing. One of the strengths of The Pool is that it goes in surprising directions.

No one draws attention to it, but the disputes of the rich stand in interesting contrast to the conviviality of life at the bottom. Even when Venkatesh teases a co-worker, it is with the affection that is vital to people who have nothing but each other. The pool and the life it represents are more than an economic impossibility: They also mean a leap across a moneyed gap that includes a built-in hostility and sullen regret, which are the real luxuries of the rich.

The Pool is not a comedy, but it has a light heart and an affection for its characters. Patekar, the senior actor in the troupe, holds things together with an unforced and naturalistic performance, but the young actors are as charming and persuasive as the cast of Slumdog Millionaire, with whom everyone seems to have fallen in love. Perhaps it is because they remind us of ourselves, before we got spoiled. 

http://www.nationalpost.com/arts/movies/story.html?id=1457472
 

Chris Alexander
02 April 2009 
Toronto & Vancouver print versions

Rating: ***** (out of five)

After wallowing in an endless miasma of elephantine, over-plotted, big budget blockbuster brain drainers it’s a genuine pleasure to stumble across a film like The Pool. Elegant, simple and sharply observed, the picture is the sort of gentle, bittersweet character drama that’s come to be dubbed Neo-realist by those in the know; low budget, quasi-documentary movies that enlighten us by telling stories about regular, working class people trying to keep their heads above water in difficult situations.

In the case of the Goa-set picture The Pool, however, our protagonist is actually striving to submerge himself in water. Awkward Vankatesh (newcomer Venkatesh Chaven) spends his days working in a Panjim hotel and, along with his orphaned friend Jhangir, selling plastic shopping bags in the local market.  One day, the two friends spot a wealthy family’s luxurious pool through the trees. So smitten with this chlorinated mirage, Vankatesh vows to swim in it no matter what the cost.

As he slowly insinuates himself into the family, first as a groundskeeper and then as a sort of surrogate son to the father, his humble dreams become more and more obscured and his fortunes change. Not exactly a synopsis that quickens the pulse, but that’s the poetry of The Pool. It’s not burdened by twists and turns or gimmicky devices, rather director Chris Smith simply sits back and lets his camera study his characters behaving in their natural environments.