Béla Tarr's Speed Racer from London

I skipped last week's "Now Showing" because of the San Francisco International Film Festival, although I filed reviews of David Mamet's jiu-jitsu movie, Redbelt, and the British comedy Son of Rambow over at Paste. Opening in theaters this week is the garish, retro, futuristic, earnest, campy, swift, turgid, and exceedingly contradictory Speed Racer. I'm delighted that Paste no longer requires reviewers to assign a star rating to a movie or album; this one might have been tricky.

By delivering important information in aggressively brief bursts, Speed Racer seems to test the limits of human perception, and it's doing this to tell a dumb, insincere story and tickle the neurons of 8-year-olds. How best to boil that disjunction into a number? Don't know, not my problem. The negative reviews are the most fun to read (Hoberman, Edelstein, Lane), but Scott Tobias's torn reaction is closer to my own feeling. He gives Speed Racer a C.

My own review is one of four or five that could have been whittled from my post-screening notes. Here's an also-ran: I happened to see the film within a couple of days of watching Béla Tarr's The Man from London at the SFIFF.

Tarr's film is as aggressively slow as the Wachowski's is speedy. Both films are testing certain viewer limits, both are using unconventional, almost hidden methods of exposition, and both have a strangely malleable nationality. Speed Racer's nuclear family is as American as Ozzie and Harriet, but it's based on a Japanese anime cartoon full of Western-looking faces that — in the version intended for American audiences — were synced with fast-talking English voices. The Wachowskis nod to this serpentine border crossing with a crazy quilt of secondary and tertiary characters. Is that French actor Melvil Poupaud providing color commentary? Is that Korean pop singer Rain driving a race car? Weird.

The first time I saw The Man From London last October, the dialogue was in Hungarian. Hey, is that British actress Tilda Swinton? Weird. In that print, much of the dialogue, including hers, was dubbed, but it turns out that there's another print in circulation, and it's quite revealing, especially for someone like me who never mastered multi-lingual lip-reading. In the print that screened in San Francisco last week, all the dialogue is in French and English, and some of the lips even line up with the soundtrack. The actress playing Henriette, for example, is clearly speaking French, like her character. (By the way, she harms no cats, no chats.) The eponymous man from London and his few compatriots, plus the actors playing them, speak English to each other. Most everyone else in the film speaks French, even if their lips are often speaking, presumably, Hungarian. But not Tilda's. Her character spoke Hungarian in the first version I saw and French in this version, but I suspect her lips were speaking English each time. Go, Béla Tarr, go Béla Tarr, go!

Does seeing the film dubbed into French and English as opposed to Hungarian change anything substantive? Actually, I think it does a bit. In one scene, a bi-lingual detective from London is speaking to a dock watchman who retrieved a case of money from the drink. They speak in French about a sensitive matter concerning a man whose wife is seated nearby. What's all this about, she asks the detective in English. It's of no concern, he lies in English. The first time I saw the film, all of this was flattened into Hungarian, so it seemed as if the woman simply didn't hear the men, or maybe she was being coy. But in the French-English print, the logic snaps into place: the English woman doesn't fully understand French, but she rightly guesses that the men are talking about her husband.

Say, this reminds me of Terrence Stamp in Toby Dammit.

Now, to the lists!

In Theaters

• Flight of the Red Balloon [trailer, review, my comments about the film on our NYFF podcast, an in-depth discussion of his work on an earlier podcast]
• 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days [trailer]
• The Visitor [trailer, review, brief thoughts on the Sundance podcast, and I'll revisit the film with J. Robert and the film's writer-director on a future podcast]
• NEW: Son of Rambow [trailer, review]
• Persepolis [trailer, J. Robert's interview with the director on the podcast]
• NEW: Redbelt [trailer, review]
• Snow Angels [trailer, listen to my chat with Green on the podcast, see also: my review in the March Paste]

Minor Films and Amusements

• NEW: Speed Racer [trailer, review]
• Married Life [trailer, review]
• In Bruges [trailer, Sundance report]
• The Counterfeiters [trailer, review]
• The Ruins [trailer, review]
• The Forbidden Kingdom [trailer, review]
• Stop-Loss [trailer, review]
• Deception [trailer, review]

No, Thanks

• Drillbit Taylor [trailer, review]
• 10,000 BC [trailer, review]
• Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed [trailer]

Where I'll Be This Week (Bay Area)

I'm looking forward to revisiting a couple of movies that are playing all week, if I get the chance, plus seeing a rare screening of Warren Sonbert's Carriage Trade, a film I've never seen.

• playing all week: Contempt at the Castro
• playing all week: Still Life at the Roxie
• playing all week: I might try to catch The Memory Thief at the Red Vic.
• April 15: Carriage Trade at SF Camerawork