Sally, the woman who answers the phone for Filmworks at the Tower Theatre, said to me as I reported for work one morning not long ago: “So, you’re showing a thriller. I thought this outfit did art films and flicks about the Romanian resistance?”
It was summer. I’d been out of town. I didn’t know what the chief had booked for August. I just write this stuff. Chief books.
“I doubt that,” I said. “Don’t you know? Thrillers are at the bottom of the film food chain. Our patrons wouldn’t put up with thrillers.”
Next, the guy who sweeps up, Fred, accosted me as I rolled a sheet of blank paper into my typewriter. “You guys having money problems? You have to show thrillers?”
I felt like I had to defend the chief. “It’s hard to book really good art films these days,” I explained to Fred. I lit up a filtered Camel. “Regal snatches them up, especially if they’re in English and star Nicole Kidman.”
I told Fred that what we — or, the chief — had been looking for was a good French film about penguins, but no luck.
I tired of defending. It was time to look into this thriller thing. I scanned the critics on imdb.com. For sure, most called our August offering, Roman de Gare, a thriller or a mystery. As critic Mick LaSalle explains, a roman de gare is a lightweight novel, a quickie soon forgotten.
Was this, then, going to be Filmworks’ summer of cinematic dumbing down? How could I put a good face on this in 450 words?
I turned the situation over in my mind. At the very least, thrillers can be entertaining. They go crash-bang at the end, and the guy rescues the girl just-in-time. (Or, in this feminist age, she rescues him within-an-inch-of-his-life.) I could spin the pick as a suitable light companion to Priceless, the cotton candy Audrey Tautou spun for us in July. It would be our summer of movie amnesia — as quickly forgotten as last night’s dream.
Then, I got around to seeing Roman de Gare.
Well, yes, it’s a thriller. But it’s other things, too. Good things. It has sexuality several clicks up from ho-hum Jodie Foster fare. It has enough plot complication to keep discerning Filmworks viewers guessing. And it has ambiguity of character, a virtue Tony Scott never does manage.
And finally, it’s Claude Lelouche. Remember his A Man and a Woman, with that camera spinning around the lovers? And also And Now My Love, which takes the entire film to get the couple together on the plane? Man, I grew up under the spell of those flicks. Here’s hoping you did, too.