CAROLINE AND JACKIE documents one very long night with some rather vapid characters
CAROLINE AND JACKIE (Adam Christian Clark, 2012)
Tuesday, April 24, Clearview Cinemas Chelsea, 9:00
Saturday, April 28, AMC Loews Village 7, 9:00
www.tribecafilm.com
Writer-director Adam Christian Clark’s feature-length debut, Caroline and Jackie, has nothing to do with the Kennedys. It also turns out to be more of a fictionalized version of a conglomeration of reality-show television series than a coherent narrative, albeit one with some powerful, effective moments. Jackie (Bitsie Tullouch) at first thinks that her sister, Caroline (Marguerite Moreau), has come to visit her to celebrate Caroline’s birthday. But Caroline turns the tables on Jackie, instead throwing a surprise party for Jackie before changing gears once again and staging an intervention, claiming Jackie is a pill-addicted anorexic, which Jackie adamantly denies. Thrust in the middle is Jackie’s boyfriend, Ryan (David Giuntoli). The three of them spend a long, complicated, emotional night together, along with some friends, examining one another as well as themselves, reaching some rather unpleasant conclusions. Clark, who has directed the American version of Big Brother and the Chinese reality show Fashion Star, had the actors improvise much of the dialogue (based on a specific outline), resulting in a choppy story with incongruent lines and characters that are hard to like or even care about. Every time the film seems to be heading in a better direction, particularly in scenes featuring only Ryan and Jackie, it slips back, getting lost in terrain better left to Jersey Shore, The Real World, and, well, Big Brother. In his director’s statement, Clark, who has been based in Los Angeles since he was eighteen and is now thirty-one, explained, “In being truly honest, we have to admit that we are all vapid.” Actually, no we don’t.
French filmmaker Mia Hansen-Løve’s third film is an infuriating yet captivating tale that runs hot and cold. Goodbye First Love begins in Paris in 1999, as fifteen-year-old Camille (Lola Créton) frolics naked with Sullivan (Sebastian Urzendowsky), her slightly older boyfriend. While she professes her deep, undying lover for him, he refuses to declare his total dedication to her, instead preparing to leave her and France for a long sojourn through South America. When Camille goes home and starts sobbing, her mother (Valérie Bonneton), who is not a big fan of Sullivan’s, asks why. “I cry because I’m melancholic,” Camille answers, as only a fifteen-year-old character in a French film would. As the years pass, Camille grows into a fine young woman, studying architecture and dating a much older man (Magne-Håvard Brekke), but she can’t forget Sullivan, and when he eventually reenters her life, she has some hard choices to make. Créton (Bluebeard) evokes a young Isabelle Huppert as Camille, while Urzendowsky (The Way Back) is somewhat distant as the distant Sullivan. There is never any real passion between them; Hansen-Løve (All Is Forgiven, 
For most of his career, South Korean auteur Hong Sang-soo has been making films about filmmakers, although not always about the filmmaking process itself. In such works as 
Writer-director Baltasar Kormákur’s adaptation of Arnaldur Indriðason’s award-winning novel Jar City (Myrin) is a bleak but compelling police procedural that focuses on a fact-based controversial government initiative that is cataloging genetic research on all Icelandic families. When an aging man named Holberg (Thorsteinn Gunnarsson) is murdered in his home, brooding inspector Erlendur (Ingvar E. Sigurdsson) heads the investigation into the death, leading him to a thirty-year-old rape, a dirty cop, a trio of criminals (one of whom has been missing for a quarter century), a woman who killed herself shortly after her four-year-old daughter died, and a doctor who collects body parts. The divorced Erlendur also has to deal with his troubled daughter (Augusta Eva Erlendsdottir), a pregnant drug addict who hangs out with some very sketchy company. Meanwhile, a mysterious man (Atli Rafn Sigurdarson) is up to something following the traumatic death of his young daughter. Kormakur weaves together the story line of the two fathers side by side — in the book, the unidentified man appears only near the conclusion, although who he is still remains a mystery for most of the film — centering on the complex relationship between parents and children and what gets passed down from generation to generation, both on the outside and the inside. Sigurdsson plays Erlendur with a cautious seriousness, the only humor coming from the way he treats his goofy partner, Sigurdur Oli (Bjorn Hlynur Haraldsson). Iceland’s entry for the 2007 Foreign-Language Oscar and winner of the Crystal Globe at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, Jar City is a dark, tense intellectual thriller. Indriðason has turned Erlendur into a continuing character in such follow-ups as Silence of the Grave and Voices; here’s hoping Kormákur and Sigurdsson do the same. Jar City will be screening on April 20 and 24 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s “Images from the Edge: Classic & Contemporary Icelandic Cinema” series, comprising nineteen works from Iceland ranging from Loftur Guðmundsson’s 1949 Between Mountain and Shore and Ævar Kvaran’s 1950 The Last Farm in the Valley to Árni Ásgeirsson’s 2010 Undercurrent and Hafsteinn Gunnar Sigurðsson’s 2011 Either Way, with the directors present for many of the screenings, including Kormákur following the 6:15 showing of Jar City on April 20.