DVDebut for Dominic Savage's unusually dark and difficult drama, THE ESCAPE

All about a woman who, to save her sanity and herself, must opt out of marriage, motherhood and maybe even -- were it on the menu -- apple pie, THE ESCAPE, written and directed by Dominic Savage, goes so quietly against some of life's ingrained tenets that it will genuinely disturb viewers happy with the status quo. When the movie opened here theatrically this past May, reviews were quite positive, yet the response of audiences, whom one would assume were mostly the "art" film crowd, has been not so good. This is one anxiety-making movie.

As both writer and director, Mr. Savage, pictured at left, has what seems an unusual way of working with script and actors (do watch the Bonus Feature interviews with both him and his star, Gemma Arterton, shown below): a kind of "lay out the bare bones of what happens, make sure your actors fully understand their characters, and then... improvise!" It works. The Escape is an intelligent, deeply-felt exploration of a woman unhappy because her life (which, yes, she has had the major hand in determining) has proven not at all satisfying.

Ms Arterton -- beautiful and extremely capable -- continues to grow as actress with each role. Last year she starred in one of 2017's best films, Their Finest, and if The Escape does not prove quite up to that level, her performance in it certainly does. Interestingly, her character of Tara has much in common with another character currently on theater screens: a married woman named Agnes, played by the great Kelly Macdonald, in the movie Puzzle.

Puzzle is the easier film to accept, not nearly as hard-edged or demanding and also closer to our status quo is finding a balance between a woman's needs and the demands of marriage/motherhood. Both films are must-sees, even if The Escape may prove difficult for more conventional folk to accept.

In the role of Tara's somewhat obtuse, self-involved but still loving/caring husband, Dominic Cooper (above, left, who starred with Ms Arterton back in 2008 in the underseen/underappreciated Tamara Drewe) makes a terrific foil for his co-star. We feel for him and his situation, even as we can also see him through Tara's tired eyes.

The filmmaker coaxes fine and very real performances from his two child actors, while Frances Barber,  French star Jalil Lespert (above) and Marthe Keller all get excellent cameos as, respectively, Tara's more traditional mother, a hot-looking photographer who trails Tara and then befriends her at a museum, and a sudden unexpected helper toward the end of her journey.

The movie belongs to Ms Arterton, however, with whom we remain at every step of this difficult voyage. So emotionally and articulately on-point is the actress at each moment that, even when we can't agree with her actions and decisions, we absolutely understand them.

By the finale, the movie has circled around to end where it began. But, my, the amazing difference between what we knew then and know now allows us to understand and (perhaps grudgingly) accept the difficult decision that has been made.

From IFC Films and running just 101 minutes, the movie hits DVD and digital streaming tomorrow, Tuesday, August 14 -- for purchase or rental.

February's Sunday Corner With Lee Liberman: BIG LITTLE LIES

At an awards ceremony in late 1917, Nicole Kidman attracted some notice for her demonstrative kiss of co-star, Alexander Skarsgård, before she mounted the stage to accept her award. After watching Skarsgård play her sadistic spouse in BIG LITTLE LIES (BLL), this viewer enjoyed seeing Kidman differentiate in public between the abuser who suffocates her with violence and the actor who plays the part. (Skarsgård perfected this M. O. as a particularly memorable vampire in HBO’s True Blood, a much wider-ranging vehicle for his acting chops.)

This ingenious and surprisingly well-crafted, seven-episode series is many things: real estate, lifestyle, and violence porn plus a murder mystery. The NYT reviewer Mike Hale called it a “compendium of cliches about upper-middle-class angst.” But its slickly designed surface (often referenced by the automatic rise of a shade on a picture window exposing a gorgeous rolling expanse of ocean that begins each episode) is package gloss.

BLL carefully constructs the package beauty and then leaps beyond Desperate Housewives angst to seduce with absorbing drama.

 Adapter/screenwriter David E. Kelley (at left), director Jean-Marc Vallée, and cinematographer Yves Bélanger, play a neat trick: They dazzle the audience with drool-worthy excess and then slowly unspool everyday domestic miseries that blot out the beauty of sparkling sun, glinting waves, and glass-walled houses (as below, the home of Laura Dern’s character, Renata).

This creative threesome purposely shows that good writing, direction, and some breathtaking images can reduce the campy trademarks of TV melodrama to wallpaper in the face of a carefully-spun, compelling story. The tension between enviable lives and suffering over the minutiae of daily life seems to be the modus operandi here. (Are these folks so ill-tempered because their sense of entitlement has raised their expectations too high?) At any rate, the viewer is unwittingly drawn into these characters’s lives, ignoring their apartment-size kitchens and their ocean vistas to instead mindfully attend to the troubles they are muddling through.

The book on which the series is based was written by Liane Moriarty, an Australian, whose novel of suburban angst is domiciled in suburban Sydney. It was a NYTimes best seller, as have been other novels of hers. Kelley places Moriarty’s story in ocean-front Monterey, California.

The story involves five women, their six-year-old first graders, their spouses, therapists, teachers, nannies, neighbors, and the police. (Below, the kids -- from l: Ziggy, twins Josh and Max, Amabella, Skye, and Chloe.)

Celeste (Kidman) is a perfect beauty and accomplished lawyer who stays home with her twin boys at handsome husband Perry’s (Skarsgard) needy urgings. They are caught in a cycle of passionate sex that grows increasingly violent (that is, Celeste turns Perry’s violence into sex as a means of pretending their coupling is not abuse but over-heated love-making). Busy-body Madeline (Reese Witherspoon, shown at right, two photos above) is on her second marriage and has two daughters — cherubic little Chloe and teenager, Abigail, from her first marriage; her life is a bit dull but she diverts herself with community projects and friends whom she mother’s. She is best friend’s with Celeste but takes up with newcomer Jane (Shailene Woodley, below) who has just moved to Monterey and lives in a tiny bungalow where she sleeps in the living room, giving her sweet-natured boy, Ziggy, the bedroom. Jane has a secret that she eventually tells Madeline — her son is the result of a rape that actively haunts, leading Jane to keep a gun under her pillow.

Renata (Laura Dern) is a high strung Silicon Valley executive who rants that her professional success makes everyone hate her and rages even more that her little girl, Amabella, is rumored to being bullied by Ziggy at school and yet no one is calling him to account. Bonnie (Zoë Kravitz) is a peace-maker, a ‘fruits and nuts’ yoga instructor married to Madeline’s ex-husband, Nathan. Their daughter, Skye, is friends with Chloe, and Bonnie and Nathan strive to co-parent Nathan’s daughter Abigail from his marriage to Madeline (Bonnie and family below). The relationship between the two families is fraught, to say the least.

The focus rotates among the households dwelling on one or another bit of domestic angst, but it gradually sharpens its scrutiny on the violence between Celeste and Perry, in which a therapist intervenes with more than usual insistence to explicitly warn Celeste of real threat to her well-being from Perry’s escalating rages.

There are two Greek-like choruses to these doings. The chorus of police launch the first episode and recur intermittently right up to the closing image in the series, seeking to solve the murder and remaining suspicious of the characters (through binoculars) even after the case has been resolved. Police activity alternates with a second chorus of friends and neighbors who gossip about the main characters.

Despite the choruses’ intermittent reminders that we have a murder here, the viewer barely pays attention, distracted by the daily interactions among the couples and their children. Then -- in the most satisfying resolution of who, what, and why -- we discover who was bullying Anabella, who is dead and how it happened. Kelley pulls the plot strands together in a few short moments consisting mostly of exchanged looks among the women and one resolute gesture, proving that a who-done-it can resolve itself with a completely satisfying, surprising, yet believable conclusion.

The story here, despite deliberately misleading cues, has not been about a murder at all, but about the day in/day out interactions among the women based on loyalty and affection, mixed with daily irritations and mistrust. Witherspoon’s Madeline, for instance, is bossy and irritating (Elle Woods 20 years later), so much so it was touch and go whether I would survive the first episode, but as we come to know her in different circumstances, a sympathetic and generous woman emerges from the package gloss. Laura Dern’s character, Renata, is even more shrill and unpleasant but she softens surprisingly when she gets new facts. Celeste emerges from semi-self-delusion to take control of her life. The group of women come together not as a group of victims or belligerents, but in a moment of collective understanding and mutual support, validating Hillary Clinton’s adage: It takes a village. 

Perhaps because the resolution was so swift and satisfying, talk of a second series has been marked with ambivalence — this gem can’t be topped; best let it stand on its own. However, screenwriter Kelley sought and received direction from Liane Moriarty in the form of a novella that gave him some guidance about where the characters are headed, and he has already completed a second set of episodes. Kidman, Witherspoon, Dern, Woodley, and Kravitz have reportedly already signed on or are in negotiations. Meryl Streep will join the cast as Perry’s mother.

I admit to having resisted watching this series having been there/done that with the contemporary suburban melodrama thing. But its star-power and award-winnings led me to want to find out what made it land in Time’s top tv shows of 2017. It turns out to have justified itself as a well-conceived enough puzzle, dressed up as suburban melodrama, to intrigue the average soap-ignorer. Nevertheless, I'm not sure I care enough for these people to watch another seven episodes about them, even if I sincerely admire Kelley’s previous work and this impactful and clever piece of plot-making.

Big Little Lies streams on HBO, with Season 2 due to air in 2019.

The above post was written by 

our monthly correspondent, Lee Liberman.

A relationship dissolves in Joachim Lafosse's astute and painful drama, AFTER LOVE

How does a 15-year relationship end between two attractive, intelligent partners who have a pair of lovely twin daughters that both of them adore? Discover the answer via a new and often searing piece of cinema entitled AFTER LOVE (the even better French title is L'économie du couple).

As directed by Joachim Lafosse (pictured below, who earlier gave us the equally searing Our Children back in 2012) and co-written by Lafosse, Fanny Burdino, Mazarine Pingeot and Thomas van Zuylen, the movie

probes the final weeks (maybe months) of that relationship by simply showing us, yes, scenes from this particular "marriage." M. Lafosse, wisely I think, gives us little exposition, except what we can pick up from the (often heated) exchanges between our two protagonists. From these we gather that she is the much more financially independent partner; he seems to be near constantly short of money, though when he does work -- as an architect/home renovator -- he does a good job. He also owes money to some rather unsavory characters. Does he perhaps have a gambling problem?

We never really learn the answer to this, or to some of our other questions, but this matters little, since we learn enough about these two that we can quickly enter into their lives and discover more as we go along.

As played by the hugely talented and fiercely committed performers Bérénice Bejo (above) and writer/actor/director Cédric Kahn (below), this pair is brought to fine and seething life. They are given plenty to say and feel via the smart and believably elliptical dialog provided by the writing team, while the choice of incidents given us by Lafosse is just varied and interesting enough to hold us fast.

The film's finest and most spectacular scene comes midway at a dinner party she has organized for the couple's friends, though he has not been invited. When he shows up, the sparks that fly seem all by themselves enough to melt this iceberg of a relationship, only the tip of which we've so far been able to fully view.

The couple's twin children (above), played with near-perfect skill and enthusiasm by newcomers Jade and Margaux Soentjens, seem to be holding up as well as could be expected under this onslaught (their parents at least have the sense to try to explain what's going on to their children as much as possible). Still, the movie should keep any of you who've experienced the anger, pain and sadness of separation where children are involved alert and very on-edge.

If After Love were all just anger and recrimination, the film would be harder to sit through than it is. But the filmmaker has provided moments of respite in which we can't help but wonder if things might finally be salvaged here.

Both parents clearly have their good and bad points, and both seem at times to want to repair some of the damage that's been done (he more than she, and perhaps for economic reasons above all). In the supporting cast, everyone is good, but the stand-out would be Marthe Keller, playing Bejo's mother, a woman who understands relationships and the work it takes to keep them going.

When, at last, agreement is reached between this pair, you're likely to feel relief -- and even greater sadness. As movies about marriage/relationships go, After Love is certainly one of the better examples.

From Distrib Films US, in French with English subtitles and running a just-about-right 100 minutes. the movie opens this Wednesday, August 9 in new York City at the Quad Cinema, and on Friday, August 25, in San Francisco (at the 4 Star Cinema) and on Friday, September 1, in Los Angeles (at Laemmle's Royal). Elsewhere? Not sure, but you might try clicking on the film's website and then scrolling down to the task bar midway and clicking on Theaters.

Steven Knight and Tom Hardy turn LOCKE into an original and compelling "confined space" film

If LOCKE is a stunt -- and to some extent, it certainly is -- then it's a damned good one. This is one of those increasingly frequent "confined-space" movies  (with the exception of its initial scene, in which the title character, played by Tom Hardy leaves a construction site, gets into his car and drives away) where every-thing takes place inside an enclosed space -- that car -- from which no exit seems easily possible. The odd thing about Locke, however, is that it is not a thriller, the genre into which every other confined space film I can think of -- from ATM to Brake, Buried, Elevator, Freezer and Last Passenger (which also opens this week and takes place entirely on a train) -- neatly fits. And why not? With enough events front-loaded, that confined space just increases the thrills. But no: Locke is... well, it's a drama for adults. How's that from a movie-maker -- Steven Knight -- who clearly has quite the pair of balls.

Mr. Knight, shown at left, has been more prolific as screenwriter (Dirty Pretty Things, Amazing Grace and Eastern Promises are among his many efforts) than as a director (Redemption), but Locke may change all that. So compelling an actor is Mr. Hardy and so specific and alert is Knight's script to the life and problems of his character (whose name is Ivan Locke) that, together, they turn the movie into a tour de force of feeling, emotion, anger, surprise and even a little humor. How? Knight lets his audience slowly learn where Locke is going and why, while simultaneously allowing us understand what this means to the life this man had led up until now. Knight and Hardy manage all this via phone conversations -- which cannot be overly expository or we'd simply not buy them -- that fill in everything from situation to character.

Locke talks to his wife, his son, another woman who is important to him, his boss, an underling, and a couple of other people, all of whom come across marvelously, thanks to voice casting and talent. (Among the voices are those of Olivia Colman, Ruth Wilson and Tom Holland.)

There is a job at stake and a family life that may be shattered, and Mr. Hardy's fine performance captures all of it and more -- lots of tiny moments that add up to "character" -- his, and the folk to whom he is speaking. The plot -- and yes, there is one -- is derived from all these conversations, which build into something quite special.

Aurally, the movie is magnificent. I don't see how you could ask for much more, sound-wise. (If broadcast during the heyday of radio, Locke would have been an award-winning drama). Visually, there are times when I think more could have been done -- the camera remains on or near our man, occasionally glancing out the windshield or at the car phone by which these many calls are being made -- but thanks to Hardy's face and talent, Locke at least comes close enough for jazz.

Marriage, fidelity, parenting, employment: the themes here are big ones, and they are given their due. So wrapped up do we become in Ivan's situation that by the finale, when we hear a certain sound -- one, by the way, that we've heard countless times before -- such a flood of emotion/satisfaction/healing is released that we're likely to be caught by surprise at how very moved we suddenly are.

Locke, from A24 and running just 85 minutes, opens this Friday, April 25, in New York City at the AMC Lincoln Square 13 and the Angelika Film Center, and then on Friday, May 2, it will open in Berkeley, Los Angeles, Phoenix and San Raphael.  To see all currently scheduled playdates, cities and theaters, click here and then click on THEATERS. (The movie's site could use some updating, however, as the Los Angeles entry seems to have the wrong theater and the wrong date....)

Best TV show ever? Adam Price's Danish series BORGEN has a good shot at that title

Not only does TrustMovies not cover television -- let alone television in Denmark -- he doesn't even watch much television, cable or otherwise. So how can he be touting a TV series that began back in 2010, in Denmark yet, and has grown more popular ever since, prompting the celebrity/writer Stephen King to hail it his favorite TV Series of 2012 and BAFTA to honor it as Best Interna-tional TV Series of the Year. How? He watched four hours of the first season and was blown away by the subject matter, plot, writing, direction and performances. He will definitely finish that first season (there are six more episodes), but as it arrived last week on DVD in a classy boxed set, he figures he should alert you about it now. (Two weeks later, he has finished that entire first season, and everything he says below still goes -- except that the series, to its credit, turns darker by the finale than it appeared at the outset.)

BORGEN's the name, and politics is the game. The series' title, I am told, is the nickname of Christiansborg, the home of the Danish parliament and the prime minister's office, and from the first we are  tossed into the world of Danish politics. Surprise: It does not seem that different from American politics -- only smaller, more humane and with definitely more left-wing clout. The brain-child of a fellow named Adam Price, shown at right, who has done a number of series for Danish TV, this program has built up more international oomph than anything else he has done.

Even the best cable/streaming stuff I have seen (which would lately include Netflix's House of Cards, which I found very fine) can't hold a candle to Borgen in terms of clever plotting, intense drama, and writing that is on-the-nose in terms of smart dialog yet able simultaneously to sweep the plot along like wildfire. The performances are also aces, especially that of Sidse Babett Knudsen (below), who plays what appears to be the leading role (so far, at least).

What makes the show particularly wonderful for an intelligent American audience is that it introduces us to Danish government, politics and media in a way that we're able to follow. Yes, you may have to occasionally backtrack a bit to make sure you understood it all, but that's a small price to pay for such grand entertainment. And Borgen is, above all, spectacularly entertaining.

It combines several plots so far (I'm sure there are more to come): the rise of a smart and decent woman politician (Ms Knudsen again, above) trying hard to balance work with her husband and kids; an ambitious, young, very pretty TV reporter (below) and her love affairs, past and present, and a hot, maybe deadly story that falls into her lap; and politicians from various parties (Denmark, as does most of Europe and Scandinavia has more than two major parties fighting for the spoils), vying for their piece of the Danish pastry.

We also learn about Greenland, over whom (I did not know this going into the show) Denmark has some kind of sovereignty. If this is beginning to sound like too much work, trust me, it is not. You will be swept up so fast by this series, you'll won't want to stop watching for breakfast, lunch, dinner, or even sleep. You'll also meet a savvy older journalist, below, who provides a lot of fun and smarts, and a bevy of PR people, secretaries, children and more.

The way in which Mr. Price has woven all this together is exemplary and seamless. Even in these first four episodes, we can see how changeable the characters surely are -- most of all perhaps the smart "spin doctor" (below) who has come full circle by the time we reach episode four. Borgen certainly demands concentration, so thank god for that "back" button on the remote.

I am forcing myself to hit the sack tonight, but I would not be at all surprised were I to rise sometime around 3 or 4am and pop a disc back in the player to watch another episode. Borgen's first season, from MHz Networks, in Danish with English subtitles, is available now in a 4-disc box set bearing a $50 suggested retail price. (Amazon has it for 5 bucks less, and Barnes & Noble for just $44.) You might also find it at some point broadcast on MHz Networks, if you live in an area the channel serves. (We don't get MHz here in NYC and environs.) Good luck, as this is a series to savor!