SKIRT DAY (La Journee de la Jupe, 2009)

Isabelle Adjani has won a pile of awards for her work in Jean-Paul Lilienfeld's rabble-rousing schoolroom drama, her first film after a five-year absence from the screen. Her Cesar award gave her the record for the most such wins by a French actress. Thinking the film over, I have to attribute the praise to some sense that Adjani was making a comeback, or to some imperative to affirm the militantly secularist message of Lilienfeld's really rather familiar story.

The setting is the College Maxim Gorky, but we've seen the place before in American films from The Blackboard Jungle forward; Class of 1984 would make for a better analogy. Adjani is Sonia Bergerac, a theater teacher near the end of her tether. Her students are the dregs of the banlieue, mostly Muslims if in name only or as a matter of ethnic pride. The boys are thugs, except for Mme. Bergerac's pet, Mehmet; the girls are barely more civilized. They're as irreverent or apathetic as you'd expect, heckling anyone who takes the stage to perform the scenes they were supposed to have memorized from Moliere's Bourgeois Gentleman. "Skirt Day" means that, against the advice of her peers, Sonia is wearing a skirt (not to mention high-heeled boots) to class, which is asking for trouble from her Muslim charges. She clearly feels threatened by them but is determined not to appear intimidated, but her commands carry little authority, just as her subject carries little apparent relevance for the sweathogs' miserable lives.

Hearing the sounds of a scuffle in the back of the classroom, Sonia interrupts a fight over a duffel bag. In the tug of war a gun pops out of the bag. As luck has it, Sonia grabs the weapon before either of the boys, who try to talk her into giving it back. In her confusion she ends up winging the worst of the kids, Mouss, in the leg. A bunch of kids flee, but she locks a handful of stragglers in the room with her, now determined to teach them all a lesson in more than one sense.

Reached via cellphone by the police, Sonia convinces them that she's a hostage of Mouss. Meanwhile, she drills her charges into memorizing Moliere's real name. When Mouss proves recalcitrant despite his wound, Sonia head butts him, then goes into a victory dance chanting the name of Zinedine Zidan, the soccer star who earned infamy by head-butting an opponent in the 2006 World Cup final. She mocks the kids' trash culture by making them vote, reality TV style, to determine who'll be the first to, um, leave the room. She shows herself a militant advocate of French laicite, forcing one Muslim kid to take off his skullcap and reminding another that the laws against ethnic slurs cover anti-Semitism as well. On the other side, her unsympathetic fellow teachers (she seem to have only one friend on the faculty) are calling her a crazy racist after a spy camera finally reveals that she's the one with the gun and the power.

On Skirt Day we dance! Isabelle Adjani celebrates a small victory.

As Sonia bargains with a RAID negotiator -- one of her demands is a national Skirt Day in public schools -- power changes hands a few times inside the classroom. Mouss plays possum at one point so he can attack her, but the gun ends up in the hands of Nawel, an Algerian girl with an agenda of her own: to lambaste the stupid boys who think they know Islam and to expose some of them as participants in the gang rape of another student. Ultimately, Nawel gives the gun back to Nadia after her moment in the spotlight, but the twists keep on coming as we wonder whether everyone will walk out of the room alive....

Skirt Day is all about female empowerment; a gun for every girl!

La Journee de la Jupe isn't even 90 minutes long, but it grows tiresome well before the end. It becomes apparent in time that Sonia Bergerac is less a character than a platform for Lilienfeld's editorializing and Adjani's tirades. The actress's role is less a performance than a succession of turns and stunts. We learn that she has a troubled marriage, but it hardly seems relevant to her meltdown in the classroom. Lilienfeld's cavalier attitude toward character and motivation is best demonstrated by the big ironic revelation, late in the film, that Sonia is herself a Muslim, or at least of Muslim parentage (Adjani herself is half-Algerian). There's no point to this reveal except to make a debating point of some kind. Apparently Sonia practised what she now preaches, assimilating into and embracing French culture. Does that make her a heroine, or even a martyr? It's hard to answer since Lilienfeld leaves us wondering whether she was just plain crazy. Is there a point to that? Sonia's character is left so sketchy that it's hard to answer, and that's one reason why it's hard to like this film. Another reason is the pointless character development of the negotiator (Denis Podalydes) who's torn between his police work and maintaining his relationships at home, yet must strive to resolve the matter peacefully before a more militant officer takes over. Lilienfiled should note that having characters refer to the movie The Negotiator does not make his situations any less cliched. Little seems original or even real here. The kids are barely one-dimensional. The film doesn't have scenes; it has statements, though Adjani is encouraged to make a scene at every opportunity.

I accuse myself sometimes of having different standards for foreign and domestic films. I know that I tend to give the foreign stuff extra credit for exoticism, virtual-tourism or time-machine appeal, and so on. These things often enhance a foreign film's entertainment value aside from narrative merit. I bring this up now to warn you that if I say that a foreign film like Skirt Day is bad, it may well be really bad for other viewers.

GOOD MORNING, NIGHT (Buongiorno, Notte, 2003)

Chiara and Ernesto, newlyweds, have just moved into a new apartment, and friends are helping them put the finishing touches on a new bookcase. It's a new year, 1978 -- an annus horribilis for Italy, introduced with a countdown on a tacky TV variety show. And one morning, alone at home, Chiara hears the roar of a helicopter overhead. She watches with unusual eagerness, and starts impatiently flipping the channels with her remote control until she finds a news bulletin: Aldo Moro, the former president of Italy and present head of the Christian Democratic party, has been kidnapped in an attack that has left several bodyguards dead.

Chiara practically jumps for joy, and then there's a knock on the door. It's the next-door neighbor; she needs to leave her baby with Chiara while she goes to the store. It's impossible to say no, but Chiara clearly knows little about tending a baby. She props it up on some pillows on the couch as she avidly watches the live reports.

Now there's another knock. She leaves the baby on the couch and lets in her friends, who bring in a large crate. The bookcase they were working on is a passageway into a hidden room, into which they drag the crate, one man asking, "Which end is his head?" Everyone pauses when the neighbor knocks to reclaim her baby, but then it's back to work. The man in the crate may have some broken ribs; Chiara is sent to get some medical supplies. These are the Red Brigades, and Aldo Moro is their prisoner.

This chilling sequence sets the tone for Marco Bellocchio's increasingly hallucinatory meditation on one of the darkest chapters in modern Italian history. It's one of many Italian films from this decade that look back on the 1970s, the time we movie fans identify with giallo thrillers and tough-cop action films. This is a look at the reality of violence and tension in which those genres flourished, but at the same time Bellocchio contemplates the unreality of the intersection of history and mundane life. Chiara is the focal figure, since she must continue to hold down a job in a library and must maintain a pretense of normality among outsiders. But the outside is politicized, too. Her friend from the library, Enzo, is a kind of radical (and the author of a screenplay about terrorists taking hostages called Good Morning, Night), and a bus Chiara rides fills up with red-flag waving strikers to the disgust of elderly women. Chiara and Enzo attend a family reunion of some sort (are they related?) and listen to old guys singing Communist partisan songs from World War II--and as you see Chiara listening you can see her growing ever more alienated from people who simply talk or sing about revolution.

At the same time, she seems to question the reality of her own incredible situation as the jailer of Moro, and the audience has even more reason to question the reality of her comrades' claim to represent the proletariat as they put Moro on trial for his life. Bellocchio does a terrific job of disorientation through the simple juxtaposition of the ordinary and the extraordinary.

The Brigadistas watch TV and do household chores and wonder why their great gesture has not inspired the masses to rise against the state. "Why is no one rebelling?" one complains as they watch politicians (including our old friend Giulio Andreotti) bloviate against terrorism. Later, all four of the gang start chanting "The working class must command" as if doing that will dispel the facts they see on TV. At that moment the Brigadistas seem almost inhuman, but Bellocchio isn't out to demonize them. Chiara is meant to be the human face of terrorism, the enemy embedded among us, the person who still has a job to worry about and isn't a full-time revolutionary, but is capable of terrible deeds. Her shuttling back and forth from work or outings with Enzo to her home -- Moro's prison -- makes her gradually question everything about her experience. As politicians and the Pope refuse to bargain for Moro's release, his captors tell him that his old friends no longer recognize him. He replies that he no longer recognizes himself. The same thing seems to be happening to Chiara. Her disorientation finds expression in dreams or delusions in which Moro moves freely about the apartment, or she tries to help him escape (only to find a horde of police outside her door), or Moro is finally free to feel the fresh air and morning rain after she poisons her comrades.

The fantastical details of Chiara's reverie of rescue include her Red Brigade comrades saying grace before slurping down their poisoned soup (above) and the poignant image of Aldo Moro at liberty (below)

It also finds expression in her alarm as Enzo (supposedly ignorant of her activities) imagines her as a character in his screenplay about terrorists and has her helping the victim in an irrational act of goodness. It finds objective expression in a brilliantly filmed moment of tension when Chiara, climbing the stairs in her library building, hears a host of police hurrying up behind her and expects her own arrest at any moment, only to see them take Enzo away instead.

With little gimmickry, Bellocchio has built a great film around a great performance by Maya Sansa. The only part of it that really rings false for me is the director's use of black-and-white newsreel or old movie footage in what seems like an attempt to illustrate the Brigadistas' revolutionary consciousness. I doubt whether they imagined the Revolution in such antique style, and the inclusion of some Stalinist frolics in the footage undercuts Bellocchio's attempt to foreground the kidnappers' humanity by making them look like totalitarian idiots. More successful is one montage of execution scenes played over Pink Floyd music from Dark Side of the Moon; the combination of image and sound clicks then, and it's all meant to illustrate Chiara's response to a book of condemned men's letters she's been reading, in anticipation of reading the condemned Moro's missives. The music overall, composed or compiled by Riccardo Giagni, evokes the era effectively while inserting original notes of dread or tension.

When I was still just a kid I had a subscription to Time magazine and read about the Moro crisis as it developed in 1978. I knew little about Italian movies then, -- I'd heard of Fellini but that was about it, -- but over time my interests in the country's cinema and its turbulent modern history have fed one another. By a certain point I was probably wondering more about what kind of culture produces such peculiar movies. By now I suppose that contemporary history is yet another Italian genre among the many the country's created. If so, then Good Morning, Night, is one of that genre's definitive films.

It's not pretty, but here's a wordless teaser for the movie that's really just an early scene on an elevator which does strike a representative note of dread.

JAGODA IN THE SUPERMARKET (2003)

Dusan Milic's film, for which his more famous compatriot Emir Kusturica gets much of the credit internationally as the producer, is a romantic comedy about an aggressive or perhaps pre-emptive case of Stockholm Syndrome. It's also a send-up of that durable modern genre, the sympathetic hostage taker film. There's a lot of specific Serbian context to the film, but not so much that it gets inaccessible for the rest of us, and a lot of the material will seem familiar to anyone familiar with films from Dog Day Afternoon to Cadillac Man to the more recent JCVD.

Jagoda is a cashier at the newly-opened Yugo-American Supermarket, whose hard-charging entrepreneurial owner promises her people that they'll slog hard on the job like real Americans. The gimmick is that the store sells American products and is designed along American lines, though they don't seem to have the latest bar-code technology. American consumer goods (and those of other lands) are confusing to older folk. One old-timer can't figure out how to tell the freshness of some Euro-equivalent of Cadbury eggs, for instance. Jagoda and a fellow-cashier both have eyes on the handsome Nebojsa, and when the other woman gets the advantage, Jagoda takes her frustration out on the last customer of the night, an old lady who wants to buy strawberries to bake a cake for her grandson. Too late, Jagoda says, the store is closed. When the granny persists, she snatches the strawberries out of her hand. The old woman shuffles out the door bemoaning what's become of the country.

Business is booming the next morning, not only for the store but for a pair of shoplifters, until a man forces his way through defective automated doors and starts firing a machine gun. This is one pissed-off dude, but what about? It seems some store clerk was mean to his grandma last night, and he's here to protest the injustice. The helpful owner asks him to point the offender out so she can be fired on the spot, but the gunman didn't get a description from granny. Jagoda isn't about to give herself away, but from that point she decides to be the most ingratiating hostage possible, wrapping up her co-workers with plastic wrap and allowing herself to be displayed at gunpoint as the police gather at the scene.

Along the way she'll help him thwart several attempts to disarm him or end the crisis, while outside a modern "democratic" cop, who is in fact the man Jagoda was pining over last night, bickers with a veteran blood-and-guts style SWAT commander over the proper tactics for dealing with the madman. With the police come crowds, and true to cinematic form they're 100% on the hostage-taker's side, heckling the cops at every opportunity while a brass band performs a kick-ass cover of The Clash's "Lost in the Supermarket" that also serves as the film's theme song. Some of this may be popular anti-Americanism aimed at the Yugo-American store, but I think Milic is simply acknowledging the generic fact that this is how crowds behave in films like this.

With increasing improbability Jagoda and her captor, whose name is Marko, thwart several attempts to storm the store, sending some subdued SWAT troops rolling down a ramp in grocery carts in one comical highlight. Even more improbably, Jagoda finds herself falling for the really rather hapless Marko, who builds himself up as a badass warrior from the civil war years but turns out to have been a company cook. There's a cute moment when he reveals his culinary skill inside the store that's a reverse of the Last Kiss Goodnight scenario (in which prowess with knives hints at more deadly talents); when he shows himself to be an excellent food chopper, that's because that's exactly what he is.

A film like this shouldn't be too long, and Milic's may be by just a bit, but overall he does a good job adding fresh complications to the situation, from the arrival of a veteran sniper and the reappearance of the shoplifters to the jaw-dropping threat to deploy "PSYCHO bombs" against our heroes. It ends up being rather a feel-good film, ending on a note of reconciliation between the rival lawmen and their implicit political positions as well as a rash act of commitment on Jagoda's part when the siege finally ends. Jagoda (her name means "strawberry," by the way) is the sort of satire that takes no sides but takes relatively gentle pot shots at everything from American culture to Serbia's recent authoritarian past. It's a genuine popular film from Serbia rather than something designed for the global art-house audience, and it gets a modest recommendation here for tourists in the wild world of cinema.

Producer Kusturica, playing an on-screen general, gives himself one of the movie's best lines.

No trailer for Jagoda is available either online or on the Cinequest DVD, which is also handicapped by a lack of chaptering. The entire film can apparently be seen on Veoh, but I don't know if it has English subtitles or not. My copy came from the Albany Public Library, and your local facility may have one as well.