Double Feature: Beginners / Perfect Sense

Starting over is a part of life most of us dread and avoid whenever. But Beginners transforms the daunting task into a beautifully bittersweet film.

Beginners opens with a stream of consciousness slide show, narrated by Oliver’s (Ewan) hushed voice, “this is 2003, this is the sun … this is what people look like …”. The dreamlike pace and perspective (from soft lighting to colors) make the film seem subconscious == like it’s unfolding in Oliver’s mind. It’s a universe in which even dogs talk, in subtitles.

Melancholy graphic artist Oliver spends his days doodling “the history of sadness” cartoons, when he’s not talking to his dead father Hal’s (Christopher Plummer) Jack Russell, or drifting off into memories of him. Like the day he came out in a purple shirt (or at least that’s how Oliver admits imagining it), at the age of 75 after a lifetime of marriage to his slightly wacky wife. A rebirth he celebrated by visiting gay dance clubs, hosting political parties, rewriting Jesus’s death and acquiring a Staples addiction. Oliver spends seconds and hours haunted by the past until at a party he meets sexy but silent Anna (Melanie Laurent), a laryngitis-muted actress with Charlie Chaplin charm and well … the loveliness of Melanie Laurent. Their romance blossoms in an inherently romantic movie with a luminosity cultivated by old-timey love longs, and scenes of the blissful sweethearts skating through the halls of a grand hotel. It’s also a thoughtful, occasionally sluggish treatise on risking love and loss that speaks in existentially eloquent Velveteen Rabbit quotes. Broken into cinematic atoms: it’s a bit Blue Valentine with Annie Hall humor, Lost in Translation’s quiet chemistry (thanks to Ewan and Laurent), and a far happier ending. For those pining for wispy, wistful, witty screen love, Beginners is a good place to begin.

Grade: B+

Despite different directors (Mike Mills and David Mackenzie respectively), Perfect Sense orbits a similarly rarified atmosphere, albeit one stirred by a sudden, and inexplicable apocalypse. Chef Michael (McGregor) and Susan (Eva Green) fall in love at the same time an inexplicable global epidemic triggers overwhelming grief and regret in sufferers followed by a permanent loss of smell. A profoundly solemn female voice narrates that the medical community has named it “Severe Olfactory Syndrome”, i.e. S.O.S. Michael’s restaurant adapts (by spicing up it’s fare), as does the world, though the narrator laments the “greater loss” of the memories no longer triggered –like the cinnamon roll scent that reminds you of grandma (thanks Negative Nelly Narrator). Then the next wave of the mysterious plague hits—terror with ravenous hunger followed by an absence of taste. Ecological reckoning, terrorism, the wrath of God … the world is mystified but indomitably carries on as the strange sickness progresses.

Meanwhile Michael and Susan’s relationship intensifies and deepen as each new loss feeds their craving for connection. Ewan delivers sensitive, soft-spoken male as enchantingly as he does in Beginners (and most of his other films). An intriguing, affecting story, Perfect Sense makes perfect sense–until the end. It clearly has a meaningful message it would like to share about life and humanity, but can’t seem to spit it out. The shutter-slam ending leaves you in the dark, disoriented, with sense of having hit a dead end. Blame the narrator? It’s the build-up of her omniscient, sometimes overly sentimental commentary that leaves you expecting some pithy conclusion that pulls it all together rather than simply put you in the same puzzled shoes as the sense-deprived characters. Without it the movie’s an engrossing sci-fi romance. Even with it, it’s a film that captivates the senses and lingers long after it’s over.

Interview: Ewan McGregor and Mike Mills Talk Beginners

I recently sat down with director Mike Mills (Thumbsucker) and Ewan McGregor (Trainspotting, Ghost Writer) to discuss their new film, Beginners. Also covered? Melanie Laurent, the acting ability of a Jack Russell terrier, and the influence of Mike’s spouse, Miranda July, on his work. Enjoy!

Laremy Legel: We’ll start with an easy one. What did you shoot Beginners on?

Mike Mills: The RED. The last generation of the RED. And we hardly used any lights. No generator, one Kino Flo, and one Four PAR.

LL: So it’s a decent low light camera?

MM: You don’t really need that much light, it’s kind of a myth that you need all these lights.

Ewan McGregor: For filming?

MM: With the RED, the old RED even.

LL: I’ve heard that you wrote Ewan a letter to get him involved? Do you have good handwriting?

MM: Oh, I typed it. But I write a lot of letters, especially to actors. Because you’re asking them to go on this crazy boat ride for you, and start this pretty intimate relationship. To really put their heart and soul in. So you write a letter, it’s only the polite thing to do. And then also you’re setting the tone. It’s “Look, I’m asking you to reveal yourself, but I’ll go first. I’d never ask you to do something I wouldn’t do myself.”

LL: Ewan, did you open the letter and say, “Well what’s going on here?”

EM: No, it’s not that unusual. It’s surprising it doesn’t happen more often, but it’s not a strange thing to get a letter from a director. It’s nice to sit down and read a story when you’ve been introduced to the story by the person that’s offering it to you.

LL: Mike, had you seen Melanie Laurent prior to Inglourious Basterds?

MM: No, because when we were casting this, Inglourious hadn’t quite come out. Someone gave me her name, and I didn’t even know about Inglourious, but I started looking her up and found out, “Oh, she’s going to be in this [Inglourious Basterds] movie.” Then I saw all these interviews with her on YouTube — I do that a lot with actors, that’s a way you can maybe-sorta get to know someone before you meet them. There’s this one interview I based a lot of Anna on, and I have no idea what she’s saying because I don’t speak French, and she’s going off — and I’m thinking she seems really intelligent, strong, and un-precious. And then I showed it to her, and she’s like, “Oh my God, you were looking at that?? I’m hungover, I’m talking to someone from my college, I’m talking shit …” and I was like, “That’s great!”

EM: That’s what we want.

MM: Yeah!

LL: That’s a bingo. Did you have a rehearsal period prior to shooting?

EM: Yeah, we shot to two halves of the story separately, so we shot the father-son story first. We rehearsed with Christopher Plummer and shot that in its entirety for three weeks. We shot it as much as we could in sequence. I’d never done that before; I’ve always thought it was a bit gimmicky, because part of our job as actors is to be able to shoot things out of sequence, but I was surprised at how useful it was. Then we finished that story, stopped shooting for a week, then we rehearsed Melanie and myself.

MM: And Cosmo! [Cosmo is a Jack Russell terrier who appears throughout the film.]

LL: Cosmo is amazing in this film.

EM: He’s an amazing dog. It feels like he’s giving a performance. He is a character, and I can say that honestly because we had another dog, and once or twice we did scenes with this other dog, a lovely little dog, but when you’re acting with him there was this huge void. He didn’t have nearly the character that Cosmo has.

MM: He’s a very gregarious thousand-year-old soul.

LL: How do you define success with Beginners? Is it just getting it made?

MM: Yeah, that’s huge. In this day and age that’s not something you take for granted.