Random DVD round-up 1 - LEAVING

Kristin Scott Thomas has a cool hard beauty that has seen her cast in many a film as, well, a cool hard beauty - emotionally repressed and stolidly dutiful. How wonderful then to see her madly, wide-smilingly in love - almost fey.

In Catherine Corsini's LEAVING, Scott Thomas plays Suzanne, a middle-aged middle-class woman married to a financially successful medic and living in a beautiful house. She is rather taken for granted by her husband (Yvan Attal) and kids, and is trying to reclaim her career as a physiotherapist. She is, in many ways, wandering through life on auto-pilot with occasional outbursts where the rage erupts - as in the powerful opening scene. Suzanne's life changes when she meets and pursues a Spanish builder called Ivan (Sergi López). Their attraction is physical - for sure - but not as singularly as her husband tries to portray it. She isn't just a middle-aged woman who has discovered sex but rather, as in Lady Chatterly's Lover - a kind of freedom and self-knowledge. The second half of the film sees the erotic character study move into a sort of procedural thriller as the two lovers are forced to live cut off from the husband's money and Suzanne's children. The surprise is that it isn't Ivan who drives the narrative - neither as seducer nor as breadwinner. Pretty soon Suzanne's girlie happiness turns into a more brutal, steely survival instinct.

By putting Suzanne firmly at the centre of the film, writers Catherine Corsini and Gaëlle Macé have given Kristin Scott Thomnas a role of the kind that is rarely seen in cinema. A middle-aged woman is allowed to be multi-faceted and the driving force of the action and emotional content of the film. Scott Thomas is completely up to the task and this is further evidence of an actress at the top of her game. I also appreciate that Corsini doesn't feel the need to spin this movie out beyond a 80 minute run-time. Too many films nowadays are unnecessarily baggy. But, there is a big problem with this film - and that's the final act. The closing action is too predictable, too crude relative to what has come before, and the final scenes over the end credits, while presumably trying to be ambiguous seem rather off-tone.

LEAVING played London and Toronto 2009 and was released last year in Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Spain and Brazil. It was released earlier this year in Germany, Italy, Portugal, the UK, Argentina, Denmark, Sweden and the US.

RAPT - This is not my beautiful house

Stanislas Graff is the President of a French industrial conglomerate. He has a beautiful wife, a beautiful house and a beautiful car. He hunts with the cream of French society and is invited on trade missions with the President of the Republic. And then, one day, Stanislas Graff is kidnapped, and the facade cracks when his family tries to raise the €50m ransom. They discover the apartment he has kept for fifteen years, the string of affairs, and - most damning - the heavy gambling debts. The company, once keen to stake their man, now backs away. In the midst of a global recession, where the unions chafe at the bosses' bonuses, they cannot be seen to bail out at playboy President whose gambling debts have presumably resulted in the kidnapping.

Now, you can see what's wrong with RAPT. It's a thriller, and yet in describing the main outline of the plot I haven't given away anything that the movie itself doesn't give away inside the first fifteen minutes of its two hour run-time. There is, simply put, no dramatic tension in the movie. Even a scene in which Stanislas has his finger cut off isn't as gruesome or shocking as it should be. I found my attention wandering. Admiring Mrs Graff's elegant clothes, and the beautiful lampshades in the apartment, and the modernist kettle in the mistress' apartment. That can't be good - can it? I mean, not when our protagonist is being kept, blind-folded and manacled in a grotto, with his finger cut off. On two occasions, I thought I could scent a plot twist - or at least a change of direction into something that could've been more interesting. Maybe the protagonist had been stitched up? Maybe dark forces were painting him to be a playboy gambler in order to seal his fate? Or maybe he was paying off the kidnappers himself to pay off the gambling debts?

Maybe not.

I'm not sure why this film has garnered so much critical acclaim. To be sure, it is beautifully produced and photographed. I certainly fell in love with the apartment. And the acting is, given the constraints of the script, very good. Yvan Attal (THE SNAKE, LEAVING) plays Stanislas Graff with a cold intensity; Anne Consigny (THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY) is noble and fragile as his wife; and Andre Marcon (THE FATHER OF MY CHILDREN) is particularly authentic as the ruthlessly efficient COO.

But, ultimately, one has to ask, what is this film for? Does it work as a thriller? No. But, I am told, it's not a thriller. It's merely using the structure of a thriller to explore the power structures in French society and to show psychologically what happens to a man in this situation. But if that's the case why don't they spend more time exploring the relationship between Stanislas and his Board? And why don't we get more of Stanislas' reactions through the kidnapping? Most puzzling of all, and here I will try to be oblique, is the final scene. The scene isn't actually puzzling. In fact, I'd seen it coming since it was obviously set up half an hour before hand. And I was pissed off it was left to the end when the script couldn't deal with it. But you have a film reviewer I really respect - Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian - calling it a master-stroke. Strange.

RAPT was released in France and Belgium last winter and is currently on release in the UK. It was nominated for four Cesar Awards (the French Oscars) but was beaten by UN PROPHET in each category.

Additional tags: Lucas Belvaux, Andre Marcon, Francoise Fabian, Alex Descas, Maxime Lefrancois, Pierre Millon, Danielle Anezin, Frederique Belvaux

THE SERPENT/LE SERPENT - mediocre French thriller

Yvan Attal (RUSH HOUR 3) plays a fashion photographer called Vincent. He's in the midst of a messy custody battle with his super-rich wife Hélène. A lingerie model accuses him of rape and then dies in his studio. At the same time, an old school-friend, Plender (Clovis Cornillac) turns up and helps Vincent hide the body. It soon transpires that Plender is a mentally unstable, professional black-mailer who holds Vincent responsible for the death of his mother. So begins his perseuction of Vincent.

Why do I call this movie mediocre? Well, it's not a disaster. It looks suitably grim, moves at a swift pace and is sufficiently interesting that you want to see how it all turns out. My problem with it is that it does nothing new with the genre. Moreover it lacks the threatening paranoia and isolation of, say, TELL NO-ONE. (Not that I especially liked that movie either.) Perhaps this is because Vincent is never really alone in his persecution. His lawyer and his wife always believe him and help him prove his innocence. Because of this, I never truly believed he was in danger.

LE SERPENT/THE SERPENT was released in France, Belgium, Greece, Sweden and Finland earlier this year. It is currently on release in the UK.

RUSH HOUR 3 - 100% pop-tastic

Brett Ratner is a vulgarian hack director and should be kept in a one-mile exclusion zone from all movie projects that require intelligence and subtlety. But give the man his due: he can direct a stupid, superficial action movie like no other. RUSH HOUR 3 is no exception. Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan reprise their roles as two cops in a culture clash, united in their hatred of triads and their love of....well...each other. You know the score: Tucker is going to dance like Michael Jackson and lech after hot chicks; Jackie Chan is going to do cool martial arts stunts; and we're all gonna go home happy. In this installment we have the added bonus of some rather perceptive gags about the US-Old World culture clash and a funny montage spoofing the buddy cop genre.

Of course, if you want to be all picky, you can find stuff to hate on. Jackie Chan's martial arts stunts may be a bit less extreme in his frail dotage. The whole "Jackie has an evil brother" story is under-written. And what the fuck is Roman Polanski doing in this sub Steve Martin role? But this is all to miss the point. RUSH HOUR 3 does one thing very well. It makes us laugh. And that helps us forget that global debt markets are going down the toilet. So two enthusiastic thumbs-up from me!

RUSH HOUR 3 is on release in Israel, Singapore, Iceland, Sweden, the UK and US. It opens in Egypt, Germany, Hong Kong, Norway, Indonesia, Argentina, South Korea and Japan later in August. It opens in Greece, Brazil, Lithuania, Denmark, Finland, Hungary, Slovakia, Estonia, Australia, Russia and Spain in September and in the Netherlands, Venezuela, France and Belgium in October 2007.