April
22
Watching The Lives of Others
I like LAT film writer Carina Chocano's weekly columns better than her film reviews. (She's been taken off film critic duty, but having a score of fill-ins isn't better than having several reliable staff voices. It's a cost-saving measure that doesn't deliver value to readers. Popular film critics like Ken Turan build real followings, especially on the web.) This column rounds up a film trend: people watching other people:
But the spying that's bothering us in recent films seems to have more to do with the sort of ad hoc, vigilante monitoring we subject one another to than any kind of organized, institutional effort. What concerns them is not Big Brother but the ways in which we've internalized voyeurism, prurience, violence, schadenfreude and self-policing.The fear these new films are expressing is a fear of the spy we know, the person in the next room, at the desk beside us, in the same bed. The fear of the spies we are becoming.
In Andrea Arnold's Cannes Jury Prize-winning film, "Red Road," for instance, Scottish actress Kate Dickie plays a Glasgow City Eye operator, whose job consists of monitoring the comings and goings of the people in a low-income neighborhood. One day, she spots a man to whom she has a mysterious link on one of her screens, and she begins to insinuate herself into his life without telling him how they are connected. The film opened April 13 in Los Angeles, the same week it was reported that surveillance cameras in 20 areas of Britain were being outfitted with loudspeakers to enable their real-life operators to publicly shame whatever thug or vandal they might happen to catch on camera.
A week after "Red Road" came "Disturbia," a gadget-obsessed Hitchcock knockoff that our reviewer called " 'Rear Window' as retrofitted by Circuit City," and now there's "Vacancy," in which Luke Wilson and Kate Beckinsale check into a motel whose rooms are outfitted with hidden cameras, the better to produce home snuff with.
Meanwhile, "Alone With Her," in which a pasty Colin Hanks plays a young stalker who bugs the apartment of his pretty neighbor to insinuate himself into her life, opened last month. And all of them follow on the heels of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's acclaimed "The Lives of Others," which topped most critics' lists last year, and Michael Haneke's equally acclaimed "Caché," which did the same the year before that.
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