edwardlamberti

Flanders, 1940: during a bombing raid, the gates to an asylum are left open, allowing patients to drift out onto the street and blend in with the human train of refugees. Folle embellie, directed by Dominique Cabrera and written by Cabrera and Antoine Montperrin, follows several of these figures from the hospital, as they learn to cope with the outside world, and not just any world: the world during wartime. It's a movie subject you don't see every day.

Cabrera has said in interviews that she wanted to tell a story looking at how this heightened situation could bring about changes in the characters, and therefore become a vehicle for a story of social change in general. It's quite hard initially to grasp how involved we are meant to be in this story and these characters, especially as events seem to proceed in a fairly disorientating fashion. At first, Alida (Miou-Miou) and her son Julien (Morgan Marinne), separated from the others, seek refuge on a barge; later, further along the canal, they rejoin with Julien's father Fernand (Jean-Pierre Leaud) and the rest of the group. From there, it becomes a kind of road movie, except that the road is a rural backstreet and the characters aren't really heading anywhere definite.

It's intriguing to spend time with a movie whose cast of characters is not conventionally communicative: unlike, say, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest (an obvious comparison), there is no Jack Nicholson character with whom the audience can readily engage, and if we could say that the nemesis role, the Nurse Ratched part, is filled by the Nazis, well, they aren't in the film that much either - although the movie does a very good job of portraying the lulled, casual threat that they pose in this landscape of stragglers and wanderers.

As Fernand, the tightly-wound and dogmatic attention-grabber, Jean-Pierre Leaud is riveting, even if it's unclear how controlled or deliberate his performance is. It's hard to watch Fernand without thinking of Leaud's own up-and-down screen persona of the past couple of decades. Perhaps Cabrera is subtly utilising our knowledge of the actor to bring edginess to the portrayal of Fernand. It would be very nice, though, to see Leaud play a role which is not, in some way, tortured, and to play it with the supreme authority that he still seems to possess. But has he ever given such a performance? He remains a frustrating puzzle of the cinema; so often has he come so close to being so good.

Morgan Marinne was, of course, superb as Francis, the teenager just out of juvenile custody in Le Fils - and yet that film appearance was also a triumph of casting; it was a question as to whether, or how well, he could do another role. In Folle embellie he may not seem strictly in-period, but with his watchfulness and concentration he is so absorbing, he manages to transcend his natural register. He also shows that he has a very sure grip on his craft: if Le Fils was a major test for actors, with its lengthy takes and movements choreographed precisely with the camera, Julien in Folle embellie is a demanding part because it's not easy to act opposite people who are aiming to be unpredictable, and Marinne proves himself equal to this challenge. His lucidity allows Julien to shine: his character arc gives a satisfying structure to the understandably meandering nature of so much of the material.

Dominique Cabrera uses the camera as an omniscient presence, more than just an observer, capable of flights of fancy (such as some Crouching Tiger-like trips through the trees) to convey the reach of her characters. She spreads an intoxicating sheen across the material, making it seem perhaps more logical than it actually is, and papering over any cracks in character development or interaction. The tone is a nice mixture of looseness and purpose, and even if it is not a totally satisfying story, it provides many striking images and a general sense that the warm moments in wartime life are hard-earned and fleeting.

Umberto Eco's novel has something of a reputation as one of the great unread bestsellers. To have it on the shelf in the early eighties was a fashion statement as much as it was a literary necessity. And yet when the film was released, it was attacked for being an ineffective adaptation. Turning the 600-page novel, a detective mystery enriched by descriptions of medieval life and semiotic ruminations characteristic of Eco's academic writings, into a mainstream two-hour movie was, of course, ambitious. Four credited screenwriters and an international co-production gave off a sense of struggle and indecision. The movie was, and remains, easy to deride.

It's true that the film, directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud, has to skip, or skirt, much of Eco's detail - the famous pages-long description of the doorway, for example, is acknowledged by a few camera shots - but it takes the novel's literary strengths and offers a cinematic equivalent: a vivid depiction of monastic life which thrusts the viewer into the period of the story. In this respect, the production is exemplary: cinematographer Tonino Delli Colli, art director Dante Ferretti and composer James Horner were all operating at the top of their game.

And, as Renton in Trainspotting (1996) knows, Sean Connery proved a perfect choice as William of Baskerville, the 14th-century Sherlock Holmes figure investigating the deaths in an Italian monastery. It's one of Connery's best performances, a happy marriage of character acting and star casting: he suits the physical description of William and he properly conveys the character's wisdom, caution and sense of regret. Christian Slater's Adso, the narrator of the novel, is a surrogate for the viewer, expressing bafflement at the mystery story and awe at William's deductive powers; while F. Murray Abraham works wonders with the underwritten part of the inquisitor Bernardo Gui.

The Name of the Rose is one of the most underrated movies of the eighties. That it wasn't brilliant should not detract from the fact that it's as good as it is.

It's easy to see why such high hopes were pinned on The Right Stuff - a passionate writer-director in Philip Kaufman, a talented cast, and famous source material courtesy of Tom Wolfe - and it's easy to see why it was a costly flop. Although the space race, told from the American side, may seem a stirring subject, a box-office winner, The Right Stuff fails to negotiate its way through an episodic plot and a dissipated focus. Spanning nearly twenty years from when Chuck Yeager (Sam Shepard) broke the sound barrier to the astronauts' first trips into orbit, the film lacks an audience-friendly shape, and there is no natural climax. Indeed, the whole film feels like a first act.

The true first act - or is it the prologue? - depicts Yeager's granite-like determination to become the first man to break the sound barrier. Here, and in the flying sequences that follow, the film is at its best and most confident. Bill Conti's heroic score accompanies the beautifully-edited sequences of airborne endeavour. After this, Yeager takes a back seat, and the rest of the film is given over to the seven men with 'the right stuff' - among them Scott Glenn, Ed Harris, Dennis Quaid and Fred Ward - and the race to get them into space before the Russians manage it with one of theirs.

The Right Stuff is a strange beast, a really curious experience. It's an absolute pleasure to look at, very expertly produced by Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff, who also gave us Rocky (1976) and Raging Bull (1980), and it's well played by its bright cast, many of whom were in the relative infancy of their careers. The technical achievements of this film won four Oscars, including Best Editing and Best Sound.

Kaufman, though, directs in an uncertain tone. Is his point to critique the American space program, and to make a mockery of the contradictions between political machinations and personal pressure? Or is he, rather, celebrating the courage and vision of these far-from-everyday heroes? It's strange to find, for example, Sam Shepard (astonishingly handsome, no matter that he hardly ages a day from beginning to end) in the same film as Jeff Goldblum's slapstick official, the latter the subject of a running joke as he repeatedly hurries along the corridor and bursts into the meeting to break news that the attendees already know. On top of that, the wives undoubtedly suffer, and yet it seems as if the film is siding more with the men, joking around in the bar, oblivious to their ladies' distress.

The result of all this is that it never digs far enough below the surface to uncover any real truths. And for a three-hour film which takes in such a great many events, that's ultimately insubstantial, impressive and entertaining though it may be.