The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 146

ssssasr it XSS seam 1 The Ud tr, Rev Fpbruarv 2001 HHESHBIIH Con brio Leonardo DiCaprio leads the FBI a merry dance in a spirited, if overlong, true tale of a trickster FILM OF THE WEEK IT Philip French jjl It small amount of which he actually spent. In the end, so we're told, he turned gamekeeper and was released from a long jail sentence to share his knowledge with the FBI fraud squad. The movie establishes its style and is located in its period by beginning with animated credit titles in the flat, hard-edged Sixties style of The Pink Panther, showing men in hats pursuing an elusive quarry. This is followed by a segment of the popular Sixties TV quiz show, To Tell the Truth, in which the panellists have to guess who is real and who are the imposters out of three people dressed as airline pilots and claiming to be Frank Abagnale. This is the programme that gave us the catchphrase 'Will the real what-ever-he's-called please stand up'.

Like many Spielberg characters, Frank comes from a broken home. His father (Christopher Walken) is a failed businessman in thrall to middle-class values and the American Dream; his mother (Nathalie Baye), a Frenchwoman he met while serving in the army, wants a life her husband can't provide. From this Frank's identity problems derive, as well as his need for money to pay his way and to impress his father. His first impersonation comes when he poses as his father's chauffeur to impress a bank, the second when he moves to a new school and turns the tables oh a pair of bullies by posing as a supply teacher, a job he holds for a week. More serious impersonations and four years oh, the run begins when he skips his home outside New York rather than commit himself to living with either parent.

We are always on his side rather than that of his uptight would-be nemesis, FBI special agent Carl Hanratty, a clever, kindly, serious, and deadly dull man played with droll exasperation by Tom Hanks. One reason we are sympathetic towards Frank is because he's such an appealing, vulnerable kid. Another is that he only takes money from large corporations and airlines and works hard doing it. No little people are involved and no one is put in danger. As a doctor and a prosecuting attorney, he draws on behaviour and language he has learnt from watching Dr Kildare and Perry Mason, but he keeps clear of doing more than encouraging the interns under him to act with confidence.

In this respect, he's unlike a much more extraordinary real-life con. man, Ferdinand Demara, played by Tony Curtis in The Great Impostor, who passed himself off as a prison warden, a Trappist monk, and a naval surgeon performing tricky operations at sea during the Korean War. Catch Me If You Can is overly complicated in its' flashback construction and too long for a movie that scarcely, digs at all into its protagonist's character. Did he, for instance, suddenly give up his fantasy life and become a responsible citizen as a result of working for the FBI and becoming a family man? There is also the problem that it's difficult to believe that DiCaprio's Frank Abagnale would fool anyone. But still, it's amusing and high spirited, the best line coming from his prospective mother-in-law, a leading Catch Me If You Can (140 mins, 12A) Directed by Steven Spielberg; starring Leonardo Hanks, Christopher Walken, Nathalie Baye THE CON MAN isn't unknown in European literature and popular culture- there's Thomas Mann's Felix Krull, Confidence Man, for instance, and the hero's father in John le Carre's A Perfect Spy.

But from Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man through Huckleberry Finn to The Sting, he's had a peculiar grip on the American imagination. In the US context, he's as much a chameleon as a charlatan, as much a benefactor as a criminal, and is an extr eme case of the fluidity of the national character and the freedom to recreate the self I was once escorted around town by the head of an American university department in which I was teaching, and wherever we went a secondhand car lot, a bank, an insurance office -he'd cast off his academic demeanour and take on the colour of his surroundings, becoming a car salesman, a banker, an insurance broker. Steven Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can is about this phenomenon, and tells in a lighthearted manner the real-life story of Frank Abagnale Jr (Leonardo DiCaprio), who, as a teenager in the Sixties, led the FBI's fraud squad on a merry dance across the continent and to Europe as he adopted a variety of guises airline pilot, doctor, lawyer, schoolteacher, federal agent and forged cheques to amass a $2million fortune, only a New Orleans socialite, when sne aiSACi In the US context, the con man is as much a chameleon as a charlatan, as much a benefactor as a Criminal covers that he's lied about his religffiussi behef his Harvard medical educa' and his law deeree from Berkeless 'You mean vou're not a iCanfio.a Leonardo i Frank Abagnale in Catch Me If You Can. W. back the dock If you could turn you wouldn't make Irreversible, which proves that telling a story backwards doesn't make it interesting OTHER FILMS Philip French Derrida is a rambling, uncritical documentary about Jacques Derrida, the celebrated French philosopher, that attempts through interviews and readings to convey some of his ideas and theories.

He seems more of a poet or gnomic aphorist than a consistent thinker and what one remembers from the movie are his visit to Robben Island during a lecture tour of South Africa, his happy reaction to adoring female students in the Statesman amusing confusion when he's questioned about Tamour' and thinks his interrogator said 'la mort', seeing that he has honey for breakfast, and discovering he's never heard of Seinfeld. There is nothing as amusing here as seeing Einstein discuss relativity with Marilyn Monroe in Nicolas Roeg's Insignificance, and one ends up longing for a Hollywood biopic in which someone says to the young Derrida: 'Come on, Jacques, can't you try to be a little more Ingmar Bergman's Persona is back in circulation in a new print. It's one of the greatest films ever made, though I found it even more puzzling than when first I saw it 35 years ago. Above from left: Vincent Cassei in Irreversible; Susan Sarandon and Goldie Hawn in The Banger Sisters. influence of cocaine and alcohol.

Noe clearly wants to shock and disgust lis. The gay club is called the 'Rectum'; the killing, using a fire extinguisher to crush the victim's head, is presented blow by blow; the anal rape of the heroine is done in a single take lasting nearly 10 minutes. But he also has certain formal and philosophical ambitions of a not especially original kind. Formally it recalls two famous cinematic statements: Godard's dictum that 'a film should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order', and Ginger Rogers' claim that 'I did the same things as Fred, but backwards and in high heels'. The film is told backwards, starting with the final credits, then the aftermath of the crime, the murder at the club, the men searching for the pimp, the rape, the party and so on (or so tious lawyer husband.

Along the way there Suzette picks up a neurotic failed screenwriter (Geoffrey Rush), and she inevitably brings a liberating vitality into Vinnie's conventional life. It's a bundle of cliches with the odd good line here and there. Looking at Hawn embodying the same elfin charm she brought to the Laugh-In show 30-odd years ago is a demonstration of the way kookiness crumbles. Philip Seymour Hoffman, one of the best actors of his generation, is poorly served by Todd Louiso's Love Liza, a movie scripted by his brother Gordy, in which he plays a shambling website designer who goes to pieces after his wife's suicide. He quits his job, rows with his termagant of a mother-in-law (Kathy Bates doing a middle-American Peggy Mount act), becomes an addicted petrol-sniffer, develops an obsession with model aeroplanes, and generally freaks out.

He exhibits the kind of narcissistic eccentricity so often found in American independent cinema and so popular at the Sundance Festival where this movie picked up a major award. More straightforward but just as disappointing is another independent picture, Patricia Cardoso's debut Real Women Have Curves, a blunt, deeply sincere film about Ana (America Ferrera), a bright, rebellious, overweight 18-year-old high school graduate faced with a choice at a major crossroads. Should she stay in the Hispanic barrio of east Los Angeles, working with her possessive mother in her elder sister's dressmaking shop? Or should she accept the full scholarship to study literature at Columbia University in New York? Everything is spelt out and underlined, especially in the scene in the overheated sweat-shop when she persuades her fellow workers to strip to their bra and pants and feel positive about their bodies as they sew and iron. Set besides Ken Loach's Bread and Roses, it's a sad affair. Compared with Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War," however, Love Liza and Real Women Have Curves are avant-garde masterworks.

Pauline Collins as the eponymous London widow leads a revolt among the inmates of an appalling old folk's home into which she's been put by her son (Peter Capaldi) so he can get his hands on the family house. The two-dimensional characters seem to have stepped out of Donald McGill cartoons leaving their jokes behind them, and it's sad to see a fine cast chewing up the carpet in lieu of a script to get their teeth into. Irreversible (99 mins, 18) Directed by Gaspar Noe; starring Vincent. Cassel, Monica Dupontel The Banger Sisters (100 mins, 15) Directed by Bob Dolman; starring Susan Sarandon, Goldie Hawn, Geoffrey Rush Love Liza (90 mins, 15) Directed by Todd Louiso; starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Kathy Bates Real Women Have Curves (90 mins, 12A) Directed by Patricia Cardoso; starring America Ferrera, Lupe Ontiveros, Ingrid Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War (110 mins, 12A) Directed by Ian Sharp; starring Pauline Collins, Peter Capaldi, Frank Middlemass Oerrida (85 mins, nc) Directed by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman; starring Jacques Derrida Persona (85 mins, 15) Directed by Ingmar Bergman; starring Liv UHmann, Bibi Bjornstrand THREE YEARS ago, in his feature debut Seul Contre Tous (oka I Stand Alone), Gaspar Noe rubbed our noses in the gutters of Paris with the gloomy, violent story of a pathetic social outcast jailed for attempting to murder the man who raped his autistic daughter. Its violent ending is preceded by a 30-second countdown so the squeamish can leave the cinema.

His follow-up, Irreversible, which excited some controversy, has all of these elements a rape, a bloody revenge and a violent climax but the principal characters are young, personable and middle-class. Irreversible traces an evening in the lives of three Parisians the gorgeous Alex (Monica Bellucci), her excitable lover Marcus (Vincent Cassel) and their close friend, the quiet academic Pierre (Albert Dupontel), who go to a party where Marcus gets high on drugs and booze, causing Alex to leave alone. In a dark subway she's raped and beaten by a vicious pimp, who's pursued to a ghastly sado-masochistic club by Marcus and Pierre. They end up respectively near-dead and handcuffed after murdering a man they believe to be the rapist. A similar tale to this became a sublime story of redemption in Ingmar Bergman's hands as The Virgin Spring, but as told by Noe it's just a squalid account of what can happen when macho men egg each other on to revenge under the back).

Gradually the camerawork seems to get less frenetic and the music less pounding as the movie regresses in time and there is self-conscious virtuosity in the long takes. But the method of reverse narration is far less effective than in Christopher Nolan's Memento or earlier examples of this device, such as Pinter's Betrayal or the 1934 Kaufman and Hart play Merrily We Roll Along (musi-calised by Stephen Sondheim) that begins in 1934 and ends in 1916. The full extent of Noe's pretentiousness is revealed in the final scene-in which the heroine in her pristine innocence is shown sitting in park reading (in English) An Experiment with Timeby J.W. Dunne, whose o'nce fashionable theories about dreams, our different selves and the way we re-live experiences influenced the so-called 'time plays' that J.B. Priestley wrote in the inter-war years.

The directorial debut of Bob Dolman, The Banger Sisters, is no better than two major clinkers he worked on as a screenwriter Willow and Far and Away. It's about a reunion between two former Sixties groupies, nicknamed 'the Banger Sisters' by Frank Zappa for their voracious sexual appetites which, it transpires, they memorialised by taking pictures of their conquests' genitalia, 'rock cocks' as they call them. Suzette (Goldie Hawn), an unreconstructed Sixties girl, loses her barmaid's job at an LA rock club and heads off to look up old chum Vinnie (Susan Sarandon), whom she hasn't seen for more than 20 years. Calling herself Lavinia, she's now a staid middle-aged, middle-class matron living in Phoenix with two teenage daughters and a rich, politically ambi 7 1. About Schmidt (15) Jack Nicholson is at his remarkable best as an actuary coping with retirement, widowhood and his daughter's in-laws.

2. Gangs of New York (18) Scorsese takes a dark view of the American melting pot at boiling point in nineteenth-century Manhattan. 3. City of God (18) Fernando Meirelles's violent saga of kids shaped by Rio's slums. A strong contender for the Best Foreign Language Oscar.

4. Hie Pianist (15) Polanski's first film in Poland for 40 years draws on his own experiences for its authoritative account of the Holocaust. 5. Catch Me if You Can (12A) Tom Hanks and Leonardo DiCaprio play cat and mouse in Spielberg's light comedy about a teenage con man. mm.