The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 135

8 SCREEN The Observer Review 1 July 2001 Why are master filmmakers like Ang Lee and Guy Ritchie creating shorts for BMW's website? i tuttpt? arc Hmm nf wohcitec cnnWhinp-nil mmmercials strive to do structure rhar he could have been enei- and vatruelv incomprehensible, a trea- fun subjecting the can THERE ARE dozens of websites something all commercials strive to do structure that he could have been engi and vaguely incomprehensible, a trea fun subjecting the cars to spectacular By Elvis Mitchell devoted to showing short films. Yet none is quite as intriguing as which is currently screening The Hire, a series of mini-dramas commissioned by BMW. The site is fascinating because although the internet offers cachet as well as freedom from the constraints that affect broadcast television, ifs hardly the first place you'd pick to show or watch mini-movies by master filmmakers. And this is what The Hire shorts are: John Frankenheimer (Renin). Wong Kar-Wai (In the Mood for Love).

Ang Lee (Crouching Tiger. Hidden Dragon). Guy Ritchie (Snatch) and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (Amores Perros) are the directors behind them. Clive Owen currently to be seen on bigger screens in Mike Hodges 's canny film noir Croupier stars in each one alongside names such as Madonna. Mickey Rourke.

Forest Whitaker and TomasMilian. The shorts are startlingly effective. BMW.as obsessed with 'credibility' as all modern multinationals, wanted to position the web spots not just as commercials. By asking well-known directors to "bring their feelings about cars to film', the company has ensured that The Hire becomes a marriage of commerce and creativity, straddling the ever-narrowing line between art and mer- smashes. The Sedan at the end of Ambush is reduced to battered remains, and what's left of the BMW at the close of Chosen should be crushed and turned into key-chain medallions.

Owen is assigned to pick up a boy religious leader, who is being chased by shadowy foes, and the car is put through its paces and several hundred rounds of gunfire it looks like a preventilated Camper trainer when Owen has completed his job and saved his client. The Hire series wants to be about dualities, too. Buyers will be attracted to the films because they're feisty and existential in the most exhibitionistic way. The Hire is what James Bond movies might be like if someone decided to give the eponymous hero a soul. And Clive Owen, with his elongated, cruel jawline, suggests a Bond physically close to Ian Fleming's conception: the Glam Reaper.

And instead of a dog, his trusty companion is a BMW. The series of shorts is a 1980s idea -spending money as if there were no tomorrow spliced onto the internet. Will this crossbreeding take? Only if looking at a BMW on the internet is the final push someone needs to buy one. These shorts aren't timid and skittish like television commercials, in which you would probably see the airbags detonate after a stunt. On the other hand, at least in the television ads, you'd be warned that Adriana Lima doesn't come as standard with the car.

Elvis Mitchell tise on loyalty and its consequences in other words, a precis of a Wong Kar-Wai film. It features hushed appearances by Forest Whitaker, Mickey Rourke as an anguished lump of a star and Adriana Lima as his wife, looking as if she has been sculptured out of white chocolate. Owen is asked to, um, follow Lima as a favour to Whitaker. It might be hard to keep an eye on Lima, despite her beauty, because she's driving a Z3, a freedom ride that in Los Angeles is almost as ubiquitous as Starbucks. Guy Ritchie's Star plays on the public perception of pop superstars.

Mrs Ritchie plays a snarl of a singer who wants what she wants when she wants it (at least Ritchie uses a Blur song instead of a tune by his real-life spouse). In this, Owen gets to have a good time -his eyes have a bedeviled twinkle, as if he were on the verge of a nervous breakdown while whipping his M5 through the streets of Los Angeles. If Hodges's Croupier showed Owen's astringent minimalism at its best, then his performance on a tiny computer screen alongside a string of gleaming, just-off-the-boat cars puts him in a whole new league. (Owen playing subordinate to the cars is not unlike Jack Nicholson in Chinatown, acting in a third of the movie with a bandage covering part of his face.) His terse responses to Madonna are hilarious; he addresses her as 'Sir', as if she were Peppermint Patty of Peanuts and he were Marcie. The directors probably had a lot of neered by exacting Bavarian designers, is the star of all five films.

He's the driver, a laconic action samurai who is chauffeur, shrink, bodyguard and master mechanic. (Like all the other actors in the series he goes without a character name, apparently in the interest of stylised anonymity associated with art films.) Given the manoeuvres he puts the cars through, he has obviously disabled the computer chip Iim-iters that govern top driving speeds for American cars, and probably the ABS systems, too. The BMW gets its toughest workout in Ambush, the only one of the films so far (Inarritu is still completing his) to have a writing credit Andrew Kevin Walker of Se7en. Owen is ferrying around a customer (the adaptable Tornas Milian, last seen as the tough-as-nails Mexican drug tsar in Traffic)who, it is revealed, is doing some special transport of his own; Milian is carrying a fortune in diamonds in his belly. Owen learns this when a truckload of carjackers attempt a road heist.

There probably aren't many directors around who can handle a chase with the ruthless intelligence of Frankenheimer. The businesslike road sequences in Ronin show he knows exactly what he's doing. BMW admit the revved-up brashness of Ronin was the inspiration for The Hire, and Frankenheimer comes closest to recapturing some might say reiterating- Ronin 's drive-time. Wong's Follow is graceful, dolorous but few achieve. If talents like Wong, Lee, Frankenheimer and Ritchie are a part of this campaign, the viewer is supposed to think, BMW must be in touch with something I need to be a part of.

These little pictures in The Hire series are not only signature pieces for their directors "they are also very effective on the medium for which they were created The intimacy of the internet demands heightened attention, if only because you may have to stare intently to see what's going on. After an initial run on the website, the spots directed by Frankenheimer and Lee were screened at the Cannes Film Festival and Wong's short was premiered there. But. The Hire left the Cannes crowd underwhelmed, perhaps because a letdown wras inevitable after the excitement generated by the directors' names. The audience was surprised and disappointed that the films were commercials.

But the BMW films tingle with zest in a way that car ads don't any more. Even Wong's moody spot has a callused machismo missing from small-screen auto ads, instead of his usual sinuous narrative style that questions traditional gender roles. (Perhaps this burly chauvinism characterises BMW's shortsightedness in a world where an increasing number of women have as much disposable income as men not a single one of the spots is directed by a female director.) Owen, with a grimace so expressive under that exquisite concave facial 'These films tingle with zest in a way that car adverts don't any more. Buyers will be attracted to them because they' re feisty' I chandising. The BMW theory is that filmmakers with arthouse lustre will be able to relieve a customer of the necessity to make a decision about their product- WINNER The nicest actor on the lot' WINNER WINNER a GRAND JURY PRIZE ffl CO AVOLPI Si I'd CO AVOLPI JAVIER BARDEM VENICE INTERNATIONAL NATIONAL BOARD OF REVIEW 5 If JAVIER BARDEM jkw VENICE INTERNATIONAL JM0 SSv FILM FESTIVAL 40" NATIONAL SOCIETY OF FILM CRITICS VJV FILM FESTIVAL SOUTHEASTERN FILM CRITICS fZii Jack Lemmon ACADEMY AWARD8 NOMINATION GOLDEN GLOBE NOMINATION BEST ACTOR IN A LEADING ROLE JAVIER BARDEM BESTACTOR IN A DRAMA-JAVIER BARDEM' "BARDEM'S PERFORMANCE DEFIES SUPERLATIVES.

HE LIVES AND BREATHES THE ROLE." ATTITUDE "IF ANYONE WAS ROBBED AT THE OSCARS' IT WAS BARDEM." THE TIMES "A MASTERPIECE!" "BEAUTIFUL, STARTLING, A COMPELLING AND POWERFUL PERFORMANCE BY JAVIER BARDEM." JONATHAN ROSS, THE MIRROR connived in his son's death in Missing, the engineer shocked that his government would put profit before safety at a nuclear power plant in The China Syndrome. In one of his finest achievements, playing James Tyrone in Jonathan Miller's Broadway and West End production of O'Neill's A Long Day's Journey Into Night, he's an actor facing up to the fact that he's allowed himself to betray his own talent, something Lemmon never had to do. Like all actors, he often played in scripts unworthy of him, but he never seemed to be coasting or getting by on charm. He worked right up to the last, the 1990s being one of his busiest decades, his works ranging from a long complex monologue delivered in a hospital by a devastated old man in Robert Alt-man's Short Cuts to a few lines as Marcellus, the Elsi-nore nightwatchruan in Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet. His greatest work of the 1990s, however, was as Shelley Levene, the burnt-out real-estate pedlar in the film of Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross, which made all of us realise that we ought to have seen Lemmon as Willy Loman in that American classic about selling, and selling out, Death of a Salesman.

PHILIP FRENCH nent of the Protestant work ethic and the relaxed philosophical Jew. Although they made a succession of pictures together, and were thought of as the perfect odd-couple team, they only appeared together in one truly great film, Billy Wilder's atrabilious comedy The Fortune Cookie (1967). Lemmon is thought of as the average American nice guy, but he was never this. His customary role was the worm that turns. More precisely, he played people who underwent major moral change, but internally and subtly expressed rather than in the flamboyant way Hollywood usually represents redemption.

Wilder's The Apartment is his archetypal role. As the grovelling clerk who uses his flat as a quasi-brothel, he moves, as his doctor neighbour puts it, from being a mouse to a mensch. As a reformed alcoholic in Days of Wine and Roses, another remarkable performance, he must cast off his wife to save himself-and does. Lemmon was not handsome (there was something dead about those eyes that Born 8 February 1925, died 27 June 2001 JACK LEMMON, who died last week, was from the start his own man. He refused to change his name to something more commercial at the hehest of Columbia boss Harry Cohn, thus winning the respect of Hollywood's most celebrated bully who called him 'the nicest actor we've had on the lot'.

But he rarely played people from his own upper-middle-class Wasp background and only twice stepped outside America and the twentieth century to play the English tenderfoot Frank Harris in the western Cowboy (which left him with an abiding hatred of horses) and the Parisian pimp-cop in Irma La Douce. Like his close friend, Walter Matthau, who died almost exactly a year ago, he was both a star and a character actor, a comedian and a dramatic performer. Neither tried to ingratiate himself with audiences by playing for easy sympathy, and as a double act they complemented each other as the strait-laced, neurotic expo FILM REVIEW "EVERYTHING ABOUT BEFORE NIGHT FALLS IS EXTRAORDINARY.9' iff Lemmon with Shirley MacLaine. resembled the illuminated sockets in a Halloween turnip) and his voice sounded as if he was recovering from a cold. But he moved gracefully, almost balletically, had wonderful comic timing and an eloquent body language that could touch the tragic.

In Some Like It Hot, Marilyn Monroe complains of always getting 'the fuzzy end of the lollipop', but in that great film it's Lemmon who finishes up with the last equivocal laugh but without the girl. Conventional happy endings are rare in his pictures. He once described a key theme of the films he made as 'the misuse of the American dream' and he was often cast as a man betrayed, discovering that life was not all he'd been led to believe it was the middle-class father discovering that the CIA "AN IM ASSIGNED AN INTELLIGENT, rs THE OBSERVER MOVING CHARACTER STUDY. VISUALLY INSPIRED." THE GUARDIAN "JAVIER BARDEM IS MAGNETIC." SUNDAY EXPRESS I IIL JL1LH Jill Jl VI Jl ju.q iuirrjJi mm The Wind Will Carry Us (1999, Sydney Tafler, Patrick Magee and Dandy Nichols. Days of Heaven (1978, PG, Paramount, DVDRetail) Migrant The Birthday Party (1969, 15, PT Video, DVDAHS, Retail) Straightforward, virtually uncut screen version of Harold Pinter's 1958 play, MICHAEL WINCOTT JOHNNY DEPP ANDREA DI STEFANO JAVIER BARDEM OLIVIER MARTINEZ workers Richard Gere and Brooke Adams JON KILIK paesentsa GRANDV1EW PICTURES SCHNABEL "BEFORE NIGHT FALLS" JAVIER BARDEM OLIVIER MARTINEZ'ANDREA DI STEFANOvJOHNNY DEPP-MICHAEL WINCOTT CARTER BURWELL rSSSLOU REED LAURIE ANDERSON MICHAEL BERENBAUM SALVADOR PARRA SXAV1ER PEREZ GROBET'GUILLERMO ROSAS iSSSJULJAN SCHNABEL-OLATZ LOPEZ GARMENDIA exploit ailing a box-office disaster that made him a cult figure.

Robert Shaw, a great Pinter exponent, plays Stanley, the frightened nebbish ICAManga, VH SRetail, Rental) Winner of the Jury Prize at Venice, this masterly movie by the leading Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami centres on the unexplained relationship between a party of sophisticated strangers from Tehran (possibly filmmakers) and the inhabitants of a remote village in Iranian Kurdistan. Reminiscent of CUNNINGHAM 0KEEFELAZARO GOMEZ CARRILESMULIAN SCHNABEL RBNALDO ARENAS JON KILIK JULIAN SCHNABEL HHB landowner Sam Shepard inTer-rence Malick's visually stunning, subtly poised tragedy set in Texas. 1 SOUNDTRACK AVAILABLE ON UNIVERSAL RECORDS mimm Www'beforcnighlf Dsmovfejjie hiding out in a seaside hotel, and he's suDDortedbya Pinter and Beckett (there's an unseen Mrs Godzani around), it's at once lucid, mysterious and disturbingly comic. PF well-nigh perfect PHILIP FRENCH cast that includes Harold Pinter..