The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 156

8 SCREEN The Obseiver Review 5 May 2002 itmare on 94th Stree Even the camera can't leave the house in this taut, claustrophobic thriller which confronts some of our worst urban fears Nig FILM OF THE WEEK Philip French bicker over a bought-in pizza supper in the unfurnished kitchen (Chateauneuf du Pape for mom, Diet Pepsi for Sarah) and go dispiritedly to their beds. While they sleep, three criminals break in, expecting the house to be deserted. They're looking for several million dollars' worth of bonds concealed in the panic room by the former owner. The trio is as conventional as the plucky Meg and her rebellious daughter, being composed of a kindly, non-violent security technician with no criminal record (Forest Whitaker), a garrulous, know-it-all neurotic (Jared Leto) and a ruthless sociopath with an itchy trigger finger (Dwight Yoakam). These people have stumbled across us in numerous movies, most famously perhaps the film of Frederick Knott's play Wait Until Dark.

But the actors bring life to them, and the screenwriter, David Koepp (whose credits include Jurassic Park and Mission: Impossible), rings smart changes on daughter work together against a common enemy and it's streetwise Sarah who instructs her well-mannered mother in the language of defiance, egging her on to yell over the PA system: 'Get the fuck out of my What gives individuality to the proceedings is David Fincher's direction. His previous four movies Alien 3, Seven, The Game, Fight Club have shown him to be a man with a dark vision of the threatening underside of modern life. Here he plays on contemporary urban fears of confronting malign forces over which we appear to have no control. Fincher avoids facile shocks or the temptation to move away from the house. Except for a brief epilogue, his film remains firmly within its walls.

Clearly he's an admirer of Hitchcock's Rear Window, and Panic Room is not remotely stagy or static. Fincher is served brilliantly by his cinematographers, Conrad W. Hall and Darius Khondji. The sinuous mobility of the camerawork familiar situations. There's the Panic Room (111 mins, 15) Directed by David Fincher; starring Jodie Foster, Forest Whitaker, Jared Leto, DwightYoakam OUR CURRENT FEARS over domestic safety are nothing new, as a con descending estate agent makes clear to Meg Altman (Jodie Foster), the potential purchaser of a splendid five-storey brownstone on West 94th Street on Manhattan's upper west side in David Fincher's expert thriller, Panic Room.

On the market due to the recent death of an elderly businessman, this grand residence is equipped with a concealed 'panic room', an impregnable sanctuary equivalent, the agent says, to the castle keep of mediaeval times. This place of refuge, from which the rest of the building can be viewed via CCTV, gives Meg a twinge of claustrophobia, but a recent divorce settlement from a rich pharmaceutical tycoon has provided the wherewithal to buy the house. Meg is in an edgy state from an acrimonious divorce and she lives with that obligatory social accessory for a Hollywood single mother a surly, alienated teenage daughter, Sarah (Kristen Stewart). They move on an inauspiciously rainy day with their first wave of unpacked possessions, attempt to attract the attention of neighbours, the strategies of the crooks to lure the pair out of the panic room, the arrival of Meg's ex-husband, the need to keep inquisitive cops at bay. Sarah's diabetes adds a further element of danger and urgency, as well as an additional weapon in the form of a syringe.

From the start of the siege, mother and recalls Khondji's work on Delicatessen and City of Lost Children. In what seem like unbroken shots, the camera swoops down stairwells, up to skylights, from room to room, along air ducts. Apparently free, the camera eye is revealed to be as much trapped within the house as the inhabitants and the intruders. Fincher avoids facile shocks or the temptation to move away from the house. Clearly he's an admirer of Hitchcock's Rear Window Mother and daughter united: Kristen Stewart and Jodie Foster in Panic Room.

Return passage to India Two go mad in theVosges Baise-Moi signals the end of the 18 certificate, but at what cost? RE-RELEASES Philip French matic and sentimental. The Bollywood star Nargis plays the long-suffering Radha, whose story unfolds in flashback from old age when she's invited to open the dam that will transform the neighbourhood economy. A village beauty, she marries a man deeply in debt, who loses both his arms in a farming accident, leaving her to raise two sons. She battles through storms, even pulling a plough when her oxen is taken by a OTHER FILMS Pather Panchali, both centring on hard-pressed matriarchs confronting the vicissitudes of life in impoverished villages in the early part of the last century. Made in 1957, Mother India is colourful kitsch, melodra Philip French Puru Chibber in The Warrior: more beautiful than it is profound.

Mother India (175 Directed by Mehboob Khan; starring Nargis, Sunil Dutt, Rajendra Kumar Pather Panchali (115 mins, U) Directed by Satyajit Ray; starring Kanu Bannerjee, Karuna Bannerjee, Uma Das Gupta, Subir Bannerjee THE BRITISH Film Institute's ambitious Imagine Asia project, 'a celebration of South Asian film' spread over eight months at dozens of venues throughout Britain, opens with the revival of two movies from the mid-1950s that deal with identical material from either end of the spectrum of Indian cinema. They are the archetypical Bombay movie, Mother India, and the independent Bengali movie, cal promotional pitches for her company in Dallas and Salt Lake City, she's disoriented and vulnerable. The aggressive, Ivy League-educated Paula makes Julie question her whole career, then involves her in an appalling prank at the expense of a slimy corporation headhunter (Fred Weller), also stuck at the hotel, whom she claims to be a rapist. Channing and Stiles play superbly together and the result is emotionally 1 Pather Panchali (U) Satyajit Ray's 1955 masterpiece is back on the big screen to launch the British Rim Institute's nationwide Imagine Asia movie season. 2 Panic Room (15) Divorcee Jodie Foster and her diabetic daughter confront ruthless intruders in David Fincher's white-knuckle thriller.

3 The Business of Strangers (15) In Patrick Stettner's three-character film, high-flying company executive Stockard Channing confronts surly junior Julia Stiles in a middle-aged-cat versus deadly-kitten game at a bland airport hotel. 4 Gosford Park (15) Altman's quietly dazzling country house whodunit is still around, rewarding second visits. 5 Bend It Like Beckham (12) Gurinder Chadra's feel-good movie brings a football-crazy Sikh girl into conflict with an ethnically divided Hounslow. Heart-warming in a naTf Capraesque manner. moneylender, but eventually she gets the village working in unison.

Radha never loses hope, even when she is forced to kill a son who has taken to banditry, and she's ever ready for large-scale song and dance number, one of which ends with an overhead shot of a map of the Indian subcontinent cut from a wheat field. The acting is broad and rhetorical, and the movie resembles those relentlessly upbeat tractor-musicals of the Soviet cinema that Stalin so much admired. Completed in 1955, Satyajit Ray's astonishing debut, Pather Panchali (the first part of the Apu trilogy, his classic cinematic Bildungsro-man) creates a wonderfully detailed picture of a Bengali village where a mother gets into debt while raising a daughter and a smali son and caring for an ancient aunt without much help from her husband, a feckless dreamer, who thinks his education has placed him above physical toil. She's irritable, worn down by work and injured pride, and though resilient, she eventually gives in and moves to the city with her family after the daughter's death and the destruction of their home in a storm. The picture is made with subtlety and imagination.

Its images by first-time cameraman Sub-rata Mitra are as memorable as anything in the movies of Renoir, Ford, De Sica, Kurosawa and Ozu, the foreign directors Ray admired. In 1980, the star of Mother India, Nargis Dutt, who had become an MP, attacked Ray in Parliament for misrepresenting India abroad, and in a sneering newspaper interview claimed that the popularity abroad of the Apu trilogy was 'because people there want to see India in an abject condition'. Pather Panchali is, however, one of the greatest pictures ever made. If you want proof of that greatness, compare the sequence where the children discover their Auntie dying on the way back from seeing their first train, with the clumsy scene in Mother India where a little boy sees his grandmother die. As revealed in his book Our Films, Their Films, Ray was a charismatic-figure of immense intelligence and humanity, as well as a major thinker about cinema Baise-Moi (78 mins, 18) Directed by vlrginie Despentes and Coralie TrinhThi; starring Raffaela Anderson, Karen Lancaume The Business of Strangers (84 mins, 15) Directed by Patrick Stettner; starring Stockard Channing, Julia Stiles, Fred Weller Showtime (95 mins, 12) Directed by Tom Dey; starring Robert De Niro, Eddie Murphy, Rene Russo The Warrior (86 mins, 12) Directed by Asif Kapadia; starring Aino Annuddin, Irfan Khan Dust (124 mins, 18) Directed by Milcho Manchevski; starring Adrian Lester, Joseph Fiennes, David Wenham THE TITLE of Baise-Moi translates as 'fuck me', which appears to be imperative in its French context rather than having the exclamatory nature of our traditional English phrase.

It's a terrible film, rather like Thelma and Louise remade as a home movie by the Man-son family. Deliberately rough in its technique, Baise-Moi is co-scripted and co-directed by the novelist Virginia Despentes (on whose book it's based) and the porno moviemaker Coralie Trinh Thi. It centres on two whores Manu of North African origins and the petit-bourgeois Nadine who meet shortly after the former has been gang-raped and has accidentally shot dead her revengeful lover, and the latter has accidentally strangled her roommate and then seen her junky boyfriend gunned down in the street. At something of a loose end, they drive to an Atlantic seaside resort and then head for the Vosges, where Nadine has to deliver some forged documents. Along the way they have sex with seven or eight men and kill a couple of dozen people, including a middle-aged woman (for her credit card), the owner of a gun shop, two cops, a writer, and the complete clientele of a sex shop, the manager of which they dispatch by sticking a pistol up his anus.

This is all supposed to be self-consciously empowering, and at one point Nadine and Manu discuss their inability to say amusingly memorable things while committing their crimes. But the movie tells us nothing about anger or the current state of relations between the sexes other than that men are pigs, fit only to be exploited, humiliated and murdered. Like several recent French pictures, the sex is explicit and the leading actresses (and presumably several in supporting roles too) were recruited from the hardcore world. The effect is unerotic (Eric Morecambe's phrase 'not a pretty sight' comes to mind) and, far from contributing authenticity to the proceedings, the explicit sex distracts the audience from other matters, torpedoing the overall sense of reality. The movie, however, will be something of a landmark if it signals the fact that an 18-certificate now gives filmmakers total freedom.

Infinitely superior to Baise-Moi, and more seriously disturbing, is writer-director Patrick Stenner's thoughtful debut The Business of Strangers. It's a chamber drama set in an anonymous airport hotel where a power-dressed, middle-aged business woman, Julie (Stockard Channing), is drawn into a class, generational and sexual game by a manipulative young assistant, Paula (Julia Stiles). Julie, a Midwestern girl from a blue-collar background, is just getting over being promoted to the head of her firm when expecting to be fired. Stranded in this no-man's-land between making identi an experienced director of commercials, makes his feature debut with The Warrior, a stark allegory set at some mdeterrninate time and place on the Indian subcontinent and made in Hindi. The eponymous warrior belongs to a military caste working for a feudal lord, razing villages that fail to pay their taxes.

One day, as he's about to kill a girl from a recalcitrant community, he notices that she wears his son's medallion. He has a vision of a meeting with her in a different clime, experiences a Damascene conversion and abandons his profession. It follows as the night the day that he'll embark on a journey of expiation that will take him from the aridity of the desert (Rajasthan) to the purifying snows of the mountains (Himachal Pradesh). Meanwhile, the angry lord sends an assassin in his wake who kills the warrior's son and has a final showdown with him in a devastated field. The carefully composed images are very beautiful, but though pretty accomplished, the film has a hollow ring, rather like a beautiful echo pretending to be a profound dialogue.

A magical realist piece much indebted to the spaghetti western, Milcho Manchevski's Dust centres on two brothers, both gun-slingers from the Wild West, continuing their rivalry in the director's native Macedonia where they are caught in the bloody crossfire between Turks and local guerrillas in 1903. The convoluted narrative style, borrowed perhaps from Titanic, has a romantic elderly lady in a New York hospital narrating the story to a thief who's after her hidden wealth. It's muddled, but conceived on a grander scale than British productions nowadays. It's a terrible film, rather like Thelma and Louise remade as a home movie by the Manson family exhausting for us and for Julie. The other American picture, Showtime, is a faintly amusing comedy starring Robert De Niro as a veteran, no-nonsense LAPD detective forced by his captain to take part in a TV reality drama with rookie cop (and would-be actor) Eddie Murphy as his partner.

The joke is the contrast between the media view of things as imposed by the show's flashy producer (Rene Russo) and everyday reality; the problem is that the makers of Showtime cannot distinguish between a cop in Beverly Hills and Beverly Hills Cop. De Niro has played this role several tunes recently (most closely in 15 Minutes) and a similar plot was better handled by James Woods and Michael J. Fox in The Hard Way. Finally two European (partly British) co-productions that rework mythic material on remote terrain. Azif Kapadia.

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