The Guardian du lieu suivant : London, Greater London, England • 25

THE GUARDIAN Thursday August 19 1993 New beat to an old tune EL MARIACHI Dir: Robert Rodriguez With Carlos Gallardo, Consuelo Gomez 81 mins, cert 15. Screen on the Green; MGM Tottenham Court Road etc LAWS OF GRAVITY Dir: Nick Gomez With Peter Greene, Eddie Falco 100 18. Gate Notting Hill LES ENFANTS DU PARADIS Dir: Marcel Carne With Arletty, Pierre Brasseur, JeanLouis Barrault 190 mins, cert PG. Renoir, Clapham Picture House HOT SHOTS, PART DEUX Dir: Jim Abrahams With Charlie Sheen, Lloyd Bridges 87 mins, cert 12. MGM Chelsea, etc LAKE CONSEQUENCE Dir: Rafael Eisenman With Joan Severance, Billy Zane 90 mins, cert 18.

MGM Trocadero etc STEPPING RAZOR: RED Dir: Nicholas Campbell With Peter Tosh 92 minutes, cert 18. Electric after him. Besides, her clients love him, and in the end she does too. Meanwhile, we know why the mariachi is being chased, even if he doesn't. There's another man carrying a guitar case in town, and his is full of weaponry.

It's a case of mistaken identity. One should always beware of overpraising a film simply because of the circumstances of its making. But Rodriguez's ability to keep his story simple and to embellish it not with any. pretension but with the liveliness of his camerawork and editing is certainly something to write home about. You can easily forgive the occasional lapses into slow motion or speeded up, sequences as, for the most part, El Mariachi bubbles along, making bows in different directions with what looks like an assured belief in itself and the ability of the cinema to make any number of stale into something fresh.

This is clearly the debut of a real filmmaker. You could ascribe this first feature as paying homage to anybody from Sergio Leone to the Coen Brothers. Laws Of Gravity, which was made for the vast sum of $38,000 in 11 days by writer-director Nick Gomez, clearly owes its main debt to David Mamet and Martin Scorsese. Set on the streets of Brooklyn, it has a group of post-adolescent friends searching for a way out of nowhere and one in particular, who has failed to answer a court summons, getting deeper and deeper into the pit. The result is predictable violence and a lesson learnt too late.

The film is as talkative as El Mariachi is determined that actions will speak louder than words and what Gomez attempts to accomplish is the kind of reality that Mean Streets actually managed to transcend. What the film achieves is a stunning if rather grinding portrait of a posse of small-time hucksters who are rio better than society makes them, and sometimes worse. Gomez is good on group loyalties, on the way their women have to put up with macho posing disguising weakness, and he also grades his characters according to their maturity and awareness with considerable skill. Certainly the performances, particularly from Peter Greene and Adam Trese are notable, but the women too make their mark. This is a nightmare world where so few are in full control of their emotions that what eventually happens takes on an air of inevitability that reminds one of Greek tragedy.

But there is an element of grind about it, and one turns with some relief to Tim Pope's Phone, a 30-min- derful performances and an eye for ute short on the same programme detail superbly embellished by Alexbased, it is said, on the transcript of a ander Trauner's art direction. prankster phone call and calling in At the time of its making during all the director's experience as a the Occupation, its importance lay video-maker to bend the imagination principally in its disguised allegory in weird directions. about the Resistance. But now we It is perhaps unfortunate for any of witness not that but the more timethe new films that Marcel less appeal of a story of love and jealLes Enfants Du Paradis is revived ousy and tragic misunderstandings this week, since it personifies in its that marries the artifice of the admittedly theatrical form (but ex- theatre to the realities of life as well traordinarily wide-ranging content) as it has ever been done. No film I almost everything the cinema seems know has quite so successfully told to have lost over the last quarter of a us of the relevance of another art century or so.

and, come to that, very few plays The fact that we have gained some- have either. thing too is also obvious. and The warning must be that you have Jacques Prevert's film isn't cine. to change your mental gear a little to matic in the way even the second- reach the film's subtleties and that rate often manages to be nowadays. can be hard if you don't know anyBut its ability to make its characters thing much about the French cinema live through other means, and to rep- before the New Wave scuttled most of resent so much more than the sum of its most cherished tenets.

their parts, still has the undeniable But if you can do that, Les Enfants air of a classic evocation not only of remains a masterpiece 190 minutes an era but of the emotional complex- during which Arletty, Jean-Louis ities of its characters. Barrault, Pierre Brasseur and Maria Set on the theatrical boulevards of Cesares provide what used to be the 19th century Paris of Louis Phi- called "poetic realism" with one of its lippe (the children of paradise are greatest triumphs. those who inhabit the cheaper balco- Hot Shots! Part Deux is Jim Abranies of the theatres), the film is at hams at it again, this time with Charonce intimate and epic. It is almost lie Sheen as a Rambo-like secret accurate to call it the French Gone agent pitted against Saddam H. The With The Wind, equipped with won- result is utterly predictable but An electrifying ifying thriller" Greg Williams, ESQUIRE CLINT EASTWOOD IN JOHN MALKOVICH RUSSO THE LINE OF AUGUST 27 15 FIRE AN way 14 E.

Carlos Gallardo as El Mariachi Derek Malcolm HERE ARE some extremely poor films that cost more than most of us could possibly earn in a lifetime, and a few highly watchable movies put together for virtually nothing. Robert Rodriguez says he spent around $7,000 on shooting El Mariachi, and since his name appears on the published credits no less than 11 times, one is inclined to believe that he cost himself practically nothing. The result, even if the cost had been $7 million, would have been creditable. But, as it is, this virtually one-man show, which has pitched Rodriguez into a two-year production deal with Columbia, has the life and conviction of everyone's favourite B- movie. The kind of film, in fact, that they don't make anymore today.

The mariachi of the title is a young man (the appealing Carlos Gallardo) looking for work in the bars of a small Mexican border town. In the first one, the owner has a synthesiser doing the job, in the second the beautiful female owner (Consuelo Gomez) is down on her luck and can't afford him. In the end, however, she takes him in since it appears that someone is.