OT Meirelles of "City of God" has a new film: ‘360’ With Anthony Hopkins and Jude Law
Went to see last Sunday and liked it.
Fortune’s Thin Thread, Catching, Not Releasing ‘360’ With Anthony Hopkins and Jude Law
By MANOHLA DARGIS Published: August 2, 2012
A butterfly flapping its wings in Chile is a familiar culprit for all kinds of global havoc, like tornadoes in Texas. In the film “360,” though, it’s a woman taking her top off in Vienna who sets off a British man’s crisis of conscience, instigates a conjugal dispute in Paris, and obliquely stirs up funny business in Denver and some murderous business elsewhere. Here the world isn’t just small, it’s also a 360-degree metaphor that begins with a woman’s breasts, leads to the boulevard circling Vienna’s center and ends with the “O” of your slack-jawed incredulity.
Anthony Hopkins plays one of several characters whose stories are all intertwined.
If this kind of multistrand narrative sounds familiar, it’s because you’ve seen iterations of it in movies like “Babel” (in which a gun connects strangers) and “Crash” (in which unnatural Los Angeles disasters do). In “360” the topless Cassandra, a Slovak named Mirka (Lucia Siposova), poses for a Viennese pimp, Rocco (Johannes Krisch), who arranges a liaison between her and a British businessman, Michael ( Jude Law). Back home in London, Michael has a wife, Rose ( Rachel Weisz), who has a lover, a Brazilian photographer, Rui (Juliano Cazarré), who’s involved with Laura (Maria Flor). Laura wises up and ends up on a plane where, en route to Miami and Rio de Janeiro, she meets a fatherly gent, John (a sympathetic Anthony Hopkins), who’s on his way to Phoenix to identify a body.
That body is one of several uninteresting doubles in a story littered with mirrored situations and forced coincidences. Laura somehow ends up in Denver, an unlikely layover for a plane trip that begins in London and ends in Rio. That’s distracting, but less so than her decision at the airport to pick up a shifty-eyed American, Tyler (Ben Foster), who, as rotten luck and screenwriter determinism would have it, is a sex offender. (Cringingly, Tyler enters the story soon after a scene of Michael and Rose with their young daughter.) In the movie’s cause-and-effect logic Laura faces danger in Denver because a Slovakian whipped off her bra because the Soviet Union fell apart ... and in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
As suggested by the film’s title and its early emphasis on Vienna and restless lovers — the businessman, his wife, her lover and so on — the screenwriter Peter Morgan was clearly attempting to bend the Austrian playwright Arthur Schnitzler’s late 19th-century play “La Ronde” into a gloss on globalization. In Schnitzler’s influential roundelay a character in a sexual twosome turns up in the next scene with someone else, a pattern that keeps repeating to create a daisy chain of desire. But in “360,” somewhere between Vienna and Paris, and the multilanguage songs and gentle guitar strumming that bridge too many sequences, Mr. Morgan and the director Fernando Meirelles break away from this sexual patterning and begin jumping among the characters with less and less evident narrative rhyme and reason.
Mr. Morgan has written some good movies, notably “The Queen,” and Mr. Meirelles has won fans for neo-exploitation titles like “City of God.” There’s no way to know what went wrong with “360” and whether it was this uninvolving and shallow from the start. It can be tricky to bring viewers into movies that follow multiple characters who may not know one another yet are somehow connected, though filmmakers do manage it, at best by going deep and not just wide. There are moments in “360” that show what the movie might have been, as in a scene of John at a recovery group that reminds you of what Mr. Hopkins can do. But the overshooting and overediting here suggest Mr. Meirelles, or maybe the producers, were trying to work around this story, instead of with it.
“360” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Adults in bed and in trouble.
360
Opens on Friday in New York and Los Angeles.
Directed by Fernando Meirelles; written by Peter Morgan; director of photography, Adriano Goldman; edited by Daniel Rezende; production design by John Paul Kelly; costumes by Monika Buttinger; produced by Andrew Eaton, David Linde, Emanuel Michael, Danny Krausz, Chris Hanley, Marc Missonnier and Olivier Delbosc; released by Magnolia Pictures. In Manhattan at the Landmark’s Sunshine Cinema, 139-143 East Houston Street, East Village. Running time: 1 hour 51 minutes.
WITH: Anthony Hopkins (Older Man), Ben Foster (Tyler), Dinara Drukarova (Valentina), Gabriela Marcinkova (Anna), Jamel Debbouze (Algerian Man), Johannes Krisch (Rocco), Jude Law (Michael Daly), Juliano Cazarré (Rui), Lucia Siposova (Mirka), Maria Flor (Laura), Marianne Jean-Baptiste (Fran), Mark Ivanir (the Boss), Moritz Bleibtreu (Salesman), Rachel Weisz (Rose) and Vladimir Vdovichenkov (Sergei). |
