The Bellhog
The Elegance of the Hedgehog is a book. In book form, it sold like hotcakes at the unparalleled Boswell Book Company, and I cannot count how many copies I must have shelved, stacked, shuffled, and sold during my tenure there. And yet, by circumstance, I have never read it -- so there will be no “book wuz better” comparisons in this review. The movie version, which I did see, drops the title down to The Hedgehog, and presumably dropped some subplots and minor characters as well. The movie focuses on three residents of a Parisian apartment building: a young girl named Paloma who is coolly planning her suicide; Renee, the bitter, dowdy superintendent; and the newest tenant, a wealthy Japanese gentleman named Ozu. There are also a lot of aptly named cats around.
Paloma zips around her room, apartment, and building like a less annoying and more artistic Amelie. She’s depressed in a very intelligent and French sort of way, having decided to kill herself on her 12th birthday, more because she fears she'll succumb to the dull life of her parents than out of any more direct teenage angst. The elegant conceit of the movie is that she is making her own film-within-a-film with a hand-held camera, a chronicle of her last few months. In the course of doing so, she befriends the Japanese man and the superintendent, whose slowly growing romance is the heart of the movie. The theme of death, particularly the idea of death coming as a thief in the night, all sneaky and unexpected-like, is a major thread throughout the film. The Japanese gentleman is able to get his swanky apartment only because a long-time tenant dropped dead without warning. The superindentent is a disregarded widow, bitter that death has taken her partner away. So she hides in a room hidden inside her apartment, a library filled with classic literature -- her chosen escape from the mundane. And Ozu is a widower himself, all too familiar with death and its aftermath. As these flawed but entrancing characters interact, they slowly discover the necessity of living in the present, and the danger of planning for the wrong future. The Hedgehog is fucking great. It well acted, perfectly paced and has a wonderful, funny/tragic/poignant/hopeful tone that is nearly impossible to maintain all the way to the end -- and yet it does. In fact, it may best the best movie I’ve seen all year.
One of the worse movies I’ve seen all year is Bellflower, a trainwreck of a hipster bromance peopled with alcoholic douchebags and shot with the Hipstamatic iPhone app stuck on the yellow filter. Briefly, two best friends from Wisconsin, Bro 1 and Bro 2, are living dead-end lives in the squalid end of Los Angeles, spinning their metaphorical wheels while ingesting massive quantities of liquor and pining after (and occasionally getting) girls1 who are mostly as drunk and immature as they are. In between drinking and drinking more (that bit is totally accurate, as Mr. Lewis Black can tell you), the boys are also doing two really awesome things: building a flamethrower and a Mad Max-esque car, so that they’ll be ready for the post-apocalyptic wasteland when it comes. Talk about planning for the wrong future...
One night, after a hard day building the flamethrower, Bro 1 acquires a girlfriend. She’s obviously bad news from the start, but he doesn't see it till it's too late, and when the relationship goes south, Bro 1 motorcycles off in a huff and -- surprise -- gets hit by a car.2 His deteriorating mental state from the accident provides the excuse for the psychedelic, sloppy filmmaking of the second half, which the audience is supposed to be impressed by, in a "Fight Club Redux" sort of way. Now single again, Bro 1 makes up with his bestie, Bro 2, who he’d been ignoring, and sort of deals with the fallout of his relationship with Bitchy Blonde, as well as his physical wounds from the accident.
However, a minor act of revenge on Bitchy Blonde quickly spirals out of control, leading to histronic, unlikely Hamlet-style group death -- except that Bro 1 may just have brain damage, and is hallucinating most of the second half of the film. Or, the horrible shit really is happening, and he’s hallucinating the “better” outcome. It’s deliberately unclear; the director wants to have his PBR and drink it too. He does not want to be tied down to a particular narrative, and is willing to let the audience drift on the cold tides of uncertainty as a consequence.
Regardless of the director's intent or the overall message of the movie, Bellflower is unfuckingwatchable. Truly. Despicable characters, dull-as-paint plotting, and one crap pile of "arty" filmstock on top of another, as scenes competed to be the most banal. I was able to stay awake only by imagining how I would suckerpunch3 each and every character until they all collapse on the ground and I could stomp on their skulls.
To those in the know, know this: Bellflower sucked so hard that it engendered comparisons to both Cronenberg’s Spider (my Worst. Movie. Ever.) and Mulholland Falls (the boy’s Worst. Movie. Ever.). As the boy put it: “This was really a lot like Mulholland Falls, in that it was confusing as hell, and also really annoying.”
I wish I could find more common themes, or discuss the methods of plotting, foreshadowing, and style that each movie chose to use. But the fact is that one movie was well-made and also really good, while the other just wasn't. C'est la vie.
1 The girls in Bellflower are universally portrayed as opportunistic sexpots far more interested in getting laid than in pursuing a meaningful relationship. The boys, in contract, are portrayed as romantics, devastated by the failures of relationships as the girls they crush upon pass them up for a quickie elsewhere. Points for flipping the paradigm, I guess, but it would help if the women weren't complete caricatures, and awful people to boot.
2 Motorcycles are fucking dangerous, people. Wear a helmet! The life you save might be your own.
3 Suckerpunch is far more watchable than Bellflower, btw. In comparison, it looks like a finely-crafted, taut cinema gem.