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WATCH THE SKIES

Producer: Crazy Pictures (Victor Danell)   Director: Victor Danell Screenplay: Jimmy Nivrén Olsson and Victor Danell   Cast: Inez Dahl Torhaug, Jesper Barkselius, Håkan Ehn, Niklas Kvarnbo Jönsson, Isabelle Kyed, Mathias Lithner, Sara Shirpey, Eva Melander, Oscar Töringe and Lilly Lexfors   Distributor: XYZ Films

Grade:  C

Looking backward and forward, this 2022 Swedish picture is a throwback to family-friendly action movies of the 1980s, but revamped for English-speaking viewers with modern dubbing technology.  Unhappily it doesn’t escape mediocrity in either respect.

The picture begins in 1988, when Uno (Oscar Töringe) takes his eight-year old daughter Denise (Lilly Lexfors) along on a stealth mission undertaken by his group UFO Sweden to extract some data from the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute (SMHI) with the help of one of its scientists, Lennart (Jesper Barkselius).  He gets the files, which he needs to confirm his theory connecting UFO visits with weather phenomena, but speeds away in his red Saab with Denise in the back seat, leaving Lennart to suffer the consequences.  In the confusion, moreover, Gunnar (Håkan Ehn), a member of the club who’d dismantled the security system, is shot in the leg, though the other participants—chubby, genial Töna (Isabelle Kyed), amiable drone Mats (Mathias Lithner) and balding nerd Karl (Niklas Kvarnbo Jönsson)—manage to extract him in their VW van.

Eight years later, Denise (Inez Dahl Torhaug) is a teen living with foster parents but hanging out with an unruly activist crowd, and it’s only the protection of concerned cop Tomi (Sara Shirpey) that keeps her out of serious trouble.  Uno has been out of the picture for years, having disappeared on a mission to track down a UFO using his weather-based calculations.  When an old red Saab comes crashing down from an undulating orange sky into a barn one night, she’s certain it’s her father’s, and after investigating it and finding his old files she approaches UFO Sweden, now led by Lennart, to help her track down the extraterrestrial object she’s certain he’d located, and perhaps even find him.  The group is skeptical, with Gunnar, now hobbling about with a cane, particularly hostile.  But Lennart is more open, and the rest agree to help.

The messy adventure that follows is marked by some car chases, another incursion into SMHI (where Kicki, an old colleague of Lennart’s played by Eva Melander, turns from antagonist to collaborator), an effort to extract a UFO from a lake with a crane and a huge magnet, and repeated interventions by Tomi.  Naturally there’s a rupture within the team at one point—even a betrayal by one of its members—before a big finale that brings a reunion between Denise and Uno within the context not of a UFO but of a different scientific phenomenon, one involving dislocations in both time and space.

All of this is pretty chaotic and encumbered by lots of pseudo-scientific babble, but what’s most notable about it is the character of Denise, with whom we’re intended to identify.  One can certainly sympathize with the loss of her parents—her mother frankly goes unmentioned—but her surliness grows increasingly grating as the movie progresses, and her obsessiveness extends to lying to her comrades and even placing them in serious danger.  (In this, as well as her tech skill, she truly seems to be her father’s child.)  Lennart in particular remains unfailingly supportive, though at considerable cost.

The fact that Torhaug doesn’t conceal Denise’s unattractive qualities may be commendable, but doesn’t alter the fact that the character makes “Watch the Skies” less appealing than “E.T.,” for example, or “War Games,” or the other pictures (most of them inferior to those) that it’s trying to channel.  Since apart from Lennart, to whom Barkselius brings a likably hangdog quality, and Ehn, whose one-note irascibility grows as annoying as Torhaug’s single-mindedness, the supporting characters are little more than sketches, it’s hard to cheer the underdogs’ triumphs against the forces of authority, or to embrace the warmhearted postscript.

Technically the movie is adequate, though the mostly practical effects by the collaborative known as Crazy Pictures (with Darnell its multi-hyphenate embodiment in this instance) are hardly cutting-edge, as the big finale clearly demonstrates.  Gustaf Spetz contributes an energetic score that helps mitigate some of the visual shortcomings.

But those are surely secondary to the switchover from the original Swedish to English dialogue, accomplished with an elaborate computer-animation process called Flawless Immersive Dubbing, which may be immersive but is far from flawless.  To be sure the system, which one can investigate through some short promo films, does result in facial movements that represent more realistic results than the usual dubbing, in which the characters’ lip movements exhibit little relation to the words emerging from their mouths.  And in response to criticisms about AI taking over, assurances that the actors themselves dubbed the dialogue provides some consolation.

But the result still has an artificial look that suggests work remains to be done before serious films, as opposed to workmanlike genre movies like this, are likely to embrace the technology.  For most directors, one suspects, subtitles will remain the go-to option despite what producers might suggest.  

So “Watch the Skies” is a watchable enough homage to those fondly remembered eighties stories about kids who proved more attuned to magic and mysteries than their elders, but is hardly their equal in creating magic or mystery itself.  And, at least on the evidence provided here, the vaunted process of converting dialogue from another language into English that it utilizes remains a dubious proposition.  

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BONJOUR TRISTESSE

Producers: Katie Bird Nolan, Lindsay Tapscott, Christina Piovesan, Noah Segal, Julie Viez, Joe Iacono, Durga Chew-Bose, Benito Mueller and Wolfgang Mueller   Director: Durga Chew-Bose   Screenplay: Durga Chew-Bose   Cast: Lily McInerny, Claes Bang, Chloë Sevigny, Nailia Harzoune, Aliocha Schneider, Nathalie Richard, Thierry Harcourt and Rebecca Dayan    Distributor: Greenwich Entertainment

Grade: C+

During the later stage of his career in the fifties and sixties, Otto Preminger had a penchant for choosing provocative material for his films—partially, at least, to pique public interest in the controversial movies that resulted.  So it should come as no surprise that he optioned Françoise Sagan’s 1954 novel for adaptation to the screen—a book thought scandalous at the time, in part because the story of a teenage girl’s disruption of her father’s engagement was itself written by a teenager.  The movie appeared in 1958 to a mixed reception (except in France, where the young film devotees who would soon create the Nouvelle Vague greeted it rapturously), but more recently it has been reassessed much more favorably by critics.

So Durga Chew-Bose puts herself at some risk by remaking the book as her first feature. The effort is an admirable debut, evoking a palpable atmosphere of ennui among the rich and aimless, but it’s hobbled by a few miscalculations.

Lily McInerny is the statuesque Cécile, who cuts a strikingly beautiful figure while lolling on the beach in the French Riviera summer, often in the company of the boy next door, Cyril (Aliocha Schneider).  She lives a life of indolence and pleasure with her father Raymond (Claes Bang), a widower who’s enjoying the favors of his most recent young mistress, dancer Elsa (Naïlia Harzoune).  Cécile has no use for school—she’s failed her exams back in Paris—and her father is not just her enabler but her companion in a lifestyle of ease without responsibility.  

The routine to which Cécile’s become accustomed is disrupted by the arrival of Anne (Chloë Sevigny), an old friend of Raymond and his deceased wife.  She’s an elegant, proper sort, who undertakes to become Cécile’s mentor in maturation, something the girl resists.  Cécile’s appalled when Raymond sets aside Elsa, a kindred spirit, for Anne, who prohibits her spending time with Cyril, and even more so when Raymond announces that Anne has agreed to marry him.  So she plots to break them up, enlisting Elsa and Cyril in a scheme that involves arranging for Anne to find Raymond in a compromising situation with Elsa.  The plot succeeds, but brings tragic consequences.

In their adaptation of Sagan’s slim book, Preminger and writer Arthur Laurents chose to expand, treating the original story as an extended, glossily colored flashback narrated a year later by Cécile as she has resumed her dissolute life, shown in lengthy black-and-white interludes.  Chew-Bose, by contrast, sticks closely to the book’s narrative, relegating the future to a relatively brief epilogue. 

Yet her version runs considerably longer than Preminger’s trim one, despite his inclusion of long, frankly extraneous dance sequences.  That’s because it’s so languorously paced, which allows for Chew-Bose, editor Amelie Labreche, cinematographer Maximilian Pittner, production designer Francois-Renaud Labarthe and costumer Miyako Bellizzi to show off their skill at mise-en-scène.  The result is often rapturously lovely, especially when accompanied by the tinkly piano runs of Lesley Barber’s score.  But it does make for a somewhat turgid overall feel.

The attempt to update the tale, moreover, is misguided.  It doesn’t really amount to much—a few uses of cellphones, mostly—but it does clash with the fact that this is essentially a period piece, a story grounded in the late-fifties, postwar ambience of spiritual alienation that drove so much European filmmaking of the time.  It would have been wiser to play it as such.

Moreover, while the casting is mostly spot-on, with the suitably pouty McInerny convincingly caught on the cusp of adulthood, Bang just marginally seedy as an ageing rake, and Harzoune and Schneider both excellent as the supporting players in Cécile’s nasty scheme, Sevigny seems wrong for Anne.  In Preminger’s film Deborah Kerr naturally embodied the qualities the character required—elegance, delicacy and fragility.  Sevigny tries hard to capture them too, but in her case it feels effortful.  One need only compare her handling of the crucial scene when Anne is confronted by Raymond’s infidelity— Chew-Bose and Preminger stage it similarly, with the camera firmly fixed on Anne’s face as she watches the offscreen couple hearing snatches of their dialogue—to gauge the difference.

So sadly, the virtues of Chew-Bose “Bonjour Tristesse” are diminished by some serious flaws.