Adrift (À Deriva)

So, apparently my favorite French actor, Vincent Cassel (it’s a shame most Americans only know him from the Ocean’s movies), speaks Portuguese. I was actually proud of myself that I could tell it was Brazilian Portuguese, something I would have known beforehand if I looked at the back of the DVD cover. I’ve been looking for a Brazilian Portuguese movie to watch to help with learning the language, especially the slang, and I’ve had this thing sitting there in plastic for who knows how long. According to his biography on IMDb, Cassel speaks English, Portuguese, and Italian, and learned conversational Russian for Eastern Promises. Don’t you feel dumb right now?  I know I do. While I’m TRYING to learn French, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese and German he’s actually DOING it. Another gem on IMDb is Cassel’s marriage to Monica Bellucci, which makes revisiting Irréversible more interesting. By the way, Bellucci also speaks at least French, Italian and English.

*****SPOILERS*****

What is it about me and watching coming of age/dissolution of a marriage movies recently (Blue Valentine, Submarine)? Adrift also reminds me a little of Remember Me, My Love (Ricordati di me), which only coincidentally stars Bellucci. During the car crash scene I actually thought Adrift was taking a page from Remember Me, but I think the drifting scene in the end was the perfect cap. If it was an American film they would have stayed together for the kids (I don’t understand why anyone considers this the best option) and Cassel would have found his daughter just in time to preserve her virginity/innocence (Taken). What causes a couple to separate has to be as mysterious as what brought them together in the first place, and the way Hollywood tries to tie bows on something so obviously messy is…you already know what I’m going to say. 

Camilla Belle, who plays Cassel’s lover, has a Brazilian mother and an American father.   I think Belle would make a great subject for a painting but there’s something odd/off-putting about her. She fits in movies like 10,000 BC, where her bushier eyebrows make more sense, or as Snow White, who you don’t imagine plucking her eyebrows. Kristen Stewart was inexplicably cast as Snow White for Snow White and the Huntsman (skin as white as snow and hair as black as ebony?), while Lily Collins was more appropriately cast as her in the soon-to-be-shit film Mirror Mirror. The point of all of this is that I wouldn’t cast Belle as Cassel’s lover, especially not if she’s supposed to typify an American homewrecker vacationing abroad.

In my last post for Water Lilies I brought up young female sexuality and how that translates to film.  Adrift follows what I was saying about Europeans tending to cast more age appropriate actresses for teen roles. Laura Neiva, 16 at the time, plays a 14 year old who goes through a sexual maturation process, which is made all the more confusing by watching her parents’ marriage deteriorate, and who also, presumably, loses her virginity to a man old enough to bartend. Like with Belle, I couldn’t stop looking at Neiva and finding something odd about her appearance. This stick of a girl, out of nowhere, had the nicest ass in the entire film (I know she’s Brazilian, but don’t you have to do a bunch of squats, lunges and elliptical machining to get it to pop like that?). I wasn’t the only one who noticed, as evidenced by the camera following Neiva’s hindquarters every time she was walking on the beach in a bikini. Maybe part of the reason I found Belle’s casting so weird is because the underaged Neiva exuded sexuality while Belle didn’t even slow drip anything resembling sex. I wonder if that was intentional by the director. There were, after all, some weird father/daughter dynamic undertones going on (I could get on a whole other thing about the daughter being jealous of the lover as a sexual rival, but I won’t).

It’s hard to believe that one of the best foreign movies I’ve ever seen was just $3.99 on a clearance rack at Hastings, while Best Buy sells shit like the Real Steel Blue-ray for $24.99. I watched about half an hour of Real Crap with my friend’s kid, Chuckles, yesterday. I feel bad for the cinema youth of America (and also Wolverine, the X-Men franchise, and Hugh Jackman’s career).

The pictures at the end of Adrift were a nice touch.

http://www.traileraddict.com/trailer/adrift/international-trailer               

On a side note, I have my monthly appointment tomorrow and they’re doing an echo to see if there’s any regeneration.  I’ve actually felt my heart beat through my chest and neck in the past few weeks, which I hope is a good sign, and not me having mini heart attacks/strokes.

Wish me luck.