Asylum

Asylum
Opens Fri., Aug. 19, at Uptown

Nobody does repression like the Brits, and Natasha Richardson looks appropriately repressed and miserable at the beginning of Asylum. She plays Stella, who moves with her cold, careerist psychiatrist husband to an isolated English mental institution during the late 1950s. The problem is that she looks even more miserable after she's been sexually emancipated by a brooding inmate, Edgar (The Great Raid's Marton Csokas). The handsome pair are plainly meant for each other; there's little delay or suspense before their first rutting on the floor of a greenhouse. It's made all the more inevitable by Dr. Cleave (Ian McKellan), a resentful colleague and rival of Stella's husband (Hugh Bonneville from Iris). "I spend my life immersed in the passions of others," says Cleave, and Edgar is his most passionate lab rat.

By setting his 1996 source novel in the past, Patrick McGrath (Spider) knowingly borrowed an older set of conventions—the bored wife, the scandalous affair, the inevitably tragic outcome—as if recasting Lady Chatterley's Lover with people who'd never read D.H. Lawrence. On film, however, I'm not sure the '50s are distant enough to match those conventions. Mad love is one thing, but to fall for a guy who killed his wife out of pathological jealousy? Stella may be desperate, but no one should be that dumb. In the novel, her fate is related in flashback; here she blunders headlong through one trap after another set by evil Dr. Cleave. ("Arranging things is your forte," he's told.) Her motives we can understand: Edgar's a hunky artist who makes her feel alive. Meanwhile, her husband barely registers (there's a young son, too), and Cleave's motives—beyond job advancement—make no sense at all.

McGrath originally tangled the narrative between two conflicting, retrospective accounts (neither one of them reliable), and by making Cleave less the obvious villain. Here, by rolling the story out more conventionally, director David Mackenzie (Young Adam) dulls the drama. It also doesn't help that he plants so many clues along the way. (Inmate to Stella: "Are you joining us?")

That adultery can lead to catastrophe is hardly new or surprising. That's why I was unsurprised to learn that the conduit between McGrath and Mackenzie was screenwriter/playwright Patrick Marber, whose Closer made a similarly grim business of nookie-on-the-side. What's missing here is also what was missing from that film: You've got to lose your heart for love before you lose your mind. (R) BRIAN MILLER

À Tout de Suite
Runs Fri., Aug. 19–Thurs., Aug. 25, at Varsity

Back when gratuitous nudity still meant something, 40 or 50 years ago, there was a certain characteristic scene in films of the French New Wave: A propos of nothing, a cute young actress—maybe Bardot, maybe Moreau—would walk through the corner of the shot naked or emerge from the bath with her towel imperfectly (yet perfectly) held or streak past a half-open door while changing her outfit. The hero, of course, intent on important matters like smoking or drinking or planning a robbery, wouldn't get up to do anything about it. These flashes were there because the directors could get away with it, because audiences (especially Americans) loved these forbidden peep shows, and because they tweaked Hollywood prudery.

Based on a young female fugitive's memoir from the '70s, À Tout de Suite (Right Now) is full of these little bonus bits of nudity. It's part of director Benoît Jacquot's deliberate evocation of the nouvelle vague, which also includes filming in 16 mm black and white, jittery editing rhythms, handheld camera, minimal music and lighting, and deliberately adding old bits of stock footage (plus some new, mismatched video inserts) to heighten the artifice of his revival project. Lead actress Isild Le Besco (whose 19-year-old character, Lili, is only named in the credits) has the right body and face for his purposes; she's the kind of blank, undemonstrative, natural beauty who'd fit right into a genuine Godard or Truffaut piece. Neither she nor her bank-robbing lover (Ouassini Embarek) talks a lot as they flee Paris—where two died in his heist-gone-wrong—for Spain, Morocco, and Greece. A bit of voice-over here and there is all the slim story needs. "A vacation for all time," she calls their flight, in an affectless manner somewhat reminiscent of Sissy Spacek in Badlands.

Of course, there have been an awful lot of movies about doomed lovers on the run since Terrence Malick and since the French New Wave, and even those drew on a long Hollywood tradition before them. À Tout de Suite adds nothing to this tradition. It feels like a movie you've seen before, and Jacquot doesn't pretend otherwise. You can admire his economy, the period feel for 1975 (check out that Chicago album sitting on Lili's mantel), how Lili loves the handsome young robber without regard to his North African ancestry (though he, of course, never forgets it for a minute). You can even enjoy it a little, provided you understand from the outset that very little will happen—and certainly nothing, nudity included, that you don't expect. (NR) BRIAN MILLER