Matters of Life and Death

Outwardly, Jean Desailly's life is perfect. He is a respected expert on Balzac and has a happy home life with wife Nelly Benedetti and daughter Sabine Haudepin. But his destiny is a fatally altered by a lecture trip to Lisbon that he almost fails to take after a suicide delays his train, the police stop the friend driving him to the airport for speeding and the steps to the plane are almost pulled away before he is safely aboard.

However, he is helped into the cabin by stewardess Françoise Dorléac and a connection is made between them that is reinforced by two rides in a life and a couple of phone calls. Back in Paris, however, the pair find the affair harder to manage. Dorléac is afraid of her disapproving concierge and both feel cheapened by booking into hotels. So, they agree only to meet out of town and Desailly's schedule comes to be dictated by Dorléac's duty roster.

Initially, Benedetti suspects nothing. But she presses Desailly about a trip to Reims and he lies in desperation. Acting impulsively (as he had been growing disillusioned with the increasing number of thwarted trysts), he asks Dorléac to marry him, but she refuses with a disdain that forces him to realise the magnitude of his folly. He calls Benedetti, hoping to beg her forgiveness. But, just as he narrowly made the flight to Portugal, so he now misses his wife on the phone, as she sets out to track him down to a favourite restaurant, armed with a shot gun.

Scripted with Jean-Louis Richard in the month after Truffaut had learnt that his proposed adaptation of Fahrenheit 451 (1966) had been postponed, this was a film fraught with difficulties and dangers. Truffaut elected to shoot in his own Parisian apartment, even though he was having a fling with Dorléac and his marriage heading for the rocks. Moreover, he and stage star Desailly struck up an instant mutual antipathy that persisted throughout filming.

Yet La Peau Douce is a compelling piece of cinema. The slick bookend sequences are worthy of the Master of Suspense. But a Hitchcockian mood of simmering unease also permeates the more mundane proceedings, while Truffaut simultaneously applies Renoir's standby maxim that `everyone has their reasons' to avoid apportioning blame to any of the characters for reckless and, ultimately, ruinous actions that have seemingly been foisted upon them by passion or caprice.

The performances are superb, with Desailly struggling to retain his dignity and poise in the depths of a mid-life crisis, while Benedetti switches from domestic goddess to avenging angel with a sadness that contrasts with the self-protective impassivity of Dorléac's enigmatic mistress, who is as icily cool as any Hitchcock blonde.

Georges Delerue's score is equally impressive, as it tempers the emotional tone without manipulating the audience's response. But it's Truffaut and cinematographer Raoul Coutard's use of space and movement that makes this so fascinating. Desailly and Dorléac are constantly kept on the move, so that their relationship remains rootless and it's ironic that the one time they do finally get to relax, on their weekend away in the provinces, they are caught out. Some have criticised the ending for being excessively melodramatic. But one only has to see the anguish on Benedetti's face to realise that her action is perhaps the most authentic thing in this supremely controlled monochrome milieu.

It has often been said that Truffaut lapsed from the fervent iconoclasm of his nouvelle vague phase to produce pictures as polished and literate as the cinéma du papa he had decried as an angty young critic on Cahiers du Cinéma. Bertrand Blier, the enfant terrible of the post-new wave era, has similarly been accused of betraying the early promise that saw him shock bourgeois sensibilities with Les Valseuses (1974), Get Out Your Handkerchiefs (1978) and Buffet Froid (1979). Yet Blier has consistently sought to disconcert the conservative and the smug and it's good to see him back in UK cinemas (albeit the Ciné Lumière in London) with The Clink of Ice.

Novelist Jean Dujardin is in trouble. He drinks so much that he can't be parted from the ice bucket holding his latest bottle of white wine, while his age-gap fling with Russian beauty Christa Theret is clearly designed to ease the pain of separating from wife Audrey Dana and his young son, Emile Berling. Consequently, he is scarcely surprised when he receives a visit from a stranger, who announces himself as the physical embodiment of the cancer that will kill him inside three months.

Dressed in an ill-fitting suit, Albert Dupontel quickly ingratiates himself into Dujardin's household, with housekeeper Anne Alvaro setting him a place at the supper table even though neither she nor Theret can actually see him (as he is only visible to the sufferer and anyone who genuinely loves them). However, Dupontel soon becomes an irksome guest, as he refuses to give Dujardin any privacy and repays any attempts at rebellion with blinding migraines that finally prompt Alvaro to send for doctor Eric Prat.

As a country practitioner, he admits he cannot detect what is ailing Dujardin, but he suspects it's not good and advises Theret to leave before the suffering begins. She departs reluctantly, with an understadning embrace from Alvaro, who has become something of a surrogate mother. But Dujardin takes her departure badly and becomes so drunk that Alvaro has to put him to bed. However, as she has long been secretly in love with him, she can't resist slipping under the covers and is mortified to wake next morning to find her employer bringing her coffee.

Soon afterwards, Alvaro is visited by her own cancer, Myriam Boyer, an aggressive, scheming and bitterly class-conscious shrew who warns Dupontel that Alvaro's love for Dujardin could cause them problems. Her words prove prophetic when Dujardin rails against his disease during what Dana and Berling fear will be a farewell visit. But Alvaro has a plan that involves a couple of ne'er-do-wells she contacts following a hospital appointment and a yacht moored off the coast.

Directing for the first time in five years and making an unlikely premise work with typical pungency and panache, Blier has produced a satirical treatise on mortality that's as witty as it's poignant. The dialogue is occasionally maladroit and too many scenes descend into bellowing. But François Catonné's fluid camera moves around Dujardin's claustrophobic Cévennes villa visually enlivens what is essentially a chamber play, while the leading quartet (who frequently address the audience or gaze directly into the lens) ably captures the respective vulnerability and virulence of the victims and their tormentors and few would begrudge Dujardin and Alvaro the possibly transient respite they earn by fighting back using the scurrilous tactics of their assailants.

Playing against his idiotically suave OSS 117 persona, Dujardin is suitably dissolute and defeated, while Alvaro combats the Blier tendency to misanthropy with the quiet determination with which she plucks her boss back from the brink. By contrast, Dupontel and Boyer deliver almost pantomimic turns that deliciously recall the demonic envoys played by Arletty and Alain Cuny in Marcel Carné's Les Visiteurs du Soir (1942). But this is very much a Blier film and the fact that taboos are challenged and decadence can go unpunished - as it did in so many of his early outings - suggests that he remains as unapologetic non-conformist in his seventies as he was in his prime.

If The Clink of Ice is about confronting death, John Cameron Mitchell's reworking of David Lindsay-Abaire's acclaimed stage play Rabbit Hole is about coming to terms with it. Carefully scripted and enacted, this is never as harrowingly intrusive as François Ozon's Sous le Sable (2000) or Nanni Moretti's The Son's Room (2001). But it nevertheless approaches the subject of grief with a similar mix of sensitivity, insight and wit as Shana Feste's The Greatest (2009), in which Susan Sarandon and Pierce Brosnan's struggle to accept the loss of teenage son Aaron Johnson is only partially eased by the presence of his pregnant girlfriend, Carey Mulligan.

Eight months have passed since Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart's four year-old son ran into the road after the family dog. They haven't had sex since and attend group therapy sessions to rationalise their feelings. But, while Eckhart finds solace in the tales of woe, Kidman can't resist mocking the simpering Christians who attribute their bereavement to God's greater plan and die-hards like Sandra Oh, who continues to attend meetings years after their initial anguish has been assuaged.

Kidman's pain is hardly eased by younger sister Tammy Blanchard's revelation she is pregnant by black musician Giancarlo Esposito or by the fact that mother Dianne Wiest insists upon comparing her grandson's death with his 30 year-old uncle's fatal drug overdose. However, a chance encounter with Miles Teller, the teenager whose car caused the accident, sets Kidman on the path to recovery. But her sudden urge to give away her child's clothes and move to a new house clashes with Eckhart's desire to surround himself with things that remind him of his lost boy.

Despite opening out his play, Lindsay-Abaire retains the emphasis on Kidman and Eckhart dealing with their emotions in isolation rather than as a couple. Fascinated by Teller's homemade comic-book about a parallel universe and the concept that somewhere her alter ego could be having a nice life, Kidman follows him from school and meets secretly with him in parks before his ill-advised visit to the house prompts Eckhart to lose his temper and nearly blunder into a fling with the sexily sympathetic Oh.

Lindsay-Abaire is less successful, however, in making the audience care about Blanchard (a spoilt brat who stole Esposito from a friend) or Wiest, whose neglect of her living children to mourn a worthless scoundrel feels more than a little contrived. Furthermore, towards the end of the story, Lindsay-Abaire and Mitchell clumsily insert a slow-motion flashback to the moment of the crash that smacks more of soap opera than modulated melodrama.

Yet there are several well-judged scenes, among them the opening that sees a well-meaning neighbour trample on the flowers that Kidman has just planted in the garden in a bid to restore some normalcy and Eckhart's choked effort to show prospective buyers around his son's bedroom. However, Mitchell - who is best known for more outré projects like Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001) and Shortbus (2006) - overdoes the use of close-ups and deprives the viewer of reading into the principals' performances. Anton Sanko's strings and piano score proves similarly coercive. But an air of authentic sadness pervades the picture and, if the photogenic Kidman and Eckhart and the idyllic Westchester County setting occasionally seem a touch too upmarket for the material, it certainly makes for affecting viewing.

Despite its earnest efforts to explore the softer centre of an Inner London tough nut, the same can't be said of Sam Holland's Zebra Crossing. Nevertheless, there are flashes of promise in this abrasive, if self-consciously flashy debut.

Eighteen year-old Lee Turnbull is the leader of a South London cabal that also comprises the pugnacious Greg Wakeham, the needy Kyle Treslove and the impressionable Aaron White. Having been abandoned by his mother, Turnbull lives with his brutish alcoholic father Nick Bartlett and devoted sister Kathryn O'Reilly, who is confined to bed with a seemingly terminal illness. He wants to better himself, but can never say no when the opportunity presents itself to rumble with Jay Brown's rival gang or to make a few quid selling drugs for psycho dealer Richard Pryal.

However, following a particularly savage bare-knuckle bout between Wakeham and Brown and yet another lecture from DCI Paul McNeilly on the difficulty of escaping from the lower depths, Turnbull vows to turn over a new leaf. He is encouraged by Michael Maris, a black stranger he encounters during his periodic visits to a quiet church. But when Treslove rapes girlfriend Annie Burkin in a pathetic attempt to prove his masculinity and Wakeham defaults on a payment to the spaced Pryal, Turnbull is forced to choose between the pals who embody his dead-end present and an uncertain, but emancipated future.

Sharing camera and editing duties with Lucio Cremonese and Justin Krish respectively, Holland proves himself to be technically adept and audiovisually audacious. Operating within a tight budget, he capably captures the hopelessness and resentment of working-class lads trapped in soulless concrete estates. However, he errs more towards stereotype in depicting female and non-white characters and allows style to triumph over content and control in the last reel. Moreover, his insights into the problem of severing juvenile bonds add little to Eran Creevy's conclusions in Shifty (2008). But the imagery is often arresting, while the performances are gutsy and raw and there is no reason why, with a tighter script and a little producorial restraint, Holland can't deliver a more impressive sophomore effort.

Finally, this week, there's a complete change of mood and method in Nénette.

Nicolas Philibert is one of the masters of the observational documentary and he keeps the camera firmly fixed on the eponymous orang-utan in this thoughtful investigation into the pros and cons of zoos. Originally planned as a short and filmed over several months in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, this is an audacious audiovisual experiment, as Philibert fills the soundtrack with the voices of unseen visitors and keepers, who put Nénette's life into context, while also musing on her physical beauty, psychological state and raison d'être.

Born in Borneo in 1969, Nénette has been in France for 37 years and has already exceeded the life expectancy of orang-utans in the wild. She has been through three mates and now shares a pen with her son, Tübo, and has contraceptive pills mixed into her food to prevent an incestuous pregnancy. Much of her day is spent sleeping, eating and gazing distractedly through the glass at the faces peering in at her. Whether devouring fruit and yoghurt or drinking tea from a plastic bottle, Nénette seems content. But Philibert and co-cinematographer Katell Djian occasionally catch a look of world-weary melancholy in her eye and it's difficult not to feel pity for a majestic creature that has had to endure captivity in such an enclosed a space for so long.

However, the keepers are keen to point out that Nénette and her companions are well cared for and that the discoveries made by the scientific staff are of enormous benefit both to understanding the beasts and ensuring their continued safe existence in the wild. Some of the comments are delightful, as parents and teachers attempt to interest children in natural history. Others are jokier and slightly disrespectful. But the observations of ordinary members of the public contrast intriguingly with comedian Pierre Meunier's improvised monologue, the gypsy song performed in Nénette's honour and the contention of 18th-century naturalist George-Louis Leclerc, Count de Buffon, that orang-utans were prone to abduct young maidens.

Tangentially, a treatise on the power of actuality to capture and preserve, this is alternately educational, touching and provocative. But, despite the courage of its minimalist close-up focus, it's never quite as compelling as such previous Philibert outings as La Ville Louvre (1990), Un Animal, des Animaux (1996) and Être et Avoir (2002).