Short Cuts (Capsule reviews of new and upcoming video releases)

• Abandon
Directed by Stephen Gaghan

Winning an Oscar for Traffic gave screenwriter Stephen Gaghan the muscle to direct this psychological thriller starring Katie Holmes. But it’s not your typical Hollywood thriller. It focuses more on the psychological state of Katie (Holmes), a serious and driven college student whose wunderkind composer/boyfriend (Charlie Hunnam) disappeared two years back. When the boyfriend’s rich family wants to close the case, detective Wade Handler (Benjamin Bratt) starts sniffing around campus. There he meets a bunch of 20-somethings who explore writer Gaghan’s fondness for drug-taking, hedonistic sex and pop-cultural references. Katie begins to suspect her boyfriend is still alive, and indeed we see him popping up on screen every few minutes. This intrigues Handler, but not enough to actually employ his detective skills to locate the guy (even though he’s seen everywhere). Instead, he and Katie start hanging out at his place, one of those cop apartments that exist only in movies: wood floors, arty photo albums, copies of Camus’ The Stranger lying around. Is Katie a) crazy, b) in serious danger, or c) playing the guy like a Stradivarius? Abandon bends genres in so many ways that its final shape may leave you a little disappointed. But it’s definitely not your usual commercial Hollywood thriller.

• Heaven
Directed by Tom Tykwer

Taking an unfilmed script from Krzysztof Kieslowski, director Tom Tykwer (Run, Lola, Run) crafts another modern-day fable about people locked together by fate, trying to do good despite the mistakes they’ve made. The story opens with Philippa (Kate Blanchett), an English teacher living in Turin, planting a bomb in an office building. She is convinced she can wipe out a drug kingpin with her act. The deadly and unexpected result leaves her in police custody, surrounded by Italian investigators who don’t understand a word of English. Enter Filippo (Giovanni Ribisi), a young Italian policeman who translates her statement – and falls in love. Within its trim 95 minutes, Heaven doesn’t get bogged down in the vague philosophical detours of Tykwer’s earlier The Princess and the Warrior. Instead it focuses on beautiful compositions, where light and weather play key notes in the narrative, and the implied twinning of Philippa and Filippo (who share birthdays, names and even haircuts by the movie’s end). These soulmates are straight out of fairy tale, or at least the Garden of Eden, the shameless gates of which the couple seem to re-enter by the final shot of the film. Mesmerizing, beautiful to look at, and nearly transcendent.

•Secretary
Directed by Steven Shainberg

Since 1989’s Sex, Lies and Videotape, James Spader has been the unacknowledged King of Weird Sex Films. We thought David Cronenberg’s Crash was the culminating achievement in his strange oeuvre, but Steven Shainberg’s Secretary goes that extra mile. Spader plays a reclusive lawyer into sado-masochistic games. He hires secretary Maggie Gyllenhaal, tall, leggy and into self-mutation, to type up his briefs. Let the games begin! Maggie is soon bending over her boss’s desk to receive regular spankings and restricting herself to two peas and mounds of mashed potatoes for dinner (on Spader’s instructions). But at least she’s stopped cutting herself with utility blades. The script by Erin Cressida Wilson tries to show that any kind of love is valid – even one based on pain and humiliation – and the film predictably raised the hackles of feminists, who no doubt missed the metaphorical possibilities of the story. Really, this is more of a fairy tale than a documentary on S&M, as evidenced by Gyllenhaal’s slow crawl around the office on all fours with a retyped brief dangling from her teeth. It’s about boss/employee relationships, and what happens when they go beyond the office. And it’s occasionally quite funny, though a little arch in its insistence that these two were made for each other. Spader gives nuance to yet another in a long line of seething psycho roles, and Gyllenhaal is effectively coy as the submissive secretary.

•He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not

Directed by Laetitia Colombani

Talk about playing against type. French actress Audrey Tautou, best known as the cute and pixie-ish Amelie, plays an art student with serious mental problems, the least of which is sending anonymous gifts to her married neighbor, a cardiologist. The opening credits – red hearts and valentines swirled with lettering – suggest a light, whimsical love story, but He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not is this only in retrospect, when all the strange twists and turns have unraveled. We are led to believe Angelique (Tautou) is having an affair with the married doctor, but this narrative skids to a halt halfway through as the movie rewinds (literally) to offer another perspective – that of Loic, the doctor (played by Samuel Le Bihan). Comedy ensues as Loic tries to figure out who’s sending him flowers and unsigned paintings: is it his secretary, a patient, or his gay physical therapist colleague? Angelique’s wily persistence (a kind of perverse flip on Tautou’s whimsical persistence in Amelie) is a little scary to watch: that impish smile suddenly seems quite menacing. And director Colombani has fun with camera moves and shifts in perspective that recall Amelie as well as Kieslowski’s Red. The tone of the film lurches from comedy to horror to existential query before we can even decide what’s actually going on; and the sly ending is as disturbing as it is cute. Interesting.

• Max
Directed by Menno Meyjes

Little-seen on its release, Max asks the question: how did Adolph Hitler, a dissatisfied WWI veteran and failed artist, become the leader of the Third Reich? Well, director Meyjes’ script posits a relationship with a Jewish art dealer, Max Rothman (John Cusack). The 30-ish Hitler (played by Noah Taylor with a mean chip on his shoulder) visits Max’s gallery asking to have his sketches looked at. The war-wounded Rothman (he lost an arm fighting for Germany in WWI) urges young Adolph to "dig deeper" – to channel all the anger he feels towards Germany’s fall into his painting. But history shows that Hitler was destined to become a public speaker, not the next Max Ernst. The film – stylized to contrast the decadence of 1930’s Germany with its poverty and rising public anger – moves at a sluggish pace, but offers fascinating arguments for and against the existence of modern art. Max’s gallery walls are covered with modern ugliness: the Expressionists, who painted the dark, twisted side of German angst. On Adolph’s wall hangs a light pencil sketch of a dog in profile, something that is obviously kitsch. Rothman pushes Hitler to drop his military pals and explore Futurism; Hitler responds with feverish drawings charting the Reichstag, the German Cross and other Nazi visions. It’s this give-and-take between Max’s opportunism and Hitler’s all-too-clear destiny that give the film whatever energy it has, Oh, that and a truly scary, mad-dog turn by Australian actor Taylor, whose work deserves a nomination as Best Animal Performance of the Year.