All versions of cover art for _Nobody Else But You_ (originally
_Poupoupidou_) feature an extremely naked Sophie Quinton. Quinton
first became noted for _Who Killed Bambi?_, a film where she plays
a foggy, clueless ingenue, and for years I avoided another film
which she may play the same character. It turns out that _Nobody_
is a surprisingly soulful and inventive film that subverts all
our expectations. In fact, there is a lot more explicit male
nudity in it.

The main character is a detective novelist who visits Mouthe
on the France-Switzerland border, supposedly the coldest
town in France. Snow is a constant in the film, which opens
with Quinton's character's voiceover describing her experience
in her mother's womb. The monolog ends in the revelation that
she has died days ago, and the camera hovers above her frozen
body. The rest of the film finds the novelist investigating
the supposed suicide, accompanied by flashbacks of her as
the local weather girl and celebrity, and her intermittent
soulful reflections on her strange life. The displaced,
delicate intimacy between the glamorous woman and the glum,
poorly dressed novelist is delicious and lovely to watch. It
reminds me of films where the down-on-his-luck seeker-of-the-
truth chases and tries to rescue the unattainable femme fatale
(_For Sale_, with Sandrine Kiberlain; _Mortelle Randonnee_
with Isabelle Adjani; and its remake _Eye of the Beholder_).
It is about time someone reverses the formula and makes the
detective female. In the meantime, we should enjoy the dry
wit of _Poupoupidou_, a film which is a million times better
than the Coen brothers' snow-bound _Fargo_.

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Tsui Hark's _Butterfly Murders_ supposedly spearheaded Hong
Kong's new wave cinema. Watching it for the first time so
many years later, I wonder what the fuss was about. It is
an incredibly talky film, with end-to-end voiceover by the
male scholar narrator. In a way that's fortunate, since
Tsui can turn the most ordinary story into an incoherent
mess, and this martial-arts gothic is extraordinarily
convoluted. It has embedded some numerology weirdness, and
goes for a _Da Vinci Code_-like conspiracy tone that gives
me a headache. (By the way, you should never trust numbers
in ancient Chinese literature, since the authors are known
to choose numbers simply because they rhyme better.)

In one scene the narrator's party enters a castle and find
an even larger party of friend-enemy stationed there, prompting
a character to comment that this is such a crowd scene. That
sentence unfortunately sums up Tsui's aesthetics. Every
scene is so crowded with people and voices (perhaps because
Tsui grew up in over-congested Hong Kong and cannot conceive
of anything else?). In his other films, there are also
continuous yelling, screaming, and general mayhem all the
time. I have never known any filmmaker so afraid of silence
and solitude. _Butterfly Murders_ does boast a handful of poetic
scenes where Michelle Yim's character explores the hidden
caves beneath a castle; it could have inspired Wong Kar-Wai's
Brigitte Lin sequences in _Ashes of Time_. Other than that,
_Butterfly Murders_ is a waste of time.

----------------------------------------------------------

The best film I've seen on amazon.com is _Violette_, about
the author Violette Leduc. That deserves its own column.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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