Mark Cousins’ The Storms of Jeremy Thomas

If given a choice, an independent film producer like Jeremy Thomas would probably prefer to be the subject of a documentary helmed by an idiosyncratic auteur whose approach is always a little off-center. At least we can hope that is the case, because that is what he got. Whether viewers feel the same is an entirely different question. Regardless, the celebrated but not-necessarily household-famous producer gets his due in Mark Cousins’ The Storms of Jeremy Thomas, which opens Friday in New York.

How big is Thomas in the business? He produced Bernardo Bertolucci’s best picture-winning The Last Emperor. Yet, Cousins devotes more screentime to Dom Hemingway and Young Adam that the epic story of Pu Yi, the boy emperor. We even see more from Thomas’s Oscar acceptance speech than from the movie itself. That should give you idea of Cousins’ highly subjective perspective.

Instead, he structures the documentary as a road movie, accompanying Thomas as he drives from his country cottage to Cannes, where his latest film is premiering, Takeshi Miike’s First Love. Frankly, cineastes could probably eagerly devour a documentary solely devoted to Thomas’s collaborations with Miike, also including Blade of the Immortal, 13 Assassins, and Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai.

By the way, Storms is not always safe for work, because Cousins’ second thematic chapter, “Sex,” does indeed show a lot of it. It isn’t inappropriate given Thomas produced Roeg’s Bad Timing: A Sensual Obsession, Cronenberg’s Crash, and Bertolucci’s The Dreamers, but just keep this in mind if you want to stream Storm in an internet café later. Bizarrely, Last Emperor is also ignored during the subsequent chapter, “Politics,” even though the scenes of the Cultural Revolution cry out to be compared with those of the May 1968 protests in The Dreamers (same director, even).

Cousins only interviews a select handful of Thomas’s colleagues, none of whom are directors (one might wonder about his thoughts on that matter). In any event, we hear from Debra Winger (The Sheltering Sky and the unmentioned Everybody Wins) and Tilda Swinton (Young Adam and Only Lover Left Alive), who is rather amusing to watch as she tries to justify Cousins’ choice of title to herself during one of their interview sequences.

Three Thousand Years of Longing: George Miller Adapts A.S. Byatt

As a scholar of myth and folklore, Alithea Binnie is familiar with the Twilight Zone episode “The Man in the Bottle,” or similar such tales. She expects the magical granting of wishes to necessarily result in ironic unintended consequences. Yet, the djinn offering her wishes has a good point when he argues she has free will, doesn’t she, so why should she be bound by the fate of others? However, when he tells her his story, he gives her plenty of examples of things not to wish for in George Miller’s Three Thousand Years of Longing, which opens tomorrow in theaters.

Binnie is used to academic conferences, but there has been something a little off about this gathering in Istanbul. It must be fate, or something, that soon guides her to pick up an old but supposedly valueless bottle in a bazaar. Guess what’s inside. Yes, Idris Elba. The djinn only needs a little time to adjust to Binnie’s language of choice and her physical scale. Then he must grant her three wishes, or suffer a terrible fate.

Naturally, Binnie asks how he got in that bottle in the first place. It is quite an epic story, spanning thousands of years and featuring a cast of characters including the likes the Queen of Sheba, King Solomon, and various royal despots from Byzantine antiquity. Ironically, his tragic history rather reinforces Binnie’s skepticism regarding wishes, but it also fascinates the Joseph Campbell-ish scholar.

Admittedly, Miller has a little trouble wrapping up TTYL (even though it was adapted from the A.S. Byatt short story “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye"), but his patience and deft touch has produced a terrific film, loaded with rich visuals and exotic settings. Somehow, Miller managed to evoke Thief of Baghdad vibes in a way that should not arouse the professionally offended.

Idris is about the only thesp who could play the Djinn with the appropriately imposing physicality and dry wit, while still evoking the sense of an old soul within. He also generates a lot of heat on screen with Aamito Lagum, as the Queen of Sheba.

Guadagnino’s Suspiria

Yes, the dance school is indeed a coven of witches, but they are not the blood-thirstiest killers spreading terror over the divided city of Berlin. Key members have been captured, but the Baader-Meinhof Gang remains a potent criminal and dysfunctional social force during the so-called “German Autumn.” The chaos outside provides a backdrop for the lunacy taking place inside the Markos Dance Academy in Luca Guadagnino’s remake of/homage to/riff on Suspiria (trailer here), which opens tomorrow in New York (11/2 nationwide).

Initially, psychiatrist Dr. Jozef Klemperer assumes his patient Patricia Hingle is delusional when she claims the Markos Academy is dominated by witches, but when she disappears, leaving behind her alarming journal filled with occult scribblings, he starts to wonder. Unfortunately, she was rather prone to unstable behavior and left-wing politics, so most of the school accepts the claim she left to join the Red Army Faction, but not Olga. When she challenges the cover story offered by Madame Blanc, the Pina Bausch-like artistic director, the witches turn their wrath on her on.

Susie Bannion, the new arrival from America, will unwittingly do their dirty work, thanks to an enchantment Madame Blanc puts on her hands and feet. The violent dance she improvises will literally beat-up, unnaturally twist, and rip apart the helpless Russian, in the film’s already celebrated and infamous show-stopping sure-to-be-iconic centerpiece scene. However, it comes squarely in the first act of the 152-minute film.

Frankly, it often feels like Guadagnino is channeling Andrzej Zuławski’s Possession more than Dario Argento’s original Suspiria. You have the washed-out color palettes, the grim Berlin setting, and episodes of jaw-dropping contortionist freak-outs. Instead of hair-raising scares, the response Guadagnino seems to be going for is: “dude that was totally bat-scat crazy.” Regardless, whatever he set out to do, he must have accomplished, because there is no holding back in this film.

In between big nutty set pieces, there is an attempt to stitch together a bit of plot, in which Mother Susperiorum will indeed eventually play a role. Speaking of playing roles, Tilda Swinton’s work here is the stuff of legend. She is wonderfully regal as Madame Blanc, gliding through the film like a cross between Martha Graham and Cruella De Ville. As you have probably heard, Swinton has finally copped to also portraying Dr. Klemperer, under heavy prosthetic makeup and the pseudonym Lutz Ebersdorf. It is pretty amazing how seamlessly she slips into character as the seventy-something man. Her voice and body language are spot-on. Arguably, it is a tribute to her skills that the is-it-her-or-not guessing game went on so long.

Dakota Johnson is also perfect for Bannion, in a glassy-eyed, vacant-staring, loose-limbed marionette (whose strings need to be pulled) kind of way. Chloe Grace Moretz is quite the hot mess as Hingle, whereas Elena Fokina gives one of the most impressive physical performances perhaps ever, as Olga (undoubtedly, she was helped by digital effects and camera tricks, but still, just check it out and try to argue). It is also a pleasure to watch all the sinister scenery chewing from the accomplished continental supporting cast, including Ingrid Caven, Angela Winkler, Silvie Testud, and Renee Soutedijk, as various coven/faculty members.

You have to give Guadagnino credit, because he successfully decouples his reinvented Suspiria form Argento’s original. Even the most ardent Argento will leave the theater saying: “okay, so that was something.”  Despite and/or because of his idiosyncratic decisions, his film is definitely its own animal—and it is a wild beast. The sum of its parts is definitely greater than its whole, but some of those parts horror fans just need to see for themselves. We’re still conflicted on it, but we wouldn’t want to sit out the debates and the second-guessing. Recommended as a horror movie event more than a discrete, formalistic viewing experience, Suspiria opens tomorrow (10/26) in New York, at the Regal Union Square and the IFC Center.

Letters from Baghdad: Gertrude Bell in Her Own Words

She was one of the few women T.E. Lawrence could almost stand—and that’s saying something. Together with Lawrence, Gertrude Bell was instrumental in defining the boundaries of modern day Iraq and installing the Hashemite Dynasty on the throne. Oh well, nobody’s perfect. Bell tells her story in her own words, derived from her personal letters and diplomatic memorandum in Sabine Krayenbühl & Zeva Oelbaum’s Letters from Baghdad (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

Right from the start, Bell’s Oxford matriculation was rather defiant of British societal norms in the mid-1880’s. Thanks to the support of her indulgent widower father, she managed to convert her passion for travel, particularly through the Mideast region, into a full diplomatic position. At first, she was something of an intelligence freelancers, dashing off reports on tribal alliances, but eventually she was given an official brief of her own. She and Lawrence would indeed be colleagues, but not necessarily friends. Arguably, she had better luck forging connections with locals, partly due to the sexism and elitism of the foreign office and partly because she was not the sort to suffer fools gladly.

There is no question Bell led a fascinating life—and for better or worse, her legacy will be an awkward fact of life for decades to come. However, Krayenbühl and Oelbaum are somewhat hemmed in by their approach. Too often, her letters home tell her father she met this newly posted official at a diplomatic soiree and he seemed like a decent chap, but, presumably for security reasons, she rarely discusses her official activities in-country. It is only during the establishment of Iraq that we really hear her addressing her ministerial duties.

Krayenbühl and Oelbaum mostly play it pretty straight during the Iraq sequences, but they clearly hope Bell’s complaints regarding British colonial administration of the future Israel will reverberate with viewers. However, what is most distressing is the omission of Bell’s role as a witness of the Ottoman Empire’s Armenian Genocide. Once again, one of the most censored and denied episodes in Twentieth Century history is again edited into oblivion.

In a stylistic twist, Krayenbühl and Oelbaum have actors playing Bell’s contemporaries as if they were talking head interview subjects, some of which work better than others. However, their judgement is spot-on in terms of the archival footage they married up with words of Bell’s correspondence. Tilda Swinton (who famously portrayed Orlando, whom Virginia Woolf based on Bell’s friend Vita Sackville-West, another talking head in Letters) has fine diction when narrating the older Bell’s letters, but her voice is not especially rich or distinctive.

Letters is fine on the broad strokes of Bell’s life, but it is short on the telling details. It is a competent introduction that is relatively successful humanizing its subject, but it feels better suited to PBS than theatrical distribution. Recommended (with limited reservations) as a future VOD pick, Letters from Baghdad opens this Friday (6/2) in New York, at the Angelika Film Center.

Dreams Rewired: Retro Future Shock

If Guy Maddin set out to adapt a ten year-old Wired magazine article, the result would probably look a lot like this, but the resulting film would not be so smugly assured of its insightfulness. That must be the difference between the Canadian and Austrian temperaments. Martin Reinhart, Thomas Tode, and Manu Luksch suggest our current digital era is only one of many successive information revolutions that constantly recalibrated the speed of Twentieth Century life. They will illustrate their point through the collage of rarely seen but suitably ironic early cinema clips that constitutes Dreams Rewired (trailer here), opening this Wednesday at Film Forum.

So perhaps the more things change, the more they stay the same—or rather maybe the only constant is change? One of those is the general gist of Rewired. The trio of co-directors plus their fourth co-screenwriter Mukul Patel somewhat convincingly suggest the magnitude of innovation wrought by the internet and wireless communication is not so very different than societal transformation brought about by the telegraph, telephone, radio (the original wireless), and forms of moving pictures.

They probably have a point there, but they never really take it to a deeper level. Instead, the film is really more about the cascading images of retro-futurism and technological anxiety culled from the films of Thomas Edison, Alice Guy, Dziga Vertov, Carl Dreyer, Rene Clair, and Louis Feuillade. Both Chaplin and Keaton make cameo appearances, but probably the most readily identifiable clips come from Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, which turned out not to reflect the future after all.

Throughout Rewired, the audience waits for Reinhart, Tode, Luksch, and Patel to step up their analysis, but it stays at the level of “look at how impressed people were with their televisions and switch boards.” As a result, the real reason for watching the docu-essay is the wild imagery they have assembled. If you want to see Teutonic men in tights and space helmets, this is film you have been waiting for. A game Tilda Swinton also plays along, narrating the repetitive thesis and sometimes providing archly anachronistic contemporary dialogue for some of the scenes the filmmakers incorporate.

If you enjoy retro-futuristic space opera, there are amusing bits and pieces in Rewired, but you are probably better off revisiting episodes of Tom Corbett, Space Cadet or classic films like Metropolis and Destination Moon (neither of which suited the purposes of Reinhart, etc., etc.). It sounds like brainy fun, but it really plays like an internet supercut. Problematically lightweight, Dreams Rewired is bound to leave viewers wanting more (of something, anything) when it opens this Wednesday (12/16) in New York, at Film Forum.

Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer

In the future, the world will become a giant allegory. Nothing in this claustrophobic dystopia performs a practical purpose, but serves a vision of class warfare at its most extreme. At least it all looks cool when the train’s tail-section revolts in Bong Joon-ho’s first English language production Snowpiercer (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

Seventeen years ago, a climate control experiment went horribly wrong. Now that the Earth is a frozen wasteland, the only surviving humans live in the protection of the globe circling train providentially prepared by the mysterious Wilford. However, instead of assigning productive tasks to each survivor, the Wilford express maintains a rigid and baffling bizarre social caste system. The further up you travel, the richer, crueler, and idler the passengers get. It’s all sushi and filet mignon up front, but gelatinous protein bars for the proletarian in the tail-section, who do not really appear to work either, but just sit around waiting to be beaten by the guards (apparently the train’s only productive class).

Curtis Everett has emerged as the leader of the proles in the back of the train, whether he likes it or not. He is still haunted the things he did during his darkest, most desperate hours, but old Gilliam provides encouragement and wise counsel to the budding revolutionary. Everett is biding his time, waiting for a cue from a source ensconced somewhere further up the train, but the arbitrary ruthlessness of Minister Mason, a buck-toothed caricature of an elitist exploiter, forces his hand. Freeing Nam-gung Min-su, the drug-addled Korean security specialist who designed the train’s door locks, and his train-born daughter Yo-na, Everett and his followers plan to fight their way to the engine room. Stopping anywhere short of that will doom their revolt.

Frankly, Snowpiercer is even less subtle than it sounds. Tilda Swinton is a great screen thespian, but her portrayal of Mason is embarrassingly cringey. She is also emblematic of the film’s fundamental problem—this simply is not a believable world. People act mean and savage for no logical reason accept to live up to a class-based stereotype. Nonetheless, production designer Ondřej Nekvasil and art director Štefan Kováčik created a distinctively detailed calling card that ought to earn them a gig on the next Terry Gilliam or Tim Burton film.

If you prefer your movie leads on the sullen side than you will probably be okay with Chris Evans’ turn as Everett. He is a brooding machine, but looks respectable during the well-staged action sequences. John Hurt’s Obiwan shtick also works well enough for Gilliam the sage. However, the only real surprises found in the film come from the characters of Nam-gung Min-su and Yo-na—as well as the respective performances of Korean superstar Song Kang-ho and Ko Ah-sung, his juvenile co-star in The Host. Viewers should keep their eyes on this tandem, because together they nearly redeem all of Snowpiercer’s flaws.

Uncut by the Weinsteins, Snowpiercer is so didactic it will give intellectually sophisticated viewers a headache. Yet, there are fascinating Easter Eggs buried throughout it, thanks to a skilled design team and Bong’s Host alumni. Diverting for those who appreciate spectacle and mayhem, but disappointing on any deeper level, Snowpiercer opens this Friday (6/27) in New York at the Angelika Film Center.

Wes Anderson’s Cannes Opener Moonrise Kingdom

Two twelve year-old runaways would like to remake the generic sounding Mile 3.25 Tidal Inlet into a New England version of the Blue Lagoon, but they aim to maintain the cultural trappings of 1965 middle class America, as they relate to it, in the process.  Unfortunately, the adult world keeps intruding on their private moments in Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom (trailer here), the opening night film of this year’s Cannes Film Festival, which bows theatrically in New York this Friday.

Sam Shakusky is a terrible Khaki Scout.  Actually, his skills are not that bad, but he does not fit in socially with Scout Master Ward’s troupe.  Unbeknownst to Ward, Shakusky is an orphan, about to get the heave-ho from his foster family.  However, the sensitive scout has successfully wooed Suzy Bishop, the eldest child of two self-absorbed yet profoundly unhappy attorneys. 

When Shakusky fails to appear at revile one fateful morning, it sets off a manhunt throughout New Penzance Island, taxing the meager resources of Captain Sharp, Mrs. Bishop’s recently dumped lover.  Chastely dedicated to each other, the two fugitives would like to permanently retreat from reality at the prosaically named inlet they duly redub “Moonrise Kingdom.” Instead, they will repeat a cycle of chase, apprehension, and escape, as a historic storm approaches New Penzance, as it always happens in an island-bound story.

It takes about ten seconds for Moonrise Kingdom to announce itself as a Wes Anderson film, through his constantly panning camera and the richly detailed vintage sets.  Indeed, the attention to detail extends down to the covers of the chapter-books Bishop reads aloud to Shakusky.  Yet, rather than detracting from his fable-like story, Anderson’s signature style is perfectly suited to the innocence of young love.  Focusing on young POV characters is actually quite a shrewd strategy on his part, giving him the license to incorporate all kinds of nostalgic eccentricity (nod to Norman Rockwell? Check.) while staying faithful to their precocious worldview.  Frankly, this is the sort of film a visual stylist like Tim Burton ought to be making, instead of aimless tent-poles, like Dark Shadows.

As Mr. Bishop, Anderson mainstay Bill Murray once again plays a middle-aged depressive with deep-seated relationship woes.  Fellow alumnus Jason Schwartzman is also back for more, getting some of Moonrise’s best comedy scenes as Cousin Ben, a slick operating senior Khaki Scout.  Indeed, the film boasts several notably colorful supporting turns, including Bruce Willis, acting his age and playing against his action hero persona as the put upon Captain Sharp.  Tilda Swinton also absolutely plays to the hilt the personification of bureaucracy known simply as “Social Services,” while the mere sight of Bob Balban’s “Narrator” in his bright crimson wardrobe generates laughter.  Still, the dramatic load largely falls on the young newcomers, Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward, who are quite emotionally engaging leads, playing their scenes together scrupulously straight.

Essentially, Moonrise is a children’s movie for adults.  Robert Yeoman’s cinematography gives it all a sensitive period sheen, while the soundtrack (dominated more by the unlikely combination of Benjamin Britten and Hank Williams recordings than Alexandre Desplat’s original themes) effectively underscores the wistful vibe.  Altogether, it is very Wes Anderson, but its gentle, humane spirit is quite winning.  Recommended surprisingly highly (well beyond Anderson’s established circle of admirers), Moonrise opens this Friday (5/25) in New York at the AMC Lincoln Square and Regal Union Square.

EUFF ’11: The Invisible Frame & Rabbit a la Berlin

For most mere mortals, the non-narrative experimental film and the travelogue rank amongst the least engaging of film genres. Yet, unlikely enough, a film that combined elements of both spawned a sequel of sorts. In the waning days of the Cold War, filmmaker Cynthia Beatt followed Tilda Swinton as she biked around the Berlin Wall in Cycling the Frame. With the fall of the Wall and the reunification of Germany, it made a certain amount of sense to revisit their trip twenty-one years later in The Invisible Frame (trailer here), with screens with the superior Oscar nominated documentary Rabbit á la Berlin at the 2011 European Union Film Festival.

Beginning and ending at the Brandenburg Gate, Swinton does indeed peddle around the Wall, or at least its remnants. We see the few odd standing fragments and looming watchtowers, decaying ghosts of a tragic period of German history. She frequently stops to examine the many monuments to the victims of the GDR regime, such as Günter Litfin, the first reported escapee killed by his Communist captors. In her voice-overs, Swinton occasionally offers some navel-gazing ruminations and recites some poetry (the most appropriate being some untitled verse by Soviet dissident Anna Akhmatova).

Frame shows viewers a whole lot of peaceful countryside, which might be pleasant, but also gets repetitive. Still, it is quite the contrast to our general mental picture of the Wall and its environs. At her most insightful, Swinton muses on the clarity with which one can see how dramatically the Wall divided people and neighborhoods, through its absence. Unfortunately, Frame makes a wholly inappropriate analogy in its final dedication to the people of so-called “Palestine.” For shame.

The Berlin Wall never saved a single life (quite the contrary), whereas Israel’s security barrier has saved hundreds, perhaps thousands. Relatively unobtrusive over most of its length, with regular established crossing points, it is protective rather than imprisoning, bearing no comparison to the Wall. Indeed, those committing acts of terror in Israel are much closer akin to the Communist guards, firing at fellow Germans like Chris Gueffroy, the final victim of the Wall, whose memorial is also found along Frame’s route.

Unquestionably, directors Bartek Konopka and Piotr Rosolowski’s truly original Rabbit á la Berlin (trailer here) is the main event of the double bill. During the immediate post-war years, a hearty band of rabbits survived by raiding the garden patches on Potsdamer Platz. Much to their supposed surprise, sheltering walls were suddenly erected around the bunnies in 1961. With a nice grassy run, plenty of shade, and precious little human contact, the whiskered critters made like rabbits and multiplied. The East German guards even began adopting them to help pass the time.

However, for many West Berliners, especially artists, the rabbits’ ability to burrow beneath the walls made them symbols of something greater—coyote tricksters for their divided age. Then, as escape attempts became more frequent and daring, the rabbits’ peaceful lives were upturned. Their lush grass was destroyed so that fugitive footsteps would be more easily tracked in the exposed dirt. Formerly their protectors, the guards declared open season on the rabbits, like a red army of Elmer Fudds.

One of Rabbit’s many surprises is the extent and quality of the archival film capturing the Berlin rabbits in their former environment. Credible simply as a wildlife film (even featuring the smoothly placid narration of Krystyna Czubówna, a well-known Polish voice-over artist for nature docs), it also has a slyly subversive sensibility, particularly when it incorporates news footage of the likes of Fidel Castro and Yassir Arafat (take note Beatt) gawking approvingly at the Wall. Wistful without being nostalgic, it was one of the more inventive and entertaining documentaries to play in New York last year. Highly recommended (but Frame not so much), Rabbit screens Sunday (3/20) and Wednesday (3/23) as part of the EUFF at the Siskel Film Center in Chicago.

Guadagnino’s I Am Love

For the opulently wealthy Recchi family, life in Milan truly is La Dolce Vita. However, it is also a life of quiet desperation for Emma Recchi, until a chance encounter awakens her deepest emotions in Luca Guadagnino’s exquisitely crafted I Am Love (trailer here), which opens in New York this Friday.

Emma Recchi married into her life of wealth and privilege. In the process, she has forsaken her Russian heritage, adopting a properly Italian identity as befitting a Recchi. She is a loving mother and a reasonably devoted wife, but as her grown children leave to pursue their lives, hers becomes increasingly empty. As Love opens, she is busy overseeing the caterers during the Recchis’ birthday celebration for their elderly patriarch, Edoardo Sr. To their collective shock, rather than naming his son (Emma’s husband) Tancredi as his sole successor, old man Edoardo stipulates a power-sharing arrangement between his long-time presumptive heir and grandson Edo Jr.

Obviously, this significantly changes their family dynamics, so when Emma Recchi meets Edo Jr’s friend Antonio in passing that night, she hardly suspects the important role he will play in her life. She certainly made an impression of him though. Planning to open his own restaurant with Edo Jr, the much younger chef happens to run into Emma in Sanremo, the picturesque town on the Italian Riviera. This time the attraction is mutual and overwhelming, but their affair will have consequences.

While Love consists of the thoroughly tangled intimate relationships one might expect from a Cassavetes film, stylistically it is the exact opposite. Visually it soars and sweeps, dazzling the audience with its grand panoramas and glossy sheen. It is bravura work from cinematographer Yorick Le Saux, but it has the effect of keeping the characters at arm’s length from the audience.

However, as a self-consciously operatic film, Guadagnino rather brilliantly uses the music of Pulitzer Prize winning composer John Adams to convey the tumultuous emotions buried beneath the Recchis’ icy reserve. Though often described as a minimalist, his excerpted themes have a pronounced romanticism that perfectly matches the film’s luxurious visual texture.

As the film’s emotional center, Tilda Swinton subtly expresses Emma’s longing and regrets, despite Guadagnino’s maelstrom of imagery. Indeed, she would well relate to The Bridges of Madison County, if it were not so tacky and middlebrow. It is a finely calibrated performance that holds the audience riveted, carrying the emotive load throughout the film.

Truly the work of a daring auteur, Love is the sort of film that needs time to sink in. Yet, the effect of Guadagnino’s artistry (with vital contributions from Le Saux and Adams) is so immediate and powerful, it inspires slack-jawed awe. A rich feast for the senses, the accomplished Love opens this Friday (6/18) in New York at the Lincoln Plaza and Sunshine Cinema.

Zonca’s Julia

If ever there was a film that could frighten a hardcore alcoholic into rehab, Erick Zonca’s Julia is it. The title character does just about every reprehensible thing a human being can do, always managing to find a new low to sink to. Opening tomorrow in New York, Julia (trailer here) is both a harrowing portrait of addiction as well as a white-knuckle crime story.

Those who need to like a film’s protagonist should stop reading now. Julia Harris does not go to sleep, she passes out. She is a self-destructive user, who is not fooling anyone anymore, except maybe herself. She has burned nearly every bridge in her wake, including the real estate job her ever-loyal on-the-wagon want-to-be boyfriend Mitch arranged for her. Penniless with no prospects, she pretends to help Elena, her obviously delusional neighbor and fellow AA member, kidnap her son Tom from his wealthy grandfather. However, she plans to double-cross the guileless Elena and ransom Tom back to his grandfather.

Zonca’s film is hardly a remake of Jimmy the Kid. Harris and Tom do not exactly bond. At first, she keeps him bound and unconscious while high-tailing it for Mexico. Eventually, she tries to make nice, telling Tom she is taking him to Elena, the mother he never really knew, as she secretly negotiates his ransom through an alarmed Mitch. Though he is skeptical, Tom forms an uneasy truce with his kidnapper. However, her incessant boozing attracts the wrong kind of attention in Tijuana, at which point things really go south.

Two and a half hours of watching Tilda Swinton play a dissipated, amoral drunk might sound excruciatingly long, but thanks to her manic conviction in the title role, Julia seems far shorter than its actual running time. It is an eye-opening performance that should completely change icy preconceptions of Swinton. Scarily compelling, she never seems false or exaggerated, despite her sheer ferocity.

Low-key veteran character actor Saul Rubinek perfectly compliments her, supplying the film’s moral center as Mitch, the world-weary romantic. 24 fans will also note the brief but effective appearance of Jude Ciccolella (a.k.a. Chief of Staff Mike Novick) as Nick, Harris’s reformed partner in debauchery.

Inspired by Cassavetes, Zonca is true to the pioneering indie filmmaker’s gritty sensibility, while adding the trappings of a film noir thriller. Though undeniably dark, it is never nihilistic, always embracing the humanity of its deeply flawed characters. Clearly not for everyone’s tastes, Julia represents tour-de-force work from its director and fearless lead. Intense to the point of exhausting, it is recommended for discerning audiences. It opens tomorrow in New York at the Angelika and Beekman Theaters.