Lang's Cool Look at Love
The director of The Monkey's
Mask casts a hauntingly cerebral eye over sex and death
By
MICHAEL FITZGERALD Paris
It's a sunny
winter afternoon in Paris, and Samantha Lang is in love. Demolishing
her crème brûlée and looking out over the city's silver rooftops
from the Centre Pompidou, the Australian director speaks of
her passion: L'Idol, the film she begins shooting in the city
in July. About a suicidal actress who finds spiritual communion
with an elderly Chinese man, "it's a beautiful story-really,
really beautiful," says Lang. "Š I am doing it for love."
British-born
Lang, 33, has been finding her filmmaking feet in France.
The Australian Film Television and Radio School graduate's
first feature, The Well (1997), was selected for competition
at Cannes. Her second, The Monkey's Mask-a stylishly steely
adaptation of Dorothy Porter's verse novel that opens in Australia
this week-was partly funded by Studio Canal Plus, with whom
Lang was discussing L'Idol. Not only is the director fluent
in French-having studied at the Sorbonne as an 18-year-old-but
she's unusually attuned to the culture. "French cinema is
renowned for its erotica, its free sexuality," she says. So
her current embrace "is by no means an accident."
Indeed,
the intellectualization of sex is Lang's cinematic specialty.
Cerebral rather than salacious, her films are marked by psychological
nuance, not prurience. Not that Lang is coy. In the climax
of The Monkey's Mask, about a lesbian P.I.'s bumpy ride through
the poetry world, the film's antagonist flourishes his erect
penis, though it is the graphic depiction of strangulation
sex that earned the film its R rating. Yet words, not action,
give Mask its dangerous charge. "I never knew poetry was about
opening your legs one minute, opening your grave the next,"
muses P.I. Jill Fitzpatrick.
Lang's work
can seem cool and detached at first, but its artful clarity
is haunting. Such was the case with her adaptation of Elizabeth
Jolley's novel The Well, in which the power shifts between
a spinster sheep farmer and her young companion were skillfully-and
scarily-heightened. In The Monkey's Mask, the bedroom maneuvers
of promiscuous tomboy Jill and the older, married Diana seem
less to do with passion than with wrestling out the truth
of a mysterious death. L'Idol, which combines the talents
of 18-year-old Leelee Sobieski (Eyes Wide Shut) and 74-year-old
screenwriter Gérard Brach (Repulsion), completes Lang's own
rite of passage. "These three films will have been my learning
period," she says. "Me cutting my teeth while I was learning
about my place in the world."
The process
continues. While Lang admires Parisians' passion for cinema,
dealing with them on a daily basis has been a struggle, she
says: "They're so rude." And getting L'Idol through to production
in a culture where "conflict is the starting point of all
creativity" has been a stretch: "In France you really have
to stand up for yourself." One senses that Lang will not only
survive the ordeal, but thrive and triumph.
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May 14, 2001 | No. 19
COVER
STORIES
The
Nuns' Stories
Hundreds of Roman Catholic sisters have opened up their lives, their memories
and (when they die) even their brains to researcher David Snowdon so that
all of us can better understand what causes Alzheimer's disease and what
can be done to prevent it
TRAVELER'S
ADVISORY
SOCIETY
BEHAVIOR: The Talking Cure...
Australian schools try shaming troublemakers onto the right path
THE
ARTS
CINEMA: Goodbye, Mrs. Tom Cruise. Hello, Nicole
Kidman, star of a bold new movie... Moulin Rouge awakens the dormant
musical
Samantha Lang, a cinematic connoisseur
of sex
MUSIC: Nick Cave, the gloom rocker, blooms
BOOKS: A slim prayer with sales that are
divine
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