With a Friend Like Harry ...With a Friend Like Harry ... * Written by Dominik Moll and Gilles Marchand * Directed by Moll * Starring Sergi Lopez, Laurent Lucas, and Mathilde Seigner * Miramax Zoe After playing a straight cipher who exists only for the clandestine pleasure of privileged Nathalie Baye in the dreadful An Affair of Love, hunky, hirsute hirsute - Occasionally used as a humorous synonym for hairy. Spanish actor Sergi Lopez has found a role worthy of his tremendous talent: He plays latently homo Harry--an extroverted ex·tro·vert·ed also ex·tra·vert·ed adj. Marked by interest in and behavior directed toward others or the environment as opposed to or to the exclusion of self; gregarious or outgoing: , ingratiating in·gra·ti·at·ing adj. 1. Pleasing; agreeable: "Reading requires an effort.... Print is not as ingratiating as television" Robert MacNeil. 2. sociopath--in French director Dominik Moll's pearl of a film With a Friend Like Harry.... (The original French title translates as Harry, He's Here to Help, but the intelligent irony of that moniker was apparently lost on American distributor Miramax.) Harry shoves himself into the center of the movie early on, metamorphosing into a scary tempest within the banal but nicely rendered teapot of a middle-class family on summer holiday. After a 16-year hiatus, Harry recognizes his long-lost classmate Michel (Laurent Lucas)--now a teacher and family man--at the sink in a highway road-stop washroom (a nice touch), and he winds up inviting himself for an indefinite stay at Michel's rustic summer house. Michel's tough, fed-up, and beautiful wife, Claire (Mathilde Seigner), is soon cringing at Harry's lunacy, and Michel hasn't the backbone to toss him out. It seems that Harry--now a man of means A Man of Means is a collection of six short stories written in collaboration by P. G. Wodehouse and C. H. Bovill. The stories first appeared in the United Kingdom in the Strand in 1914, and in the United States in Pictorial Review in 1916. who doesn't need to work--has been obsessed ob·sess v. ob·sessed, ob·sess·ing, ob·sess·es v.tr. To preoccupy the mind of excessively. v.intr. with Michel all those years, remembering every word of the sexually charged poems and surreal sci-fi stories Michel wrote for their high school paper. Indeed, Harry soon decides to save Michel from his mundane life so he can dedicate himself to his (dubious) art. That means the systematic elimination of Michel's parents, brother, spouse, and his three needy kids. (Harry also gets rid of his own companion, a girl toy called Plum.) The only other Gallic filmmaker who could get away with such an outrageous family drama is Claude Chabrol. The homosexual text is barely sub: Ditching the family would leave two to tango, and there's a Pan-like twinkle in Harry's eyes. Inspired but never limited by the work of Alfred Hitchcock--Harry's last name, Balestrero, is that of Henry Fonda's accused innocent in The Wrong Man--Moll's film owes debts to both Strangers on a Train (Robert Walker assuming he has the right to knock off to cease, as from work; to desist. - De Quincey. To force off by a blow or by beating. To assign to a bidder at an auction, by a blow on the counter. To leave off (work, etc.). See also: Knock Knock Knock Knock object-of-desire Farley Granger's wife) and Rope (John Dall and, once again, Farley Granger as two intellectual lovers so arrogant that they commit the "perfect" murder). The milieu is as French as, um, Hitchcock's Riviera-set To Catch a Thief--OK, I'm kidding, but joking around is not out of place for this finely tuned new movie that deploys extremely black humor en route to a terrorizing denouement de·noue·ment also dé·noue·ment n. 1. a. The final resolution or clarification of a dramatic or narrative plot. b. . Hitch lives. Vive Dominik Moll. Feinstein also writes for Time Out New York and the New York Daily News New York Daily News Morning daily tabloid newspaper published in New York City. It was founded in 1919 by Joseph Medill Patterson and his cousin Robert McCormick as a subsidiary of the Tribune Co. of Chicago. The first successful tabloid-format newspaper in the U.S. . Find links to Web sites related to With a Friend Like Harry ... at www.advocate.com |
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