Men Behaving Badly

Two guys weighed down by the old ball and chain:

EVERYTHING STRANGE AND NEW (2009) (B-minus) - Wayne (Jerry McDaniel) traipses through his days in a daze and a haze. He's married, with two boys, 4 and 5. He kvetches about money. He takes the bus each day to his boring construction job. He has beers with the boys, where they bitch about their zipless marriages and crazy wives. They barely have the energy to fantasize about straying.

This is the second feature from Frazer Bradshaw, who makes his living as a cinematographer. Shooting in Oakland, Bradshaw lingers achingly over the mundane details of domestic life: cooking a meal, reading to the kids, waiting for the bus, getting kids to eat dinner, lying silently in bed next to your spouse. Bradshaws camera stares at house fronts and across rooftops. He records routine traffic, then plays it backward. The camera tracks with Wayne walking down the street, sweeps around in a lazy 360, and there's Wayne, walking past the same restaurant, as if he's stuck in a loop (an obvious metaphor).

Wayne narrates in a monotone that is barely more than a mumble. Often the dialogue comes from off-screen while the camera goes off on a lark. One key piece of dialogue takes place during a super-slow zoom into the leaves of a tree. Wayne dresses as a clown to entertain his kids' party, and we see him in that costume during random scenes -- alone in bed (did his wife leave him?) or at the convenience store, where he gets change for the bus. A recurring musical interlude sounds like an Irish symphony warming up.

Time passes. We hit the one-third mark, then the halfway point, and nothing of significance happens. But at the two-thirds mark, he has an awkward exchange with his buddy Leo (Rigo Chacon Jr.) who has turned to porn (on videotape) as he goes through a divorce with his unstable wife. Wayne's boss Manny (Luis Saguar) escapes with chemicals. A tragedy hits at the climax. A final scene is of a man coming home from work, steeling himself to yet again interact with the daily cacophony that is the wife and kids. Numbing and brutal.

GILLES' WIFE (2005) (B-minus) - This glacial drama has one thing going for it: the face of Emanuelle Devos.

Here she plays a super-dutiful wife, Elisa. In the hardscrabble world of the early 20th century, she cooks and cleans and gardens and tends to the children, giving birth to a third during the film -- all while Gilles (Clovis Cornillac) has an affair with her sister.

During the first hour, Elisa notices all the little sign of a fiery romance between her louse of a spouse and the prettier Victorine (Laura Smet). She is impossibly stoic, as if she is merely piecing out a puzzle, trying to understand the situation. We watch Gilles and Victorine dance suggestively down at the local pub; and we see Gilles seethe with jealousy as Victorine takes a spin with another suitor. Elisa represents the fine line between saint and sucker. Too often she comes off as simply a dimwit, a mopey Edith to a philandering Archie.

At the midway point, the husband and wife finally verbalize the realities of their menage a trois. The second half is devoted to Gilles' determination to end the affair and his mental breakdown in trying to forget about Victorine. It doesn't go well. All the while,

The main problem here is that journeyman director Frederic Fonteyne emphasizes mood way more than narrative. This is a plod, though a gorgeous one. He works well in confined spaces, sometimes devoting a fraction of the screen to a glimpse through a window. His final sequence of the film -- employing a gymnastic flip of the camera -- is breathtaking and heartbreaking. "Gilles' Wife" is worth seeing for Devos' performance and for that profoundly disturbing way in which Elisa finally solves her problem.

BONUS TRACK
The trailer for "Everything Strange and New":