By Ray Pride, Ellen Fox

MAY 18, 1998: 

Artemisia

A ravishingly lit and decorated romantic biography of 17-year-old Artemisia Gentileschi (Valentina Cervi), a hot-headed young woman with a gift for art in seventeenth-century Florence, where young girls are not supposed to want to do such things, particularly if it involves asking men to model nude for her. (She's kicked out of convent school right off the bat for drawing nude self-portraits by candlelight.) Her father, the painter Orazio Gentileschi (a sage Michel Serrault), recognizes her gift and encourages the fresco painter Agostino Tassi to take her on as a pupil. The bond of teacher and student, as it must in such lush bodice-rippers, produces more than art... Sensual turbulence ensues, with much discussion of the meaning of art and much contemplation of the naked form, both male and female. Cinematographer Benôit Delhomme's work is a delicate study in lighting, with many luminous scenes suggestive of the styles of the paintings on display. From the talented director of the wonderful but little-seen "Son of the Shark." (Ray Pride)

The Horse Whisperer

Does anything faze Robert Redford? He's like a stone that holds the warmth of the sun. As horse healer Tom Booker, Redford's classically strong, silent, another righteous man of few words-the kind of maddeningly Zen man that women hate to love. When Annie, a frantic New York magazine editor (Kristen Scott Thomas) contacts him after her teenage daughter and horse have been injured in an accident (a fast, waking nightmare in the first ten minutes that had me gasping "If only...."), he declines with that damnable intractable folksiness. Doesn't he help people with horse problems? "I help horses with people problems," he explains from a side-of-the-road phone booth. Sigh. Annie drags daughter and horse out West in the Range Rover anyway and cuts off his polite refusal with impatience: "Please don't do the 'Shucks, ma'am' thing again." Thus begins a stunning, almost three-hour showcase of the West that, like country livin', takes its own sweet time but never once feels slow. It's also not, to Redford's credit, completely sanctimonious. Yes, yes, it is "visually stunning," with the vastness of the scenery tempered by all the fetishistic gimcracks of ranches and riding. The glinting buckles and warm, worn leather straps, the clean buttoned-down shirts, not a single plop of shit in sight. Redford's camera captures every sun-dappled thing and makes you glad to live on this Earth, and in the US of A in particular. But while the busy-for-nothin' New York lifestyle frequently comes up short against the Western wisdom of changing seasons, people are the same all over. You sought some healing clarity in the West? Redford wisely undercuts that myth: his characters are left coping, rather than healed. Annie jogs to clear her head, but Booker takes his morning rides. Their hands never rest. (Their attraction is sealed in his intense, lingering squeeze of her pants leg. Gulp.) As Annie turns on to some of the reasons she's fled the East, we learn that the West can be an escape for a man who made his life there. Who wouldn't be tempted to spend a life with the horses when human interaction always brings us the most torment? It's also, unfortunately, the thing that brings us the most joy. That a man past 60 can point out the existence of necessary distractions-animals, creative projects like magazines, or even movie-making-is not so much stony as it is stoic. (Ellen Fox)

Shooting Fish

If only charm were as simple as a pattern of speech or the flop of a forelock. If only, "Shooting Fish" wonders at futile length. I wanted too much to like this strenuously zany romantic comedy, but its attractiveness comes down to two words: Kate Beckinsale. Without Beckinsale, the ingenuous Flora Poste of "Cold Comfort Farm," the classically cranky compulsive in Whit Stillman's upcoming "The Last Days of Disco," this movie would be dead in the water. Stefan Schwartz flings her toothy, beaming face into a sea of schemes and scams dreamt up by a pair of ostensibly charming con-men-cum-Peter Pans. The frenzied story, set in contemporary London, is written, directed and performed as if it were still the London of the 1960s. But the characters here aren't the Beatles. Fast-talking American Dan Futterman is teamed with Englishman Stuart Townsend, and their unconvincing fleecings of the rich are leavened somewhat by Beckinsale, their charming temp, who, wouldn't you know, turns out to be rich. A doctor. And, and, and.... Could she love one of these losers? It's always something. And Beckinsale? Is something else. (Ray Pride)

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