Meg Tilly – Christian Sauvé

Body Snatchers (1993)

ByChristian Sauvé 2019-10-172023-03-19 Movie Review

(On Cable TV, October 2019) I have now seen four different film versions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers —1956, 1978, 1993, and 2007, and they each have the singular distinction of being worse than the previous one. I saw the now mostly forgotten 1993 version out of a sense of completion, but I can’t say I’m feeling fulfilled now that I’ve seen it. The problems start early with Body Snatchers, as a moody teenager’s voiceover opens the film with a soliloquy more at ease in an overdone coming-of-age drama than a full-blown horror movie—it’s a strong cue about the film being aimed explicitly at teenage audiences rather than tap into universal paranoia. Then the script makes a dumbfounding decision to set the story on a military base, completely undercutting the suburban (or urban) this-could-happen-anywhere anxiety that made the reputation of the earlier entries. The parallels between pod people and military rigidity isn’t as clever as the screenwriter thinks, and the result plays safely at a remove, defanging a lot of the innate terror that such a scenario should have. To be fair, there are a few things I do like about this version—director Abel Ferrara usually knows what he’s doing, and Meg Tilly is pure sexy evil here. But as for the individual components that I liked (the shrill shriek, the big-budget military hardware and explosions, the special effects depicting the pod people taking over) all seemed to have been taken from other better movies. A muddled ending that seems to rescue disaster from the jaws of victory is a further irritant. Within the context of its handicapped scope and repetitive nature, this Body Snatches does OK, but it falls far short out of the best versions of the story.

Movie Review

Agnes of God (1985)

ByChristian Sauvé 2019-03-302023-03-19 Movie Review

(On Cable TV, March 2019) There are films that you hear about, forget and rediscover later. The title “Agnes of God” did remind me of something, but didn’t know what exactly. I still recorded it without knowing why. It’s while watching it that I realized that I had completely forgotten the film’s strong Montréal connections: helmed by Canadian-born directing chameleon Norman Jewison, the film is not only set in Montréal with recognizable French-Canadian accents everywhere in the background, but it’s clearly, visibly shot in Montréal with its mid-1980s city logos and cars and slushy winters. Meg Tilly is quite good here in the title role, especially considering that we never see anything but her face and hands. Elsewhere in the cast, both Anne Bancroft (as a mother superior) and Jane Fonda (as a hard-driven psychiatrist) get great roles. All the Anglophone actors can be easily spotted by the fact that their French is phonetically pronounced mush. Narratively, the ambiguous ending is a forgone conclusion the moment the film sets up its characters—we know it’s going to end up with a could-it-be-rational-or-could-it-be-not, in order to make everyone happy (it’s the default conclusion of any religious-or-reality movie). Still, the journey is interesting, and it’s worth noting that the three lead performances in the film are all from women—the men are supporting characters at best. Despite a muddy yet predictable conclusion and a somewhat esoteric and difficult subject matter, Agnes of God is frequently interesting—for the acting, for the setting, sometimes for the drama itself. I’m not sure I’m going to forget it again.