Personal Velocity; Die Another Day

It's too bad that the title Femme Fatale was taken by Brian De Palma's dazzlingly artificial boy fantasy; it applies, in a very different way, to Personal Velocity, writer-director Rebecca Miller's earthy triptych about the interior lives of three complex, sexy, self-destructive women. It's the type of movie that's often written off as small or, worse, a women's picture, which seems to be the way of the world. Thanks to the cult of the auteur, which reserved the lion's share of its enthusiasm for male-centered genre pictures (Douglas Sirk notwithstanding), most films that treat women as flesh-and-blood people-as opposed to vixens, saints, mommies or shrews-get written off as cute curiosities that needn't be examined too closely.

The Sundance-prizewinning Personal Velocity is far from perfect-its very literary third-person narration is sometimes intrusive, and thematically, its three sections don't dovetail as well as they could-but it deserves a close look. Like many of the feature-length dramas and nonfiction movies I've praised this year-including Domestic Violence, The Pinochet Case, The Fast Runner, A Song for Martin, Beijing Bicycle and WTC Uncut-it is defiantly rooted in how life is actually lived. Its images have a luminous, genuinely cinematic quality (the way cinematographer Ellen Kuras treats digital video makes it shimmer and burn; editor Sabine Hoffman's freeze-frame montages suggest the elliptical vagueness of memory). But in all the ways that count, it's a documentary (with actors). Its theme is female sexuality-men's nearly helpless obsession with it, and women's struggle to control it, direct it and use it in ways that enrich rather than derail their lives.

Kyra Sedgwick stars in the first segment as Delia, a onetime free spirit who kissed (and slept with) all the cute guys in high school but only thought she enjoyed it. She settled down with Kurt (David Warshofsky), a burly galoot who made her feel adored, even worshipped, and had two kids with him. But he turned out to be a sad little boy with a man's fists. One morning, after he slams Delia's face into the breakfast table while her children look on in horror, she decides to flee to a shelter. She soon tires of its helpless aura, calls up an old friend she hasn't seen since high school, moves to the friend's town and gets a waitress job at a coffee shop, where one of the regulars, a leering stringbean named Mylert (Leo Fitzpatrick of Kids) keeps hassling her for a date. Mylert's another overgrown boy, but the helplessness of his lust charms Delia, reconnecting her with a strong (if perhaps false) notion of her own sexual power.

Sedgwick, a charismatic natural Hollywood never figured out what to do with, is the best she's been since 1995's Something to Talk About. Frazzled but tough, with a been-to-hell, bought-the-t-shirt grin, she makes a powerful impression. But it was a mistake to place Delia's story first. The second tale, Greta, in which the reliably eccentric Parker Posey plays a book editor whose unexpected career success and related affair throw a kink into her happy marriage, can't help but seem trivial in comparison. Miller adds weight with a dreamy flashback exploring Greta's hazy memory of her late mother, a Holocaust survivor, and Greta's tangled reactions to her famous judge dad (Ron Liebman), who remarried a much younger woman. (He brushed his first family off like leaves from a sweater, remarks the narrator-a great line.) But these digressions feel like an attempt to add weight-as if Miller feared (or knew) that a privileged woman's misadventures in the publishing scene couldn't stack up against Delia's story.

Personal Velocity regains its footing in its final story, Paula, which stars Fairuza Balk as a troubled boho who goes on the road after a freakish, violent accident. Paula's journey feels too fiction-workshoppy (to say more would spoil its twists, as contrived as they are) but Balk's controlled, mostly nonverbal performance centers the story and redeems it. Like Sedgwick, Balk has a survivor's eyes, and her face is transparent. You can sense what Paula's feeling even when she's trying to hide her feelings from the other characters.

Despite its problems, Personal Velocity is a triumph of the real over the superficial-of female introspection over boy-movie noise. It's a bundle of loose ends. As in Miller's heartbreaking debut, 1996's Angela, Personal Velocity is a serious attempt to understand whether desire can (and should) be compartmentalized from the rest of a woman's life. Miller offers no answers, only observations. Much has been made of John Ventimiglia's omniscient, vaguely patriarchal narration; it's wry, relaxed and confident, with lyrical observations that seem to offer clues, but don't. Some have asked why Miller hired a man for this job; the question answers itself.

Die Another Day Directed by Lee Tamahori Die Another Day has the most daring credits sequence in a Bond film. Bond (Pierce Brosnan), captured by the North Korean military after a botched mission, is subjected to prolonged, brutal torture. His sufferings are juxtaposed with the usual silhouettes of writhing naked babes; but the babes are sinister shapeshifters with demonic eyes. Some are made of ice, others of molten lava-visual analogs for Bond's two modes, glacial cool and volcanic wrath. They're wraithlike; they seem to taunt him, and in a couple of startling dissolves, they caress him sensually. I don't recall another credits sequence that integrated Bond into the imagery so completely, and I'm sure there's never been one that showcased him in a helpless state. When he emerges months later-physically and emotionally scarred, with a wildman's hair and beard-he seems to have confronted certain illusions about himself.

But of course Die Another Day doesn't build on this smashing intro. Bond seeks revenge against the people responsible for his betrayal and capture, entering into a tangled globetrotting plot that involves a terrorist-connected fencing champ (Toby Stephens) and a kickboxing North Korean assassin (Rick Yune, in a simmering star turn). And there are the requisite two Bond girls, an icy British agent aptly named Miranda Frost (Rosamund Pike) and a bodacious American assassin named Jinx (Oscar doll Halle Berry, whose bikini-with-hip-dagger during the film's Cuba sequence deliberately invokes Ursula Andress of 1962's Dr. No).

I love the Brosnan Bond films' attempts to locate their stories in something resembling reality; since Goldeneye, the political references have grown more astute and world-weary. This one reminds us that the sea of land mines in Korea's demilitarized zone were planted there by the West, and that money trumps ideology every time (the Commie bad guys in the opening sequence have a stable of luxury cars). But the politics are skin-deep, soon giving way to the usual rich-megalomaniac-with-a-God-complex routine. Bond's suffering in prison ultimately seems cosmetic; he cleans up and kicks ass pronto. Brosnan is the best actor of all the Bonds-less buoyantly nasty than Connery, but more closed-off, damaged and sympathetic. But the movies are darker, sophisticated versions of the same-old same-old.

Still, I don't hear anybody complaining. Boy fantasies reign supreme.