Beauty, travel & a cat-and-mouse game

MANILA, Philippines - We film junkies have just settled down with the Metro Manila Film Festival with its own awards that some moviegoers find unacceptable, even controversial. With the onset of Hollywood movie awards (Golden Globes, Oscars, foreign critics’ groups, etc.), we await the announcement of would-be winners. Here is a movie that recently got nominated for three Golden Globe Awards: Best Picture, Best Actress in a Musical/Comedy (Angelina Jolie) and Best Actor in a Musical/Comedy (Johnny Depp).

With a powerhouse cast led by the stunning Jolie, the versatile Depp and award-winning German director Florian Henkel Von Donnersmarck, we anticipate a film worth our time and money in The Tourist. We are served Jolie as a beautiful, sexy and alluring woman dressed in the most glamorous of clothes. Contrary to first impressions, the demand on her acting is a respite from her roles in the spate of commercially successful films, from the two Tomb Raider movies, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Wanted and Salt (all action-packed, full of stunts and too physically brutal for my taste).

In The Tourist, we see Jolie at her exquisite best, which is exactly her role — to attract, to seduce, to capture and waylay her prey and pursuer with her magnetic charm. She uses her huge eyes (screaming with eyeliner!), her lips (that perennially looks swollen from a torrid kissing bout), her face (so perfect you would think it is made of wax), and her curves to convey sensuality and allure.

Depp, on the other hand, showcases his flexibility. Gone is the manic Depp of the Pirates franchise, Alice in Wonderland and Sweeney Todd. One will not see the eccentric, eye-twitching, finger-twirling, swashbuckling and swishy Depp. Here, he is an ordinary and simple guy. When he first appears in the train ride from Paris to Venice reading a paperback, he is unnoticeable, the proverbial wallflower so to speak, until he sees Jolie across him, and he begins to light up, reflecting her presence and reacting to her brazen flirting.

His face is innocent and angelic, like the angels and saints in the Vatican pantheon. Put a cassock on Depp and you will mistake him for a priest, albeit a handsome one. Unfortunately, for him, even with two nominations this time, the Golden Globe Award has remained elusive to Depp.

The Tourist is an interesting film, lovely to look at, like its principal actors. Imagine seeing two of the planet’s most beautiful people in two of the most beautiful cities in the world: Paris and Venice. As the movie unfolds, one is tempted to conclude that the director puts Paris and Venice as characters in the movie as well, and rightly so.

They are postcard-perfect. One does not need to go to Paris and Venice to feel these places: The cafés, the sidewalks, the canals — ahhh, you have them in their simplicity, grandeur and beauty.

The story revolves around the escape of a British banker Alexander Pearce, who embezzles $2B from a Mafiosi Don. The British police inspector John Acheson (Paul Bettany) and Mafiosi mobster (Stephen Berkoff) lead their separate tracking teams to monitor, harass, chase and bag Pearce around Europe. As a strategy, Pearce instructs his paramour Elise Ward (Jolie) to look for a man with his features and convince the police and the Don that the man is actually Pearce himself. In the train ride from Paris to Venice, she finds the man in the person of Frank Tupelo (Depp), an American math teacher vacationing alone as a tourist in Europe. Frank, unknowingly (and subsequently, with growing awareness and understanding of his plight), stands in for Pearce and submits himself to Elise. This cat-and-mouse game between Jolie, Depp, the police and the Mafiosi is the thread that binds the story from start to finish until the final twist before the movie ends.

The director does not dwell on the actual bank heist and embezzlement (thank goodness!) as an ordinary thriller would excruciatingly elaborate on, but focuses on how the two leads elude the pursuers and how their relationship grows so that they become protective of one another until the final outcome. He utilizes picturesque locales and sets, like the most dazzling hotels and vistas. He sparingly pumps some action with a yacht chase in Venice and a roof chase with a goofy Depp in pajamas. Before the movie’s end, however, there are intriguing questions that should be answered: Will Elise and Alexander ever reunite? Why was Frank chosen when he does not look the least a criminal?

(E-mail author at [email protected] or text 0927-5000833).