Ready Player One versus A Single Girl

Visual overkill: Ready Player One

Steven Spielberg's Ready Player One confirms his status as a first rate film craftsman and a second rate film artist. Ernest Cline's YA novel provides a sturdy enough game plan for the usual amblin theme park adventure and thrill rides. Spielberg gets to explore the latest faux gamer technology and indulge in nostalgia for the pop cultural artifacts of his own past. He fills the frame with enough Easter eggs to last till Doomsday. The pop references give the movie some fizz, especially the sequence in the Overlook Hotel. Mark Rylance, always an ace in the hole for Spielberg, has a nice turn as VR game savant whose invention propels the semblance of a plot.

Olivia Cooke is a rounded and entrancing performer as the female lead, but her counterpart, Tye Sheridan, seems a cut-rate Miles Teller. The baddies, Ben Mendelsohn, T.J. Miller and Hannah John-Kamen, have little to do but stare at screens and sneer. Spielberg wants to get a Hawksian camaraderie from the rainbow warriors that aid the hero, but they function largely as mechanical parts of the film's construction. The final battle seems a sop to Game of Thrones fans, the direction lacks even the (overly) reverential conviction of Peter Jackson in the Ring films. As a Spielbergian construction, Ready Player One ranks somewhere above Tintin and below Minority Report.

After the visual overkill of Ready Player One, the adult ambivalence and relative restraint of Benoit Jacquot's A Single Girl, from 1995, was particularly gratifying to this viewer. Despite its supposed status as a cinema verite offering, Jacquot uses his camera subjectively to heighten the hunted nature of his heroine. Virginie Ledoyen, the most significant ingenue of 90s French cinema, gives an astonishingly grounded performance as Valerie, a young woman who must tell her creepy boyfriend that she is pregnant on the day she begins working room service at a ritzy hotel. The drama is separated into discrete segments, acts one and three are set in a café where Valerie alternately spars with and seeks comfort from her homme. These bracket scenes of Valerie's misadventures at the hotel. A coda is set two years into the future and shows Valerie and son bonding with her mother, heretofore unseen. Valerie's strong, almost obsessive relationship with her has been illustrated in a series of one-sided phone calls Valerie makes from the hotel.

Virginie Ledoyen in A Single Girl

The film initially traps Valerie in a claustrophobically small café where she must deal with her sullenly shiftless boyfriend. She is temporarily freed as she dashes via tracking shot to her first day of work. The relief is temporary, as her workplace is a rat maze populated by the anxious and unhinged. Valerie's colleagues are ambivalent to her. The workplace banter is punctuated by Jacquot's quick, punchy pans, appropriate to a frenetic setting filled with both resentment and kindness. Valerie is also beset by a Me Too moment, but puts her coworker in his place with a quick, public slap. The trips to guests' rooms are all done in tracking shots to emphasize the repetitive unease of the experience. Valerie pops open the door with her key card and is confronted with a veritable Pandora's box of unsettling tableaux. The guests are inclined to overshare with their youthful interloper. She is unfazed by this journey through a late capitalist zoo where appetites are indulged, but individuals are unsettled and encaged. 

Deficiencies in the last third of A Single Girl leave it just short of being a masterpiece. A lifesaving embrace by the boyfriend seems like a Hollywood gimmick. Jacquot does undercut this by having his heroine give the elbow to the creep. The coda dawdles, but little Mateo Blanc is adorably himself and is proof enough that Valerie's declaration of independence is worth celebrating. (7/7/18)