Seed NewsvineTwo Of A Kind
Monsieur Hire (Michel Blanc) stands by his window--having finished his routine hard-boiled egg for supper--and watches his neighbor Alice (Sandrine Bonnaire) from the across building, with lustful and adoring eyes; Leonard Schiller (Frank Langella) sits at his desk, clad in in shirt and tie, staring at his typewriter, unable to bring himself to type with any conviction or passion. Both men are at a standstill--incapable of seizing and acting on their greatest desires.
"Monsieur Hire" (1989-left picture) and "Starting Out In The Evening" (2007-right picture), two very different pieces of work, end their narratives on two polar notes--yet the "wants" that drive the story up until then come from the same womb, plump with desideratum. Monsieur Hire, a man who is despised by his neighbors and is the focal suspect to the local Chief Inspector, is an enigma of a Don Juan. He is at once creepy and toweringly romantic. For much of the short running time, he is made to be a mild-mannered voyeur, whose only connection to societal acceptance is by being an expert bowler at the local bowling alley. After the audience is convinced that Hire could in fact be the murderer that the Inspector is trying to weed out, Director Patrice Leconte pulls the rug from under and unspools Hire to be one of the most faithful lovers and admirers of postmodern cinema.
Hire's lust for Alice moves past the Norman-Bates-Peephole-Fascination, and into the role of a romantic martyr whose real intentions and desires are so moving that it may take an immediate second viewing to take it all in at a recommended dosage. Leonard Schiller, in "Starting," has equal desires of the heart to finish his last novel, yet his intentions are firmly guarded behind his weathered stoic stare and restrained vernacular. Schiller's muse comes in the form of a female grad student Heather Wolfe (Lauren Ambrose) but she is no Alice to him; the finished text is Schiller's lover from the across building. Essentially, the roles of Alice, Heather, the book, and the subject of murder are all interchangeable variables that revolve around the nucleus of male adoration. Schiller very much wants to finish his novel, not so much for revived literary fame, but to give him purpose in this life. The language, the ideas and the story have supplied the yearned for nourishment to Schiller, so much as to drive the seperation from his wife in the earlier years. In Hire's case, his love and dedication to Alice has forced him into a corner, an almost metaphysical one indeed, as he shrouds in the confinements of his tiny studio apartment.
What happens to these two men in the end is very different and yet we see each man's fate clearly from the beginning, almost from the opening frame. Both films strike at the absurdity of manhood, and the bag of expectations that arrive with it. The notions of duty, honor and family go out of the window when the desires of the heart are ignorantly exposed or threatened.
And if you take that idea into consideration, then Hire's "letting go" at the end of the film can be seen as a liberation.
