Review

Review Date: 23-June-02
Spoiler Rating: Low
Juju Judgment: Just OK

CQ (2002)

It's always dangerous to make a movie that could easily turn around and bite you in the butt like "CQ," in which a character asks the hero to consider that the film he is making might be boring. In his first effort, Roman Coppola (who both wrote and directed) sometimes wanders into the territory between arty pretentiousness and earnest (if stylish) contemplation, but he never fully loses his way. The result is a decent, generally entertaining movie about the search for one's personal voice, and how that requires that we look outward as well as inward.

"CQ" tells the story of Paul (Jeremy Davies), a somewhat ambiguous American who lives in Europe during the 1960s and works as an editor on a cheesy sci-fi picture about a gorgeous, space-traveling, secret agent babe named Dragonfly. At the flat he shares with his neglected French girlfriend, Paul is also working on a personal cinematic account of who he really is. That is say, he's collecting a bunch of random, often inconsequential images and monologues about his life on grainy black-and-white film that are meant to be deeply artistic. After the initial director is fired due to artistic differences with the producer, and the replacement director is injured in a car crash, Paul suddenly finds himself at the helm of the Dragonfly movie. While struggling to discover the elusive ending that will make it a success, he encounters new forms of inspiration that put him more in touch with himself.

There's enough eye candy and good acting to prevent this somewhat thin story from collapsing. The action moves back and forth between Paul's life and scenes from the sci-fi movie, which provide some humor, a few nicely imagined '60s fantasy sets, and newcomer Angela Lindvall, who is an absolute knock-out as Dragonfly. (Scenes of a wild New Year's Eve in Rome are also beautiful.) The cast is stocked with an impressive group of American and European actors, including, in addition to Davies and Lindvall, Giancarlo Giannini as the producer of the Dragonfly film, Gérard Depardieu as its first director, Jason Schwartzman (also of the Coppola clan) as its second director, Dean Stockwell as Paul's father, and Billy Zane as Dragonfly's revolutionary paramour. Overall, "CQ" is fairly light, simple fare, but the cast and writer/director seem to have taken it to heart, and it shows.

Copyright © 2002 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.