I took a Metro-North train from Harlem up to Westchester County early this afternoon because that was the nearest location of After Hours, which is not a gentlemen’s club but the formalwear chain my friend Joe has selected for his wedding party’s tuxedos, two-button Tommy Hilfiger models with long ties and “truffle vests.”
After a relaxing half-hour ride, I set out on foot from the White Plains station, spotted a large blue Sears sign, then walked over and entered the mall it was attached to. There was no tuxedo store to be found. After calling Joe, I learned I was in the wrong mall. Joe mapped my predicament online then relayed to me via cellphone that White Plains has a pair of malls approximately eight city blocks apart and I was in the more ghetto of the two, the Galleria.
After arriving at my correct destination, the Westchester Mall, I took in its modern architecture, carpeted floors, Apple Store, Sharper Image, Brooks Brothers, Neiman Marcus and roving packs of Asian teens. I stood in line at After Hours with a bunch of gawky high-schoolers whose older brothers were getting married, had various body parts tape-measured and tried on two in-store “test jackets,” smelling of sweat and cigarettes, to pinpoint my size (37 long, for those keeping score at home).
I took an express train back to Grand Central because I had plans to see The Lives of Others, which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film last month. It’s reminiscent of Coppola’s Hitchcockian The Conversation, in which a snoop (Gene Hackman) thinks he’s heard a murder in a wiretapped apartment through his headphones. To a lesser degree, I thought of 3-Iron, in which a young couple lives for moments at a time in the vacant apartments of strangers.
In Lives of Others, Ulrich Mühe plays a member of East Germany’s Stasi in the Berlin Wall-divided early ‘80s. Resembling Stanley Tucci from certain angles, he’s an expert interrogator who switches to the passive end of the business when he takes on a life-consuming wiretap stakeout of a writer who’s suspected of harboring a subversive streak. The same stone-faced officer who’s patient and exacting enough to sweat the “truth” from suspects at the station has difficulty finding fault in a man whose complicated life he’s exposed to in conversations the writer has with his girlfriend and friends. The end, sappy yet satisfying, gets choppy with jumps in the timeline of multiple years at a time. But I’d recommend it.
And, yes, I still think it deserved Best Foreign Language Film over Pan’s Labyrinth. That film, while wondrous in its effects and imagination, had a predictable fairytale plot and little character development. Lives of Others is more unexpected and focuses on the nuances and complexities of human nature and expression. Katie disagrees. “I guess you don’t care about the plight of a little girl,” she snapped in disgust, as she, Andie and I briefly discussed the films afterwards. I didn’t take it further because I’m not smart enough to win an argument with her. She should consider a career in politics.