Interview (2007)

The opening of Steve Buscemi’s Interview is as curt and direct as the film’s protagonists pretend to be. Pierre (Buscemi), a fallen political journalist, whines to his damaged brother about a puff piece he’s being forced to do on the new star de jour, Katya (Sienna Miller). Katya practices her lines for an amusingly awful gig on a Dawson’s Creek wannabe with her co-star. Katya remembers, an hour after the fact, that she’s to meet a journalist to promote her new, to quote Pierre, “slasher film”. Pierre and Katya meet at the restaurant, disastrously, and leave separately a few moments later. Then something happens, and Katya and Pierre find themselves killing a few bottles of wine and bourbon and scotch together in Katya’s absurdly glamorous loft, and the interview proper begins.

Buscemi, remaking a film by director Theo van Gogh, has made a film in which two very fractured, insecure people meet and proceed, for the next eighty minutes and change, to personify everything that the other fears that society actually thinks of them. Pierre plays on Katya’s need to be seen as something other than sexy tabloid fodder, and Katya continually rubs in that, regardless of her importance in the grand scheme, she’s more important to most people than Pierre’s political grandstanding.

Pierre is sharper and more manipulative than Katya intially grasps, and Katya is even more aware of her every gesture, the stretch of the back, the purr of a seemingly insignificant detail, than even Pierre initially thinks. Katya appears to be the most cliched of movie stars, she wears her entitlement like she’s embarrassed about it, but, of course, she’s not. This second element, the actual expectation of the privilege, is not the hidden thing she’s fakes or conceals. The hidden thing is that there is NO hidden thing. Katya isn’t an onion, she’s an everlasting gobbstopper, one flavor morphs into another and then morphs back into the first flavor again. It’s all true, and all false.

Interview isn’t a bitter, misogynist fantasy though, Pierre’s hypocrisy and hall of mirrors evasion is just as apparent, and possibly more insidious, because he has the shield of self-righteousness. Pierre is the one we instinctively root for (unless you’re a movie star yourself, and if you are and reading this I’d love a blurb) and he plays his unattractiveness, his honed intelligence and indignity, the exact same way Katya plays the opposite qualities. Put these two in the same room together and you have a metaphor for about ninety percent of what is wrong with this country. These two are channeling the simmering hatred and frustrations of an entire country but we can’t help but really wonder if they’ll fuck.

Look, I know all this sounds like a college thesis wank, and that, to a certain extent, is impossible to escape. Buscemi and Miller, onscreen together nearly the entire time, are the reason to see the film. They breathe life into the platitudes I just described, and turn every nightmarish verbal reversal into something vicious, erotic, dazzling. Miller has been the almost Next Big Thing for a few years now, and it’s sad that it finally happened in a film five people (including me) saw. She’s brilliant, one of the best performances of either gender in the entire year. Her Katya may very well be one of the definitive portraits of the Actress. Miller has always been a beautiful woman, but she seems for the first time to be in total command of her appearance. She, like the character, continues to bamboozle us, to play our assumptions of the Actress against us. Her voice is even different here, huskier than you expect, hungrier, but that just may be another of Her Things, an instrument of distraction, but maybe the fact that you expect it to be a distraction is the actual distraction.

Buscemi is just as good, but not as surprising, as he’s been providing definitive portraits of the self-loathing loser for the better part of twenty years. The surprise with Buscemi may lie in his directorial performance here, and I say that as someone who loved his debut, Trees Lounge. Buscemi, as well as anyone I can recall, trumps the limitations of the one set chamber play, and really makes the thing sing. The film never feels static or stagy; it’s electric, humming with the characters’ desires. This may have been what James Toback was after in his silly, laughably self-absorbed Two Girls and Guy.

Interview doesn’t go wrong until the end, where it mistakenly provides a Victor to cap off the night’s proceedings. There are a couple of reversals before the end that work just fine, but I didn’t believe the final few minutes, they’re too cathartic. We shouldn’t be let off the hook so easily; we should leave the theatre bewildered.

I’m going to go on record, though, and say that film and theatre students most assuredly should NOT see Interview. Buscemi and Miller make this sort of battle of the sexes as really about something else thing look too easy, it could inspire too many dangerously banal imitators. Scratch that, I’ll risk it. All film and theatre students should see Interview, if only for the chance it inspires at least one of them to make another like it.

★★★½

Posted on December 20th, 2007 in 2007, Reviews, Drama |

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