KEY POINTS:
Herald rating: * *
This is the first part of a trilogy of New York-set remakes of films by Dutch provocateur Theo Van Gogh, whose audacious attacks on religion, in particular Islamic fundamentalism, resulted in his grisly assassination in 2004.
His ghost may be seen in the new film, which is dedicated to him: he's in a photograph glimpsed on a coffee table and a truck belonging to "Van Gogh's Furniture Removals" passes through another shot. But these may be the only traces of the European sensibility which must surely have made the original very different in tone from the remake.
The story has Buscemi as Pierre Peders, a journalist assigned to do a puff piece on Katya (Miller), a one-name actress whose main roles appear to be equally divided between the gossip columns and a cheesy television show. They meet in a restaurant where they quickly get offside and she walks, but - in the first of the film's many contrivances - the two of them end up in her nearby loft apartment.
The implausibilities that litter the set-up (a pretty TV star meeting a journalist in a New York caf doesn't arrive alone and if, after insulting her, he needs a sticking plaster, she sends him to a drugstore) would not fatally undermine what follows if it had conviction and dramatic coherence. But, as the pair of them settle into a game of psychological Strip Jack Naked, the tone's all wrong. Her sudden flashes of teasing intimacy are intended to hint at a problematic coquettishess, but they are shockingly, unbelievably inappropriate.
Meanwhile, the script's abrupt changes of direction seem more indicative of the writers' irrationality than the character's. The narrative sacrifices a dramatic arc for a kind of roller-coaster wave motion: whenever an idea runs dry, a fight starts out of nowhere. At one point, he asks her about something intimate "because I care about you very much" and we feel like saying "yeah right", not because he's a journalist but because we have seen nothing that suggests it could possible be true.
Even the smart ending feels predictable once it's happened: "Move along," it seems to say, just like those New York cops. "There's nothing to see here."
* The other films in the Triple Theo trilogy are Blind Date, directed by Stanley Tucci which premiered at Sundance, and 06, directed by John Turturro, still in production.
Cast: Steve Buscemi, Sienna Miller
Director: Steve Buscemi
Running time: 83 mins
Rating: R13 (offensive language)
Screening: Rialto
Verdict: Psychological duel between a journalist and an actress feels contrived and empty.
