Film reviews: White Noise | Peter von Kant

It may star Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig, but White Noise is a car crash of a movie from start to finish, writes Alistair Harkness
Left to right: Adam Driver as Jack, Greta Gerwig as Babette and Don Cheadle as Murray in White Noise PIC: Wilson Webb/Netflix © 2022Left to right: Adam Driver as Jack, Greta Gerwig as Babette and Don Cheadle as Murray in White Noise PIC: Wilson Webb/Netflix © 2022
Left to right: Adam Driver as Jack, Greta Gerwig as Babette and Don Cheadle as Murray in White Noise PIC: Wilson Webb/Netflix © 2022

White Noise (15) **

Peter von Kant (15) ***

Based on the Don DeLillo novel of the same name, Noah Baumbach’s adaptation of White Noise kicks off with a disquisition on the cheerfully optimistic overtones of the car crash in American cinema. It’s meant as overarching metaphor for the way catastrophe can simultaneously distract and focus the mind on what’s important in life by normalising it, but it works far better as an unintentionally appropriate statement of formalistic intent. The whole film is a car crash, an insufferably whimsical satire on the 1980s (and and how we got to where we are) that veers wildly off course as its miscast stars careen hopelessly into DeLillo’s verbose, conspiracy-laden prose and Baumbach’s ill-judged efforts to render it on screen.

Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig are the aforementioned stars, prematurely middle-aged as a provincial college professor and his flaky, pill-popping wife, the former hiding behind a paunch and grey-streaked hair, the latter dowdy in ringlets and mum jeans – both acting for the back rows, their eyes wide, their voices and gestures full of theatrical phoniness. Driver’s Jack Gladney runs the Hitler studies programme and is obsessed with death; Gerwig’s Babette is a distracted follower of the zeitgeist whose sweet nature is fading into a narcotic fugue state fuelled by her secret status as a human guinea pig for unregulated medications. They love each other and preside over a happily chaotic brood of children and stepchildren who get their kicks watching news footage of airline disasters. But when an environmental catastrophe forces their evacuation from their home, disrupting their relatively comfortable lives in the process, Jack’s subsequent exposure to what’s referred to in ominous doublespeak as “the toxic airborne event” catalyses a familial unravelling that exposes the slipperiness of every certainty Jack holds dear.

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Steering away from the rooted-in-reality family dysfunction of Marriage Story and The Squid and the Whale, Baumbach structures the film around one grandiloquent set-piece involving an intellectual dual between Jack and a colleague (played by Don Cheadle) whose own theories on Elvis and early rock ’n’ roll Jack hijacks and transforms into a showy treatise on the Führer, the swirling camerawork speeding up as he reaches an oratorial crescendo that Baumbach intercuts with a tanker truck crashing into a train full of toxic waste – the unthinkable always possible, no matter how much society attempts to consign it to the past. Thenceforth the film tries and fails to turn this provocative idea into compelling satire on late capitalist society’s determination to bury its head in the sand by embracing the comforting distortions of consumer culture. In this world, the supermarket has become the new church, a place where Jack and his family can get their daily bread and make peace with the meaninglessness of their collective existence by dancing down the aisles, something Baumbach has them do in a musical-inspired finale that’s as smug as the rest of the movie.

With Peter von Kant, prolific French director François Ozon delivers gender-switched remake of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1972 film The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, itself a sort of twisted queer spin on All About Eve that was built around a fashion designer’s fracturing psyche as the power dynamics shifted between her and her younger lover and the assistant she routinely abused. In the new version, the titular Peter, played by Denis Ménochet, is now a big-shot film director, newly single after a high profile break-up and living with his mute, put-upon assistant Karl (Stefan Crepon). When the star of his first film, his one-time muse Sidonie (French legend Isabelle Adjani), shows up on his doorstep with a young aspiring actor called Amir (Khalil Ben Gharbia), he’s instantly smitten, vaguely promises him a role in his new film, then promptly seduces him and invites him to move into his apartment.

Like the original, it’s all set within the confines of said apartment, its claustrophobic setting intensifying the predictable souring of Peter and Amir’s relationship and the emotional fallout that ensues. Ozon retains his source material’s theatricality too, but he ratchets up the campiness, turning a story about emotional exploitation into a melodramatic tale of an egotistical monster lamenting the changing times. In this version, the protagonist's tears are of the crocodile variety, not the bitter kind.

White Noise streams on Netflix from 30 December; Peter von Kant streams on Curzon Home Cinema from 23 December and is on selected release in cinemas from 30 December.