Butler's Cinema Scene

"Zonad"...it's not another "Once"

“Zonad” (Now available)

Everybody who follows pop music has heard of the one-hit wonder.

Same thing can happen in movies.

A couple of years back Irish filmmaker John Carney had an international hit with “Once,” a modest mini-musical about a Dublin street busker who falls for an immigrant girl.

They end up making beautiful music together…so beautiful that “Once” won the Oscar for best original song.

I loved “Once”; thought it may have been the year’s most satisfying film.

But Carney’s followup, just out on DVD, suggests that “Once” was indeed a one-time-only deal.

The premise of this silly and simplistic comedy is that an escapee from a rehab center (Simon Delaney) is mistaken for a space alien by the residents of a small Irish village (he was dressed up in a red vinyl spacesuit for a patient costume party when he took off).

The pot-bellied galactic traveler announces himself as one Zonad and proceeds to eat, drink and diddle away the days under the guise of learning about Earth culture.

He resides with an astoundingly gullible middle-class family and has lustful designs on their hot-to-trot teenage daughter (Janice Byrne), whose dumb-as-a-log boyfriend  (Rory Keenan) doesn’t pick up on any of the sexual innuendo she radiates.

The resulting film isn’t awful, just overwhelmingly “meh.”  Quite a letdown.

“Park Benches” (Now available)

The cover of this DVD release features faces familiar to lovers of French cinema: Catherine Deneuve, Mathieu Almalric, Chiara Mastroianni, Emmanuelle Devos.

But it’s a bait-and-switch deal.

Yeah, those actors all are in this movie — for about a minute each. So are dozens of other staples (Thierry Lhermitte, Michel Aumont, Michael Lonsdale) of the Gallic film industry. At times “Park Benches” looks like a meeting of the French Screen Actors Guild.

What we don’t get is a terribly coherent movie.

Writer/director Bruno Podalydès gives us a day’s worth of goofy happenings in the Paris suburb of Versailles. They begin in an office building where three women employees are intrigued by a hand-painted banner (“Lonely Man”) that appears on the balcony of an apartment building across the street.

Is it a cry for help? A pervert’s way of picking up women?

The scene then shifts to a city park filled with lovers, bums, mothers and children. Little mini dramas and comic interludes are played out in the sunshine. None are all that interesting.

Then it’s off to a hardware store whose bumbling employees manage to foul up everything they touch.

The humor ranges from reasonably realistic and sophisticated (the office scenes) to silly and slapstick (the hardware store episode).

Were “Park Benches” actually about something it might have been able to thematically unite all the characters,  situations and styles Podalyde provides in scattershot style.

But, alas, despite all those recognizable faces, nobody’s home.

| Robert W. Butler