Regina Lambert

Mysterious Woman in Black

Jessica Bendinger,

Jonathan Demme,

Peter Joshua,

FILM REVIEW; Mystery Husband Turns Up Dead

by Elvis Mitchell

This knockabout, moderately successful remake of the 1963 comic thriller ''Charade'' lacks the heartless, silken cool of the original, a lustily shallow classic peopled by stars in gorgeous bespoke clothes that seemed tailored to both their bodies and their personae. This time Mr. Demme has littered the soundtrack with a compendium of world-beat pop, movie score classics and nostalgia power pop; his eclecticism ranges from trip-hop to Henry Mancini. You almost get the feeling you have to step over his music collection, scattered across the floor, to get to the picture.

But frankly, most of the film's allure comes from the sensual, butter-voiced Thandie Newton; with her, Mr. Demme has found the 21st-century corollary to Audrey Hepburn. In ''Beloved'' and the slightly condescending ''Besieged,'' Ms. Newton proved she could act. In ''M:I-2'' she displayed enough warmth to bring life to a laminated corpse, at least in the scenes she was in. And in ''The Truth About Charlie,'' which opens today nationwide, she demonstrates that she has the head-turning charisma of a movie star.

She's a gamine in touch with her sexuality instead of floating slightly above it; unlike Hepburn, she's an angel whose feet touch the ground. She's so good that when she's on screen, the movie works -- or at least you think it does. It's a spot-specific case of alchemy.

Ms. Newton plays the recently married Regina, who returns home to her spacious Paris flat to break off with her husband, Charlie, an art dealer who should be back from chasing down works that include a Basquiat and a Julian Schnabel. She finds him gone and the apartment so thoroughly ransacked that holes have been punched through the walls. The looters took everything but the rubble; the place now looks like a Schnabel painting.

When Charlie's corpse turns up and a pack of mysterious strangers pop around threatening Regina and asking questions about a treasure that he supposedly left behind, she's stunned. The truth about Charlie is that everybody knew more about him than she did, including the fact that he was American, not Swiss.

Regina's first hope is Joshua (Mark Wahlberg), a helpful American whose slightly closed-off smile doesn't hide the dimples in his cheeks. But when even Joshua turns out not to be what he seemed and the French police are vaguely threatening, she has to turn to Bartholomew (Tim Robbins) at the American Embassy for help.

The old-school fear in Peter Stone's script for the original ''Charade'' started with the concern of every newlywed: discovering that the person you married didn't exist, a potential horror back in a day when even toying with getting a divorce was almost like joining the Foreign Legion. Taking that step almost precipitated Regina's fall from grace in the original. Mr. Stone and the director, Stanley Donen, flirted with plunging their heroine into hell for claiming her freedom -- using the movie saw that a woman who rends the fabric of marriage deserves trouble -- and leaving her bereft of friends and husband.

''Charlie'' has done nothing to supplant that motif. Even the ''Charade'' dreamboat -- as played by Cary Grant, the epitome of such -- who might be able to take her away from all that, turned out to be a looming danger. (Unfortunately, Mr. Wahlberg doesn't nearly match up in comparison to Grant.) It was in keeping with the sexual politics of the 1960's for Regina to fall for the stranger who could deliver her from, or to, evil. But for her to do the exact same thing in ''Charlie'' with the Wahlberg character seems incredibly sad, a good-girls-make-bad-choices psychology that belongs on ''Oprah.''

''Charlie'' isn't helped by Mr. Wahlberg, who doesn't seem to understand the difference between a mystery and a blank. His blandness was well used in ''Boogie Nights'' and ''The Yards''; his withholding became a kind of tension. Here he's just the one person in the picture who doesn't fall for Regina the way everyone else does.

There's an extraordinarily sexy clinch during a tango at a Parisian nightclub when Regina is tossed from partner to partner while information is being exchanged.

But it's not with Mr. Wahlberg; rather it comes when Regina is cheek to cheek with the once-flinty Lola (Lisa Gay Hamilton), one of the greedy pursuers. Lola has softened toward Regina, and ''Charlie'' burns higher on the Celsius scale during their moment than in any of Regina's scenes with Joshua. Mr. Wahlberg's defiant, shoulder-first stride makes him walk like an American undercover cop; he looks not as if he's spoiling for a fight but as if he just finished one. (Though he has steamed the Boston inflections from his altar boy speech cadences, his vowel enunciation when he speaks French gives him away.)

Ms. Hamilton and the rest of the cast, notably Mr. Robbins in the Walter Matthau role from ''Charade'' and Ted Levine as one of the gang after Regina -- do very fine work. Mr. Demme has worked with most of them before or fallen in love with them from other places. Joong-Hoon Park, another of Regina's menaces, is from the Korean action picture ''Nowhere to Hide.'' And much of the French aspect is Mr. Demme's loving salute to the Nouvelle Vague: Anna Karina, Magali Noël and Agnès Varda are seen in small but important roles.

The most important cameo comes from Charles Aznavour, who plays himself crooning ''Quand Tu M'Aimes''; a clip from ''Shoot the Piano Player'' runs a little later, and one shot evokes ''The 400 Blows.'' Mr. Demme buzzes through a startling number of references to other movies, and at times it's as if he's out to defeat the Quentin Tarantino land-speed record.

There are so many film quotations that, as handsomely rendered as they are by Tak Fujimoto's dexterous cinematography, you may feel there's no there there.

The heavy scheme of reference notes brings to mind the frisky ''Amélie,'' which was so lacking in ethnicity that Paris appeared to be Euro Disneyland. ''The Truth About Charlie'' is at the very least a wondrous antidote to that; one of the cops is named Dessalines, after the Haitian ruler. This Paris is filled with people of color, and the noises and music have a cultural sophistication that gives ''Charlie'' moral authority.

Mr. Demme, who co-wrote the screenplay, may be today's least arrogant filmmaker. And his wide-eyed sense of hippie-egalitarianism makes him nonjudgmental. This generosity extends to a pasteurizing of the chief villain's motive by the end of the film. Mr. Demme wants us to sympathize with the bad guys, but playful mercilessness is what we want from a thriller. At some point, we have to feel the villain's tart breath moistening the hair on the back of Regina's neck.

This kindness is what ties Mr. Demme to the pulse of David Byrne, with whom he collaborated on the documentary ''Stop Making Sense.'' Few directors have been as influenced by another artist's purview as Mr. Demme has been by Mr. Byrne's funky eclecticism. The world-beat soundtrack, with rhythms of many nations, plays through ''Charlie,'' giving it a lovably infectious swoon. And like most of Mr. Demme's comic thrillers, among them ''Married to the Mob'' and ''Something Wild,'' ''The Truth About Charlie'' ends with a singer delivering a tune to the camera that comments on what we've seen.

This time it's Mr. Aznavour, who puts us in mind of what the picture could have been. But Ms. Newton does something more: she makes us believe in the future.

The Truth About Charlie

by Kirk Honeycutt