Hungry Hungry Hipster

It’s hard to imagine how the French actor Gaspard Ulliel could have given a less seductive performance as the young Hannibal Lecter in Hannibal Rising, but damned if he doesn’t keep smiling naughtily into the camera with the confidence of a performer who’s sure he’s worming his way into every moviegoer’s heart. In fact, I spent much of the movie trying to figure out who that coy, self-adoring smirk reminded me of. It sure wasn’t Anthony Hopkins—I knew that much.

And then it hit me: it’s an Amélie smile. Ulliel even co-starred opposite Audrey Tautou in A Very Long Engagement as the childlike soldier Manech, and seeing Ulliel hold the corners of his mouth in the same way was creepier than any twist in novelist/screenwriter Thomas Harris’ overcooked plot. It’s almost as if Hannibal were wearing the skin from Amélie’s face like a mask—now there’s an image I wish this movie had kicked off with!

Instead Harris sets out to explain Hannibal’s pathology with a murky WWII childhood trauma that manages to be both disgusting and sentimental. (I don’t want to waste much time explaining it: suffice it to say that it involves the child Hannibal, a snowed-in Lithuanian castle, a squad of very hungry Nazi collaborators, a stewpot and Hannibal’s temptingly plump little sister Mischa.)

Director Peter Webber obviously believes he’s bringing a veneer of “class” to this project, but that veneer is very patchily applied: he’ll “tastefully” keep Mischa’s death offscreen, but still throw in a garish shot of Rhys Ifans’ evil ringleader devouring a raw grouse and smearing blood all over his chin while amplified “munch-munch-slobber-slobber” noises play on the soundtrack. Webber might show us someone getting a knife shoved through his head, but at least he’ll light the frames like a 17th-century Dutch painting. (Webber also directed Girl With a Pearl Earring, a similarly humourless gouache of pretension and pulp that was my pick for the worst movie of 2003.)

If nothing else, Ulliel’s unimaginative characterization makes you remember how fresh and vivid Anthony Hopkins was playing Lecter in Silence of the Lambs. Perhaps Ulliel is hampered by having to perform in English—he doesn’t have the ear for the playful, theatrical cadences Hopkins brought to the part, the music he brings to even a simple line like “Hello, Clarice,” his voice dipping low on her name and almost swallowing it whole. Or his flat, nasal pronunciation of the word “Chianti” in his famous line about the fava beans and the census-taker’s liver—a sophisticate sneering at every boob he’s ever heard stumble over the foreign words on a restaurant wine list.

It’s this side of Hannibal that Thomas Harris seems increasingly fascinated by—Hannibal the aesthete, the connoisseur of fine dining and classic art and architecture. (In Hannibal Rising, Gong Li plays Hannibal’s aunt, “Lady Murasaki,” a pointless reference to the author of The Tale of Genji that only emphasizes the gap between Harris’ highbrow ambitions and his actual achievements. A similar thing happens when Webber stages a scene at “Castle Vigo.”) Who is Harris trying to impress? Doesn’t he realize that audiences are lured to Hannibal movies by the same thing that lures them to the Saw and Final Destination sequels: these films contain the most memorably, grotesquely imaginative deaths around, and we keep hoping that they’ll figure out a way to top themselves. Harris may not like to hear it, but all that talk about Renaissance art and the best way to roast animal cheeks? All that mystical hugger-mugger about the symbolism of cannibalism? That’s what we sit through in order to get to the good stuff.

Believe me, there’s nothing transcendent about eating human flesh. A few nights before I went to see Hannibal Rising, I went bar-hopping while wearing a too-tight pair of shoes and developed a blister on my heel. A day later, it burst, leaving a flap of skin hanging there, about the size and thickness of a thumbnail. I began playing idly with that flap as I watched Hannibal Rising and somewhere during one of the many scenes of Gong Li looking expressionlessly at her sinister nephew, I accidentally tore it off.

The movie was so obsessed with cannibalism that I decided to see what all the fuss was about and impulsively popped it into my mouth. Yeah. Disgusting. The skin felt vaguely waxy, with small ridges, the texture of fingerprints, that I could make out with my tongue. I chewed it up into flavourless shreds between my incisors and swallowed, washing it down with the last of my Mr. Pibb. I swear, I just don’t see what the big deal about cannibalism is—and Hannibal Rising didn’t give me any clues.

Maybe if I’d drunk a nice Chianti instead?