UNSPEAKABLE FILTH

A review requested by David Greenwood, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

L'âge d'or, an hour-long 1930 feature, is the second of the two collaborations between France-based Spanish surrealists Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, and it is certainly less jam-packed with iconic "every film buff alive knows this shot" shots than their 1929 short Un chien andalou. But it also better - oh, fuck me. "Better" is a word that has no place in this conversation at all. Buñuel and Dalí were, quite specifically, not looking to do things that would get them praise for being "good". Using "better" is exactly missing the point. L'âge d'or is, let us say, the more complex of the two, and the more thematically probing, which is probably inevitable given that it's four times as long. It is absolutely the more naked political film - Dalí was an iconoclast who just wanted to up-end people's expectations, Buñuel a committed radical who wanted to tear down the Catholic Church and and the right-wing European governments of that period with all the force and rage he could muster. In its combination of rabid left-wing politics and vigorous surrealism, L'âge d'or is the first truly "Buñuelian" film, then, and it is not surprising to learn that the relationship between the two artists had deteriorated to the point that Dalí had virtually nothing to do with the film's production once the screenplay was completed - according to a deliciously tawdry but hard-to-verify legend, Buñuel chased Dalí off the set on the first day with a hammer.

The film has a scenario that starts to reveal itself more and more explicitly as it moves along, but for a healthy span of the beginning, it doesn't seem that way. Instead, L'âge d'or picks up right where Un chien andalou left off, as a series of seemingly disconnected visual gags, though "gag" is in the eye of the beholder. Violent shocks of aggressive absurdity is probably closer to the mark. The first of these is a series of images of scorpions, taken from a nature documentary, stitched together with large blocks of intertitles - the movie is a sound/silent hybrid, but more on that later - which pretty neatly sets up the mood of the film as a series of lashing, defensive attacks by venomous arthropods. Which is about as nice a sentiment as anything Buñuel and Dalí have to spare for the twin targets of their ensuing satiric broadside, the bourgeoisie and the Catholic Church.

The nature of that attack is two-fold: first in the accumulation of random startling and blasphemous imagery, second in the details of its story - perhaps surprisingly, given how cozily L'âge d'or fits into even the most proscriptive definition of Surrealism. But for as madcap and what-the-almighty-fuck-is-going-on the film's barrage of visual non sequiturs no doubt is, L'âge d'or actually tells a rather clear, straightforward story: they want to have sex (they are played by Gaston Modot and Lya Lys), and circumstances keep preventing. At first they can't because the city of Rome is founded on the exact muddy patch where they were trysting. Afterwards, they can't because of the censoriousness of Rome's most noteworthy export, Catholic morality. Finally, they can't because of psychological symbolism. Meanwhile, Jesus Christ (Lionel Salem) is raping young girls in a monastery. Only it's possible he's just a man who look as and acts uncannily like Christ. It's also probably not the case that Rome was founded in 1930. But that is when it was foundered, anyway.

So, fair is fair, it gets less clear the closer you look at it, but at the broadest possible respect, the film is first and above all about the importance of openly and honestly engaging with one's libido, and the way that all of Polite Western Upper-Middle Class society is structured to make that engagement specifically impossible. It's a randy film, with seductive blow-jobs delivered to the toes of statues, and the man feverishly imagining that advertisements are depicting abstract, disembodied vaginas, and all that good stuff; and while it presents sex as the stuff of loopy comedy, it also presents it with good-natured humor. The rest of the film, though, is pure, rage-filled mockery of the stifling rules of society, opening with a bleak joke against a quartet of bishops, ending with a nasty attack on Christ as a hero-villain out of de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom, and middling with a stuffy bourgeois party that's pelted by absurdities and anti-social provocations like something from a more sexually-charged Marx brothers movie. For anti-social behavior is presented in L'âge d'or as an aphrodisiac; both in a nod to the erotic nature of the taboo, and a clear implication that everything about this society is worth being anti.

The film is confusing and densely packed, but one thing it's surely not is subtle: there's no way to watch it without being repeatedly hit in the face by the filmmakers' disgust with the puritanical conformist urges that are linked through bizarre staging, crafty editing, and ironic sound cues with cruel exploitation of a working class that the wealthy ignore completely, with sublimated violence, with feces - much like the then eight-year-old Ulysses, another work of art to fearlessly confound social satire with pornographic depictions, L'âge d'or wants us to see and hear and think about shit, the great unifying element of all humanity and animals, that Nice People Never Talk About, and can be made to look ridiculous simply by placing them in its metaphorical proximity.

Is it all a bit puerile? Aye, undoubtedly - the 26-year-old Dalí and 30-year-old Buñuel weren't kids but they were close enough anyway to have the enraged snottiness of youth, and that's the clear animating force underneath L'âge d'or: the young person's snarl of contempt to an older generation that has massively ruined everything, "fuck you for this, and fuck you for that, and just fuck you". By drifting from boldly authoritative documentary footage and narration to cheap visual and audio gags to startling, often upsetting weirdness that seems to come from no place but a chaotic dream, the film connects the real, tangible world (the documentary) to a frolicking hell of random nonsense (the rest), and it does this with the unchecked, self-confident gusto of untried, undisciplined youth. I freely admit that it's largely for this reason that, as easily as I find myself whipped along in the film's frenzies, I can't find it in me to regard it as top-level Buñuel; most of his career later, the director would revisit much of the same ideas (the need for sexual openness, the totalitarian hypocrisy of the Catholic Church, parodic religious iconography) in Viridiana, a film as controlled and clear as L'âge d'or is freewheeling, and directly because of its greater maturity and more precise presentation, it's a far nastier and more piercing satiric assault.

But by no conceivable means does the existence of that later film mean that L'âge d'or is redundant: it has a vitality and insane level of visual creativity that are all the justification it could possibly require. As a document of capricious madness turning the world into a pile of steaming shit and then declaring things a Golden Age, the films' unpredictable shifts in tone and content, and the inexplicable content of its various jokes, could not have been bettered. It was the film that 1930 needed, and decades upon decades later, it still has potency to shock the squares like almost nothing else out of entire generations of the avant-garde.

Read More

NO HAY BANDA

A review requested by Gabe P, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

Spoilers are going to be crawling up and down this post like ants. If you haven't seen Mulholland Dr., know that I'd give it a perfect 10/10, and if I were making a list of the films of the 21st Century that are essential viewing for anyone even moderately interested in the art form, this would be jockeying for very top spot.

There was a time when any discussion about David Lynch's magnificent Mulholland Dr. would automatically turn into an attempt to piece out exactly what the fuck is happening within it. Having been right in the thick of the film's original release in 2001, I took part in more than my fair share of such conversations, and I am pleased that, in the interevening 13 years and change, cinephile culture has arrived at two basic groups of theories that represent the consensus "solutions" of the movie's mysteries ("it's all a dream" and "it's two versions of the same story in alternate universes" - I much prefer the former, but the film mostly works the same either way), thus freeing us all to talk about anything else. For I cannot think of a film that more clearly demonstrates the truth of Roger Ebert's dictum that what a movie is about is less important than how it is about that thing. In fact, the how of Mulholland Dr. is almost totally inseparable from the what - it is a film that burns its artistic themes and believes about life deep into the bones of its story structure, its acting technique, its sound design, its editing. Unpack the gnarled narrative, and you find a potboiler about desperation among wannabe actresses. Unpack the aesthetic, and you find one of the best - no, fuck it, the best autocritique of cinema as a medium that has yet been made.

But just in the interest of having something to talk about, let's start with the plot. And I mean "plot" in its strictest sense: what events are depicted onscreen and in what order we see them. "Story" is a different matter. "Story", in Mulholland Dr., is puking its guts up behind the dumpster around back of a little coffee shop. What happens is that a woman (Laura Elena Herring, about as far as you can go on the Prestige-O-Meter from her 1990 feature debut, The Forbidden Dance - though not, actually, giving much better of a performance) survives a murder attempt that's interrupted by a car crash on Mulholland Dr., the cliff road overlooking Los Angeles from the north. She staggers away from the crash without her memory, and finds solace in an abandoned apartment; the next day, she's found by Betty (Naomi Watts, in her never-bettered starmaking role), who was coming to stay there at the invitation of her actress aunt, currently shooting a project in Canada. Betty herself wants to be an actress, but she finds herself dividing her time between job hunting and trying to help this mystery woman - who calls herself "Rita", after spotting the name on a Gilda poster - determine her own identity and figure out whether she's in any danger, as she clearly feels without being to articulate it. Meanwhile, a film director, Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux), is being leaned on hard by a mysterious cabal to cast an unknown named Camilla Rhodes as the lead in his picture, The Sylvia North Story. There are scattered scenes throughout in which characters who seem momentarily important simply evaporate away, sometimes after interacting with one of the two main threads of the story and sometimes not. Eventually, Betty and Rita track Rita's past back to a place called Club Silencio, where notional reality is shown to be a fake, and the film restarts itself as the story of Diane Selwyn (Watts), who is having a very rough time dealing with the fact that her girlfriend, Camilla Rhodes (Herring) has gotten the lead role that Diane wanted herself, apparently by fucking the director, Adam Kesher (Theroux).

There are a lot of things that the movie can be about, depending on how hard you want to run it through an analytical wringer, but the one thing it's always about is that motions pictures and the industry that produces them are toxic shit-holes of lies. And nowhere is that more evident than in the famously insoluble mystery. It would be trivially easy to re-edit the film using all the footage it contains and only the footage it contains in its present form, basically just swapping the concluding fifth of the movie (where Watts plays Diane) to the beginning, and in the blink of an eye you've made thoroughly comprehensible story: a woman is thrown over by her lover, so she hires a hitman to murder her; the night after the job is done she has a fantastic dream dripping with symbolism, in which she and her now-dead girlfriend lived the exact happy life she wanted, and she is herself a promising, desirable young star, though hints and details of her guilt keep nudging in. Awakening, she is so horrified that she kills herself, and her last thoughts are flashes of that pleasant dream. Now, that does require ignoring the fact that Mulholland Dr. was born a TV pilot for ABC that the network passed on (aghast that they hired David Lynch to make a David Lynch show for them, upon which he did so), which included none of the Watts-as-Diane material. But the film has been re-worked from the material originally worked into that pilot enough to make them distinctly unique properties even in the places where they overlap, so writing off the story's past life seems fair. Even necessary, given the amount of its plot that's all about writing off personal history that gets in the way of a pleasing reality.

The point of Mulholland Dr., of course, is that it does not make this one simple shift, and that proves to be all the difference. Instead of an almost boringly straightforward Freudian psychodrama, the film turns into a morass of almost unnavigable narrative mysteries, breaking down the idea that films represent some kind of Thing That Actually Happened by inviting the viewer to bring together all sorts of details that seem like the must be Important Clews - I mean, if they weren't important, then why would Lynch have included them? - only to find that most of what happens in Mulholland Dr. is baffling nonsense. You can do what I just did, and mentally re-edit the movie, to make it relatively easy piece of dream analysis where we know that we're picking apart the details of a symbolic dream. Or you can catalogue all the places where Rita seems to take over or recede from reality, and use those as evidence for how it's a film she's dreaming into existence in real time. Or you can leave the movie entirely and discard all of the random effluvia as detritus that would have been explored in the full TV series, and Lynch left it in just because it was fun and stylish, in which case you will forgive me for accusing you of being kind of boringly literal.

But no matter how you try to square Mulholland Dr., you're ultimately trying to compensate for the fact that David Lynch has handed you a broken movie. And since we are accustomed to movies being things that aren't broken, but only appear to be in the interests of shocking us, we busily set ourselves to the task of fixing it. This is our habit as viewers trained by Hollywood to watch Hollywood film. But really, isn't Lynch only actually saying, "this thing is broken - I broke it on purpose". Five years later, he'd be more explicit in doing the same thing with Inland Empire, which not only breaks cinematic structure, but cinematic form,* recklessly chopping up hideous digital video footage into a frenzied slurry of anti-cinema. That film took place in Hollywood, too, which is one of the closest things Mulholland Dr. has to a tell. The other is its lynchpin scene at Club Silencio, in which sound and editing march right up and announce themselves: do you hear how a record soundtrack can lie to you, the film asks, and do you see how dissolves can be used to make you think that discontinuous motion is continuous? It is the equivalent of a magician who confidently states "I'm going to trick you now", and then does so.

The two most important developments in the plot - Betty and Rita's sexual encounter, and the unlocking of the blue box that collapses the Betty/Rita plot, by eliminating Betty completely and consuming Rita - are both preceded by moments where the film openly breaks itself, in fact. Club Silencio leads directly into the latter; the former is shortly preceded by a moment in which Rita's panic causes the film image to double and overlap itself, a rupture of reality as intense as any in the 35 years separating Mulholland Dr. from Ingmar Bergman's Persona. And then, in the cheekiest movie reference in a film saturated with them, their lovemaking is followed by a variation of the classic "Persona shot". So it's not like all this is an accident.

Like Persona, Mulholland Dr. isn't just a breakdown of the sacred rule of narrative filmmaking, that the viewer should never realise that they're watching constructed reality. It's a breakdown of form that mirrors the breakdown of personality that its plot - in whatever interpretation or lack of interpretation we want to describe that plot - depicts. The film itself is having a psychotic split from reality, in effect. Whatever that reality might be: there are at least three "realities" in Mulholland Dr., leading off with the banal, cheery reality of Betty's plotline, with the corny dialogue and campy acting that dominate it, the shiny, sparkly clothes she wears, the sexualised parody of the stock "some nobody gives a dynamo reading, is discovered and made famous" scenario, and the fact that her fucking name is "Betty". We know Lynch; we've seen Blue Velvet; we get that he likes travestying '50s tropes by exaggerating them and filling them full of rot and perversity. So the "Betty" third of Mulholland Dr. is easy to read as a joke. But it's maybe not so easy to read the "Adam" plot the same way, with its menacing lighting and quavering Angelo Badalamenti score, its terrifying dwarf puppetmaster played by Michael J. Anderson, whom Lynch employed in Twin Peaks to let us know in the most disturbing way possible that the gum we like was going to come back in style. Since we know that we're watching a Lynch film, we're ready for the darkness, the screeching horror injected into banal spaces, the migraine-inducing flickering light. And Mulholland Dr. comes along and wipes it away just like it does the corny scenes with Betty. And what does that leave us with? The plain style and grit (I gather that the new footage used to complete the pilot was on a different stock for practical reasons, but the texture of the newer material is certainly less polished than the rest, whatever the cause) of the "Diane" sequence, the "real" sequence, the "explanation". Which Mulholland Dr. also includes in its collapse of signifiers and narrative clarity near the end.

The idea behind Mulholland Dr. isn't that some movies are realer than others; it's that movies are constructs designed by liars. Ever since he smashed in a TV to kick off Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, Lynch's movies have all been some kind of commentary on the unreliability of classic cinematic forms - yes, even the sedate The Straight Story, which depicts all the moments that most movies cover in a dissolve or montage, and barely cares about its nominal dramatic stakes - it's just that Mulholland Dr. is the one where he actually did it in the context of movie stars and movie-making. The film's slantwise namesake, Sunset Blvd., made waves in 1950 by reveling in the fact that the people who made movies were selfish, greedy, arrogant pricks; a half-century later, that baton had been picked up by many people in many places, but virtually nobody had ever done a better job than Lynch and his note-perfect crew of extending that bilious observation to the movies themselves, which are here supposed to be nothing but the natural extension of the broken minds involved in making them. It's there in the soundtrack, full of misleading and confused audio cues; it's there in Peter Deming's intense cinematography that's all shadows and sugary sunlight, pushing our mood in directions not determined by the script; it's there in Mary Sweeney's elusive editing, stitching together moments with the illusion of connectivity; it's there in Jack Fisk's romanticised and patently artificial production design.

In Mulholland Dr., a movie can be a comforting and optimistic lie; it can be a horrifying and upsetting lie; it can be a sad lie; it can be a confrontational lie designed to make us furious at the pretentious dick who made it just to mess with our heads. But it cannot not be a lie. That is its essential nature. And the film's beauty, its intellectually gripping complexity, its slippery and unpredictable performances, all make it a pleasure to have it lie to us, to calmly assert how much more intelligent it knows itself to be than we are.

Read More

BDSM WEEK: SEXUAL POLITICS

To the best of my knowledge, at the time of this writing, 1976's In the Realm of the Senses has never been shown uncensored in its home country of Japan. The easy gag is to go for the "ye gods, it's too explicit for the country that invented tentacle porn?" angle, except that glosses over the social complexity that explains not merely why ITROTS - oh, we're going to have to work on finding a better abbreviation, aren't we - was so unprecedentedly controversial when it was made, but also why it was made to begin with. It is not merely a sexual film; it is a critique and deconstruction of Japanese sexual mores constructed into a film-shaped object.

To be a bit more specific, Realm of the Senses is that great theoretical ideal that all of the filmmaking intelligentsia of the 1970s kept driving itself: it is the great example of Artistic Porno. There have been attempts, as long as the film has existed, to somehow reclaim it from the category of pornography, often with the assumption that "art" and "porn" are mutually exclusive categories. But trying to redeem Realm of the Senses from the shameful genre of porn is, I think, to completely misunderstand what it is, what it's doing, and why writer-director Oshima Nagisa made it. The film shows, almost to the exclusion of any anything else, unsimulated sex scenes; the mechanics and fluids involved in sexual intercourse are depicted with unabashed physicality in close-ups and wide shots; and the really important part is that, unlike virtually every other artistically nuanced film containing explicit sex that I can think of, Realm of the Senses has no obvious interest in circumventing our proclivity to finding its sex scenes pleasurable and arousing. It's not prurient, and the grimly transactional feeling that characterises what most of us probably think of as "pornographic" is absent. But it is erotic, and even given the brutal place it winds up, it never feels for a nanosecond that sexual ecstasy is something for which its character or its audience deserve to be punished. That's far, far rarer in cinema throughout the world than explicit onscreen sex itself.

If I understand things correctly, the idealised Japanese audience that has never been able to see the film in the form Oshima wanted would have known exactly where things were going from the start, so allow me to give away the ending: Realm of the Senses is based on the true story of Abe Sada (Matsuda Eiko), who in 1936 killed her lover Ishida "Kichi" Kichizo (Fuji Tatsuya) by strangling him during sex, and cutting of his genitals to take with her as a memento. Oshima's movie trades, heavily, on our knowledge that things are heading in that direction (there's at least one moment of explicit foreshadowing that is, honestly, a bit more corny and leering than a film of such sensitivity and subtlety deserves), but only for purposes of strictly sex-positive humanism. In fact, that In the Realm of the Senses never seems to struggle with balancing self-positivity and a narrative it knows in advance ends with death and dismemberment is, in and of itself, one of the most impressive things about a movie that's basically 102 straight minutes of immaculately controlled filmmaking.

The film's narrative focus is conscribed to the point that it feels like fine lace, defined more by the holes it leaves than what's present. Starting right around the time that former prostitute and current maid Sada meets Kichi while cleaning his home, and the rest of the film consists of virtually nothing other than scenes of them having sex, or the time immediately before and after. Whatever domestic narrative passes between these events is alluded to but never shown; the tense political situation in Japan (the film takes place in the shadow of a failed coup d'etat by certain military leaders, less than three months before Ishida's death; war with China was just a year in the future) at the time is occasionally visible in the background, but it's never the focus. We have, in effect, just enough of a sense of everything that's not Sada and Kichi's increasingly intense sexual assignations to be particularly aware of how much the film isn't paying attention to that everything.

In the context of a culture with as defensive and repressive a relationship to sexuality as Japan - Oshima not only couldn't screen the film there, he couldn't even make it, legally, meaning that the negative had to be brought to France to be developed and edited - this focus on sex as a mutually satisfying and empowering act that requires no kind of narrative or social grounding was itself a bold social statement. Oshima being a reliably, perhaps even exclusively political filmmaker (I've seen only a small handful of his films, but that's the clear connective tissue between them all), it's unsurprising that for him, depicting explicit sex would be a primarily political consideration, and particularly considering its production and distribution woes, In the Realm of the Senses proves to be a uniquely powerful swipe against the culture it depicts. As Sada and Kichi's relationship grows increasingly isolated, it too grows less ashamed and mannered, finding more extreme limits of ecstatic violence and what would be called "aberrant" behavior, if it weren't for the fact that the sex itself is, in a sense, considered "aberrant" in context.

The film isn't exclusively driven by social concerns, though that is its primary focus. It's equally driven by character; and if there's any way in which this explicit, erotic film made almost solely out of sex scenes can rightfully be described as non-pornographic, or even anti-pornographic, it's in the way that it uses sex as a means of building character. Considering how little we actually see them do, we get a strong sense of the two leads, Sada especially (and how much more still can be said about the way that this taboo-busting indictment of Japanese sexual morality fixes specifically on an empowered woman in full ownership of her own desire, contrary to the norms of an especially male-dominated culture?). Part of what the film achieves for itself with all of that nudity and unfaked intercourse is a degree of relaxation and closeness with the characters. When Sada playfully bats at Kichi's penis, we're seeing two people who are totally comfortable with each other enjoying a quiet moment as much as we're seeing sex play (and, for that matter, Matsuda and Fuji have to have been fairly at ease with each other and the crew to be so guilelessly naked for such long stretches). Oshima and cinematographer Ito Hideo's strategy of close-ups and acute angles means that our focus is as much on whole bodies as on genitalia, and we're encouraged to think of the two characters relating to each other as people in love and lust, not just as thrusting, penetrating body parts interacting.

The visual scheme of the film is, overall, quite particular and intentional. It subscribes fully to a very Japanese-specific geometric language with its costumes and sets deliberately suggesting a more archaic time period than the one in which the story takes place; though I am sure it wasn't Oshima's intention (regardless of the film's subsequent history, it's hard to imagine his hope was ever for this to be renowned internationally and unseen in his native country), the overall effect to Western eyes, trained to anticipate a certain kind of Japanese cinema, is that it looks very characteristic of that nation's most important cinematic imports. There's a squared off "room as frame" technique used fairly often that immediately recalls the work of Ozu Yasujiro; the more emphatic cut-ins and sharp angles tend to accentuate the same and depth of cubed spaces, rather than work against them. Take any given frame, and it reads as "Japanese"; except that most of those frames have copious nudity. There's no inoculation against the intellectual disjunction that causes, no matter how much cinematic nudity one has seen. The visual language it subscribes to is almost exclusively used (especially in Ozu, but in plenty of other filmmakers of that generation), to insist on a kind of formalism and mediated approach to drama; In the Realm of the Senses explodes that formalism by virtue of what it depicts.

There is, essentially no distinction between form and content here. The way it depicts the actions it shows and the thoughts it has about what those actions mean are indivisible. It is all about the frank appreciation of sexual behavior in all its extremes, and the firm belief that what brings mutual pleasure to the participants cannot possibly be obscene or licentious or unworthy of visual depiction. The way it moves through its story is so minimalistic that it's almost easier to think of it as an experimental film than as a narrative; but a tremendously successful experiment it is, staged with beauty and complexity and psychological thoughtfulness that I have, personally, seen in no other film on anything resembling the same subject.

Read More

BDSM WEEK: O NO YOU DIDN'T

Take my hand - or whatever other body part you prefer - and walk with my back to the 1970s, and the Golden Age of Eurosmut. It was a time when the boundary between the glaciated art films developed from the mid-'50s onward and the new world of pornography was as thin and porous as it could be, and filmmakers in Italy, Germany, and especially France dove headfirst into serious, psychologically and culturally-oriented stories of unbelievably gorgeous women wandering around naked as sleazy older men stared at them. They are damn weird pictures to watch, is what I'm saying: plainly exploitative and tawdry, yet with non-erotic and even anti-erotic fixations on story elements that forestall any real sense that this is actually pornographic. It's what happens when you apply intellectualism to sex, basically, only it's not very intellectual, and sometimes, not all that sexy.

The Citizen Kane of this particular genre was 1974's Emmanuelle, which I guess makes 1975's Story of O its approximate equivalent to The Magnificent Ambersons: the director's follow-up, based on a literary classic, even more ambitious and complex than his enthusiastically-received debut, but ultimately compromised and hobbled in ways that leave it somewhat dissatisfying in comparison. The difference is that Orson Welles's first two features both belong in any sensible conversation about the greatest films of all time, and Just Jaeckin's films don't. Not in a sensible conversation, anyway.

But anyway, Story of O. It is an adaptation of the 1954 novel by Pauline Réage (a pen name of Anne Desclos) that served as ground zero for BDSM culture in the latter half of the 20th Century, and arguably the watershed moment in the artistic treatment of explicit sex. As the new representational freedoms started to roll around at the dawn of the '70s, it was a no-brainer pick for adaptation, and Jaeckin was, all things considered, pretty much a no-brainer as well (though he wasn't the first director to sniff around the project). For Jaeckin, he got to solidify his position as the leading light in the Tony Erotica genre that showed no signs of how incredibly short-lived it would turn out to be; for the producers, they got to have the assurance of a filmmaker who had already worked with disreputable fare right in line with Story of O - Emmanuelle ends with something very like a summary of the original novel - without making something in the least ways disreputable.

Sure enough, Story of O is pretty damn classy; about the classiest version of the material that could possibly be summed up. The simple version of things is that a woman identified only as O (Corinne Cléry) has been taken by her lover, René (Udo Kier), to Château Roissy. Unless, as a perplexing alternate opening puts it, a shadowy second man is behind it all. How O finds herself at Roissy is less important than what happens there: it turns out to be a veritable school for sadomasochism, in which gorgeous women are taught obedience and submissiveness to every whim of the males in their lives, the more violent the better. After she's been properly tamed, O meets René's dear friend, almost a brother, Sir Stephen (Anthony Steel), with the apparent intention that René is in fact pawning her off, to make room in his own life for the bisexual blonde model Jacqueline (Li Sellgren). But in order to get at Jacqueline, René must ask O to serve as a honeypot.

That's not much plot, and if your assumption is that Story of O fills up the bulk of its running time with scenes of O's training and subsequently her use as sex slave to René and Stephen, congratulations on being well aware of what kind of experience this intended to be. It is quite a sexed-up movie, much more than Emmanuelle, which found Jaeckin at least as interested in lingering on notions of white Europeans in the third world as on perfectly-formed breasts. The Story of O script, adapted by Sébastien Japrisot, simply doesn't have an interest in any such external topics; it starts with considered interest in how BDSM works, and it stops there as well.

Notionally, the idea of a movie whose entire purpose is to uncritically depict a process by which women are whipped and chained into absolute submission for men's pleasure ought to seem inordinately offensive, but such is not the case with Story of O. It's not because it does a fine job of exploring what O herself gets out of the whole deal, as I gather is true of the novel. In fact, the psychological element of the film is almost totally lacking, thanks to perfectly flat performances by virtually everyone in it - Steel alone seems to have put any effort into expressing what his character feels through his expressions, and Kier manages to be the most wooden, dis-invested of all, which is a bizarre thing to say of an Udo Kier performance - and thanks to a boring screenplay that tells far more than it shows, and even what it tells isn't that useful. The film is addicted to voice-over narration, drily recapping what's going on in the characters' minds without pausing to see if it appears to be matched by their faces.

The result is the absolute worst-case scenario: a film about the effect that being turned into a willing sex slave has on the woman so turned. By all appearances, O is perfectly satisfied with the state of things - the ending in particular emphasises that - but Story of O never manages to dig into why; it blandly rolls through sexual activity without bothering to make things sexy, or making it clear that O, at least, is erotically stimulated by all of this. It's a clinical treatment of its subject, which makes for a boring, repetitive film, one in which the trace of a real plot doesn't show up until almost halfway through. You can only show so many staged scenes of whipping and burning, all shot in mostly the same angles, with mostly the same performances, before they start to blend into each other, no matter how jaw-dropping the physical perfection of the naked women in question (which, to be fair, is a lot of perfection).

Not helping matters is how utterly bland the filmmaking is, dominated by arch-'70s brown and beige and white interiors, and hobbled by an insipid Pierre Bachelet score (he was the only major behind-the-scenes talent other than Jaeckin who logged time on Emmanuelle). While Jaeckin's previous movie boasted some genuinely lovely shots of rooms and lawns, which provided a painterly backdrop for its sexual shenanigans, Story of O has an unyieldingly generic, suburban look, which makes its insufficiently vital sex scenes feel even more rote. Which feels like a tremendous failure for one of the very first films to depict BDSM with such unblinking interest and so little snickering.

In effect it's art-porn that tries so hard to be art that it loses sight of what it means to be porn, while simultaneously lacking the strong writing or well-crafted visuals to succeed at being art. It neither makes its sex seem exciting, nor does it investigate what that sex means to its characters. Basically, it's just a drab failure all around, and a bit of a chore to watch. How that could be true of a film that opens at a dreamlike, Eyes Wide Shut-style sex château is beyond me, but there you have it.

Read More

MOVIES I MISSED IN 2014: CAUGHT IN A BAD ROMANCE

Sometimes, I have to wonder which is actually more puritanical: when American movies depicting sex do it from a winking, peekaboo remove of carefully neutered inoffensiveness, or when European - by which I almost exclusively mean French - movies depicting sex in all its explicit, damp glory suggest that the only people having sex are soul-dead mechanical non-humans sublimating all their depression into hatefucking.

And so we have Stranger by the Lake, which freshens things up only in that the extremely explicit sex and damn near constant nudity involve gay men. The anhedonia and crushing cosmic alienation, though, are precisely the same.

The setting: an isolated stone beach separated from the world by a scraggly thicket of trees. This lonely patch of rock and water is the site of a cruising grounds, where a variety of lonely men come to doff all or most of their clothes, stretch out in the sun, and surreptitiously watch each other with expressions indivisibly mixing lust with hostility. Sometimes, they pair off for sex in the bare privacy afforded by the trees and tall grasses of the woods. Here, one sunny day, Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps) arrives for the first time this season, hoping to find some companionship of either the emotional or physical varieties, ideally both; and one would not say, to look at the objectively hot Franck, that he could possibly have a hard time finding guys in a less godforsaken part of the world. Yet even with the clearly-defined value system of the cruising site, where the handful of extremely hot men are stared at by the more numerous pudgy, old, or simply unkempt men, Franck is isolated and untouched. The only person he makes any kind of connection with, at first, is Henri (Patrick d'Assumçao), an overweight middle-aged man looking like the world's saddest Gerard Depardieu impersonator, who idly claims that he's not gay, but simply enjoys the beach for its quietude. Which might even be true, after its weird fashion - the fascination and attraction that passes between Franck and Henri isn't apparently erotic in nature, though it is certainly profound.

Meanwhile, Franck has his sights set on Michel (Christophe Paou), a much more conventional hunk who already has a boyfriend, or at least a regular fuckbuddy at the lake. So while Franck trysts dispassionately with whatever mostly attractive men will have him, he still casts a handful of longing, fruitless glances Michel's way, and after a few days of this, Michel takes definitive action to free himself up: while swimming, he drowns his lover, which Franck witnesses. And Franck latches onto him immediately as the object of all his desire to be intimate, not caring in the slightest about the fact that his new boyfriend is a murderer at the very least.

This scenario has been described, rather reflexively, as "Hitchcockian", which doesn't fit at all, but that's not to say it doesn't have it's charms as a bleak erotic thriller in which the plaintive desire to love and to fuck is so intense that it outweighs even the most basic survival instinct. It is, above all things, a study of the sheer horror of disconnection and alienation, the sense of being surrounded by people and yet totally unable to connect or interact with them, of being trapped in rigidly defined routines that channel life into ever more narrow channels. In fact, for all its endless supply of dongs - floppy dongs, rigid dongs, dripping dongs - the key visual motif in Stranger by the Lake has nothing to do with its frank and fearless depiction of sex, its aftermath, and lingering voyeuristic nudity, but with the straitjacketed litany of angles it uses to show those things, or the constant return to the same angle of the parking lot where all of the men return to the exact same space every day to meander to the exact same patch of beach to stare at the exact same collection of bodies. It is a repetitive film, purposefully so, establishing the mechanistic quality of life (the gay cruising life, the life of all lonely people, the life of just Franck and nobody else) through images and editing as clearly as it possibly could.

There's enormous value to everything the film has going on, and yet it still left me more than a little dissatisfied; by design, it's the sort of movie where any ten-minute slice is virtually indistinguishable from any other ten-minute slice, save for the intrusion in the second half of the laconic police inspector Damroder (Jérôme Chappatte) who investigates with very little urgency the possibility that the drowned man might have been the victim of foul play. That's key to how it works, but it also means that we have a hell of a lot of identical slices, and along with the film's steadfast commitment to the idea that we are all isolated and unknowable - "stranger by the lake" describes every single character at every single moment of the 97-minute film - it leaves the film feeling more than a bit unyielding and schematic. Its superficial commitment to the dynamics of the thriller genre are so willfully undercut, by Franck's immediate knowledge that Michel is a killer, and then by the refusal of anybody at the beach to care much about the death within their tight niche community (it's kind of like a parable for AIDS in an alternate universe where gay men all hate each other and secretly want to die), that its impossible to accuse writer-director Alain Guiraudie of having made a boring or aimless film; it's pretty obvious that focused, ritualistic aimlessness is exactly what he was gunning for.

In short, I am convinced that Stranger by the Lake is perfect, in that it achieves exactly what it meant to. It portrays the world of casual sex and cruising with almost journalistic proficiency - every character in the world of the beach is sharply etched and has the tang of real life and close observation - and it diagnoses that lifestyle as the result and the cause of lonely people trying to connect at all costs, whether sexually or emotionally or in the strange post-sexual philosophical state that Henri (the real destabilising element in Franck's experience of the beach, not the murderous hunk) strives to achieve or has achieved. It depicts the free-floating lust, judgment, self-loathing, and furtive, innocent longing of its singular milieu with precision and even a little bit of sympathy. I confess that even so, I find it dreary. This setting could have been the focal point for a great many kinds of stories that didn't involve incidentally ascribing an unchecked death drive as part and parcel of queer sexuality. But then it wouldn't have been French, and make no mistake: this might be one of the most irreducibly gay films of recent memory, but it far, far more irreducibly Gallic.

7/10

Read More

MOVIES I MISSED IN 2014: LARS AND THE REAL GIRLS

And so, Nymphomaniac; or is it Nymph()maniac? There are more than just cosmetic reasons for the latter to count as the actual title, since the dividing line between nymph and maniac is even more important to the film's project than the fact that an open parenthesis followed directly by a close parenthesis looks in the vaguest possible way like a vagina. But Nymp()maniac is cumbersome to type out and a bit pretentious so I will, not without regret, let it go.

At any rate, the film is the latest project by international cinema's most important and reliable provocateur, initially came to us in the form of two volumes of about two hours each that debuted, with all possible showiness, on Christmas Day in 2013 in Denmark, before the director's preferred cut surfaced piecemeal over 2014. And it is this longer cut, coming to a total just shy of five and a half hours, that we shall be considering now. For Antagony & Ecstasy believes in honoring artistic intent, even in the case of artists who we do not much care for.

I will say this much for Nymphomaniac, though: it wasn't nearly as diabolically unpleasant as I was prepared for it to be. It finds von Trier in a surprisingly overt comic mode; for those of us accustomed to viewing most of his films with a dispirited "he has got to be kidding, right?" reaction, this is the film where he pretty clearly admits that he is. The film takes the shape of a memoir in eight chapters, narrated by a middle-aged woman named Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg, reigning von Trier muse) to the older Seligman (Stellan Skarsgård, reliable von Trier mainstay), the man who found her bloody and bedraggled in an alley by his home one snowy night. The story is about her life as a nymphomaniac, ever since the fateful day she began to perceive her own sexuality; "I discovered my cunt as a two-year-old" begins her narrative, delivered over a shot of a bare-chested toddler staring down out of the frame, because Lars von Trier does not believe in starting slowly. For the rest of the night, Joe tells Seligman of her lost virginity to the dashing Jerôme (Shia LaBeouf), who is in and out of her life forever after); her teenage adventures in casual sex (Stacy Martin takes over for the pre-30 version of Joe); the way that having sex constantly with a broad variety of men came to dominate her young adulthood; the crisis that happened when she lost all feeling in her clitoris and began to seek out more extreme ways of coming to orgasm; and eventually her career as a mob extortionist. And in all of this, we see so, so much genitalia.

But the real purpose of Joe's tale isn't to convince Seligman that she's insatiably addicted to sex, but to convince him that she is a morally unjust person, and therein lies the comedy. Throughout her long recitation (which increasingly seems to be made up, Usual Suspects-style, of the things that come into her head while she sits in Seligman's empty rooms - not a reading the film insists upon, but certainly one it welcomes), the action frequently reverts back to the two of them sitting across from each other, with Joe asking some variation on "didn't that bit completely offend, shock, titillate, or disgust your?" to which her audience responds with labored theoretical frameworks justifying her behavior. First, he eagerly compares her sexual hunting to his own beloved hobby of fly-fishing, and by the time dawn roles around, he'll also have dragged into polyphonic theory and the history of the Eastern Orthodox church, among many other random tangents. Eventually even Joe seems to find him fatuous and boring and over-written.

These cutaways with Seligman offering baroque readings of Joe's life are, for one thing, the funniest part of a movie that's often prone to going for weird comedy rather than the sober drama of most of von Trier's work, especially in the first three hours. For another thing, it doesn't take knowing that the director has basically admitted that he views the women in his films as his authorial stand-ins to realise that we're watching Joe-as-von-Trier trying to provoke Seligman-as-film-critics, with Joe's life including several obvious references to the director's past work, whether in images or plot points, and even to the details of his public life; there's even time to have a chat about the morality of the Nazis, recalling the most famous controversy of von Trier's career. Through the characters' dynamic, von Trier is both repeating his claims to telling something important and challenging that must be said, and also asking, somewhat aghast, "do you people actually buy this shit I'm selling?"

Which, for as impenetrably self-regarding as that it is, it definitely gives Nymphomaniac a peculiar goofiness that makes it far more watchable than the story of yet another woman mortifying herself to find transcendence ought to be, especially at such a monstrous running time. And, throughout, Nymphomaniac also reverts to more traditional von Trier territory: there is much that is visceral and angry, whether the melodrama of a spurned wife (Uma Thurman, in a disorienting, almost cartoonish depiction of rage that's perhaps the film's single best performance); or the frequent explicit sex scenes in which there is no hint of eroticism, only the compulsive movement of mechanical beings; or what has to be the most gut-wrenching abortion scene in cinema history. Or the atrocious final scene, a violation of all character and story logic that exists, as far as I can tell, solely for von Trier to laugh at us on the way out of the theater, having ruined anything resembling a character or thematic arc across the whole immense beast of a movie.

In all of its modes - self-regarding, absurdly comic, clinically unsexy, violently distressing - Nymphomaniac never quite gets around to justifying the why of all this. Any insights into human interaction, sexual behavior, or gender politics are filtered through so much visually staginess and tonal insincerity that they hardly feel authentic in any way; the film is so long, repetitive, and predictable in its arch-European sexual chilliness that it doesn't even work as a provocation. It makes outrageous sex look absolutely tedious, and while I am sure there are those who would be shocked and outraged by this, and whose prudishness would thus give the film some merit as a "gotcha!" exercise, they wouldn't ever end up watching it. Besides, the idle emotional punishments von Trier ladles out on his characters for the sexuality is prudish enough on its own.

Essentially, it's a hollow plaster cast of a movie, acerbically funny enough to give it some personality, but devoid of any real meaning; it is an artificial construct of suffering than hardly feels painful even when we're watching it, an exercise in watching the director demonstrate once again that he can push buttons, even as he announces right there in the dialogue that he's just pushing out buttons for the hell of it. There are plenty of impressive shots throughout, some comic, some moving, some astonishing; and the way sound is used (especially the way it gives the film a broad structure) is clever, though the songs that crop on the soundtrack frequently are virtually never anything but obvious and dopey. So it's not poor cinema. And it's certainly varied enough that even as slow as it moves and as long as it lasts, it never feels pokey. But it's self-referential and self-rewarding to the point that it has virtually no other content. Although, in a film with this many close-ups of human orifices, I suppose it makes sense that the film basically takes place up Lars von Trier's ass.

5/10

Read More

CHICAGO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL '14: RED ROSE (SEPIDEH FARSI, FRANCE / GREECE, IRAN)

Screens at CIFF: 10/15 & 10/17 & 10/19
World premiere: 7 September, 2014, Toronto International Film Festival

Movies about ideas are wonderful things; movies that are "About Ideas" to the point where they start to disappear inside their own ass are much less so. And the French-made Iranian film Red Rose (that is, the crew and creative team are Iranian, but it was too politically charged to be made in that country) lives right on the knife's edge that separates satisfying conceptual filmmaking from tedious wankery. It wants very much for its character drama between a middle-aged former activist and a twentysomething protester and Twitter warrior, who end up having sex with potentially sinister overtones, to be all at once a story of two people attempting to make any kind of connection with humanity at large, to flaunt religious moral convention by presenting a sexually bold and provocative film, and to metaphorically explore how the generation that couldn't save the world last time and the generation that's probably not going to save the world this time interact with each other. All while the protests following the hopelessly corrupt and compromised 2009 elections in Iran serve as both the background and the main theme of the film.

One out of three is… dubiously impressive. As hard as it tries, Red Rose has a very hard time balancing its protagonists' identities as a worn-out old guy, Ali (Vassilis Koukalani), wary of ever leaving his apartment for fear of the state, and bubbly Sara (Mina Kavani), sexually open and eager to fix the world, with their roles as Emblem of the Failures of the 1979 Revolution and Symbol of Youthful Exuberance Untainted by Wisdom and Experience, and also How Technology Changes Things. And by "has a hard time", I mean that it doesn't; at a certain point, and it comes awfully early, one gets the impression that director/writer Sepideh Farsi and co-writer Javad Djavahery have quietly given up hope that their story will ever exist at a level beyond symbolism. Or maybe they never intended for it to leave that level, and the intimations in the early going that it might also work as a simple but intelligent character study are simply accidental byproducts of putting generational forces into human bodies.

Whatever the case, the film ends up a curiously frustrating affair, in which virtually everything happening around the edges is terrific, interesting cinema, while the main bulk of it is frankly tedious political cartooning too obsessed with Saying Something with every new shot to have any soul to speak of. The good stuff is keen, nuanced character material, or sharp depictions of the way that people who define themselves in terms of their politics can lapse into self-loathing or braggadocio, sometimes simultaneously, or simply nice little beats of acting and character creation, in which the performers (Kavani especially) simply let the characters breathe. And there's a lot of that, all through the whole running time of the movie (which, at only 80 minutes, is thankfully free of extraneous fat).

The more overtly symbolic approach to the material can't really be called "bad", since it's obviously what the film wanted to do, and I get the impression that this turned out more or less exactly the way Farsi had in mind. But it's awfully dry, regardless. The film is so openly aware of its Importance in how it Engages With Culture that it can be awfully tedious to watch it.

That being said, when Farsi and company calm down and let the movie be the movie, it's awfully wonderful. Kavani and Koukalani are both fascinating to watch, and their chemistry just strained enough for it to be clear that these aren't any kind of soulmates, just two people, each with their own baggage, who end up in a complex and thorny emotional situation. Unlike a lot of films that foreground their rulebreaking depiction of sex, Red Rose always makes it clear that the sex is part of the characters' development, and not just an end to itself - not simply 'let's depict sex as a political act!" in the aggressive and somewhat juvenile way that it was deployed back in the '60s, say. Though of course that subtext is very much present. Let's not downplay it: Red Rose is a film that depicts people, events, and actions that don't get a lot of screentime, and that is the thing it cares about the most. And it matters: pinning down a particular historical moment that, just five years later, has been almost completely forgotten in the West is a terrifically important thing, and between telling its human story as impacted by the protests, and collecting footage from 2009, Red Rose is as important a document as it is a dramatic fiction.

That said, fictions cannot live on importance alone, and I wish the film was a little less stuffy, and didn't feel compelled to weight every narrative beat with social significance (it pays off in the blunt, unexpected ending, but that's at least somewhat too little, too late). There's a beautiful two-hander sitting right there, given just a tiny bit less room and freedom to develop independently of the background narrative to feel like anything other than a pretext. There's a whole lot in Red Rose that's interesting and well-done - if just for her skill in portraying the inside of a single apartment with kinetic, varied imagery that prevents it from ever feeling claustrophobic or static to the viewer, Farsi deserves all the praise in the world - and I left the film feeling pretty good about what had just happened. But pretty good isn't great, and it's frustrating to see Red Rose do so much to limit itself to being just an editorial, at the expense of its drama.

7/10

Read More

STANLEY KUBRICK: NO DREAM IS EVER JUST A DREAM

When Stanley Kubrick died on 7 March, 1999, it was some twelve years since the release of his last film, Full Metal Jacket; but all was not lost. He'd been working for some time on a new movie, and just days before his passing, he had screened a cut of it to some executives and the lead actors. "The final cut!" assured Warner Bros. to all of us nervous cinephiles hoping for one last masterpiece from one of the least prolific auteurs of the last quarter of the 20th Century. Well, the final cut except for the sound mix, a tossed-off admission that was framed in the entertainment media as just an incidental detail, oh the sound mix, well nobody needs to worry about that. As though Kubrick's films had slap-dash sound mixes that didn't do much besides make sure you could hear the dialogue. And of course, the director who had re-cut The Shining after it had opened - twice - could hardly be counted on to have a real picture-locked cut months out from the release date.

So let's just call it like it is: Eyes Wide Shut is an unfinished movie. It might very well be 98% of the movie Kubrick would have signed off on if he'd lived on for years and years; but that 2% niggles. The sound mix, for one, has some fucking dodgy moments, and the music (culled from Kubrick's notes, for he had not finalised the soundtrack yet) at times cuts in and out crudely. There are incidental shots that feel redundant, scenes that plainly go on too long, and the film's momentum is extravagantly strange in its final hour. I do not know what changes Kubrick would have made, had he lived; but I really don't think this movie is exactly the movie he'd have signed off on. It's unfinished. We might deeply wish that not to be the case, but it is.

That being said, it's one of the greatest unfinished movies in the history of cinema. In its current, unmistakably compromised state, it's still among my favorite of all the director's career: it's a little spooky to imagine what it might be like if Kubrick had had the time to make it even better. As it stands, it one of the most tightly self-contained and complex in its themes; it's positively brazen in how it plays by a cinematography rulebook that no other movie I've ever seen has apparently even heard of, let alone copied from. It even manages to make the hoariest, most laughable cliché in all of dramatic fiction - "it was all a dream!" - work in such a way that the possibility of its most confounding elements being explained away thus actually manages to make the film denser and more challenging, not simpler and gimmicky.

Admittedly, it comes by the dream subtext by virtue of its source material, the 1926 novella Traumnovelle by Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler. Kubrick and Frederic Raphael's screenplay is surprisingly faithful, considering the shift from 1920s Vienna (not incidentally, the home of Freud and symbolic psychoanalysis) to 1990s New York, and from a pair of not-quite-explicitly Jews to the most vanilla gentiles you could conceive of (to hammer the point home, Kubrick - an ethnically Jewish filmmaker, lest we forget -; set his film at Christmas and included decorations and trees lit with multicolor bulbs in so many shots that it very quickly lunges into self-parody). The very title of Traumnovelle - that is, Dream Story - tips its hand that there's more than a little possibility that some of what we're reading takes place in the characters' heads, and while Eyes Wide Shut is significantly more cryptic, it unpacks to mean about the same thing: being absolutely certain you're awake (Eyes Wide) when you're not (Shut). At any rate, I think it's quite certain that some of the action takes place inside its protagonist's dreams, though I won't pretend that I can pick the exact scene where the dream starts or where it stops.

Regardless of how much of it is in dreams, it's obvious that it all takes place inside the main character's head: at heart, as suggested by the very first image - a blunt, objectifying shot of Nicole Kidman dropping her dress to reveal her naked backside - this is the story of how Dr. Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) perceives his wife. And himself, and their relationship, and the world; but mostly, it's about an individual man being terrified by the inscrutability of the female sexual drive. One night, the day after a dull but opulent Christmas party where they both fruitlessly flirt with other people (and Bill saves a naked woman from dying of a drug overdose in the private room where the host took her for a rendezvous), Alice Harford (Kidman, then married to Cruise; easy to forget all these strange years later, but it's part of the reason they were cast) recounts a memory of a profound romantic and sexual longing she felt towards a man she made eye contact with during a family vacation. This completely unmans Bill, and he spends the rest of the evening wandering in a fugue: encountering a friendly prostitute (Vinessa Shaw) with whom he does not have sex, hearing tell of a mysterious party from an old college friend (Todd Field), serving briefly as a kind of protector for the barely-dressed teenage daughter (Leelee Sobieski) of a Balkan costume shop owner (Rade Šerbedžija), and ending up as a voyeur at a bizarre orgy in a huge manor home outside of the city, where masked individuals in sweeping black cloaks engage in ritualistic copulation so devoid of passion for all its mechanical energy, so unearthly and uncanny and terrifying, that a new word needs to be coined to describe it, because "sex" feels like it describes something in an entirely different emotional universe.

The key thing uniting all these experiences, and the rest that Bill experiences in his days and nights of working through the confused fugue state that Alice's words threw him into, is that he is presented with the most generic manly-man fantasies of having gorgeous women throw themselves at him, but he never actually has sex with any of them. And here's where it makes the most sense to describe the plot of Eyes Wide Shut in terms of being a dream, so cleanly and snugly symbolic that I frankly find it dull. The more interesting questions raised by the movie are those of Bill's own personality: what kind of man would either experience these things in the way he does, or have the fantasies he does? Answering that question is in no small degree the reason to watch Eyes Wide Shut, a film that absolutely deserves better than being pinned down to any one interpretation, but my own sense is that we're meant to understand Bill as deeply threatened by real feelings, by authenticity: this brings us to the question of why Kubrick cast Cruise, which in grand "Ryan O'Neal in Barry Lyndon" fashion I believe to be because Cruise represents a completely superficial kind of movie star. Think about Cruise - what do you think about? His smile, right? Maybe his hair? Completely surface-level, easily faked elements. Cruise, as an actor, is about the appearance of charm and charisma, irrespective of whether or not he actually possesses it (the same year as Eyes Wide Shut, Paul Thomas Anderson compellingly argued that he does not, in Magnolia). And Bill Harford, as a character, is about the appearance of being a New York doctor: attending the right parties, making the right social gestures, having the right frigid wife who gave up her job to raise their daughter, pointedly denied any personality beyond "that little thing that the Harfords have to exist around".

In this reading, the understanding that his flawless wife, both morally and aesthetically, has feelings and urges outside of his script is so profoundly threatening to Bill that he has to retreat into a fantasy - and dream or not, Eyes Wide Shut plays out as a fantasy, with side characters who feel more like a male daydream of what women act like, streets of a patently artificial New York,* arriving at what can only be called an inscrutable nightmare of an orgy where he is rescued - redeemed, which is a much more emphatic and meaningful word - by a naked woman who behaves as both an exclusively sexual object and also a sexually untouched goddess figure. On his second day, he then plays at being a sleuth, a brave problem-solver who can easily explain everything; but this only results in his intelligence and implicitly his masculinity being undercut so easily that it's damn near comical.

(I've heard it said that the film, during its theatrical release, opened and closed on extravagantly grainy footage that slowly grew clearer until the orgy sequence, at which point it was sharp as could be. Since every home video release - the only way I've ever seen the film - scrubs clean all the grain that Kubrick worked so hard to put into it, I'll never know if that's true. But it certainly makes the idea that the orgy represents the deepest, more primal expression of Bill's feelings towards sex as an incoherent, inscrutable terror a lot easier to defend).

What is certainly true, no matter how you interpret its various puzzles, is that Eyes Wide Shut is about surfaces, and truth being disguised and revealed (no movie with so many masks can possibly pretend to be coy on this point). It is about the environments people build for themselves, whether that means the palatial interiors throughout the movie or the backlot New York; and it is about how people inhabit those environments. Everybody who saw the hugely misleading ad campaign that tried to act like this was a steamy erotic thriller knows that the film is about human bodies, but what matters isn't how those bodies are sexualised, and anyway, Eyes Wide Shut is a deeply non-erotic film. What matters is how casually Kidman (who is simply terrific in a smallish and probably thankless role as the prism through which a man is confronted with his dysfunctional ideas of women) moves her body, lounging on chairs and beds in sheer clothes that reveal the details of her breasts, completely without modesty; it matters how much Sydney Pollack barrels around with his thick, hairy abdomen; it matters how Alan Cumming tightens himself up in little coils of unexpressed desire. It mostly matters how Cruise moves, fluid but mechanical, and how calculated every gesture feels; how unlike all the other characters other than the freakish masked orgiers, he seems to be using his body as a tool to maneuver, not as a part of himself to inhabit.

The film thrives on a sense of disorientation and disconnection, which is communicated best through it's soundtrack, a great one however potentially corrupted from Kubrick's plans. There are, broadly speaking, three signature tunes: one is an original, rare for the director, composed by Jocelyn Pook. It's a droning, menacing chant (a backward tracked piece of Romanian Orthodox liturgy), with humming strings beneath it; it's pure, unadulterated horror, equally as suited for an Italian paranormal thriller as for a strange and otherworldly ritual orgy. The other two major pieces in the film are the second movement of György Ligeti's Musica ricercata, a pounding, metronomic repetition of sharp notes that drive a sense of inevitable fate into your skull like nails; and Dmitri Shostakovich second waltz from Suite for Variety Orchestra (misidentified until 1999, and thus in the film's credits, as Jazz Suite No. 2), a swirling, carnivalesque number that opens the film on a spirit of energetic confusion that it never shakes.

And, too, the film's visuals contribute a great deal to its mood, as one would expect of a Kubrick film; his unfortunate victim this time around was Larry Smith, credited as a lighting cameraman, who had to execute Kubrick's hugely ambitious scheme of shooting the whole movie solely with available lighting, frequently showing the sources of lights - table lamps, chandeliers, neon signs, and what feels like billions of miniature Christmas lights in all colors - right onscreen. The result is a film that almost literally glows: especially in the opening party scene, the whole thing is coated with a fuzzy aura, but there are few places anywhere in the movie where the lighting does anything like we would expect. There are hard spaces with suggestive, floating shadows; there are dusky spaces with yellowish haze ever so slightly diffusing the image; there are cool neon-lit interiors that feel like brief oases from the chaos of lighting on the streets outside. I literally can't name a single other film that even starts to resemble the look of Eyes Wide Shut, and while that's geekery talking a little bit, it's surely the case that, if only on a subliminal level, anyone watching the film will absorb how strange and totally alien the film's look is, and apply that feeling. The story of the film is already frequently inscrutable, despite a late scene where Pollack's character explains it all and is probably lying (it's the one scene of the film I just don't like, and I hope some or all of it would have ended up on the chopping block if Kubrick lived), but the images push that inscrutability right into the realm of feverish hallucination.

The point is not to confuse us for the sake of being a dick; the point is to blur the distinction between what's "really happening" and and the half-formed, vaguely-remembered, fatigue-addled perception of what's really happening. At a pragmatic level, all of us are living a life based on our best guess of what's going on rather than knowing for 100% certain what is true and what things mean; in burying itself in Bill's foggy perception and letting just enough of the actual reality of Alice, of the orgy, of whatever else creep in at the edges, Eyes Wide Shut becomes a magnificent depiction of that perceptual gap, and the ways in which it affects our ability to genuinely engage with other people, too easy to reduce - as Bill does - to supporting characters in our own solipsistic dramas. In giving the final word to Alice - and oh, what a word it is - the film at last breaks clean of Bill's limited perspective and suggests that he's come through his experiences with a greater ability to appreciated the distinct inner lives of other people, and that all told, he's better for his traumatic experience, whether a dream or not. In that respect, Eyes Wide Shut might be the most genuinely optimistic film that Kubrick ever made.

Read More

MOVIES I MISSED IN 2013: LOVE IS ALL YOU NEED

Some titles are just destined to be used ironically, and Paradise: Love is their king. Particularly being from Austria, a country with a fetish for cinematic misery. And particularly, I understand, from the mind of director Ulrich Seidl, who I gather (I have not previously seen his work) is kind of like a version of Michael Haneke without the formal playfulness to leaven his depictions of awful people suffering.

Sure enough, the film's bitter, travesty of the qualities presented in its title is made clear early on and repeated vigorously throughout. Paradise is here played by a beach resort in sub-Saharan Africa, where middle-aged European women and young African men engage in a corroded kind of pas de deux over sex and money, and love refers to the way that one particular woman, Teresa (Margarete Tiesel), is able to convince herself that the various gigolos she encounters during her vacation care about her on any kind of vaguely emotional level, and that she cares about them in the same way.

That's basically it, as far as narrative content goes: an early scene back in Austria sets up Teresa's vacation while introducing us to her sister (Maria Hofstätter) and teenage daughter (Melanie Lenz) , the subjects of the other other two legs of Seidl's Paradise trilogy, Faith and Hope. Everything else is a series of largely repetitive scenes of Teresa navigating the treacherous emotional terrain of a sex tourism trip that she might very well have misunderstood until she got there - both the screenplay (by Seidl and Veronika Franz) and Tiesel's immaculately subtle performance leave it very much up for debate how much Teresa actually knows about what's going on and when she knows it. The conflict in this largely anecdotal story, barely even plotty enough to call itself "episodic", is not between Teresa and anyone else, but within Teresa: to what degree is she actually looking for love in the strangest of places, and to what degree is this just her elaborate game of self-deception that allows her to continue feeling like a moral person in the midst of this whoredom parade?

This is positively aching to be presented in the bleakest possible way, the sort of film that we endure rather than watch. To its credit, Love is not nearly as punishing as it could be, for it largely stays away from being particularly cruel to Teresa. She suffers no humiliations to speak of, though it could be easily argued that the grossly transfixed detail with which Seidl and cinematographers Ed Lachman and Wolfgang Thaler depict Tiesel's sagging and overweight naked body is in and of itself all the humiliation the film needs (this is not a movie with a particularly forgiving or positive attitude towards the sexual desires of aging women). There's no punishment for her transgression of lying to herself and others about her emotional and sexual needs, except that she ends up unfulfilled in both of them.

It shouldn't be assumed that since Love keeps Tiesel from the abuse that perhaps Haneke or definitely Lars von Trier would have heaped on her, it's somehow a more pleasant movie than the grubbiest of Euro-art "everything sucks and people most of all" pictures. Love presents a singularly black portrait of how people engage with each other, using its blandly documentarylike long-takes and wide shots to watch its characters like zoo animals. The comparison is not flattering to the animals. In Love, human behavior reduces basically and always to one point: tell me what lie I should use to get what I want out of you. It's impossible to reduce it to simple parable of disgusting Europeans literally fucking over poor Africans, because the Africans are just as predatory and merciless as the other side. Nobody seems honorable or worthy in this scenario, because every one is actively and consciously reducing everyone else to cogs in a game of humanity-as-economics, and Teresa is the worst of all since she seems to believe - at the very least, she broadcasts it to everyone else - that by framing her behavior in this system as part of an emotional journey and desire for connection, she excuses herself from the nonstop cycle of mutual exploitation.

"Dear God, then why bother?" is a very legitimate question here. Because the issues are real, and under-explored in the movies, or at least under-explored with such non-sensationalist intellectualism, is one answer. Because Tiesel gives one of the year's great performances in creating a woman of murky inner depths, as murky to her as to anybody watching the film, is another. But in honesty, Paradise: Love is a film that I'm dubious enough on for myself that I can't really claim that it's necessary or rewarding cinema. It's a mean movie in some unfortunate ways: from the very first shot of people with Down syndrome being battered about in bumper cars at the attraction Teresa runs, Seidl shows a disreputable fascination with weird body shapes that only worsens once the panoply of nude scenes focused on Tiesel's conventionally unattractive body starts up. I wouldn't say it's pedantic and moralising in the way that his countryman Haneke can easily become in his worst moments, but the film feels at times like it's standing in judgment, even when it's not really standing in judgment of anything in particular.

At any rate, it's a real sock in the gut, though I think if Seidl's impulse to tell the Paradise films in one two-hour omnibus rather than as three separate features had held steady, it would lose none of its impact and gained some sense of focus. In its current state, it's a bit redundant, and Tiesel's fluid performance and our shifting sense of who her character is only carries it so far. But there are moments in the film, both character-based and not - there are long shots where Siedel seems to grow weary of sufferingy and instead allows himself a chance to simply watch human beings in the act of getting by with life - that linger on in the mind as sharp pieces of observation that rise above any simple moral argument, and give the film more nuance than just another damn story of depravity. At any rate, it's a film that, once watched, is not readily un-watched, in both good and dismaying ways alike.

7/10

Read More

MASTERS OF ITALIAN HORROR: RICCARDO FREDA'S DIRTY LITTLE SECRET

Part of the Italian Horror Blogathon at Hugo Stiglitz Makes Movies

The phrase that I have chosen, "Masters of Italian horror", doesn't entirely describe the work of Riccardo Freda, surely not a name spoken of in the same breath as Mario Bava, Dario Argento, and Lucio Fulci. But his historical importance is such that he's worthy of elevation to the status of, if not Master, then at least Father. Freda, you see, was the director of the first Italian horror movie of the sound era, 1956's I vampiri (though his cinematographer, Mario Bava, took over at a certain point), and of the second, 1959's Caltiki, the Immortal Monster (though his cinematographer, Mario Bava... hey, wait a second), and we cannot help but assume that Freda thus had some measure of influence over how these films turned out, and the whole corpus of Italian horror that built upon those films' model.

Eventually, Freda even made horror movies all by himself without Bava having anything to do with them at all, of which the most prominent is easily The Horrible Secret of Dr. Hichcock, sometimes rendered in English more bluntly as The Horrible Dr. Hichcock, and always rendered with that distinctly "T"-less spelling that makes my fingers itch every time I type it. The horrible secret, we learn reasonably early, is indeed horrible, enough of a cinematic taboo in 2013 that I can't even imagine how it played in 1962, to say nothing of how the censors of any country in the world stayed asleep at the switch long enough for it to see release to paying audiences in the first place. I speak of necrophilia, though even that isn't quite as fucked up as what the film depicts: in its opening sequence, set in London in 1885, we meet the Hichcocks, notable surgeon Bernard (Robert Flemying) and his wife Margaretha (Maria Teresa Vianello), who like to have sex while she's drugged into a coma on his revolutionary new anesthesia. And I do very much mean they like it: the expectant grin she gives to her husband as he starts to pull out the equipment to give her a shot makes it absolutely clear that this is not the first time they've played this game, and it's very much consensual.

By this point, mind you, we've already seen that Dr. Hichcock's interests don't lie solely in pseudo-necrophiliac monogamy: the opening scene reveals him sneaking into a graveyard to fondle a corpse he finds there. This matters later.

The Hichcocks are aided in their kink by the housemaid Martha (Harriet Medin), whose own little smirk of pleasure when the doctor gives her the unstated command to hurry his wife up through the party she's hosting downstairs states just how much she's not offended by this arrangement. And presumably, things could be ever thus, with the married couple engaged in their weird, non-reciprocal pleasures, and Bernard sneaking off to play around with dead girls in the cemetery every now and then, except that one night, the doctor decides, quite consciously but for no obvious reason, to give his wife an extra-large dose of anesthesia. This triggers a frightening and unpleasant choking reaction from the terrified Margaretha, and Dr. Hichcock is unable to help her, despite his transparent horror at what's happening. He is so heartbroken that he decides to leave the house immediately after the funeral.

Twelve years later, a remarried Hichcock decides to try and resume his life, bringing his young bride Cynthia (Barbara Steele) back to his large London home. It takes all of one night for Cynthia to realise that things in the Hichcock home are severely fucked up: a screaming woman in an unseen room that Martha promises is her sister, people creeping around at night, and her husband revealing certain threatening predispositions that she doesn't know what to do with, all make for an unpleasant living situation that only gets worse as secrets begin spilling out, and Bernard decides to start practicing his old sexual habits again, whether his new wife is in on the game or not.

It is known of The Horrible Dr. Hichcock that Freda and writer Ernesto Gastaldi (both of them, incidentally, hiding under pseudonyms; the idea seems to have been to convince the Italian market that the film was an American or British import, as those were still bigger draws) had a lot more exposition and explaining ready to go, but the shoot went over schedule, and those bits were the first casualty, leaving us with a film where a lot of motivations and backstory doesn't exist except through implication. I will freely acknowledge that the film turned out better as a result. We don't need to know exactly how the Hichcocks' marriage worked, or every thought that crosses through Bernard Hichcock's mind; the only question that genuinely feels wanting to me is why Martha kept the secret of Margaretha's survival (which the film wants to pretend is a secret, but of course it's not) from Dr. Hichcock all those years. Everything else is communicated well enough through the film's visuals, and I suspect that everyone complaining that The Horrible Dr. Hichcock leaves a lot of things unclear is really just admitting that they don't like films that do important parts of storytelling exclusively through imagery.

But that is exactly what we like about Italian horror films, and I find that this particular movie strikes a splendid balance between being cryptic and weirdly-written after the fashion of so many later genre films from that country, and having all of its images grounded in explicating the plot and characters, rather than just being gorgeously baroque for the sake of it. The thing about Dr. Hichcock that's special even among Italian horror is how much of its effect is based in acting - traditionally the last thing you'd rush to praise in one of these movies - especially the acting done by Flemyng, who later claimed to hate the film, indicating that he'd done everything he could to sabotage it with his performance. Mission emphatically failed, if that was truly the case: the one constant throughout the whole film is that Flemyng's face, in just a handful of frames, communicates the inner workings of his character with a force and impact that would have taken pages and pages of screenplay to cover verbally. And since the film trades extensively on the massively fucked-up sexual peccadilloes that dominate Hichcock's life, having a quick means of communicating the shadings of his psychology to the audience is absolutely essential. There are other good bits of acting in the film - the only generally ineffective performance is that of Silvano Tranquilli as the colleague who starts to realise that Hichcock is up to No Good - although I wish that Steele had a bit more to do than recoil in horror; but the film lives and dies with Flemyng.

Of course, Freda does a lot to help the actors along. His aesthetic does not show noticeable influence from Bava (this film was shot by Raffaele Masciocchi, whose bread and butter appear to have been in the peplum, or sword & sandal epic): like early Bava, the emphasis is heavily Gothic, but the extreme phantasmagoria of Bava's films is nowhere in evidence, and Freda generally keeps his camera much closer to the thing he's depicting. The effect is something closer to naturalism, which is useful in two ways: one, because it allows the spikes of outright fantastic imagery to land with quite a bit of force (the way that a room suddenly explodes with red light when Hichcock spots a dead young woman to violate; a stunning shot of Cynthia pounding on the glass window in a coffin, trying to beg for help, and succeeding only in steaming up the glass with her breath). Two, because the creation of a fairly grounded visual normalcy means that the necrophilia material is much harder to escape than it would be in a more vividly imaginative horror setting; though obscured by many decades, the film is plainly depicting something like the real world, and this gives its kinky sexuality far more potency than I know what to do with, even 51 years on.

Ultimately, everything that is most fascinating about The Horrible Dr. Hichcock has to do with sex. It's a good horror film, mind, though the last ten minutes with their series of Shocking! reveals, and the gradual reduction of Cynthia to a screaming, running victim take a lot of the sting out. But it's even better as a film of psychological exploration - I will not even call it "psychological horror", since the film takes careful pains to never depict the sexual behavior of the Hichcocks as aberrant or immoral. It is simply a fact of their existence, and only once Dr. Hichcock has to look elsewhere to get his rocks off do the really terrifying behaviors start up. The film's vagueness about anything we don't directly see makes this a lot more unnerving than it might be, since we're never entirely clear what happens to Cynthia, or what happened between her and Hichcock before their arrival in London; we might have suspicions, but we don't know what he's been up to with corpses, or how those corpses get made; we surely don't have much sense at all what's going on in Margaretha and Martha's heads, and that leaves itself open for all kinds of interpretation.

It's possible to read the Hichcocks' marriage as the ultimate example of Victorian repression, or the ultimate violation of it; as something uniquely benign or especially unhealthy. The film's triumph is that it gives us just enough certain knowledge that we can start to make all kinds of alarming assumptions for ourselves, and it uses the striking visual contrast between the desperate Flemyng and the fragile Steele as a catalyst to make sure that those assumptions will all be unpleasant ones. It's quite a trick to have the driving force behind a plot be implication and innuendo, and while there's a lot to like about the film as pure Gothic horror (that coffin scene will stick with me for quite a while), it's at its very best when it's asking unresolved, uncomfortable questions about sexual behavior and power imbalances between men and women.

Read More