BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: SWAPPIN' CONSCIOUSNESS WITH TARSEM

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: director Tarsem Singh shows us the terrible things that can happen when two personalities are stuffed into one brain in Self/less. In this, he is merely returning to his roots.

When it was new, The Cell was at the center of controversy about its content: is there something wrong and wicked about how this movie used absolutely breathtaking images to depict horrible, violent acts, stripping them of their real-world gravity. How innocent a controversy it was! Back in 2000, when this movie came out, we hadn't even seen Saw yet (a film through which you can draw a surprisingly straight line from The Cell), and we didn't know just how pornographic violence could get. I don't know about you, but if I get to choose between a film that might be fetishising violence and is also gorgeous, and a film that definitely is fetishising violence and looks like it was shot on film stock made of dog turds, I'm not going to have to think very long.

But even that's begging the question. To be clear, no, I don't think that The Cell is a fetish object for anything, outside of perhaps the impossible fantasy costumes (Eiko Isihioka and April Napier share costuming duty; I'm going to assume without any real evidence that Napier is responsible for the clothing that looks like what human beings wear, while Isioka's contribution were all of the gilded parade floats with space for people's legs at the bottom). In fact, of all director Tarsem Singh's movies - this was his first - it strikes me as the one where style is most clearly used as a function of the needs of the story and the rather horrible psychological depths that story plumbs (his sophomore effort, The Fall, strikes me more as a story built more to facilitate style than the other way 'round; not that I feel for The Fall anything less than total love).

That said, style is still a very, very important thing; style muscles its way to our eyeballs right from the opening, while the story is still deliberately keeping itself hidden. In the beginning there is desert: shattering orange sand and glowing blue skies, the undiluted colors of the very concept of The Desert of legends and myth (this sequence was shot in Namibia, which would, 15 years later, provide the same uncompromising primary colors to Mad Max: Fury Road). In the desert is a woman all in beautiful, flowing, feathered white, looking like a dove come down from heaven - we don't know her yet, but she's Catherine Deane (Jennifer Lopez), a psychologist. And we don't know this yet, either, but this desert is all in the mind of Edward Baines (Colton James), a boy of about 10. Deane is a member of a team working on an extraordinary technology to treat extraordinary mental disorders: she can literally enter another person's headspace and interact with their consciousness directly. Edward is suffering from a coma triggered by psychological trauma, and his well-to-do parents have sponsored the development of this extraordinary technology under the hands of Drs. Kent (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) and Cooperman (Becker).

I'm in awe of this opening for reasons that have nothing to do with its literally awe-inspiring scenery and the exquisite costuming. By the ten-minute mark of The Cell, Tarsem and screenwriter Mark Protosevich have told us exactly what their movie is going to be and how to watch it: there will be beautiful tableaux, framed with a sense of painterly composition by music video veteran Tarsem and music video cinematographer Paul Laufer (who shot only one other movie in his career) that is far more attuned to the rules of graphical art than traditional narrative cinema, and is meant to be read accordingly. These images are the expression of moods, and the moods moreover of very specific individuals: tell a sullen 10-year-old to think of a "desert", and it is very much the desert that we get in the opening scene that he'll probably have in mind. So the first thing we learn is to read the images as essential concepts, and not as narrative spaces. The second thing we learn is that we're either on-board with a device that lets a psychologist mind-meld with comatose patients suffering from transparently made-up mental conditions, or we are not. And the film makes its technology as unreasonable as it can: the rig is some kind of fantastic open space where the participants are suspended in mid-air on many fine wires, while wearing suits that make it look rather like they've been skinned alive, which cannot possibly be an accident given the film's eventual fixation on torture and murder. Basically, I mean to say, the opening ten minutes find the movie putting everything on the table: if we aren't on its side, we never will be, and I greatly admire a film that certain of itself.

The plot pretty clearly situates The Cell at the end of the big wave of film's cribbing from The Silence of the Lambs: there's a serial killer, see, who drowns women in an implausible elaborate automated drowning cube (the glassy set for which vividly predicts Saw and its sequels and their theatrical murder boxes), and then bleaches and paints them to resemble porcelain dolls. Catching this repugnant creature has become the fixation of FBI agent Peter Novak (Vince Vaughn, in what is by an enormously exaggerated margin my favorite of his performances), who has finally scraped enough evidence together to catch the killer, Carl Stargher (Vincent D'Onofrio), right in his house. The problem is, Stargher's kill factory isn't in his house. And Stargher is currently suffering from another made-up psychological coma, meaning that Novak and his team only have about 40 hours to find, based on no leads at all, where the killer's present victim has been imprisoned, before she drowns. And there follows the one piece of contrived screenwriting that I can't bring myself to overlook, out of the whole lacework of contrivances that makes up the first third of The Cell: Novak is somehow aware of the experimental dream-sharing machine, and he wants Deane to go hunting in the hideous reaches of Stargher's subconscious to find any scrap of evidence for where he might leave his victims while they die.

The thing that The Cell transforms into at this point is damned near impossible to describe - certainly, even attempting a verbal sketch of the imagery is pointlessness itself. Tarsem, along with Ishioka and Napier, production designer Tom Foden, set decorator Tessa Posnansky, and art director Geoff Hubbard, create mental worlds in this film, both Stargher's and eventually Deane's, that are without specific precedent, nor can I offhand name anything that has copied them since. A few points along the way, though: the film is not quite as straightforward as "the inside of a serial killer's mind is like this" symbolism, though that's enough to get by. Beyond that, it's a synthesis of imagery from European and at least South Asian artistic traditions, as well as American pop culture, and what this suggests within the film itself is not just "let's make the most horrifying hellscapes possible by drawing on multiple sources". Instead, it suggests that Stargher is himself making the same synthesis that the filmmakers do, pulling together fragments of remembered images to construct a worldview. Setting aside its applications to the film's deep wells of horror, this is a tremendously effective way of cinematically visualising the process of how human personalities are built out of piece of memory, whether from personal experience or appropriations of fantasies, stories, and the background radiation of culture. And of course, since this is horror, the personality we need to be chiefly concerned with is one dominated by suffering, directed inward and directed outward and even freestanding representations of pain and death that simply exist, independent of who caused the pain or who receives it.

Importantly, this all applies not just to Stargher, but to Deane herself (at which point I think it deserves saying: Lopez is better in this role than she gets credit for, a placidly calm presence whose relatively simple and straightforward way of presenting the character's beatific sensibilities starts paying considerable dividends when that simplicity runs into the dense imagery), who defines her inner life with signifiers of goodness as soft and generically calming as Stargher's are specific and increasingly draining to watch. The design is no less striking, for being less cruel; Deane's get-up like a cherry blossom that became a nun is among the film's boldest costumes. This is not about reducing the film to a Manichean good/bad framework, though the implication is certainly that Deane thinks in those terms. What it's about is providing a counterpoint to the inside of Stargher's head, while making the same point: we mentally visualise the world in terms of broad signifiers which we then decorate with our own reference points, and that process is called "having a personality". A variation on it is called "consuming art, up to and including the movie titled The Cell", and that's maybe the most cunning thing about the film: it contains within its own structure the expectation that we will be effected by what we're watching. If we are healthy and know that's what we're doing, we can leave the movie having broken down its enormously memorable visual setpieces into our own personal library of reference points. If we are not healthy, well, the movie has some very imaginative ideas about what happens to people whose personality-construction goes awry. The point being, though, that the film is one of the boldest depictions of how external stimuli are transformed into internal narrative, for good or otherwise, that I know the movies to have attempted, and that's rewarding even beyond the shockingly bold images that almost exclusively make up the film's final hour and change.

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THE WORLD IS A FINE PLACE, AND WORTH FIGHTING FOR

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

I shall start with a personal anecdote, since who doesn't love personal anecdotes from nominally objective arts critics? But "a man goes to the movies. The critic must be honest enough to admit that he is that man." And when the man now writing was a good deal younger - a boy, really, though I mightn't have thought it at the time, all of 18 and new to college - he saw for the first and until very recently the only time, David Fincher's 1995 breakthrough Se7en, the film with which that music video director proved that, absent the clusterfuck of studio intervention that made Alien³ such an unimpressive feature debut, he had the stylistic chops and tight control of tone required to be a Real Auteur. And upon this first viewing of Se7en, Wee Young Timmy Brayton was absolutely flattened - just so damn thoroughly unnerved and wrecked by it that, for 14 years and change, it was the one and only title on my list of movies So Good I Can Only Bear to Watch It Once. Now, obviously, the film's not that extreme, and in the intervening decade, I've watched many films that are far more punishing in every way, and for some years now, I've supposed that in this case, memory was exaggerating the titanic dreadfulness of how cruel and unabating the film was, and of course that turns out to be the case. Still, the point remains: it takes a hell of a movie to trigger that kind of response. And yes, Se7en is absolutely a hell of a movie - and a movie of Hell, I might idly throw out there, if I wanted to engage in feeble wordplay.

The film's impact has been seismic; along with The Silence of the Lambs, four years earlier, and maybe we could argue TV's The X-Files, which premiered in 1993, it's one of the creative works in what we might, for want of a clear term, call the Horror Cop genre: police procedurals which appropriate all they can from the gore and terror-driven horror genre (a genre that was, I suspect not coincidentally, in abeyance in the first half of the 1990s), to the point that they start to blur definitional lines. Silence, I think, is a horror film; Se7en, ultimately, probably isn't, but it's right there. And though these two films are, by themselves, almost the entire history of this experimental subgenre, their influence has been felt absolutely everywhere in the two decades since the latter film's premiere - Holy Mother of all things sacred, Se7en is 20 years old, when the fuck did that happen? - in less pure form. Take some of the horror back out, and you have the glut of TV procedurals in which grim-faced cops sorrowfully poke at the most hellaciously violent and often sexualised crimes, depicted with all the brio that standards and practices will permit. Go the other way, and lump in enough horror that it's impossible to deny that's what's going on, and you basically have Saw (a film whose aesthetic does not at all hide its theft from Se7en) and all its little torture porn offspring.

That's a pretty shoddy legacy, but let's not permit it to devalue Fincher's great achievement in anyway, which after 20 years - 20 fucking years - and countless copycats, hasn't lost any of its unnerving, devastating nihilistic power. It is a cruel, bitter movie, undoubtedly the film that most plainly expresses the theme common to all of Fincher's work, that humans are basically prone to cruelty and stupidity, and all decent people can do is try to not give into that impulse. And one may or may not respond to the bleakness and nihilism of that message - and if any English-language film can be confidentally described as "nihilistic", it's Se7en - but it's impossible to deny the potency and artistry with which Fincher and company execute it here. I do not hide my frequent lack of affection for the director's work, but this is a great piece of cinema, the kind that works on such a visceral, primal level to communicate its thoughts and feelings that quibbling with it like pissing in the wind. It is a powerful, brutalising thing, and maybe the most totally successful thing Fincher has directed; alongside Zodiac (which I'd call his best movie; it's also probably his most clinically intellectual), it suggests that whatever he does, Fincher should probably always make movies about serial killers.

The plot of the film, inspired by screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker's miserable stretch of time living in New York (it's a bit remarkable how not at all impressive Walker's subsequent career has been, when he's every bit as important for the film's impact as the director), is straightforward enough: in an unnamed city where it almost always seems to be raining, and which ends up even filthy after the rain than before it, Detective Lieutenant Somerset (Morgan Freeman) is in the last week of his employ with the police department, and is to spend the next seven days (the title has a double meaning!) showing the ropes to new transfer Detective Mills (Brad Pitt), who is more or less going to end up his replacement. On day #1, they find an appalling murder scene, where a man was tortured to death by being forced at gunpoint to eat till he burst; this turns out to be the first in a series of killings inspired by the seven deadly sins - gluttony, lust, wrath, sloth, pride, envy, and greed. As the two men investigate, the gulf between their respective worldviews begins to inform everything about how they respond to the ugliness and savagery of these crimes: Mills's conviction that right will out, and that the universe favors justice drives him towards passionate anger, while Somerset's work-honed certitude that there is more wickedness than the good people of the world can ever hope to combat leaves him doggedly pursuing clues with a detachment that's like depression, if only depression could somehow be even sadder.

The actual meat of the film is pretty easily gotten through; the content, for the most part, is a more or less literal tour of Hell. Not for nothing does the film heavily emphasise Dante's Inferno: like that poem, Se7en functions as a story of one wise old man guiding a younger, more optimistic soul through several tableaux vividly demonstrating the consequences of worldly sin. The difference being that, in Dante, the sins are against God, while in Se7en, they are punished only by one deeply broken human, played by - is a 20-year-old movie still covered by spoiler alerts? Because it's a huge spoiler - Kevin Spacey in the best work of his career, granite-faced as he spits out his bile in brittle, inhuman tones. There is definitely no God in the universe of Se7en; only psychopaths. And instead of the message "these are the punishments you might face if you misbehave", the lesson is the infinitely bleaker "these are the punishments you might face for having the misfortune to have been born".

Walker's script is insistently symbolic without being overbearing about it, and it's surprisingly willing to stop the narrative development entirely to favor scenes of the two leads talking about morality and philosophy, but the thing never drags. A lot of credit for both of these things must go to Freeman and Pitt, who might fall into the ordinary "sagacious black cop/fiery white cop" dynamic, but build such extreme personality into the parts that everything they say and do feels far more an extension of character than the requirement of the screenplay (it might be my favorite Freeman performance; it is, anyway, the one where he engages with his then-nascent "wise old black man calmly intoning advice" persona in the most interestingly off-kilter ways). And certainly, the quality of the filmmaking is at an extraordinary level: beyond Fincher's direction, there is the matter of Howard Shore's erratic, scraping score, Darius Khondji's cinematography, with its overtones of infection and dessication, and Richard Francis-Bruce's tightly controlled editing, all slow build-up to explosions.

It's an absolutely top-shelf thriller first and foremost; a movie that uses its nervy central gimmick as a great spine to pose the question, "so what happens next?" before plunging us through one of the most raw-nerve mysteries of its decade. The film is propulsive in the exactly the same gestures that it's nauseating and distressing. Hell, that's basically the thesis statement presented in the film's enormously influential opening credits, which combine punchy cutting and a thick visual sense of moral rot and so set the entire film off on the footing it will pursue forever after. Exciting on the one hand; immensely unpleasant on the other. It is a desperately involving and watchable film for something so absolutely starved of joy; it makes the expression of total nihilism vividly cinematic in a way that no other American film I can immediately call to mind has ever even attempted. It is not the kind of film I can honestly say that I could love, let alone do love; but I don't suppose I could possibly admire it any more than I do, for its absolute commitment to tone and the excellence of its construction in every scene and every frame.

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BDSM WEEK: HELL FOR LEATHER

Like a great many films that were birthed in controversy, time has somewhat mellowed opinions towards Cruising since its notorious first release in 1980. Once a film universally condemned by gay rights groups for its apparent series of transitive arguments that male homosexuality = the leather/S&M scene = self-hating gays murdering everybody, the film has even to some degree been reclaimed as a precious time capsule offering a view into the New York leather subculture right before AIDS came along to largely eradicate it and its freewheeling casual sex. And it is beautiful that different people can see one object and interpret it different ways and take wildly different meanings from it, but I just don't see it. There are readings of the film that make it possible to take it as a deliberately cryptic mind-trip and not a foggily-expressed thriller with half-assed characteristations and a third act that collapse under the weight of its own ambiguity. But there are not, that I can imagine, any readings of the film that make it actually empowering towards gay people.

Reducing the film to its hook does absolutely nobody any favors, but let's anyway to get things rolling: somebody is murdering and dismembering homosexual men in New York, linked only by their general appearance and their frequenting of a handful of leather bars in Greenwich Village. Capt. Edelson (Paul Sorvino) of the NYPD homicide division has his job on the line if he can't crack the case, so he goes for broke: from the rank and file, he plucks up one Officer Steve Burns (Al Pacino), who physically resembles the victims, to go deep undercover. Specifically, Burns is to infiltrate the Village leather scene and offer himself as bait, in the hopes of flushing the killer out. But when this straight cop - who glides through Edelson's crass questioning of his sexual history, and has a female girlfriend, Nancy (Karen Allen), and everything - enters the bizarre realm of gay BDSM, handkerchief codes, and easy anonymous sex, things become far more troubling and distressing than just the ordinary stress of being undercover.

What, exactly, starts to happen in Burns's mind is exactly what Cruising remains steadily ambiguous on, but it seems in any case to begin with the sheer rampant Otherness of the leather fetishists. Writer-director William Friedkin took enormous pains to make sure that everybody understood that he wasn't making claims about gay men in particular, or even about the very narrow substrata of gay male life that serves as Cruising's backdrop, but it's hardly besmirching the film's aims or its effectiveness to suggest that it adopts a boggle-eyed confusion bordering on terror bordering on dreams in depicting the bars and clubs where Burns - hiding under the name of "John Forbes" - goes cruising for the killer. The way the camera peers around with prurient revulsion is half Alice in Wonderland, half David Lynch (or would have been, if there was a good base of David Lynch films to speak of by 1980), and while nothing in the film suggests that it, or Friedkin, or anybody else involved has any actual negative feelings about gay people per se, it's obviously the case that we are meant to feel spectacularly confused and disturbed by our plunge into that environment, which is presented with deliberately confusing editing and unearthly lighting and a very tense, darting camera. It is a waking nightmare, pure and simple.

This is not all that surprising a direction for Friedkin to take, given his career-long commitment to the idea that everything is awful, and people are corrupt and prone to wickedness, especially the ones who should most especially be held to a higher morality. The weirdness of the leather bars isn't a referendum on gayness so much as a referendum on humanity, and it's the rawness, visual distinctiveness, open sexual activity, and above all things the mainstream unfamiliarity of the setting that recommends as the backdrop for what is, ultimately, not the story of how a mysterious killer is (or isn't?) found out, but how a cop can have his identity broken and reassembled incorrectly. Undoubtedly, there's a healthy impulse to shock the squares present in the hard-R depiction of what goes on in Those Places, but it's not ultimately what Cruising is about.

What it is about can be a little difficult to parse. The most generous possible reading of the film would be to think of it as something of a riff on the more florid of the Italian gialli made in the idiom of the New Hollywood subgenre of filthy, gritty stories about street life in New York. Glance at a still frame, and you'd guess from James Contner's grainy, color-parched cinematography that it's one of the handful of attempts around the turn of the decade to desperately pretend that it was still 1975 and artfully artless urban docurealist filmmaking was still all the range. But put it in motion, pair it with the tinny, pasted-on sound design (a happy accident: the film had to work around protesters trying to ruin the shoot with noise), and Jack Nitzsche's industrial droning that passes for music, and you start to get a sense of sickly, creeping terror. It is a film whose visual and audible textures feel entirely ill, doom-ridden and death-soaked even without reference to the specifics of the plot, portraying a world of men doggedly, madly pursuing sex in the face of a well-publicised threat right in their midst, mysteriously selecting victims and killing them for their sexual behavior (one could say it predicts the AIDS crisis, but it's best, I think, not to risk adopting Cruising's corrosive cynicism as a frame to ever think about the spread of AIDS).

So the generous reading, again, is that the film is anxious to work first on the level of mood and impression reached more by Italian genre films (primarily; other examples can be found throughout Europe), to impart a sense of inexplicable awfulness, to work as a stylistic exaggeration of a cop story. Even the murder scenes, each of them a wildly different collage of violence with jarring visual discontinuity, have a certain European flair. And the blank slate Burns, an empty vessel into which we can pour all the psychoanalysis in the world only to find it all draining out immediately, would be perfect in a giallo.

That generosity stumbles a bit in facing what Cruising actually is, though. Whatever Friedkin's aims might have been - his career isn't marked by the kind of disconcerting non-realism I'm trying to make a case for, but it's not a complete out-of-nowhere curveball - the film itself is a bit more muddled than it is deliberately obscure. The biggest problem is Burns himself, or at least Pacino's performance; while there is value in giving the cop no backstory and only whispers of an interior life before it starts to be torn down by his disorienting experiences, and it's clear what Friedkin hoped to achieve by casting that actor of all actors (quintessentially masculine, but in a very delicate, breakable way, and he's weirdly "pretty" despite looking in no way effeminate), I don't see in Pacino's face the impression that he was making those connections. Instead, he seems to be largely walking, uninfected, through scenes that deny him any kind of Method hook to get into the character. And it's plainly uncomfortable - not in a way that reinforces the film's attempt to build discord, but in a way that reminds us that we're watching Al Pacino standing in front of a camera trying to decide what his character things about watching men screwing. It's alienating in the worst way for what the film wants to achieve.

There's also the whole matter of the script, which simply doesn't gel. Not in the sense that things don't make sense all the time - they don't, and a legendary cut 40 minutes is perhaps to blame - but that the film simply plops things together and expects story and meaning to emerge from the fact that they are now adjacent. It's most ineffective when it starts to flesh out the maybe-probably killer near the end, and the attempt to balance Burns's increasing fragmentation with the flat, generic crime movie staging of all the scenes finds the film tripping over rake after rake for some 30 straight minutes. But there's a nagging disconnect between how the film "feels" and what it does much earlier, such as when Burns is given a chipper gay sidekick in the form of Ted Bailey (Don Scardino), or every time Burns retrenches to the arms of the horribly underwritten Nancy, a series of gestures that don't suggest normalcy, self-delusion, or anything other than a calculated attempt to remind a skittish audience, at intervals, that the protagonist for real really likes pussy.

I want to admire the stylish madness of Cruising; but the film makes it incredibly hard to do so. It's certainly not the grotesque failure of art and morality described in 1980: as failures go, it's a tremendously interesting one. But a failure nonetheless: a failure at digging into a subculture with any kind of class or insight, of marrying a pointedly inscrutable psychodrama with Friedkin's muscly directorial style, a failure of building a basic meat-and-potatoes cop picture that fits together comfortably.

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THE COWS ARE NOT WHAT THEY SEEM

Li'l Quinquin is, I gather from those who would know, a really bad choice to have as one's first exposure to director Bruno Dumont. So before I start going on about how wonderful it is - and I am going be quite obnoxiously enthusiastic, too - you should know that I have no idea what I'm talking about.

Also, before I do that, it's worth spending a moment trying to categorise the thing that Li'l Quinquin is, as an object. It is a four-part television miniseries that aired in France in September, 2014, but that came some four months after its premiere at the 2014 Directors' Fortnight at Cannes, where it was screened as a single film clocking in at three hours and seventeen minutes. It screened in that form at the Toronto International Film Festival, and Cahiers du Cinéma named the film version as the best work of cinema of 2014, which is frankly enough for me. Particularly since it was shot in a TV-unfriendly widescreen aspect ratio that begs for a big screen and not the little online streaming bullshit that we in the United States get to enjoy, whether we're watching it in four chunks or one (it screened in New York for a week, but it's not news that New York cinephiles matter more than the rest of us). Yet even watching it in its guise as a feature film, the structure of the thing insists that we think of how it works as episodes, not a unified whole.

Regardless of what it technically is, Li'l Quinquin is an absolutely delightful experience, gathering bits and pieces of genres and styles until the act of trying to describe the feeling it imparts requires one of those 19-syllable German compound words. It's a bleak dark comedy, a police procedural, neorealist examination of the rhythm of childhood a study of morality, and a parable about racism in France; I can't do better than to call it a materialistic version of Twin Peaks that borrows its sense of humor from deadpan Scandinavian comedies and its overall tone from The 400 Blows, which means I can't do very well at all.

Reduced to its most simple elements (something about it has to be simple), Li'l Quinquin tells two adjacent stories, the first of which centers on Quinquin (Alane Delhaye), one of the chief ruffians in the tween population of a rural town in the north of France, with a primary focus on his youthful courtship of Eve Terrier (Lucy Caron), in those moments when he's not raising hell and hurling insults at the town's black Muslim family. The other story concerns Commandant Van der Weyden (Bernard Pruvost) of the local gendarmerie, and his lieutenant, Carpentier (Philippe Jore), and their investigation of a series of bizarre murders in which human bodies are being found, chopped into pieces, in the rectums of dead cows. Quinquin and his other little bad-news friends are on the scene when the first cow is airlifted out of a deep well where it seemingly can't have gotten to, and from that moment, he and Van der Weyden keep gliding past each other, to the commandant's annoyed frustration and the boy's sense of being unnecessarily bullied.

So, about that Twin Peaks comparison: herein, a quirky law enforcement agent who seems like an object of mocking comedy right up until it becomes clear just how nervily tuned-in to the moral and philosophical side of humanity he is, investigating a crime in which the odd inhabitants of a small town meander through space being their irrepressibly unique selves, and it becomes pretty clear pretty fast that the murder investigation, whatever is actually going, is really just a proxy for digging into the evil that happens in the presence of basic human decency, and because of the tacit approval of basically decent humans. As the lines of investigation keep cooling off, Van der Weyden suggests to Carpentier that it is, in fact, the Devil perpetrating these crimes, which is as good an explanation for any; the trick is that Li'l Quinquin prefers to situate the Devil someplace more human than metaphysical. Evil lies in how casually everyone talks about betraying their loved ones; evil lies in playing along with racism even when it feels wrong.

All of which ignores how absolutely hilarious the film is, which is, I am told, absolutely unheard of for this director. There's plenty of deadpan absurdity, and much uncomfortable, audience-indicting humor at the expense of the actors (most of them non-professional) and their strange, almost cartoon faces. Delhaye looks like a smudgy charcoal drawing or a hastily carved potato; Pruvost plays Van der Weyden as prone to wagging his eyebrows and bobbing his head, and it's deeply unclear whether these are the character's tics or the actors. Seeing these performers first shocks us into amusement; then, as we have time to get used to them, we're forced to reckon with that initial discomfort, as they all become more and more engaging and fascinating to look at for their expressiveness, not their strangeness (which is, I am told, entirely characteristic of this director).

For even while it's hard to see how funny the film is by look at its plot, it's hard to guess how richly human it is in thinking about how funny it is. Basically, the film twists itself every time you get think you get a handle on it, mixing violence and humanism, frivolous jokes with profound considerations of behavior. It's gorgeously shot by Guillaume Deffontaines, sharply etching every color of the buildings, sky, and land; yet it's entirely set among plain buildings and graffiti-coated slabs of ugly concrete. It has a vivid, living, involving soundscape made up of fuzzy, atonal singing and empty exteriors. The course of its plot is captivating even though virtually nothing happens in Van der Weyden's half of the story and literally nothing happens in Quinquin's. The characters are all beautifully tangible even though they're mostly awful people who behave like garish freaks. All of Li'l Quinquin feels like impossible contradictions stuffed into one box, and that gives it an unpredictable nature that makes the jokes funnier, the morality more piercing, the characters more alive. It is a marvelous, shaggy beast altogether, and while it's an overreach to call it the best film of any year, it's started 2015 off on the sturdiest footing.

9/10

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: PROTO-SLASHERS

The Town that Dreaded Sundown is not the most important film in the career of director Charles B. Pierce - almost beyond question, that honor goes to 1972's The Legend of Boggy Creek - and maybe it's not even his most interesting. It is, however, his best, and the one that best combines the director's fascinating amateur cinematic sensibility and some feeling that it's actually, y'know, a movie. Pierce ranks alongside Herschell Gordon Lewis as one of America's most successful regional filmmakers (assuming we're not counting Southern California as a "region"), and his most characteristic films have a tendency to feel like elaborate home movies dedicated to the people and land of Arkansas, made with a kind of intuitive and frequently 100% ineffective aesthetic that almost deserves to be called outsider art. The Town that Dreaded Sundown fits neatly into this tradition; it is a swoony love letter to the city of Texarkana, circa 1946, and to the forests and swamps surrounding it, and it frequently allows that love to eradicate anything like narrative momentum or tone. And yet it stars Ben Johnson - Oscar winner Ben Johnson, by that point - as big as life, giving it a weird legitimacy.

Also, unlike Pierce's other films, which exist in some kind of mythic fever dream place that seems indebted to nothing other than the director's private whims, The Town that Dreaded Sundown slides neatly into the tradition of mysterious psycho killers that was percolating in the States all throughout the '70s. It's a police procedural at heart, but with a murderer who wouldn't look remotely out of place in an Italian giallo (whose visual appearance, moreover, is a clear influence on Jason Voorhees mk. 1 from Friday the 13th, Part 2, five years later), and whose preferred methods of killing grow more baroque as the film progresses; there's a peculiar trombone-based death some two-thirds of the way presented with an absurd flair and sense of black comedy that feel like something from the slasher film in its first desperate phase, around 1983 or '84, far more than like anything happening in America in '76.

The film is based on a true story, and unlike virtually every subsequent horror or thriller film to make that claim, you can still actually see most of the real history through Pierce and screenwriter Earl E. Smith's thin fog of zesty exploitation (the film was, after all, distributed by American International Pictures; we should be deeply grateful that there's only the small amount of prurient editorialising that we get). In '46, from March until May, Texarkana was haunted by four attacks by a never-caught assailant, arbitrarily choosing isolated people (always in couples, though not always in a sexual context) and savagely attacking them. The first couple, necking on the local Lover's Lane, survived, and sent up the alarm; for the next couple of months, Texarkana deputy sheriff Norman Ramsey (Andrew Prine) is the chief local law enforcement agent working the series of dead ends making up the case, while legendary Texas Ranger J.D Morales (Johnson) comes to town to add his expertise and gravitas. A second attack happens 21 days after the first; then a third 21 days after that; then the killer, by now nicknamed the Phantom, changes up his pattern, all without ever giving the cops a chance to predict his movements or get out in front of him or do more than watch him recede in the the distance.

It's a captivating film, but a bizarrely messy one ("but", do I say? Nay, the two facts are deeply related), owing in large part to Pierce's unerring eye for local color and detail. And to the film's inconsistent generic framework; building on Boggy Creek, The Town that Dreaded Sundown presents itself, in moments, as a kind of docudrama, or at least a series of re-enactments, contextualised by a smooth-voiced narrator (Vern Stierman) with fussy, authoritative collection of details about whos and whats and whens and wheres. It is a film anxious about Getting It All Right, and this leads it to a place of unexpected hyper-realism of a sort, where the little undramatic bits and pieces in between policework are presented with strict attention. Morales, upon arriving in Texarkana, walks to a newstand to buys a handful of cigars, an act depicted in real time despite it having not a damn thing to do with anything else; we are privy to roundabout conversations, and scenes of calling for backup and confirming that backup is coming and confirming that it's all right to move all along, and having to click the radio transmitter button a couple of times to get the police station to pick up; all very square and by the books, I have no doubt, and all deeply unusual in a movie, given that the form does tend to expect at least some level of forward motion, consistently. But it's stuff like this that gives The Town that Dreaded Sundown its oh-so-distinctive character, even more than the way it plays like a Southern fried Bava thriller down up as a docudrama.

If the dominant mode of the film is a period police procedural - and it unquestionably is - it nevertheless functions more than satisfactorily as a movie about a mysterious serial killer; it is not a horror film according to any strict definition, but it captures a feeling of inexplicable dread better than most straight-up genre pictures ever manage to. There's the obvious matter of its "slasher" scenes (though that word wouldn't have been first on anyone's tongues back in '76), which are honestly tense and scary and shocking like the vast majority of such sequences are not: particularly in the opening, when that human form with two bright eyes staring from a white sack simply pops into view, it's actually unsettling as all the Jasons in all the camps in all the world never managed to be. Part of it is simply that Bud Davis, playing the killer, is absolutely superb, making his energetic, gibbering monster of a role something that is clearly human in a degraded, awful form, while so many later slashers would feel very much other than human; he is a realistic and thus real threat compared to pick any damn psycho killer of the '80s.

The other, greater part is that, like I said, The Town that Dreaded Sundown isn't a horror film: it's a dramatic film about horror. Pierce's films are all very much of a piece, capturing the texture and physical space of life in his chosen location (often though not always the American South) with an unforced easiness. One gets the impression from watching his work that he was a good observer of people, and knew how they acted, and even when the writing and the acting borders on, or crosses into amateurishness, there's a kind of relaxed naturalism about his material. And of course, the writing and acting nearly always cross into amateurishness, but that's not the point I'm aiming at. The Town that Dreaded Sundown, with its heavily articulated post-WWII setting and its wide array of incidents in small-town post-war Arkansas, has a beautifully lived-in quality, not asking us to believe bromides about rural innocence but acknowledging the frustration and lust and anger and boredom that was as true in '46 as in '76 and now. For the quietness and low-key intimacy that brings with it to cut into screaming and dead bodies and the occasional baroque nighttime visual is jarring and eery in a way that doesn't require the filmmakers to actively strive for horror style. It is, after all, about the TOWN that dreaded sundown, not the sundown killer, and the film's greatest success is to marry in its own shifting tones the way that what happened in '46 felt like a perversion and violation of that town's sense of calm and safety.

That being said, there are three clear problems with the film: four if we count its generally slapdash, low-budget, one-and-done feeling, but I'm inclined to cut regional filmmakers working from the hip a bit of slack, even when they manage to suppose that Sunday could fall on 3 March and Saturday on 24 March, and that in same calendar year (the former is correct). No, let's stick with three problems. One of these is the narration: building on Boggy Creek, the film wants to make sure we understand how real and rooted in history it is, and so there's chatter about everything, even when the scene construction explains exactly what we know in a strictly narrative, not docudrama fashion. It's distracting at best and outrageously campy at worst. Second is Jaime Mendoza-Nava's score, a crazy collage of styles and moods with no rhyme or reason, though generally the points where it is most noticeable are exactly those points where dead silence would be best for the development of tension, the emphasis on naturalism, or both.

Third and worst, Pierce cast himself in the medium-size role of patrolman A.C. "Sparkplug" Benson, and like most characters with a made-up nickname in quotes, Sparkplug is comic relief. Fucking horrible comic relief. The kind of comic relief who, to pull of a sting, decides to dress up as the ugliest woman in the world, like it's an afternoon cartoon show where the only logic is absurdity. Or the kind of comic relief who, standing in front of a big board marked CAR KEYS with only one key hanging on it could turn and ask his boss where the keys to the car are kept. Re-watching the film, there's less Sparkplug than I thought there was, but it doesn't change the fact that every single moment he's onscreen is absolute death, with even the other characters seemingly confused why their serious murder investigation has to keep ceding space to this ludicrous yokel. Worse films have had worse comic relief; so have better films. But it's fascinating and aggravating to me that Pierce made such an irredeemable waste of a character and then chose to embody that waste himself. I take it to always mean something when a director plays a role in his or her movie, and in The Town that Dreaded Sundown, the only thing I can suppose it means is "Hi, I'm Charles B. Pierce, and I'm a giant asshole".

Body Count: 5, with three survivors of what feel like they ought to be body count deaths; but that's historical fealty for you.

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MOVIES I MISSED IN 2013: AND HE'S DANCING LIKE HE NEVER DANCED BEFORE

It would be nice if more remakes found some way to justify themselves beyond "because of the money" - it would be nice, in fact, if more movies generally did the same - and this goes doubly for films that are basically flawless. Which is a phrase I feel super uncomfortable in applying to 1980's Maniac, the spetacularly notorious calling card of cult director William Lustig, because in some ways it's miserable, and in many ways it's amateurish, but I don't think you could possibly deny that it is the best possible version of what it wants to be. Namely, a brutally, unforgivingly intimate stay in the mind of a sexually neurotic serial killer, not at all unlike the ones starting to crop up in every cheap horror film in 1980, with one huge difference: while Jason Voorhees and his legions of imitators are psychological and dramatic junk food, Maniac's Frank Zito is petrifyingly plausible, and the film built around him isn't exploiting the real world horrors of violent death, but in a very sickening and inescapable way, explaining them.

We can quibble over the question of whether the experience of Maniac is something that anybody ever ought to submit themselves to, but let's skip to the punchline: any remake that even begins to justify itself needs to find some way to at least approach the original's effect of trapping us in the brain of a person who we'd very much like not to be trapped inside, or it might as well not even bother. And sure enough, the remake of Maniac that now exists is absolutely hellbent on not just matching but exploding its predecessor's skill at marrying our perspective to that of the psychopath in question. One would expect no less of a film produced and co-written by New French Extreme icon Alexandre Aja (director or not, the film has a lot of his fingerprints on it; the actual director, doing a good job of it, is Franck Khalfoun), a man with an intense passion for making sure that violence is treated with unblinking gravity and care, but even then, it's hard to predict the, as it were, literalism with which the film picks up the mantle of its forebear in making us feel like we're in Frank's head. Maniac '12, in point of fact, is shot almost exclusively from Frank's point of view as he goes about stabbing and scalping women in a glossy, unnamed city played by Los Angeles (the originally was specifically, and even vitally, located in New York).

It's a gimmick, of course. First-person movies are always gimmicks, even the very best (which is, by leagues and leagues, Russian Ark). I will claim for Maniac the merit that it is an awfully well-mounted one (none of the wobbly gimcrackery of something like Lady in the Lake here!), with star Elijah Wood and cinematographer Maxime Alexandre collaborating in the most staggeringly complicated ways to make a vivid and fleshed-out character out of camera movements and occasional glimpses of Wood's hands. Mechanically, it's the kind of thing that seems unbelievable in the moment, only to get more unbelievable as you think about it. Aesthetically, it's a gimmick, one that never stops being distracting.

Mind you, it's a gimmick that gets the point across. It also permits a singularly fantastic moment in the middle of the film, when for a brief time during a murder, the camera does shift back to show Frank's entire body, the best job that I have ever seen any film do of suggesting the high that serial killers are said to feel in the act of killing. So in general, one must credit Maniac with making its point emphatically. We are thrust in the position of lingering over the things Frank lingers over, and understanding the urgency he feels in needing to kill and also the disgust he feels with himself. Much as is the case in the original film, there's very little sense of any of this being presented as "cool" in the way of the standard generic slasher or splatter film. The first death scene happens so suddenly, before we've gotten a chance to find our footing with the film, that it shocks one into a sense of dazed confusion that carries over to the first of the film's intensely graphic and persuasive scalpings; a later scalping is presented with the victim screaming hysterically in a way that makes it the most legitimately upsetting and alienating death scene I've seen in a horror movie in a very long time.

This is all the opposite of gore pornography: it is uncomfortable and distressing, though never as much as the original Maniac, which I'd credit to the first film having such grungy, hellish cinematography along with the unsparing murders, while the new film is a good deal cleaner and crisper. Obviously, it's not an easy film to recommend: there's absolutely no uplift or entertainment, only a lot of pummeling, and the film's ultimate message, like the original, is that this kind of thing happens and it is an absolute perversion that it does, but as humans we need to confront this kind of grotesque reality. Everything about the film build to this point brilliantly: the degree to which Wood has permitted himself to devolve into schlubbery for the few shots he appears in (the ratty-ass goatee in particularly is a wonderfully queasy touch), the jagged electronic score by Rob (the professional name of Robin Coudert), which adds a layer of distorted anti-humanity to the proceedings, unworldly and distancing even more than the animalistic kabuki of Wood's performance.

It is, all told, a potent and thoroughly effective reworking of the original film for new audiences and new concerns, though my question remains the same as with the version: is it valuable? I have seen each Maniac once and am very satisfied to have done so, though I have no intention of seeing either one a second time. They're bleak movies that rub our faces in the worst things that can happen in an stable, violent mind, confronting us with bloodlust and misogyny and depravity in a most direct and inescapable way, and this is not an unworthy thing, insofar as it can't help but produce a profound effect on the viewer. And certainly, art has a responsibility to make us aware of the ugliest and darkest as much as anything else, and the new Maniac achieves that goal gloriously. But it's just not the kind of thing you "like", and not the kind of thing you want to suggest that anybody watches at any time, for any reason, even if it's pretty nauseatingly powerful.

7/10

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