7/12/15: The Sleep of Reason

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bad fathers, Benjamin Shielden, Catriona MacColl, cinema, co-writers, Dario Argento, dream imagery, dream research, dream-like, dysfunctional family, Emmanuel Bonami, family secrets, feature-film debut, film reviews, films, foreign films, French cinema, French films, Fu'ad Aït Aattou, Gala Besson, horror, horror films, horror-fantasy, Horsehead, Joe Sheridan, Karim Chériguène, keys, Lilly-Fleur Pointeaux, lucid dreaming, lush, mother-daughter relationships, Movies, multiple writers, Murray Head, Nightmare on Elm St., nightmares, Romain Basset, step-father, supernatural, surreal, Vernon Dobtcheff, Vincent Vieillard-Baron, visually stunning, writer-director

In many ways, writer-director Romain Basset’s feature debut, Horsehead (2014), is as strange a creation as its titular demonic figurehead: both too nonsensical to conform to standard cinematic narratives and not gonzo enough to properly pay homage to the surreal, Italo-gore films that are its obvious influence, the film is lush, visually stunning and stuck in a bit of a no-man’s-land. When the film’s visuals and atmosphere mesh, Basset comes dangerously close to approximating the fever dream insanity of vintage Argento: something like A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) jammed sideways into Inferno (1980), if you will. When the film leans hard into actual plot mechanics, however, it tends to collapse into a bit of a chaotic mess, favoring complex backstory over actual emotional impact.

Jessica (Lilly-Fleur Pointeaux), our plucky heroine, has been plagued by terrible nightmares of a terrifying, horse-headed demon for the majority of her life. After her grandmother Rose (Gala Besson) dies, Jessica returns to her childhood home for the funeral. Like many horror film heroes, Jessica has a difficult history with her stern, disapproving mother, Catelyn (Lucio Fulci mainstay Catriona MacColl), although she gets along great with her cheerful, ultra-supportive step-dad, Jim (Murray Head). Returning to her old stomping grounds for the first time in years, Jessica and her mom immediately get to butting heads, all while Jim and faithful servant, George (Vernon Dobtcheff), try to run interference.

Once she gets “home,” however, Jessica immediately starts to have strange dreams about her grandmother, dreams in which a younger version of Rose frantically looks for some sort of key. A sinister preacher (Fu’ad Aït Aattou) also pops up in her dreams and he seems to be pursuing Rose, for some undisclosed reason: we know he’s evil, however, because he has one of those patented “totally, completely evil” voices…always a handy indicator. She also continues to see the menacing Horsehead, the towering, monstrous presence from her youth that’s pursued her in her slumber for decades.

Using a handy bottle of ether and some of that “take control of your dreams” advice that all the kids on Elm Street receive, Jessica proceeds to explore the phantasmagoric world of her dreams, attempting to figure out the connection between the creepy priest, Horsehead, her grandmother and that damned missing key. Jessica will have to be careful, however: if Horsehead gets a hold of her while she’s dreaming, it might spell the end of her in the “real world,” as well.

Similar to Rob Zombie’s recent The Lords of Salem (2012), Basset’s Horsehead is a very clear nod to the classic ’80s horror fare of Italian gore-maestros like Argento and Fulci: hell, he even casts MacColl, the star of such Fulci standards as City of the Living Dead (1980), House By the Cemetery (1981) and The Beyond (1981), as Jessica’s mother. With its dreamlike atmosphere, brightly colored lighting and emphasis on visuals over logic, it’s pretty easy to draw a through-line straight into the heart of Basset’s little opus. If you’re going to wear your influences on your sleeve, however, there are certainly worse ones you could pick than Argento or Fulci.

When the emphasis stays on the visuals and vibe, Horsehead works remarkably well: cinematographer Vincent Vieillard-Baron, on only his second full-length feature, produces some staggeringly strange, beautiful imagery, much of which is on a par with the best of Luciano Tovoli’s work in films like Suspiria (1977) and Tenebre (1982). The figure of Horsehead is a genuinely creepy image and certain scenes, like Jessica’s climatic battle with the dream demon, approach del Toro and Tarsem Singh’s level of fastidious attention to detail. Horsehead looks consistently great, with a truly cool sense of Gothic grandeur that befits the more fairy-tale-like aspects of the narrative.

Basset gets good work from a dependable cast: it’s always good to see MacColl and she brings quite a bit of edge to her portrayal of Jessica’s troubled mother, while Pointeaux is a likable, (mostly) reasonable protagonist. As befits the film’s spiritual forebears, some of the performances are a little more over-the-top than others: Fu’ad Aït Aattou’s evil priest and Joe Sheridan’s oddly lecherous doctor are pure comic book, while veteran actor Dobtcheff doesn’t get a whole lot to do as the seemingly superfluous butler/caretaker.

In another parallel with the aforementioned Zombie film, however, Basset’s movie starts to unravel whenever we get thrust down into the actual nitty-grit of the plot. To not put too fine a point on it, Horsehead makes very little sense, even when all of the cards have been laid on the table by the film’s conclusion. This, of course, was a pretty common issue with the films that directly influenced Horsehead: no one ever went into a Fulci or Argento film to focus on the plots, most of which only existed as a rough framework to hang numerous setpieces from. The difference, of course, is that both Fulci and Argento seemed perfectly aware of this and were more than happy to play to their strengths: Basset, unfortunately, tries to have his cake and eat it, too, by turning his film into an extremely plot-heavy, if thoroughly surreal, exercise in combining style and substance.

By the time that Jessica figures out what’s happening, the film has become a morass of missing keys, symbolic imagery, musty old “family secrets” and philosophical concepts masquerading as spook-show imagery. Immaculate conception, stillborn twins, abusive fathers and imaginary churches all make an appearance, although it’s all so much nonsense, at least as far as the actual impact on the story goes. By the time that Jessica is advised to “follow the wolf, not the horse,” I found myself more bemused than anything.

One of the odder aspects of Horsehead ends up being the many parallels between the Nightmare on Elm Street series. From Jessica learning to take control of her dreams, to the “sins of the parents” themes, to Catelyn’s attempt to stop Jessica’s lucid dreaming via some sort of “anti-dreaming” drug, there are times when it definitely feels as if Basset (who co-scripted with Karim Chériguène) is actively trying to kickstart his own version of Wes Craven’s little empire: even the final shot seems to set up a direct, more action-packed sequel, which doesn’t sit comfortably with the film’s headier aspirations.

Despite some fundamental problems, however, Horsehead is still an intriguing, if frustrating, film. Whenever the dream sequences are in full force, it’s hard to deny the intoxicating power of Basset’s imagination: like Singh, he knows how to blend the horrific and fantastic in equal measures, often within the same frame. It’s also encouraging to note that he’s taking inspiration from horror’s forefathers but using it to create his own, new mythology: I’ll take that over another remake/reimagining any day of the week.

For his first full-length, Romain Basset shows a tremendous amount of promise: if he’s able to completely jettison his more traditional narrative impulses and just go with the power of his imagery, I have a feeling that he just might be able to get in the same head=space as his Italian horror heroes. Horsehead isn’t quite a thoroughbred but it’s a damn strong runner: that wins races, too.

8/31/14 (Part Two): 15 Going on 90

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abused children, Alexis Kavyrchine, Anais Demoustier, Celine, cinema, drama, feature-film debut, film reviews, films, foreign films, foster kids, French films, Funny Games, homeless children, l'Enfance du Mal, Lolita, Ludmila Mikael, mother-daughter relationships, Movies, Olivier Coussemacq, Pascal Greggory, Sweet Evil, Sylvain Dieuaide, writer-director

When we first see Celine (Anais Demoustier), the wise-beyond-her-years teenager who forms the chaotic focal point of writer/director Olivier Coussemacq’s Sweet Evil (2010), she’s literally looking in from the outside: specifically, we see her framed in such a way that she appears to be physically separating the couple of Henri (Pascal Greggory) and Nathalie Van Eyck (Ludmila Mikael) as they dine at their kitchen table, unaware of their hidden observer. It’s a smart, canny bit of cinematography and one that will be repeated to good effect throughout the dark, thorny narrative. Indeed, throughout the course of the film, Celine will handily succeed in ripping the troubled couple to shreds, using them as pawns in a game of her own devising, although this is anything by a one-player: Henri and Nathalie, in the end, have just as much a hand in their inevitable destruction as Celine does. In a world of gray, with no heavily defined sense of morality, we see that everyone is capable of evil: whether a supposedly innocent young girl or a theoretically incorruptible judge, humanity is always but a hairbreadth away from its own absolute destruction.

Without a doubt, Celine is quite the complicated character. When not shaking down perverted older men with the aid of her male accomplish, Romain (Sylvain Dieuaide), she wiles away her time in the garden house of the well-to-do but aloof Van Eycks. The jig is up, in a way, when Henri happens to catch Celine on the property one night: she tells him that she’s a 16-year-old foster child who’s run away from her foster home, although this conflicts with her earlier admission to a wannabe john that she’s actually 14. With a little reverse-psychology and a whole lot of manipulation, Celine wheedles her way into the judge’s good graces, although she seems to have a bit of an agenda that extends beyond finding a roof, four walls and a hearty meal. Indeed, Celine tips her hand fairly early when she “innocently” proclaims that being a judge must be nice, since people respect the law, but wonders how many innocent people have been unfairly locked away. What if, she reasons to Henri, life has really left them no choice? There’s always a choice, Henri snorts back. As we’ll come to see, this is absolutely true, although clarification may be necessary: there may always be choices but they aren’t always good ones.

As Celine insinuates herself into the Van Eyck household, she stirs a hornets’ nest of repressed desire, barely concealed anger, resentment and misplaced parental instincts. She plays the couple against each other by appealing to each partner’s basest needs: Henri desires her, sexually, while Nathalie seeks to mother her as substitute for her own inability to have children (in a telling bit of character development, the childless Nathalie is obsessed with dolls, although Celine complains that they all look like “old dead children” to her).

It turns out that Celine has a plan, however, a rather diabolical scheme that involves Henri, her incarcerated mother and the increasingly unstable Romain, a young man whose favorite hobby involves stabbing innocent dogs. As Celine moves everything towards her end game, Henri’s weakness may spell the couple’s doom, while Nathalie’s ferocious desire to be a mother may mark her evolution into something other than Henri’s “faithful spouse.”

Tone-wise, Coussemacq’s film certainly recalls the work of misanthropic German filmmaker Michael Haneke, in particular his most famous film, Funny Games (1997). There’s an austere severity and frigidity to the film that nearly constant, a solemn tone that seems to be heightened by the almost playful musical score. The world of Sweet Evil is a cold one, all arctic whites, blues and chilly winter sunlight: in certain ways, the film’s look serves as a compliment to Tomas Vinterberg’s equally chilly The Hunt (2012). As previously mentioned, Alexis Kavyrchine’s cinematography is consistently exceptional, serving up not only beautifully staged images but also expanding on the film’s themes by way of the imagery: Kavyrchine has a particular way of shooting the trio of Henri, Nathalie and Celine that always manages to place one person between the other two, a perfect visual representation of the characters’ inner conflicts.

Coussemacq’s script, like Kavyrchine’s cinematography, is exceptionally smart: one of my favorite sustained bits was the notion that all of Celine’s lies end up being halfway between reality and fiction. It’s an idea that’s made explicit regarding her age (she introduces herself to the first john as being 14, tells Henri that she’s 16 but is actually 15) but is revealed in other, more subtle ways throughout the narrative. Coussemacq also has a particular way with dialogue, giving Demoustier plenty of choice lines to chew on. The development of Nathalie’s character was also quite impressive, particular given that the disparate elements of her personality could easily have across as “movie-shorthand” but feel much more organic than that. Her work with women’s rights parallels nicely with Celine’s more dastardly machinations and allows for a nice sense of evolution in the third act. Craft-wise, Sweet Evil is top-notch filmmaking.

While the cast is generally good, Demoustier is pretty impressive as the less-than-innocent waif: she has a way with subtle facial expressions and vocal inflections that manages to reveal hidden dimensions within her character. Most impressively, the 27-year-old actress is pretty convincing as a 15-year-old, no mean feat in itself (just ask any of the middle-aged “teenagers” that frolicked through most ’80s slasher flicks). Demoustier manages to walk a fine line between playing Celine as a hard-edged loner, a dutiful daughter and a confused teenager: one of the better aspects of Sweet Evil is the way in which Celine’s ultimate character is left up for the audience’s interpretation. Viewed from various angles, it’s possible to see Celine as a cold-blooded criminal, the shattered product of abuse, a victim of the welfare system and a wiser-than-her-years “emotional con-artist.”

Ultimately, Sweet Evil is an atmospheric, well-acted and appropriately thorny (if occasionally confusing) film, the kind of movie, like The Hunt, that gives one plenty of food for thought once the final credits have rolled. If the film offers no easy answers, particularly regarding the character of Henri (it becomes exceedingly difficult to fully sympathize with Henri once one sits through the scene where he tries to sneak a peek at Celine’s sleeping body), it also offers plenty of interesting characters, a quick pace and a climax that handily splits the difference between tragic and ironic. I’m still not really sure how I feel about Celine, although I must admit to being completely swept up by her self-assurance: when she believes in herself that much, it’s kind of hard not to feel the same way, regardless of her ultimate goal.

4/26/14: To Project and Swerve

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absurdist, Arden Myrin, auteur theory, bad cops, Best of 2013, black comedies, cinema, comedies, cops, cops behaving badly, dark comedies, Eric Judor, Eric Roberts, Eric Wareheim, favorite films, Film auteurs, film reviews, films, French cinema, French films, Grace Zabriskie, Harmony Korine, Marilyn Manson, Mark Burnham, Movies, Mr. Oizo, Officer de Luca, Officer Duke, Officer Holmes, Officer Rough, Quentin Dupieux, Ray Wise, Rubber, Steve Little, surreal, Terry Gilliam, Tim & Eric, Wes Anderson, Wrong, Wrong Cops

Quentin Dupieux gets me. He really does. If any filmmaker operating in our modern age can really be tuned in to my bizarre little wave-length, Dupieux is definitely it. While I may hold Refn and Wheatley in the highest regard, never having seen one of their films that I haven’t adored, Dupieux is the crackpot auteur who seems to view the world with my eyes. Beginning with Rubber (2010), the French writer/director/musician (he’s also Mr. Oizo, the French electro artist) has seen fit to depict a world that’s one part Lynchian suburb, one part dystopic wasteland and one part absurdist stage play. While 2012’s brain-melting Wrong serves to set-up the bizarre wonderland that’s finally unleashed in Wrong Cops, Dupieux’s newest is a completely stand-alone triumph, an absurdist nightmare that manages to be both hilarious and disturbing. Basically, Dupieux is up to his old tricks.

Whereas Wrong told a more linear, complex but, essentially, traditional (or as traditional as Dupieux can get) narrative, Wrong Cops functions more as a bat-shit crazy Pulp Fiction, wherein we are introduced to a disparate collection of characters who we then follow about as their stories eventually intertwine. In the case of Wrong Cops, we’re introduced to the titular characters, a ragtag collection of “law enforcement” personnel that are sort of like Police Academy filtered through It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, by way of Harmony Korine. We have Officer Duke (Mark Burnham), who has sex with transsexual prostitutes, delivers the pot he sells to locals by stuffing it in dead rats, carts around a “75% dead” body in his trunk and needlessly hassles a poor teen nerd who just wants to listen to his headphones (Marilyn Manson, in a role that must, literally, be seen to be believed…and yes…he is playing a teenage boy). We get Officer de Luca (Eric Wareheim), who holds yoga students at gunpoint in order to get their phone numbers and his partner, Officer Holmes (Arden Myrin), who uses her young son as bag-man in a money-drop involving the blackmail of a fellow cop. Said fellow cop, Officer Sunshine (Steve Little), has an active side-career in law enforcement-themed gay porn, a business venture which he’s managed to successfully hide from his adoring wife and daughter. Meanwhile, Officer Rough (Eric Judor), is just trying to make the best damn dance track that he can. There’s something missing, however, and Rough just can’t quite put his finger on it. Good thing that the “75% dead” guy (Daniel Quinn) has a thing for beats, though: with a little luck, he may just be able to give the cut the extra oomph it needs to secure Officer Rough a meeting with a top record exec. That is, of course, if he doesn’t bleed to death first. Throw in Eric Roberts as Duke’s drug supplier and Ray Wise as the group “who gives a shit” Captain and you got yahtzee, folks!

Like all of Dupieux’s films, Wrong Cops is easier (and better) experienced then explained. He has a particular skill with enveloping viewers completely within the reality of his films, something that Wes Anderson and Harmony Korine are both experts at. There’s never a point in the film, regardless of how strange, random or absurd, where the viewer is taken out of Dupieux’s reality: for my money, it’s one of the most impressive displays of world-building I’ve seen this year. The film has a sun-bleached, washed-out color palette and tone that recalls not only Rubber but, almost subliminally, Alex Cox’s outsider classic Repo Man (1984). I actually see several parallels with Repo Man in this film, not least of which is the almost mundane way in which the characters all deal with the strangeness massed around them. There was definitely this feel in Dupieux’s previous film, Wrong, but that movie was also a much more explicitly fantasy/sci-fi oriented project, as was Rubber. Wrong Cops, by contrast, is set wholly within a world that could, technically, be ours, albeit one in which everything was tweaked a few degrees…a world in which everything was just a little wrong, as it were.

Part of the joy with Wrong Cops, similar to watching exploitation films or anything by Lloyd Kaufman, is seeing just how bad things will get. As with everything else, Wrong Cops doesn’t disappoint on this count: things start bad and get steadily worse until the whole thing becomes a roaring tsunami of bad taste, bad choices, bad behavior and bad, bad people. Truth be told, there isn’t a single character in the film that you can truly “root” for, not one person who passes the sniff test as a “hero.” We spend the most time with Duke but he’s the furthest thing we’d want from a protector. Ditto Officers de Luca and Holmes, a potential sexual assailant, on the one hand, and a cop so dirty that she even “feeds” on her own peers, on the other. The closest we get to an “innocent” cop in the film is Rough who wins by default: he doesn’t really do anything terrible (outside of some hanky-panky with his neighbor’s married wife, that is) but he also doesn’t lift a finger to help anyone, least of all the poor dying guy sitting in his living room.

Films like Wrong Cops walk a very fine line: on one hand, they only work spectacularly well if they push the envelope as far as it will go. On the other hand, however, there a definite difference between crudity with a point (see Blazing Saddles) and crude-for-its-own-sake (see pretty much any Troma film). Earlier this year, I lambasted The Comedy, a hateful hipster-skewering/lauding film that also featured Eric Wareheim in a prominent role. In that case, I was never sure which side of the issue the filmmakers were actually on: more often than not, The Comedy seemed to be celebrating their terrible behavior, while also trying to half-heartedly tsk tsk it. There’s no such hemming and hawing in Dupieux’s film, however: he’s all-in on the various officers terrible behavior but he makes no bones about what unrepentant assholes these people are. There’s nothing to look up to, here, no sense of cool cats thumbing their noses at a square world: these people are part of the problem, not any part of the solution, and Dupieux knows it. He also, however, knows that they are a seriously funny bunch of misanthropes (similar to that lovable bunch of apes in It’s Always Sunny) and gives them plenty of room to work their funny magic.

And the film is funny. Very funny. Unlike the ultra-dry, high-concept Rubber or the wry, tricky Wrong, Wrong Cops is all loud, belching, farting id, the Sam Kinison to the previous films George Carlin. Perhaps this speaks more to my sense of humor than anything else (remember…Dupieux gets me) but I laughed my way through the entire film. Hard. There are so many great scenes in the film that picking out favorites is a little hard but there’s stuff that still makes me crack up, even as I type it now: Eric Wareheim’s hair getting blown back by a tornado of pepper spray from a decidedly bored wannabe “victim”; Mark Burnham tossing a drug-filled rat onto a diner counter like it was no big deal; Officers de Luca and Holmes walking into a murder scene and proceeding to raid the fridge, featuring the priceless exchange, “Aren’t you going to ask any questions?” “I do have a question: how old is this mozzarella?”; the record executive dismissing Officer Rough’s efforts with the revelation that he doesn’t think “anyone’s going to want to listen to music from a black, one-eyed, slightly monstrous DJ.” Wrong Cops is like a bottomless treasure chest, constantly spewing forth glittering new comedic jewels at frequent intervals.

The acting, across the board, is dead on. All of the cops are pretty much perfect but there isn’t a single actor/character in the film that feels off, regardless of how much/little screen time they get. Marilyn Manson, in particular, is utterly fantastic: he plays the part of David Dolores Frank with absolutely zero hint of his more famous day job and the result is a pretty realistic portrait of a hassled teen. It’s a brilliant, metaphysical move that should have been nothing more than silly sight gag (oh look: the Antichrist Superstar is wearing jeans and a t-shirt) but plays like an honest-to-god directorial choice. This, in a nutshell, seems to sum up the Dupieux method: treat everything, regardless of how absurd or meaningless, with the utmost respect. Dupieux may be a court jester but he’s a smart one, perhaps as smart as Terry Gilliam, in his own way.

As previously mentioned, the film looks great and the sparse, dry electro score compliments everything perfectly. Truth be told, I just can’t find anything to really dun the film for: if this was a baseball game, this would have been a home run, no questions about it. As such, I’m pretty much left with just deciding where the film fits into Dupieux’s existing oeuvre. I actually like it quite a bit more than Rubber, which is easily the most “difficult” film in Dupieux’s catalog, but not quite as much as Wrong. While Wrong Cops is a much funnier film than its predecessor, I also think it’s a slightly smaller film: Wrong was working with some truly mind-blowing concepts and metaphysics, whereas Wrong Cops is a peek into an insane world. By the time Ray Wise showed up in a role that couldn’t help but remind me of his turn as Satan in Reaper, I had begun to wonder whether Dupieux’s whole point was to plop us down into a kind of purgatory while his various characters continued their slow shuffle into Hell.

A sentient tire…a talking dog…a collection of the worst police officers in history…if there’s a method to Quentin Dupieux’s exquisite madness, I’ve yet to see it. This, of course, is what makes waiting for his next film so excruciating. At this rate, the next movie could, literally, be absolutely anything under the sun. That’s kind of terrifying, if you think about it, but that’s also pretty damn exhilarating. It’s what creativity should always be. It’s what the movies should always be. It’s why I’m still here…and it’s why you should be, too.

2/1/14: Your Mind Will Betray You

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'Nam, 1970's cinema, absurdist, Academy Award Nominee, Academy Awards, Adrian Lyne, Alexandra Stewart, Alice in Wonderland, Alois Nebel, animated films, Au revoir, auteur theory, avant-garde, battle of the sexes, black market, Black Moon, bureaucracy, Cathryn Harrison, cinema, Cold War, Czech-Polish border, Czechoslovakian films, Danny Aiello, dark films, drama, Elizabeth Pena, experimental film, fall of Communism, Fatal Attraction, Film auteurs, films, foreign films, French cinema, French films, French New Wave, homeless shelter, horror films, hospitals, Indecent Proposal, insanity, isolated estates, Jacob Singer, Jacob's Ladder, Jan Svankmajer, Jason Alexander, Joe Dallesandro, les enfants, Louis Malle, Movies, post-office, psychological horror, Rotoscoping, scary faces, Silent Hill, strange families, talking animals, Therese Giehse, Tim Robbins, Tomas Lunak, train conductor, unicorns, veterans, Vietnam vet, Vietnam War

Although I didn’t really plan it that way, last Saturday’s screenings definitely had a theme: the unreality of reality. These were films that may (or may not) have been about insanity or they may (or may not) have about something more tangible and bizarre. All three of the films challenge audience perceptions of what is real and imaginary, proving that we really don’t know as much about our world as we like to pretend we do.

My immersion into dark animated fare continues with Alois Nebel, an Oscar nominated Czech film from 2011. As I’ve mentioned before, animation style can, often, be the biggest impediment to my initial enjoyment of animated films. In the case of Alois Nebel, however, this issue was pretty much thrown out the window early on with the film’s gorgeous black-and-white imagery. At first, the animation style reminded me of a more severe, serious version of Archer. Upon closer examination, however, I realized that the animated images were actually Rotoscoped. Now, in general, I’m not the world’s biggest Rotoscoping fan: up to this point, my go-tos for that style would have been either A Scanner Darkly or Waking Life, neither of which really blew me away. The images and animation in Alois Nebel, however, are certainly the best Rotoscoping I’ve yet seen and have given me a new benchmark for stuff like this in the future. As always, I heartily approve of anything that expands my horizons.

Tomas Lunak’s film begins in a small town on the Czech-Polish border in 1989, at the tail end of the Cold War. The titular character is a quiet, reserved train conductor who first comes to us via voice-over as he unemotionally recites the train schedule, his droning voice taking on the feel of a litany or a mantra. He lives in a town that seems to exist outside of the current world, a town where the black market is in full swing, thanks to the local military and one of Alois’ “friends”, a fellow switchman. Alois has been having dreams of his childhood, specifically about events that happened in 1945, when German citizens were expelled from Czechoslovakia. His caretaker was one of these people and Alois never ceases wondering what became of her. His dreams become interpreted by those around him as a mental breakdown, however, and he is committed to a pretty wretched insane asylum (electro-shock therapy and Rohypnol appear to be the standard treatment choices). When he is released, Alois ends up homeless and falls in with a former train conductor who now resides at the local homeless shelter. He begins a tentative romance with the woman who runs the shelter before events around him conspire to throw him back into the mystery of his missing caretaker, Dorothe, and her fate. Into this mix we pour a mysterious mute man with an ax and a grudge, the collapse of Communism and a harrowing finale involving betrayal, a torrential downpour and washed-out roads.

There’s an awful lot to take in with Alois Nebel and I’ll be honest: even with an extremely close reading of the film and copious notes, I’m still not sure that I understand everything. In particular, I found many of the relationships to be a bit confounding, especially when dealing with older/younger versions of the characters. There are times when I was positive that I was following one character, only to find out that it was someone else, entirely. The stuff about the mute man is especially confusing, which can be a bit of a critical wound when one realizes how intrinsically he’s tied into everything.

There also seemed to be a lot of very casual betrayal going on, so casual, in fact, that I keep wondering whether I missed something: surely these people couldn’t so actively fuck each other over without incurring any sort of ill-will from those around them, could they? Again, I’m not sure if the intent was to highlight institutionalized duplicity, point out how naive Alois was or if I just managed to misread it but there seemed to be quite a few examples of characters doing everything in their power to step on someone else.

For as confounding as Alois Nebel can be, however, the film is also powerfully hypnotic and flows with a beautifully lethargic sense of dream-like wonder. The sound design is exquisite and, when paired with the stunning imagery, combines to create a truly immerse experience. At times, the film almost seems like a partial horror film (there is a particularly nasty ax murder that occurs) or nod to German expressionism (the combination of Rotoscoping and black-and-white imagery makes for some truly sinister shadows), although the slow pace and dour attitude definitely place this squarely in the “serious art film” category.

More than anything, I found myself wondering just what, exactly, this film would look like as a strictly live-action affair. From what I can imagine, it would still look pretty darn interesting. The shot composition and framing is nothing if not reminiscent of live-action films and the frequent silent scenes, showcasing only subtle facial expressions or, in some cases, no expressions at all, would certainly play well with “real” actors. Ultimately, however, the Rotoscoping helps to add an unearthly edge to the film which is perfectly in tune with its themes: Alois Nebel is about a man who doesn’t quite fit in anywhere and the film, itself, really doesn’t, either. Patient viewers (or anyone with a sense of Cold War Czech politics) will find much to like and appreciate here but those expecting more action may find this to be a bit inert. Odd, unsettling and slightly too confusing to be a complete success (for me, at least), Alois Nebel is still a fascinating film.

I’ve always had kind of a love/hate relationship with Adrian Lyne’s Jacob’s Ladder. As a rule, I’m not really a fan of Lyne’s oeuvre: his career has tended towards Hollywood potboilers like Fatal Attraction, Nine 1/2 Weeks and Indecent Proposal, none of which I’m a big fan of (I do tend to have a soft-spot in my heart for Flashdance, however: that film is just so stupid that it’s kind of brilliant). Jacob’s Ladder always stuck out like a sore thumb, at least to me: the closest any other Lyne film got to that little psychological shocker was Fatal Attraction, which wasn’t particularly close.

Jacob’s Ladder deals with the struggles of Jacob Singer (Tim Robbins), a Vietnam war vet who currently works at the post-office, romances his co-worker (Elizabeth Pena) and has extremely unsettling flashbacks to his war-time experiences. You see, Jacob was part of an army platoon that experienced…something…during the war and he’s never been quite right ever since. He goes to see his friend and chiropractor Louis (Danny Aiello, in a truly great supporting role) whenever he needs an adjustment but there’s no adjustment that will fix his bizarre dreams or the creepy imagery that has begun to seep into his waking like, including strange creatures with no faces and demonic lizard-men.  Jezzie, his girlfriend, is starting to get fed up with his problems, especially once he has a complete freakout at a nightclub and begins screaming about monsters and demons. He might just be ready to confine himself to the loony bin until he happens to reconnect with one of his old army buddies and realizes that he’s not alone: everyone in his former platoon is experiencing the same issues. Jacob tries to take action, even going so far as to initiate a class-action lawsuit with lawyer Jason Alexander (a mere one year into his tenure on Seinfeld), but is stymied at every turn by his own comrades, shadowy mob figures and those damned creepy faceless critters. Will Jacob finally get to the bottom of his problems or is this all one big exercise in futility?

For most of its run-time, Jacob’s Ladder is a pretty effective, nifty little chiller. The visuals may seem commonplace nowadays but it’s interesting to note that the “scary-quick-changing-face” effect that’s become all too ubiquitous in modern horror films actually got its start here. In context, it works well but I can’t help but hate its genesis on principle, alone: if Jacob’s Ladder could only see what it wrought with Paranormal Activity…

The acting is, generally, pretty good, with Robbins giving a nicely nuanced performance as Jacob and Aiello providing just the right amount of mystery as his “is he/isn’t he?” friend. Pena wears out her welcome fairly quickly, unfortunately, playing her character with so much anger and aggression that she seems sorely out-of-place in the film: she even seems pissed off when she’s making love. Her attitude works in the scenes where it’s necessary (blowing up after the dance-floor fiasco, for instance) but fails completely in those scenes where she’s actually supposed to act loving. I never bought Robbins and Pena as a couple, ever, which seems like a real lost opportunity.

The film has an interesting, atmospheric quality to it, although the horror elements are really only paid off in a few scenes. One scene, in particular, is a real corker and the true horror centerpiece for the film: after escaping from abductors, conking his head on the pavement and getting his wallet stolen by a Salvation Army Santa, Jacob is taken to a hospital and sent for X-rays. As he’s being wheeled down the hallway, going down first one corridor, then the next, Jacob’s surroundings gradually change, going from normal hospital sterility to the kind of gore-drenched, body-part littered hellscapes that one would normally find in Silent Hill. The truth? The hospital scene in Jacob’s Ladder was actually a big influence on the seminal horror video game. At any rate, it’s an amazing scene and goes a long way towards cementing the film’s horror cachet.

So, with all this to recommend it, why do I have a love/hate relationship with the movie? Well, you see, it happens to have one of those twist endings and this particular one manages to undo the entire film as surely as if it pulled on a loose shoelace. This isn’t the kind of ending where you say, “Eh, it was alright.” It’s the kind of ending that makes you say, “Hey, wait a minute! How is that possible if this and this and this actually happened?” It’s the kind of ending that seems powerful and emotional, for about 30 seconds, before you start to really think about it. Once you let it bounce around in your noggin, however, you realize that the ending is pretty much impossible: if you accept it, you basically end up discounting the entire film. If you choose to toss the ending out the window, however, then you’re provided with absolutely no sense of closure or resolution. In other words, a lose/lose situation. Ultimately, this will always make Jacob’s Ladder a good, rather than great, film as far as I’m concerned.

There are times when you can be completely unprepared for a film, even if you’ve been anticipating it for some time. Case in point: French auteur Louis Malle’s 1975 surreal oddity, Black Moon. I’d read about the film for some time and had become quite curious to actually see it. After finally viewing it, however, I find myself nearly as perplexed as I was before I saw it. Sometimes, seeing does not bring clarity.

Although he had a distinguished career (including a 1956 Academy Award for Best Documentary and several nominations after) in France before he made his first English-language films, it will probably be a trio of these American films that he’s best remembered for: Pretty Baby (1978), Atlantic City (1981) and My Dinner with Andre (1981). These films, along with Au revoir, les enfants (1987), showcase Malle as a filmmaker as comfortable with testing film’s technical constraints as he is with pushing the emotional limits. Although Malle was a constant presence during the French New Wave of cinema, his work never really fit explicitly into that movement. At least, it didn’t really fit into that movement until he released Black Moon in 1975, however, only a decade or two since the movement ran its course.

Black Moon is many things but plot-driven is not one of them. Nonetheless, there is a plot (of sorts) and it will sound imminently familiar to anyone who’s read Alice in Wonderland: a young, inquisitive blonde girl wanders about a strange house, meets bizarre individuals, talking animals and, gradually, comes to learn something about herself. The young girl, in this case, is named Lily (Cathryn Harrison, a mere 16-years-old at the time of shooting) and she’s on the run from some kind of lethal gender war: men and women have taken up arms and proceeding to blast each other to kingdom come. Lily takes refuge in a mysterious estate and meets the eccentric family who lives there: Brother Lily (Warhol regular Joe Dallesandro, who gets by his acting inadequacies by way of remaining mute for the entire film), Sister Lily (Alexandra Stewart, as mute as Joe) and the Old Lady (Therese Giehse, who died shortly before the film was released and to whom it’s dedicated) and her husband, Humphrey the rat (yes, he really is a rat).

After introducing these decidedly odd elements, Black Moon does what any good absurdist film would do: piles one absurd event on top of the other. Lily discovers the family’s pet unicorn (a creepy-looking pony-thing that looked, to my disturbed eyes at least, as if it had a skull for a face: I don’t think it does but I could probably be forgiven for thinking that); drinks milk out of an absurdly large glass, while a pig looks on from a high-chair (hello, Alice, my old friend…); has to constantly pull up her constantly falling-down knickers; runs over a badger and suckles the old woman. We see naked children leading around a giant pig (shades of Jodorowsky); crying flowers (don’t ask) and creepy people in gas masks.

In many ways, Black Moon does come across as a kinder, friendlier version of a Jodorowsky film or, possibly, a version of Waiting for Godot enhanced by three sheets of acid. As with any absurdist/avant-garde film, the visuals are at least as (make that: much more) important than the actual story, although I think that the description of this as a “post-Apocalyptic Alice in Wonderland” is as good as anything I could come up with.

This is a defiantly weird film (Brother Lily can communicate via thought but only while touching someone; the Old Woman appears to die in one scene only to be fine in the next) but it’s also a pretty interesting one, anchored by the wide-eyed performance of Harrison as the surrogate Alice. She sees a lot of weird stuff, no doubt about it, but she always seems to be ready for more, which, consequently, makes us pretty game for more, too. When faced with the bizarre, Lily grits her teeth, puts her head down and says, “Just a minute, please,” whether dealing with hawk-slaying siblings, talking unicorns or hungry old women.

Whatever Black Moon actually ends up being about (Is it a strange Alice in Wonderland adaptation? A dialogue about the battle of the sexes? A story of a girl becoming a young woman?), the film is quite lovely to look at and filled with just enough absurdity to make one wonder what could possibly be around the corner. At times, it reminded me of the unholy offspring of Jan Svankmajer’s Alice and Hardy’s original The Wicker Man, a gauzy, odd landscape with any number of potential horrors just over the horizon. At other times, my wife and I turned to each other and shrugged in complete bafflement. Without a doubt, this is a strange one.

1/21/14: Listen to the Cat

Tags

1920s, Algiers, animated films, Antoine Delesvaux, cinema, films, French cinema, French films, graphic novel, Islam, Jews, Joann Sfar, Judaism, Movies, Rabbi Sfar, religious conflicts, talking cat, The Rabbi's Cat, Vastenov, Zlabya

For the past decade or so, there seems to have been a bit of a boom in adult animated features (think more Watership Down than Fritz the Cat, you pervs), especially those coming from France. While Japan has always been a leading distributor of mature animated films, including such landmark films as Akira (1988), Grave of the Fireflies (1988), Princess Mononoke (1997) and Tokyo Godfathers (2003), there have been quite a few French films released between 2003-2013 that look set to springboard their way into the canon of classic animated films for grownups.

Films such as The Triplets of Bellevue (2003), Persepolis (2007), The Secret of Kells (2009), A Cat in Paris (2010), Tales of the Night (2011), A Monster in Paris (2011) and The Painting (2011) may all come from the same country but they’re just about as different from each other as can be. Add in an array of quality animated features from other countries, such as Waltz with Bashir (Israel, 2008), The Fantastic Mr. Fox (U.S., 2009), A Town Called Panic (Belgium, 2009), Mary and Max (Australia, 2009) and Chico and Rita (UK, 2010) and it’s been a great time for those who like their cartoons with lots of big themes and issues.

Following in the footsteps of these aforementioned great French animated films comes Antoine Delesvaux and Joann Sfar’s exceptional The Rabbi’s Cat, based on Sfar’s graphic novel series of the same name. Although the animation is a bit crude and may take a short time to get used to, the film, itself, is whip-smart, exciting, very funny and quite thought-provoking. Any qualms I had were pretty much banished by the ten-minute mark.

Combining together several different volumes of the graphic novel, The Rabbi’s Cat takes place in 1920s Algeria and details the adventures of Rabbi Abraham Sfar, his beautiful daughter Zlabya and their mischievous cat, who has recently gained the ability to talk after eating a loud-mouthed parrot. In order to continue spending time with Zlabya, the cat decides to convert to Judaism, a plan that causes no amount of headaches for the Rabbi and his aged Master, a humorless and severe Rabbi who thinks Sfar doesn’t take his job quite seriously enough. Along the way, the group meets a Russian Jew who’s fled religious persecution in his country (his story, told through animated watercolors, is quite beautiful) and is searching for a fabled lost Jewish city in Ethiopia; Sfar’s cousin, a Muslim sheikh and his philosophical donkey; an insane Russian millionaire; a beautiful, dark-skinned bartender; a racist American “artist”; and a tribe of mysterious, violent desert nomads.

As is the case with many French animated features, there is quite a lot going on in The Rabbi’s Cat. We get plenty of intense religious discussions, my favorite being the debate that the cat and donkey get into over the relative merits of both Islam and Judaism. There are debates on the validity of religious “truth” (when the Rabbi tries to teach the cat about Adam and Eve, he scoffs and writes them off as “symbols’); racism (the American artist tries to explain eugenics to the Russian Jew and it doesn’t go over well; the Rabbi is kicked out of a little outdoor cafe, since the proprietor doesn’t “serve Jews…or Arabs.”); the hardship inflicted on Jews in 1920s-era Russia (the crazy millionaire states that “A Jew is not a Russian. A Russian, you challenge to a duel. A Jew, you burn” with a completely maniacal glint in his eye) and the perceived/real differences between Islam and Judaism.

If this seems like quite a bit to pack into a film that runs less than two hours, you’re absolutely correct. At times, The Rabbi’s Cat feels fit to bursting with content and it isn’t until we settle into the film’s main storyline (the hunt for the lost Jewish city) that things seem to settle down a bit. Most of the disparate elements fit together beautifully but a few of them, including an appearance by a lunk-headed adventurer and his stupid dog that are clearly supposed to be Tin Tin and Snowy, feel forced and a little out-of-place. The ending also seems a bit abrupt, as if they just pulled the plug rather than wound the proceedings down in a more natural way.

Nonetheless, The Rabbi’s Cat is, essentially, one delight after another. Once one gets used to the animation style, the film has a natural breath and flow that is extremely easy to watch. The voice acting, especially from Rabbi Sfar and the cat, is top-notch and the film is laugh-out-loud funny at times: my favorite line has to be the one where Rabbi Sfar brings the Russian millionaire back to his house, after previously finding the Russian Jew hiding in a box of Talmuds. The Rabbi’s cynical master raises one eyebrow and asks, “What’s this?” After the Rabbi responds with, “A Russian,” the Master retorts with, “What, you collect them?” Classic.

In the end, The Rabbi’s Cat is a pretty exceptional film. More than anything, it’s a film that constantly surprises, whether with the extremely genuine pathos of the painter or the surprising and shocking violence that pops up when the group visits the nomads. Any film that’s willing to throw not one but multiple weighty philosophical and religious discussions into the mix, while still finding time to develop the sweetly gentle courtship between the bartender and Russian Jew, is pretty alright in my book. There were even a few times where the film reminded me fondly of Terry Gilliam’s classic The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, which, if you know anything about me, is pretty much the highest praise I can give it.