Criterion Sunday 611: Being John Malkovich (1999)

I can’t really be considered part of the cult following of Charlie Kaufman. The tone of his work just doesn’t resonate with me so much, and there’s a lot here too, in what must surely be considered his foundational work, that leaves me a little cold (though it clearly works for a lot of people). That said, like plenty of classic comedies (albeit with an ironic 90s tone), this film throws so much at the screen that plenty of it does hit, and some of it really is quite affectingly off the wall. Specifically, the way that the film utilises Cameron Diaz is very much against type, and Catherine Keener too has never been more striking (usually those two actresses would be playing these roles the other way round, you feel), but together they create an emotional bond via the mediation of the titular figure that almost erases John Cusack’s puppeteer from the film entirely. By the final third, things have been put in motion that pull the film off in all kinds of weird directions, and the constant accrual of detail makes for a rather rich and perplexing series of thematic explosions that have a cinematic pyrotechnic value at the very least, though some even achieve emotional resonance. It remains a film I still admire more than fully love, but that’s on me; it’s a singular American achievement both coming out of the 1990s and drawing a line under it for a new decade.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director Spike Jonze; Writer Charlie Kaufman; Cinematographer Lance Acord; Starring John Cusack, Catherine Keener, Cameron Diaz, John Malkovich, Orson Bean; Length 113 minutes.

Seen at the Penthouse, Wellington, Saturday 27 May 2000 (and on VHS at home, Wellington, May 2001, and most recently on Blu-ray at home, Wellington, Sunday 29 January 2023).

Criterion Sunday 571: Black Moon (1975)

Louis Malle was not a director who was scared to try things out on film, however strange or unpleasant they might be. This film, in particular, feels like it’s drawing from a lot of sources. Some of it may be Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as there are a lot of animals in this film, and a certain dollop of surrealism (it’s never quite clear what’s real and what’s imagined, but it seems like a lot may be in the head of its Alice-like young woman at the centre, played by Cathryn Harrison). But there’s also a brutal apocalyptic scenario apparently playing out, as the film opens with gender-separated gangs murdering people of the other gender, and an old woman acting as some kind of rebel leader from her hideout in a garret. Within this scenario there’s a deep sense of English country life (it reminded me a little of the underappreciated Saoirse Ronan film How I Live Now in that respect), yet the edge of strangeness comes from being filmed in France. Indeed, it’s very much not an English film despite being in that language, and that creates an extra layer of the uncanny to it. I can’t say I exactly understood or always liked it, but it does seem like a very distinctive vision, a strange and disturbing one, with hordes of feral naked children and an old woman being suckled like a baby, and a lot of clearly deeply-felt symbolism that makes it feel like a personal film to Malle. Someone early on asks what’s going on here, and that’s all I’m really left with at the end, but it’s compelling all the same.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director Louis Malle; Writers Malle, Joyce Buñuel and Ghislain Uhry; Cinematographer Sven Nykvist; Starring Cathryn Harrison, Therese Giehse, Joe Dallesandro, Alexandra Stewart; Length 100 minutes.

Seen at home (DVD), Melbourne, Thursday 23 February 2023.

Criterion Sunday 570: Zazie dans le Métro (1960)

I do know that I’ve read Raymond Queneau’s 1959 novel — the man who the following year would go on to found Oulipo, a collective known for their playful experimentation with narrative form — and surely what Malle has done with this film adaptation is to translate Queneau’s inventiveness and wit, and his particular glee in coining new words (certainly something that the subtitles are keen to capture). Whether it will be to your taste is another matter, and I found the non-stop “zaniness” of the whole enterprise was a little grating to me. That’s less to do with the young girl at the heart of the film (Catherine Demongeon, who’s not nearly as abrasive as the poster image would have you believe) and more the way that Malle has put it all together, with frequent recourse to sped-up sequences playing at a manic knockabout pace, quick cuts that violate time and space and create a certain level of magic (albeit not the same kind of magic that Rivette would dabble with the following decade in Céline and Julie Go Boating), and an exhaustingly inexhaustible energy from all its leads. There’s also a underlying weirdness about the way men respond to Zazie which seems somehow inappropriate but also difficult to pin down (I suppose one could write it off as ‘of its time’, except that Malle was often of another time when it comes to young women in his films). Still, I can’t fault the energy on display, and while it may not be for me, it has its definite charms.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director Louis Malle; Writers Malle and Jean-Paul Rappeneau (based on the novel by Raymond Queneau); Cinematographer Henri Raichi; Starring Catherine Demongeot, Philippe Noiret, Hubert Deschamps; Length 92 minutes.

Seen at home (Blu-ray), Wellington, Sunday 18 September 2022.

Criterion Sunday 402: La Voie lactée (The Milky Way, 1969)

In his long career, Buñuel hardly shied away from the merciless mockery of religious hypocrisy, and that’s sort of the entire point of this film. It is essentially a kind of episodic comedy with a series of vignettes serving to set up a series of situations in which people argue on points of religious schisms, which when set out in this way can’t help but seem utterly absurd and futile. The plot, such as it is, hangs around a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela being undertaken by two men (Paul Frankeur and Laurent Terzieff), though they seem pretty happy to hop in a car when it suits them, and they don’t seem particularly committed to the more spiritual aspects of the journey, which don’t just travel through space but also just as often through time as well. Still, the director has his customary fun with Jesus (Bernard Verley), priests, monks and other holy men, and those who aspire to holiness, and I can’t deny its at times anarchic humour.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director Luis Buñuel; Writers Buñuel and Jean-Claude Carrière; Cinematographer Christian Matras; Starring Paul Frankeur, Laurent Terzieff, Édith Scob, Bernard Verley, Alain Cuny; Length 101 minutes.

Seen at home (Google Play Movies streaming), Wellington, Thursday 25 February 2021.

Criterion Sunday 390: Sweet Movie (1974)

This may well be a masterpiece of piercing bourgeois complacency and for some people it clearly is, but I think I just have trouble connecting with the carnivalesque sense of polymorphous perversity. It almost feels more coherent than his 1971 W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism, though it’s still a blend of elements (including some very unsettling footage of WW2 atrocities being uncovered, although ones committed by the Soviet forces being brought to light by Nazis). The rest of the film involves a lot of people debasing themselves for various causes, and surely that’s the point of the film — starting with the valorisation of virginity presented as an American style talent contest, and moving through both women and men debasing themselves, being humiliated, acting out and generally being pariahs, and all in the name of the film’s satirical targets. I find it wearying where others revel in its warped sensibilities, though I imagine that making the likes of me feel a bit worn out is probably an achievement the film should be perfectly happy with.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director/Writer Dušan Makavejev; Cinematographer Pierre Lhomme; Starring Carole Laure, Anna Prucnal, Pierre Clémenti; Length 98 minutes.
Seen at home (DVD), Wellington, Sunday 17 January 2021.

Ar Condicionado (Air Conditioner, 2020)

I’m just following up my Global Cinema piece on Angola with another, more recent, film from that country which was recently given its international premiere online by the We Are One Film Festival, via YouTube, having screened for the first time only earlier this year at the International Rotterdam Film Festival. You don’t see much cinema from the country, for fairly obvious reasons, but I thought it worth representing a more modern take on some of the same issues.

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It’s really all about the tone this film, the sort of dreamlike atmosphere that suffuses the world through which Matacedo (José Kiteculo) wanders. He’s some kind of maintenance guy (or concierge, or security perhaps) in a crumbling Luanda apartment block, where air conditioning units have been falling off. He has a problem with his ears, allowing the film to just move into wordless almost surreal sequences at times. In this, the camerawork and sound is crucial, allowing the film to be both heightened and magical while still very much grounded in its class consciousness: there’s a shouty boss who is very insistent that his air conditioning gets fixed, pushing Matacedo and his colleague Zezinha (Filomena Manuel) into action. You get the sense that maybe the air conditioning itself is a symbol of a class divide in a country which has been pulled apart by war until only relatively recently; the crumbling infrastructure is just one way in which society has been stretched and broken by this extended period. But while that all looms in the background, Matacedo is just trying to get by, and his relaxed groove is what the film is ultimately trying to convey, pretty successfully I think.

CREDITS
Director Fradique [Mário Bastos]; Writers Fradique and Ery Claver; Cinematographer Ery Claver; Starring José Kiteculo, Filomena Manuel; Length 72 minutes.
Seen at home (YouTube), London, Thursday 11 2020.

Criterion Sunday 290: Le Fantôme de la liberté (The Phantom of Liberty, 1974)

One of Buñuel’s typically absurdist late films, which narratively careens from one character to another almost randomly (like Linklater’s Slacker), a series of brief skits which fundamentally question the meaning we ascribe to narratives by constantly bamboozling one’s expectations. It may be one of his greatest films in fact, although the experience of watching it can necessarily be a little bit confounding, as familiar targets are satirised — like the bourgeoisie (sitting down to go to the toilet together), the police (the commissioner with his fixation on his sister, or the cadets being taught about polyamory in a class setting), men of religion (drinking and gambling in an inn), and just the general slew of human perversions and vices. There are some hilarious individual episodes as well as others which seem somewhat more of their time, but Buñuel stays above the fray dispassionately observing these foibles.

CRITERION EXTRAS:

• The only significant extra is a short video introduction by the screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière which sets up some of the ideas he and Buñuel were playing with in the film.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director Luis Buñuel; Writers Buñuel and Jean-Claude Carrière; Cinematographer Edmond Richard; Starring Julien Bertheau, Jean-Claude Brialy, Michael Lonsdale, Michel Piccoli, Jean Rochefort, Monica Vitti; Length 104 minutes.

Seen at National Library, Wellington, Wednesday 7 June 2000 (and most recently on DVD at home, London, Sunday 9 February 2020).

빈집 Bin-jip (3-Iron, 2004)

Following up on my Korean week, I return to one of the most lauded of recent works from that country, by prolific filmmaker Kim Ki-duk. It finds an almost spiritual register to deal with themes of dislocation and abuse, while also running at under 90 minutes.

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I’m not quite sure how to feel about this film, but one thing I think is clear is that it lays out a space somewhere to the side of reality — maybe one that’s surreal, maybe one that’s imaginary or rather I should say mythical (there’s certainly a sort of folkloric undertow to the whole concept). At the heart of the story is a wife (Lee Seung-yeon) abused by her husband who tries to run away from him, and the attachment she forms to an itinerant young man (Jae Hee), neither of whom speaks (the wife or the man). He moves from home to home on a motorcycle, posting flyers over their locks so as to identify which aren’t being occupied when he returns later, and who then breaks into the homes to spend the night and eat their food, while mending broken items and doing the washing. At this point, it seems fairly clear — for such people don’t really exist except in stories like this — that he’s somehow other-worldly, though I suppose I could just as easily label him a plot device. The point is, there’s something magical about his presence, which allows the wife to hope for a better future even as she finds herself stuck with this horrible man she’s married to, and the dynamic between the three of them makes the ending rather a melancholy one, even as it is lift up by the promise of love, however spectral it might be. The lack of dialogue between the leads means the film never quite has to explain itself in so many words, leaving it an enigma, like these characters.

CREDITS
Director/Writer Kim Ki-duk 김기덕; Cinematographer Jang Seong-back 장성백; Starring Jae Hee 재희, Lee Seung-yeon 이승연; Length 88 minutes.
Seen at home (DVD), London, Monday 23 September 2019.

Possibly in Michigan (1983)

One of the most prolific genres in cinemas is horror, and with It re-released this week in UK cinemas ahead of It Chapter Two in a couple of weeks — along with a few other titles like the latest by prolific genre director Alexandra Aja, a Guillermo del Toro production, and a documentary about Satanism — it’s about time I featured a few films in this genre (or closely adjacent to it) on my blog. Honestly, I’m not a huge horror genre acolyte, and it’s rather a blindspot for me — one I heartily acknowledge and am trying to remedy, given that a great deal of the most impassioned cinephilia revolves around horror. After all, I only watched my first few giallo films three years ago. There’s a huge range of work that falls under the ‘horror’ mantle, and it’s often a genre that attracts directors with a great amount of technical skill or visual flair (somewhat like metal in relation to other popular music), and as such has a committed fanbase of knowledgeable commentators. I’m not one, so this week I’ll just be picking out some things I’ve found interesting, starting with a short film for a change. It’s on YouTube and is worth 12 minutes of your life.

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Due to my 2018 project to try to watch a film every day I was watching a lot more short films that year, and this strange video-shot 1980s oddity has been through periodic flashes of internet interest, because after all, it. Is. Wild. It feels like the kind of lo-fi found-in-an-attic thing that John Darnielle would be writing a novel about, except it is very au courant about its themes (because those themes, sadly, are always au courant) — being the link between capitalism and murder, and the creepy violence of weird dudes. It’s set largely at a mall, and it has the best Casiotone-style chunky keyboard music — it’s basically a musical short film. It is, in case this isn’t clear, thoroughly delightful with a strange, slightly surreal edge reminiscent of early Lynch.

CREDITS
Director/Writer Cecelia Condit; Cinematographers Amy Krick and Jeff Chiplis; Length 12 minutes.
Seen at home (YouTube), London, Thursday 4 October 2018.

Criterion Sunday 143: Cet obscur objet du désir (That Obscure Object of Desire, 1977)

In the long pre-history to this blog, I’ve already written about this film after seeing it on the big screen back in 2007, and even posted it here. Revisiting it again for this project, I am reminded that I find Buñuel’s style, especially in these later French films, both beguiling and maddening in equal measure: short scenes, people wandering into and out of rooms, little attempt to always make any narrative connections or explicate “meaning”. That, plus the very 70s ways of working through issues of desire — by which I mean not just a certain normalisation of elderly male attention to young women, but casual domestic violence. Of course, Mathieu is hardly intended to be sympathetic — part of the ‘comedy’ is that Mathieu’s calm explanations to his fellow train passengers (the film is largely told by him in flashback) of how he’s in the right are undercut by what we see of his behaviour — and the terrorist conflagrations which periodically engulf the film (and which consume it ultimately) seem to be a sort of wilful erasure of Mathieu’s aggressive desires. Still, Conchita never comes across as much more than a surface onto which Mathieu’s confused desires are projected, though casting two actors in the role (the aloof Carole Bouquet and more sensuous Ángela Molina) does come across as something of a masterful stroke (however it was intended by Buñuel).

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director Luis Buñuel; Writers Buñuel and Jean-Claude Carrière (inspired by the novel La Femme et le pantin by Pierre Louÿs); Cinematographer Edmond Richard; Starring Fernando Rey, Ángela Molina, Carole Bouquet; Length 99 minutes.

Seen at National Film Theatre, London, Wednesday 28 February 2007 (and earlier on VHS at home, Wellington, August 2000, and most recently on DVD at a friend’s home, London, Sunday 12 February 2017).