The Possessed [Luigi Bazzoni & Franco
Rossellini, 1965]:
Watched: Aug 06, 2019
This ticked a lot of boxes for me. I love films and
stories about characters arriving at a strange, ghostly location, and finding
themselves enveloped in the mysteries and conspiracies that exist beneath the
polite veneer of a society. Here, the location itself becomes a character; the
coastal village and its atmosphere of off-season emptiness, the wintery
desolation of places and the sense of somewhere that's fallen into ruin and
disrepair. Every architectural space, every backdrop, adds to the haunted,
forgotten quality of the film and its central mystery. Some critics have cited The
Possessed as a giallo, or even a proto-giallo, featuring as it does a central
character plunged into an investigative mystery surrounding a disappearance and
death. I'm not convinced by the comparison, as The Possessed seems more
interested in the aftermath of a crime, in the unspoken air of tragedy and
shame that follows it, than in the crime itself. This is a distant, subtle
film, that feels closer to Antonioni than it does to Argento, with the wintery
landscapes and modernist shot compositions adding to the feelings of desolation
and melancholy that permeate the narrative, and recalling with it the
experience of a film like Il Grido (1957) or Red Desert (1964). Co-writer and
director Luigi Bazzoni would go on to direct the actual giallo The Fifth Chord (1971)
as well as the strange and mysterious Footprints on the Moon (1976). Those
later films were photographed by his cousin, the now legendary Vittorio Storaro,
in vivid, saturated colours and with a focus on dense urban environments.
Conversely, The Possessed, photographed by Leonida Barboni in a high-contrast
black and white, lacks the more ornate stylization of those later films, however,
it's no less masterful and intuitive in its direction, design and
cinematography, or in the development of its lingering mystery.
Cops Vs. Thugs [Kinji Fukasaku, 1975]:
Watched: Aug 06, 2019
Despite the implications of its title, the film sets
out to blur the moral and ethical lines between its characters to such an
extent that no clear delineation exists between the protagonists or
antagonists. "Good guys" and "bad guys" are absent here;
there's just survival, with both sides doing whatever it takes to persevere. Much
more than a postscript to director Kinji Fukasaku and
screenwriter Kazuo Kasahara's earlier series
of films under the title "Battles
Without Honor and Humanity", Cops Vs. Thugs is a brilliant and engaging work
in its own right. Shot in the same loose, docudrama style as the analogous "Battles..."
series, Cops Vs. Thugs has a gritty urgency to its scenes of action and drama
that seems deferential to the influence of The French Connection (1971) by William
Friedkin. Filming on mostly real locations with handheld cameras, presenting
statistics and information on screen as if presenting genuine facts, and
generally placing the film's fictional narrative within a wider framework of actual
post-war Japanese history, Fukasaku and his collaborators elevate what could've been a fairly conventional or even generic Yakuza movie, into a bold,
morally complex study on loyalty and corruption.
Symptoms [José Ramón Larraz, 1974]:
Watched: Aug 10, 2019
Like Vampyres (1974) and The Coming of Sin (1978),
Symptoms is another film by José Larraz about the
symbiotic, possibly psycho-sexual relationship between two women, where the
motivating factors of jealousy and desire lead to bloodshed. There are obvious
parallels to Roman Polanski's more widely known and influential psychological
drama Repulsion (1966), with the same emphasis on a vulnerable young woman
suffering an emotional crisis after she finds herself isolated against an
overwhelming world, but Larraz, less ashamed of the lurid, exploitation
elements of the sub-genre, does something more interesting with the material. While
Polanski used the striking looks and naive presence of Catherine Deneuve to engender a sense of vulnerability –
reinforcing the character as both beautiful and innocence and as such a natural
victim to the predatory whims of the patriarchy – Larraz casts Angela Pleasence, a no less beautiful actor, but one with a
more unusual or otherworldly look. While equally terrorized by forces both
within and without her control, Pleasence doesn't play into preconceptions
about female vulnerability; she isn't used as a prop or model, the way Deneuve
is. Polanski set his film in swinging London, where "Jack the lad"
predators stalk the concrete jungle, and every automated sound, from construction
work, to passing traffic, to voices in overheard conversation, present a potential
threat. By contrast, Larraz's sets his film in the lush and bucolic English
countryside. The setting gives the film a pastoral fairy tale-like quality, subverting
the expectations of the genre and re-emphasizing the dislocation between the
character and the natural world. In this regard, a closer point of comparison
might be Robert Altman's obscure but brilliant psychological drama Images
(1971), a film that is in every way superior to Polanski's more influential
forebear. While the film suffers from the usual languors and lapses in logical
clarity that mar Larraz's best work, Symptoms nonetheless remains an
interesting and thought-provoking film, defined and elevated both by its beautiful
cinematography and by the incredible performance of Pleasence in the lead.
Frankenstein [Bernard Rose, 2015]:
Watched: Aug 18, 2019
The career of Bernard Rose is an eclectic one. From
his beginnings as a director of music videos in the 1980s, he produced such
bold and memorable clips as the Martin Scorsese influenced "Red Red
Wine" by UB40, the impassioned and sensitive LGBT+ related "Small
Town Boy" by Bronski Beat, and the infamous "Relax" by Frankie
Goes to Hollywood. His film career has been similarly varied and provocative,
moving from films about classical composers – Ludwig van Beethoven in Immortal
Beloved (1994), Niccolò Paganini in The Devil's Violin (2013) – to a film about
the noted Welsh drug smuggler Howard Marks – Mr. Nice (2010). He's also written
and directed several films based on the works of Leo Tolstoy – among them the
big budget Anna Karenina (1997) and the micro-budgeted Ivans Xtc (2000).
However, it's his work in the horror genre that Rose his best known for. In
each decade of his career, Rose has produced one horror film that really stands
out among the competition. From cult classics, like Paperhouse (1988) and Candyman
(1992), to the hugely underrated political meta-horror Snuff-Movie (2005), Rose
has worked to redefine the conventions of what horror cinema is capable of.
Only the dreadful found-footage horror Sx_Tape (2013) strikes a wrong note.
Bouncing back from that particular film, Rose has created perhaps his most
thought-provoking and singular work with this updating of author Mary Shelley's
1818 novel "Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus." Some attempts
to place the story in modern setting strike a false note and strain
credibility. Nonetheless, this is an oddly engaging adaptation of Shelley's
text, which weaves the familiar themes of motherhood, abandonment and doctors
playing God, but adds additional commentary on the plight of those marginalized
from mainstream society. One sequence, occurring as a dream, is so haunting, and
redolent of the poetic and elemental influence of the filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky,
that it has remained etched in memory.
A Pistol for Ringo [Duccio Tessari, 1965]:
Watched: Sep 05, 2019
I must hold Alex Cox responsible for this one. It was
through reading Cox's exhaustive "10,000 Ways to Die: A Director's Take on
the Spaghetti Western" (2009) that my interest in the film was piqued.
Cox's writing style is direct and conversational, knowledgeable without being
condescending and intelligent without falling into pretense. Discussing the
film in question he was able to skillfully establish the cultural and aesthetic
value of the work, as well as its storytelling capabilities, making the
experience of the film seem both accessible and exciting. Directed by Duccio
Tessari, a screenwriter who previously contributed to the writing of Sergio
Leone's middling but influential first western, A Fistful of Dollars (1964), A
Pistol for Ringo is devoid of many of the more iconic conventions that would
become prevalent in the Italian westerns, post-1966. The "Leone-isms",
as defined by later masterworks like For a Few Dollars More (1965) and Once
Upon a Time in the West (1968) – which established the extreme close-ups on
eyes and hands, the operatic soundtracks, the extreme widescreen compositions
and the prolonged build-up to a brief stand-off – are absent here, with the
film instead showing a more pronounced influence from later, post-studio American
westerns like Warlock (1959) by Edward Dmytryk or Marlon Brando's One-Eyed
Jacks (1961). Led by a charismatic turn by the actor Giuliano Gemma, A Pistol
for Ringo isn't simply one of the best Italian westerns, it's one of the best
westerns period! Beginning with a brutal bank robbery that establishes
the various characters and their relationships through scenes of action presented
as plot-development, the film eventually settles into a quietly dramatic siege
picture that uses the confined nature of the setting and the dynamics between
characters to generate some extraordinary intrigue and tension. As the robbers
take hostages at a hacienda, the title character begins a game of deception,
pitting both captors and captives against each other.
