Tag [Sion Sono, 2015]:
Watched: Aug 20, 2019
In the first scene, two coaches filled with
schoolgirls make their way back from a class trip. As the coaches travel along
an empty stretch of road, spirits run high, as teachers try to keep things
under control. One girl, soon revealed to be a protagonist of sorts, is
scribbling words in her journal. Distracted by the antics of her teenage
friends, she drops her pen. As she reaches down to pick it up, the top of the coach
she's travelling in is suddenly lifted away in a torrent of broken glass, as
the bodies of her teacher, the driver and her classmates are ripped in two.
Stunned, as if in a trance, the girl raises her head to see the gore and
destruction all around her. From here, the action of Tag is unrelenting. The
film surges ahead, moving between sequences, like a dreamer moves between
dreams. The effect is audacious and disorienting, skipping between scenes of
tranquil coming-of-age soap opera and bursts of kinetic violence, surrealism
and philosophical conjecture. At its heart, the film mixes elements of
exploitation cinema, horror, black comedy, video game and reality TV
conventions, with more traditional existential dilemmas, asking questions about
identity; "why are we here", "what is our purpose",
"who is our creator" and so on. As a narrative, the film might have
benefited from a less indefinite coda, giving us something concrete to conclude
the wild and hallucinatory ride the filmmakers have created, but I suspect the
abstract questions the film poses are part of the intent. Nonetheless, Tag
remains a work of delirious entertainment. The fluid narrative and inherent
surrealism of the concept help keep the audience guessing as to what strange
phenomena is occurring, while the strong performances from its actors ensure
the seesawing emotional transitions are always affecting.
The Key [Tinto Brass, 1983]:
Watched: Aug 21, 2019
What if Bernardo Bertolucci, then at his absolute
pinnacle circa The Conformist (1970), and before the slide into the bloated,
self-satisfied narcissism that overwhelmed the better aspects of Last Tango in
Paris (1972) and 1900 (1976), directed a porno? The result might look something
like this. I've dipped into the work of director Tinto Brass before, experiencing
the different periods of his career, from The Howl (1970), his bewildering and
pretentious attempt to ape Jean-Luc Godard's ground-breaking film Week End
(1967), to his most infamous production, the big budget, star-driven, Roman
burlesque, Caligula (1979), and beyond, to the more characteristic and brazenly
pornographic Tra(sgre)dire, or Cheeky (2000). While I'm always quietly
impressed by the aesthetics of Brass's work – the art direction, costume design
and cinematography are genuinely impeccable – I've been less taken with the
films themselves. The Key however is a marked improvement. Adapted from the
1956 novel "Kagi" by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, Brass's film chronicles the
complex sexual relationship between a middle-aged academic and his much younger
wife. When the wife begins a passionate affair with her potential son-in-law,
the husband uses it to live out his own sexual fantasies vicariously, projecting
his obsessions and desires onto the vigorous copulations of the younger couple.
Moving the action to Fascist Italy, Brass has more than just sex on his mind,
as he uses the relationship to blur identities, gender roles, and to create a
rift in the stability and mental wellbeing of the married couple as a portent
to the historical darkness still to come. It's a provocative and transgressive
film that uses the personal to allude to political upheaval, corruption and
debasement, defined as it is throughout by ornate production designs, gorgeous
period costumes and cinematographer Silvano Ippoliti's graceful camera work, where
the slow zooms, haloed backlighting and frequent mirror symbolism create the implications
of voyeurism, objectification, identity and self-reflection.
Battles Without Honour and Humanity [Kinji Fukasaku, 1973]:
Watched: Aug 25, 2019
Director Kinji Fukasaku's final film, Battle Royale (2000),
was a firm favourite of mine during my early to mid-teenage years. This was the
period when I was first discovering cult cinema and the Japanese cinema in
general. Battle Royale, with its comic book stylisations, mordant humour, satirical
underpinnings and scenes of extreme violence, felt like a specifically Japanese
take on the American films of Paul Verhoeven. Like Verhoeven's work, such as
Robocop (1987) and Starship Troopers (1997), Battle Royale walked a fine line
between criticizing fascism and celebrating it. The glee with which both
filmmakers approach the violence of their work and the seriousness underpinning
their subtext, creates a disparity that seems intentionally provocative. Despite
my fondness for Battle Royale, I never got around to exploring Fukasaku's
career in any greater detail, seemingly more drawn to filmmakers like Nagisa
Ôshima, Shohei Imamura, Kaneto Shindo, Hiroshi Teshigahara, or more
contemporary directors like Hideo Nakata, Takeshi Kitano, Kiyoshi Kurosawa and
Shinya Tsukamoto. This changed last year with a viewing of four of Fukasaku's films. In each of these works, the
aesthetics of Fukasaku are consistent throughout, with a gritty, street-level
approach to the crime movie genre that put me in mind of the earlier William
Friedkin directed classic The French Connection (1971). Like Friedkin's film,
Fukasaku's work from this period combines documentary or cinéma verité
techniques alongside conventional storytelling. Real locations are used where
necessary, the camera is mobile, often hand-held, dates and statistics flash up
on screen like in a news report, reminding us of who the characters are and
where the narrative takes place. While I preferred the director's later and
related film, Cops Vs. Thugs (1975), Battles Without Honour and Humanity is
another bold and engaging work for Fukasaku, and an absolute masterwork of the
Yakuza sub-genre.
The Price of Power [Tonino Valerii, 1969]:
Watched: Sep 07, 2019
Given the subtext, I'm surprised The Price of Power
wasn't highlighted in Alex Cox's "10,000 Ways to Die: A Director's Take on
the Spaghetti Western" (2009). Cox, an old-school conspiracy theorist, has
frequently waxed lyrical about the assassination of
President John F. Kennedy, and the potentially insidious air of collusion and
corruption surrounding his death. The filmmaker even dedicated a full-length
book to the discussion: "The President and the Provocateur: The Parallel
Lives of JFK and Lee Harvey Oswald" (2013). In The Price of Power,
screenwriters Massimo Patrizi, Ernesto Gastaldi and co-writer/director Tonino Valerii, use the 1881 assassination of American
President James Garfield to hypothesize on the more
recent assassination of the aforementioned JFK. It's a novel approach to a
sub-genre that was often more interested in mimicking and then subverting the
conventions of earlier American westerns than in detailing specific events from
contemporary politics, and while its transposition of the Kennedy killing onto
the assassination of Garfield plays fast and loose with the genuine facts, the
film shows a level of ambition and verisimilitude that sets it apart from many
of its peers. One of the more obscure Italian westerns, hampered perhaps by its
generic title, The Price of Power is nonetheless a strong work for Valerii, a
competent director that had previously helmed two other Italian westerns, Taste
for Killing (1966) and the better known Day of Anger (1967), and would go on to
direct a mostly successful giallo, My Dear Killer (1972), and the Sergio Leone
conceived western, My Name is Nobody (1973). Using the machinations of the
Kennedy assassination as a prism through which to view the earlier
assassination of Garfield, Valerii and his collaborators succeed in folding
American history in on itself. As such, the film manages to find sociological
parallels between the prejudice and discrimination of the old west and that of
the modern America, but also uses the subtext of the film to reflect on the
corruption of the then modern Italy as well.
Portraits [Stephanie Paris, 2019]:
Watched: Sept 21, 2019
It would be a stretch to call Portraits a great film.
It isn't. It has its flaws and some viewers will be less sympathetic to those
flaws than others. But again, it's a film that ticks a lot of boxes for me, and
while the result isn't perfect, it's worth embracing the film as a directorial
debut that shows considerable talent and a strong auteurist sensibility, which
is increasingly rare. As a close comparison, Portraits has definite
similarities to the Nicolas Winding Refn film The Neon Demon (2016). Both films
focus on lost girls drifting through a miasma of noirish Los Angeles,
unravelling personal mysteries that lead invariably to vampiric conspiracies
that hint at a satirical swipe at Hollywood and its culture of abuse and
exploitation. While Refn's film undoubtedly has superior aesthetics, its
increased budget of $7million and the support of A-list actors going some
lengths towards giving his empty shell a veneer of actual engagement and
artistic credibility, I found Portraits to be more honest and authentic, both
in its exploration of this world and in its presentation of the female gaze.
The Neon Demon was an attempt at imitation from a filmmaker who should've long
since developed his own voice, while Portraits is a directorial debut from a
filmmaker still finding theirs. In this context, the apparent nods to filmmakers
like David Lynch and Dario Argento are less egregious. Paris is taking the
influence of films like Suspiria (1977) and Mulholland Drive (2000), not as
some post-modern game, but as a foundation on which to build her own story. The
first half of the film is excellent, beginning with a neon-soaked stalk and
slash sequence backstage at a burlesque club, which evokes the great masters of
the Giallo sub-genre, and the usual themes of objectification, voyeurism and
reflection noted above. Then, it switches gears, becoming a Lynchian noir that
has a certain affinity with David Robert Mitchell's analogous mystery, Under
the Silver Lake (2019). It's only in the final act that the film stumbles, the
later scenes descending into generic slasher film territory, where its greatest
mysteries are sidelined and left unanswered.
