The Year in Film 2019 - Part Six

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.

The Year in Film 2019 - Part Four

Happy as Lazzaro [Alice Rohrwacher, 2018]:

Watched: May 04, 2019

The furious social commentary of the film put me in mind of an old quote attributed to the filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard; or more specifically, to Godard's character in his own great masterpiece, First Name, Carmen (1983): "When shit's worth money, the poor won't have assholes." The sentiment reverberates throughout Happy as Lazzaro, where the saintly nature of the central character, held, along with the rest of his fellow villagers, in a perpetual cycle of poverty and subservience, like hostages to their own employers, gives an added weight to the film's condemnation of capitalist exploitation. Like M. Night Shyamalan's much maligned but brilliant The Village (2004), Happy as Lazzaro plays with the perception of time and the idea of characters imprisoned, not by lock and key, but by manipulation; by the intentional withholding of information by those in positions of power. In both films, the subsequent revelation as to the true nature of events hits the audience like a sucker punch. It breaks the spell of the film's earlier, more pastoral or otherworldly sequences, and has the potential to leave its audience disarmed and disoriented, unsure of where we are or what we're seeing. Supernatural elements surface as the film does something extraordinary with its central character, the titular Lazzaro, who, like his near-namesake, rises literally from the dead to become a living mirror to the heartlessness of people, and the unending cruelty that defines us as a species. With Happy as Lazzaro, writer and director Alice Rohrwacher announces herself as a clear descendant to filmmakers like Pier Paolo Pasolini and Robert Bresson; finding an analogous push/pull between unscripted naturalism, bordering on the documentary, and something more artificial, stilted and austere.

Us [Jordan Peele, 2019]:

Watched: May 04, 2019

Like the director's first film, the zeitgeist capturing horror commentary Get Out (2017), writer and director Jordan Peele's second feature, Us, never really betters its amazing prologue. Finding a balance between contemporary horror movie cliché and social satire, this opening sequence creates an atmosphere that is unnerving and pervasive, perfectly evoking a feeling of plausible suburban dread, both in its fairground setting – itself a kind of self-aware acknowledgement of the film as "thrill ride" – and in its observation of the family dynamics; the curious child, the distracted parents and the constant threat of something insidious existing just beyond the frame. The sequence is also necessary in establishing many of the key themes and characteristics that develop throughout the film. The hall of mirrors, set as it is in the façade of a fairytale kingdom, connects back to everything from "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" (1865) and its follow-up "Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There" (1871), to films like The Lady from Shanghai (1947) and Orphée (1950); that notion of the 'magic mirror' that transports a character to a literal underworld, as well as the usual connotations to self-reflection, identity and duality of the mind. While the subsequent home invasion sequences and the third act twist into something more elaborate if far-fetched are clever and brilliantly executed, they pale in comparison to this opening scene. With Get Out, I thought Peele's ideas, both in his subversion of conventional genre iconography and his engagement with the current politics of identity, were brilliant, but the film was let down by a bland, televisual aesthetic. Working here with cinematographer Michael Gioulakis, best known for his excellent work with directors David Robert Mitchell and M. Night Shyamalan, ensures that Peele's imagery is now as powerful as his ideas. Despite some obvious flaws, Us is a bold and singular experience, confirming Peele's reputation as an exciting and ambitious new voice in American genre cinema.

Unicorn Store [Brie Larson, 2017]:

Watched: May 05, 2019

In a year when Brie Larson would go on to achieve enormous pop cultural significance with her starring role in the blockbuster superhero movie Captain Marvel (2019), it seems especially incongruous to be discovering her first feature-length work as director; the small and defiantly unusual Unicorn Store. Representing a complete creative antithesis to the kind of cinema typified by Marvel's flashy, big-budgeted CGI adventure, Unicorn Store is an intimate, heartfelt, visually creative comedy drama film that combines genuine twenty-something existentialism with more fantastical or magical realist elements. Scripted by Samantha McIntyre, Unicorn Store captures something of the millennial experience in a way that feels genuinely authentic, at least in regards to the experience of middle-class suburbanites who leave the supposedly liberating institutions of college and university only to find themselves back at home, living with parents, and struggling with low-paying temp jobs that offer little outlet for the kind of creativity and expression that childhood promised. As a contrast to much of the current crop of American independent cinema, which is blandly shot and unremarkable, looking more like television movies than something directed with personality and style, Larson's film has a bold visual aesthetic that practically bursts with glitter and rainbows. The stylization extends from the personality of the central character, the struggling artist Kit, meaning that in this instance the content dictates the form. However, the result is still a confident and exciting work that suggests Larson could have potential to be a bold new voice in American cinema. I found the film both funny and moving, connecting with the character's sadness, her sense of failure and disillusionment, and her eventual move towards something approaching hope and self-acceptance. Ultimately, it's a film about belief and the need to believe in something greater than the world around us; about having a purpose, no matter how personal or irrational it might seem, which draws and connects us to other people.

The Usual Suspects [Bryan Singer, 1995]:

Watched: Jun 06, 2019

It's hard to believe there was ever a period when films like this would dominate the cultural discourse. In a world where hundred-million-dollar blockbusters are expected to gross billions in revenue, and predictably lead to the creation of an actual franchise of follow-up installments that run and run until the series exhausts itself, only to then be remade and rebooted as the process begins again, it seems entirely alien that a film that cost $6million to produce and grossed only $34million world-wide, once impacted the popular culture as significantly, if not more so, than The Avengers (2012), Wonder Woman (2017) or Joker (2019). While the creative success of the film and its legacy has been largely tainted by the separate sexual assault allegations leveled at both director Bryan Singer and the film's co-star Kevin Spacey, The Usual Suspects nonetheless holds up as a fantastic piece of comic book noir. From the very first frame the film grips the audience with a sense of mystery as we find ourselves faced with a seemingly senseless crime, conflicting timelines, an unreliable narrator and a character who acts as a surrogate for the audience, piecing together the clues. The screenplay by Christopher McQuarrie is brilliant; it's clever without being conceited, and compelling without becoming unnecessarily convoluted, always finding the right balance between tone, story and the playful manipulation of the audience. In the presentation of the mysterious Keyser Söze there is a touch of Dr Mabuse: the criminal mastermind created by Norbert Jacques and made famous in three films directed by Fritz Lang between 1922 and 1960. This similarity works to connect the film to the influence of German expressionism and by extension the legacy of the American film noir.

The Coming of Sin [José Ramón Larraz, 1978]:

Watched: Jun 15, 2019

The inference of the title, The Coming of Sin, creates an inherent tension within the presentation of the narrative and in the relationship between its three central characters. By seeking to personify "sin" as a characteristic in the flesh and blood form of a living person, co-writer and director José Larraz succeeds in taking his story out of the literal reality and creates instead a figurative representation that suggests something symbolic, almost mythical. By turning "sin" as a concept into a physical harbinger, Larraz cuts the film free from the restrictions of conventional drama and instead suggests something closer to the psychodrama. In this sense, it's a film in which characters become representations; where the struggle that exists between the protagonists is meant to externalise an internal point of view. Like his earlier film, Vampyres (1974), The Coming of Sin is a work that straddles the line between the arthouse and the grindhouse, proving itself to be another hard sell for both factions as it appears too salacious or leering for high-brow audiences, and too esoteric or languorous for the populists. On one level, the film is filled with scenes of soft-focus, softcore erotica, suggestive of analogous works by other European provocateurs such as Walerian Borowczyk and Tinto Brass, and films like The Immoral Tales (1974) or Salon Kitty (1976), where sex and depravity were treated as selling points, but packaged with creative cinematography and appeals to historical or psychological depth. The Coming of Sin undoubtedly takes great pleasure in depicting its lengthy scenes of sex and nudity, but it also features intelligent themes, strong emotions and an emphasis on smaller, observational scenes, which establish the world of the film and the relationship between the characters. The psychological subtext is as rich here as anything found in a film by Ingmar Bergman.

Vampyres

Thoughts on the film by José Ramón Larraz

Putting together a short comment for MUBI, I wrote the following: "With its atmospheric locations, painterly shot compositions and use of natural lighting, Vampyres is a grindhouse film that succeeds in dipping a toe or two into the esoteric world of the arthouse movie. Despite its minimal plotting, the story sustains interest and has a few surprising developments, but it can't compete with certain similar films by the great Jean Rollin, who could have injected this particular brand of exploitation with something more dreamlike, hypnotic and surreal."

I drafted the above almost automatically. At the time it seemed a good enough means of expressing (within the minimum character limit available) the film's strengths and weaknesses. I was content to leave it there and move on to something else when I started to question the film's deeper merits. I was thinking about how, from a surface perspective, the "vampiric" characters of Vampyres (1974) seemed to lack a political or sociological component. What was the subtext? Was the film simply a work of empty exploitation designed to shock and titillate the undiscerning viewer, or was it an opportunity - like with many other horror films before and since - to explore more interesting themes?

In many gothic horror films, the presentation of the "monster" - be it werewolf, vampire or something else - is often a figurative stand-in for something more theoretical, or subtextual. For instance, in Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922) by F. W. Murnau, the vampire sweeps across the landscape like a literal plague. It becomes in the process a kind of harbinger of sickness; a physical black death. In the later remake by Werner Hezog, Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979), this "plague" becomes a possible invocation of the encroaching darkness that would infect the German psyche in the early to middle parts of the Twentieth Century. For Herzog, the vampire is almost a portent of the Weimar Republic; that period of decadence and ruin that led directly (or indirectly) to the rise of National Socialism, and later fascism and war.

Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror [F. W. Murnau, 1922]:

Nosferatu the Vampyre [Werner Herzog, 1979]:

In these films the vampire is symbolic; a personification of something greater than its single form. Later vampire films, such as The Hunger (1983), Interview With the Vampire (1994) and The Addiction (1995), would use vampirism as a metaphor for AIDS, homosexuality and drug addiction respectively, while a more recent vampire film, Byzantium (2012), found parallels between its vampiric protagonists and the experience of asylum seekers forced to flee their native homes and live nomadically in foreign countries.

Thinking more about this particular film by José Ramón Larraz, I started to wonder if I'd sold the movie short. While I think it's easy to be blindsided by the sleazier aspects of the film - its low-budget nature, wooden performances, perfunctory dialogue, etc - there is something about Vampyres that seems to connect, albeit in retrospect, to a more interesting interpretation. It's a reading of the film that seems analogous to that of the aforementioned Interview With the Vampire (both the film version by Neil Jordan and the original 1976 novel by Anne Rice) in which the relationship between the two vampire characters could be seen as a metaphor for a homosexual relationship in the times before same-sex partnerships were more widely accepted.

Interview with the Vampire [Neil Jordan, 1994]:

In Vampyres, the lesbian lovers at the centre of the film are forced to remain hidden; living a nocturnal existence away from the conventional society. In the opening scene of the film, the couple, during an act of love, are punished and destroyed for their natural, consensual desires, by the literal shadow of puritanical virtue. In the decades, if not centuries that follow, they are forced to feed off various men in a mockery of heterosexual sex.

Vampyres [José Ramón Larraz, 1974]:

Like Interview with the Vampire, the subtext of the conventional vampiric existence is as such one of longing and repression; about two characters bound-together in partnership, sharing time and space, but not legally recognised as part of a "Holy" union. Further to this, the subplot involving the young couple who arrive at the film's manor house location with their caravan in tow (and with it an image of conventional domesticity in miniature) becomes endemic of the threat of the "straight", the conservative conformity of the "normal", or the everyday. In this context, it adds an element of colour to the interpretation, exaggerating the tedium of the heterosexual couple with the transgressions of the central characters. As does the ending, and the necessity of the two supernatural figures to once more take flight into the uncaring wilderness, lost within the margins of society.

In Vampyres, the scenes of heterosexual sex are fittingly grotesque. This grotesquery may have been coincidental - a result of having bad actors floundering into awkward love scenes without the guidance of an intimacy coordinator and literally fumbling their way through - but I think it's intentional. The wild pawing of flesh, the slobbering lips and tongues penetrating open-mouthed encounters, are the antitheses of eroticism. It fits in with the idea of characters forced to engage with a kind of sexuality that isn't felt, but instead becomes a cruel necessity for survival.

Vampyres is the first of two films I've seen by Larraz. While it's interesting enough to spend some time with, I found his subsequent work, The Coming of Sin (1978), to be on the whole a lot more interesting and much more successful in its combination of exploitation elements and art-house mind-games. Nonetheless, Vampyres makes an interesting companion-piece to that later film, with another story about female courtship and female desire under threat from the almost supernatural harbingers of conservative masculinity, guilt and emotional repression.