The Year in Film 2019 - Part Seven

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.

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.