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.

A Year in Film Pt. 2

A Viewing List for Twenty Eighteen

Married to the Mob [Jonathan Demme, 1988]:

Watched: Apr 16, 2018

Once again, it's the personality of director Jonathan Demme that enlivens and enriches the experience of the film. From his eclecticism - that bold mishmash of colours, fashions, music and settings, so vibrant and diverse - to the unwavering humanism already evident in previous films, such as Citizens Band (1977), Melvin and Howard (1980) and the preceding Something Wild (1986), the attitudes and relaxed stylisations favoured by the filmmaker succeed in charming the audience at every conceivable turn. Even when his characters are shady, or when the social milieu is suggestive of a particular threat of violence and criminality (as it is here), there's always a resolve and determination to these people, which is infectious. As such, the film becomes a celebration, with Demme allowing his actors the space to define and develop their characters through an expression of their own individual personalities; their quirks and idiosyncrasies on full display. The ensemble cast is incredible throughout, with standout turns from Michelle Pfeiffer as the film's strong-minded protagonist Angela, Dean Stockwell as the slimy mob boss Tony 'The Tiger' Russo, and Matthew Modine as Mike; a boyish FBI agent-cum-love interest.

Ghost Stories [Andy Nyman & Jeremy Dyson, 2017]:

Watched: Apr 19, 2018

Pitched in its promotional materials as a kind of horror anthology - a film in the same tradition as Dead of Night (1945), Spirits of the Dead (1968) or Tales from the Crypt (1972) - the eventual presentation of Ghost Stories soon expands into something far more character-driven and cohesive. Framed around the attempts made by a paranormal investigator to debunk three supernatural cases that led to his former mentor's disappearance, the individual vignettes presented by the investigation soon begin to suggest a different type of story; one that eventually propels the film towards its revelatory third-act twist. While the general nature of the three cases and the over-reliance on conventional jump-scares does initially seem to promise only modest thrills, it's the film's later sequences - and their clever dismantling of the fourth-wall between the supernatural and the psychological - that opens the film up to a more emotional interpretation, as well as moments of genuine surrealism. Co-written and co-directed by lead actor Andy Nyman and the former "League of Gentlemen" collaborator Jeremey Dyson, Ghost Stories is a film that riffs on the well-worn clichés of the horror genre; playing with the language and iconography that we've come to expect from other supernatural works - from The Shining (1980) to The Sixth Sense (1999), etc.  - but distinguishing itself through a kind of post-modernist deconstruction. It's a film rich in atmosphere, visually inventive and one that creates a palpable sense of fear throughout. However, the most disturbing aspect of Ghost Stories is the sense of loneliness that comes to define the character's journey as the film draws to a close.

Force of Evil [Abraham Polonsky, 1948]:

Watched: Apr 27, 2018

The film noir as art film; elusive, inscrutable and rich with allegorical interpretation. The two brothers representing Cain and Abel; a descent into subterranean worlds as a kind of figurative "Dantean" inferno; Faustian pacts and capitalism as a literal black death. The love story seems like an afterthought, but it's the performances, heightened and emotional, like the great American theatre, and the dialog, which has a kind of poetry to it, that are entirely gripping. Most movie dialog is merely perfunctory. It attempts to evoke naturalism; finding in its construction the awkward pauses, lack of cadence and layman's vocabulary that define the ordinary, or the everyday. Force of Evil however presents something far more interesting in its use of dialog. There's an "ornate" quality to the language here; a certain grandeur, though a grandeur that belies an undercurrent of violence and betrayal. In this sense, one could argue that the film is something of a precursor to the work of the American playwright David Mamet. Like Mamet's best writing, the dialog of Polonsky's screenplay has a rhythmical, almost musical quality to it. It has repetitions and reiterations that continually shift the emphasis from word to word; changing the subtleties and meanings of sentences in a profound way; finding subtext and insinuation; expressing everything and nothing simultaneously. The direction and cinematography are also incredible, utilising the full creative arsenal of post-German expressionist cinema to create a world full of atmosphere and emotion.

Secret Beyond the Door [Fritz Lang, 1948]:

Watched: May 1, 2018

Unfurling with an inscrutable dream-logic rife with visual symbolism, Lang's enigmatic, proto-Lynchian mystery, ties the Gothic intrigues of classic novels like "Jane Eyre" and "Rebecca" - with their similar presentations of lost girls, damaged men and figurative allusions to rooms that are off limits - to something comparatively more modern in its psychology and approach. From the very start of his career, Lang's cinema seemed preoccupied with matters of the subconscious. Think of the vengeful inventor Rotwang in Metropolis (1927), driven insane by grief, or the titular master criminal at the dark heart of The Testament of Dr Mabuse (1933), casting his insidious influence over the city, like a veritable plague. Using the bare necessities of his routine genre assignments to explore more interesting ideas perhaps closer in presentation to the form of the psychodrama, Lang's greatest works frequently dealt with this conflict between the inner and outer self. This is most apparent in the film in question. While considered a poor effort by many critics, Secret Beyond the Door is nonetheless a film where Lang takes his Freudian/psychoanalytical interests to the absolute limit. The entire film has an internal quality to it, where the use of voice-over monologues establish the notion of a character looking back on their own experiences. Not merely 'from the past', in the conventional sense, but as if suspended; hovering above the narrative, trancelike; as if recalling events through a form of hypnotic suggestion. It's a film full of mirrors and mirror imagery, suggesting ideas of replication, doppelgängers, self-reflection and the fragmentation of the self. It's also one of Lang's most visually inventive and expressive films.

The Girl Who Leapt Through Time [Mamoru Hosoda, 2006]:

Watched: May 16, 2018

As with Blade Runner 2049 (2017), this is another film that I didn't manage to make any notes on after my initial viewing. As such, I'll try to extract from memory the things that most impressed me, though again, I feel it's a film I'll need to return to in the not-too-distant future. Nonetheless, the animation here is stunning. Unlike American animation, which is often loud and hectoring - an endless blur of action, colour and movement that always seems to be in a great rush to get to the next big set-piece - Hosoda's film is quiet and reflective. While there's a definite high concept at work here - a presentation of time travel and repetitions of chance and coincidence that seems to owe a debt of influence to the film Groundhog Day (1993) - The Girl Who Leapt Through Time doesn't allow its science-fiction elements to boil over into action or spectacle. Instead, it remains focused on the relationship between its characters; the moral concerns and personal considerations, which are engaging throughout. It's a film that seems content to focus on the small, seemingly inconsequential daily routines and activities that define the lives of these characters. The emotions are overwhelming.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 [David Yates, 2011]:

Watched: May 20, 2018

Harry began the story as an innocent. During the course of his childhood a war breaks out. As a result, the youth must radicalise; preparing themselves for battle and the uncertainties ahead. As the series drew to a close I was struck by how much this parallels the experiences of its own audience. Those that came of age with the franchise: roughly speaking, millennials, or "Generation Potter"; these children of Marvel and J.K. Rowling. Like Harry, these kids would've experienced the relatively more colourful adventures of The Philosopher's Stone (2001) in a state of complete innocence. As the fall of the Twin Towers brought terrorism and tyranny on a global scale, the subsequent instalments - beginning perhaps with The Prisoner of Azkaban (2004) - saw the battles at Hogwarts coincide with the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan; the books' subtext of 'in-world' prejudice (the slurs against the "mud-bloods") or the characters displaced by war, connecting with the grim realities of the migrant crisis, racial intolerance and an overwhelming climate of fear. This probably sounds intensely pretentious, but I couldn't help seeing a connection. As the film's final moments found its characters framed against a landscape of death and destruction - ruined buildings and the soil still black from war - I felt the films had somehow become a mirror to the experiences of a generation, and the wider cultural events that surrounded their formative years. Not in the sense of the themes being inspired by these events- which would be impossible, given that the books predate both the films and the political climate - but adapted in response to them; giving this culmination to the seemingly disposable film series an incredible weight and depth.

Lunacy [Jan Švankmajer, 2005]:

Watched: Jun 16, 2018

Combining a number of possible inspirations - from two texts by Edgar Allan Poe, "The Premature Burial", and more significantly, "The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether", to the writings of the Marquis de Sade - Švankmajer's fifth feature-length film, Lunacy, is perhaps best surmised by the well-known idiom: "the lunatics have taken over the asylum." Set mostly within the walls of a decaying psychiatric hospital, the early scenes of Švankmajer's film are a bizarre and sometimes alienating experience. As an audience we witness these early scenes through the eyes of our protagonist, Jean; a young man that has been suffering from night-terrors following the death of his mother. We share his bewilderment and sense of disbelief as he's initially taken in by a man who claims to be the embodiment of the aforementioned de Sade, and who allows the patients at his hospital to run riot as a part of some bizarre form of behavioural therapy. However, as the film progresses and more revelations become clear, we begin to recognise where the influence of "The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether" is eventually leading us. Without giving too much away, the satirical crux of Lunacy is a depiction of society under both the left and right-wing systems of government; a political commentary that feels somewhat relevant to the world of 2018, in which the perception of society is now torn between the two extremes of the modern left, with its social-constructs, micro-aggressions, identity politics and safe spaces, and the modern right, with its rhetoric of intolerance, ignorance and hate. For Švankmajer's, both systems are inherently flawed. Too much order leads to oppression, censorship and abuse; no order at all leads to chaos. As such, the argument of the film seems to be this: that to find true freedom one must accept a compromised middle-ground between the two extremes of anarchy and totalitarianism. It's a bold and provocative supposition, but one that is intelligently conveyed.

The Tree, the Mayor and the Mediatheque [Éric Rohmer, 1993]:

Watched: Jun 19, 2018

Conversational to the point of didacticism, Rohmer's extended rumination on the political divides of a small village and its questions of commerce and redevelopment in the face of a changing cultural identity is exhausting, but also quietly adventurous. While much of the film is presented in the characteristic manner that one associates with Rohmer's work - familiar as it may be from earlier or even subsequent films, such as The Aviator's Wife (1981), Pauline at the Beach (1983) and A Tale of Springtime (1990) - there are nonetheless several bold deviations from the typical "Rohmerian" aesthetic. These deviations include 1. moments of actual documentary - comparable to some extent to similar sequences found in the filmmaker's earlier and no less brilliant Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle (1987) - 2. a sub-plot that feels more befitting of a Hollywood romantic comedy, and 3. a later sequence that can only be described as a kind of folk-musical. The last of these deviations was the most surprising, not least because it broke from Rohmer's typically relaxed sense of naturalism; aligning the work instead to the stylised historical opera of something like Moses und Aaron (1973) by Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet. Arriving at the end of what is otherwise a kind of dry cinematic discourse on the themes aforementioned, this coda felt entirely remarkable; connecting the film, in some small way, to the legacy of one of Rohmer's most bold and unconventional earlier efforts, the masterful Perceval le Gallois (1978).

The Whispering Star [Sion Sono, 2015]:

Watched: Jun 19, 2018

If we were to attempt to simplify the experience of the film, then The Whispering Star is essentially The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) remade by Andrei Tarkovsky. Again, it's a simplification. However, like The Man Who Fell to Earth, The Whispering Star involves a non-human character who travels to our planet to fulfil a specific task - in this instance, delivering packages to the scattered pockets of civilisation - and invariably becomes a kind of witness to the folly of mankind. Aesthetically, it's more modern - if not post-modern - than any of Tarkovsky's films, particularly in its transformative final scenes, but nonetheless, the film shares an affinity for Tarkovsky's contemplative tracking shots, monochromatic  imagery, ruined locations that suggest the collapse of civilisation, and an interest in the elements; the rain, wind, sand and fog. Apparently filmed in and around the district of Ōkuma - the site of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster - the authenticity of the film's desolate locations and its depiction of humanity clinging to the last semblances of contemporary existence while poverty and desperation take hold, is quite extraordinary. Like Jia Zhangke's brilliant Still Life (2006), a film where the writer and director set a fictional relationship against a real backdrop of the village of Fengjie - at the time being destroyed by the building of the Three Gorges Dam - the placement of the science-fiction story into this particular setting suggests a clever blurring of the line between fiction and documentary. It also gives an added weight to the central character's observations on human experience, perseverance and survival.

Amour Fou [Jessica Hausner, 2014]:

Watched: Jun 21, 2018

Hausner's control of the formalist elements of the film are impeccable. In terms of the aesthetics - the art direction, costume design, cinematography, etc. - Amour Fou is a complete work. However, there is much more to the film than just stylisation. In telling the story of the relationship between the writer Heinrich von Kleist and his lover Henriette Vogel - a courtship that resulted in the pair committing to a murder-suicide pact in the winter of 1811 - Hausner views the events through a modern lens; inviting an element of irony (even cynicism) into this retelling of history in order to challenge the audience's perceptions of Kleist, German Romanticism and the myth of the male genius. In keeping with this ideological approach, the film's depiction of Kleist is not that of the romantic dreamer, the sensitive soul or even the vulnerable adult beset by crippling neuroses, but a cold, aloof, ineffectual figure; a man-child who doesn't so much die as an attempt to express some fatalistic sense of devotion, but instead, selfishly kills Vogel and then himself out of a state of manic depression. In presenting the story in such a way, Hausner creates an intentional indictment of Kleist and a sardonic dismissal of romanticism in general.