Possession (Andrzej Zulawski, 1981)

 

One might feel that Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession hardly needed its explicit monster movie reveals: even without them, the film is about as strangified and crazed as narrative cinema ever gets. As with few others, it’s virtually impossible at any point to guess what’s coming next: even the smallest aspects of performance are distorted and heightened, indeed conveying a sense of widespread possession that can’t be placed in a tidy narrative box. Not that Zulawski tries to do that of course: his film provides no point of comfort, starting by stripping away the security of marriage, ultimately suggesting one can’t take refuge even in one’s basic sense of will and self. The film is set in West Berlin, with numerous shots of the Wall in all its brutal functionality; what we see of the city though is almost unremittingly drab, and weirdly unpopulated, undermining any sense of ideological superiority. Within this space, Mark (Sam Neill) returns from some mysterious, apparently espionage-related mission to learn that his wife Anna (Isabelle Adjani) wants to split up; in due course he learns she had a lover, Heinrich (Heinz Bennent) who has himself been abandoned for some unknown other, and also meets his son’s teacher, who looks almost exactly like Anna. It’s futile to pick out individual scenes of note, but the initial meeting between Mark and Heinrich, encompassing elements of seduction and communion and of startling, pitiless violence, sums up as well as any how the film seems to teeter on a behavioral precipice. Zulawski discharges his genre obligations adeptly enough, delivering shocks and blood and startling visuals, but as noted, they appear here as extensions of an already fraught social intercourse (one in which for example Anna and Mark both engage in self-mutilation; another character calmly commits suicide; an innocent bystander near the end can be as gently coaxed into taking and firing a gun). It’s a draining viewing experience, leaving you feeling destabilized by its furiously strong-willed maker.

Avanti! (Billy Wilder, 1972)

 

Even major film buffs might struggle to identify a link between, among others, Dario Argento, Paul Morrissey, Billy Wilder, Marco Bellocchio and Elio Petri, but one exists in the form of cinematographer Luigi Kuveiller, whose work on Wilder’s Avanti! came in between assignments for those latter two. No doubt Avanti! isn’t the maestro’s most distinctive work, any more than it’s anyone else’s, but he aptly maintains the requisite sun-baked palate, while navigating such novel framing challenges as a naked Jack Lemmon emerging from the sea or the bathtub. That might not sound like a recommendation, but it’s a film of sustained small pleasures, one in which Wilder elevates even the most potentially mundane scene with a well-delivered quip or bit of business (many of them handled by Clive Revill, in career-best form as a pragmatically unflusterable Italian hotel manager). Absent that, the overall trajectory isn’t too surprising: short-fused businessman Wendell (Lemmon, who else, mannerisms held mostly in check) comes to Italy at short notice to recover his father’s body, learning that during his annual health breaks the old man was carrying out a ten-year affair with a British woman whose daughter Pamela (a very winning Juliet Mills) is there for the same reason, the two having died in a car accident together; Wendell and Pamela initially clash, but by the end, well… The film’s sense of cyclicality and inevitability makes it well-suited for comfort viewing-type revisiting (albeit maybe not annually), despite many programmatic aspects, and dated trappings such as endless remarks about Pamela’s barely discernible weight problem (especially given a now-laughable comment about how Americans are all so thin), although a diplomat’s brief summary of the state of the Middle East still holds up sadly well. In terms of Wilder’s late work, the film is a close companion to Fedora, an artifice even more dislodged from time, in which pleasure is even more intimately informed by loss.

Closed Circuit (Giuliano Montaldo, 1978)

 

The opening section of Giuiliano Montaldo’s Closed Circuit is a real nostalgic delight, immersing us in the old-time movie-theater experience of people waiting for the doors to open, lining up for their stubby tickets and the like; the place teems with posters for Italian B-movies starring the likes of Mimsy Farmer and Ray Lovelock (Torn Curtain was the only higher-end item I spotted), and the film takes in the varied clientele including the guy who only comes in to hang around the washroom, and the frequent patron who comes in late and sits right in front of someone else who thus has to move (Aurore Clement is the best known cast member, but her role amounts to very little). The fatal shot during the film’s climactic gunfight coincides with a real-world shot that kills that late-arriving patron; the police are immediately on hand, preventing everyone from leaving, eventually carrying out a reenactment with a ticket taker in the victim’s place, only to have him suffer the same fate: they locate a bullet hole in the screen, but in a spot where no shooter could possibly have been standing. The notion of an audience that perpetually watches the same film and never gets to see the end has Bunuelian possibilities, and the film sometimes comes close to that (without the unmatchable elegance), although the ultimate explanation marks it as a quasi-precursor of something like The Ring, or perhaps of Kyoshi Kurosawa. Whatever one may think of the denouement (and I’m not sure myself, which at least marks it as providing something to mull over, it makes terrific use of the real-life film within the film (A Sky Full of Stars for a Roof, the lead actor of which, Giuliano Gemma, is possibly more memorable as showcased in Closed Circuit than in any of his actual starring movies).

Blow-Up (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966)

 

On a present-day viewing, Antonioni’s still-ravishing Blow-Up may seem to be primarily about come-uppance and control: decades before the “Me Too” wave of consequences, it depicts the clipping of the wings of an arrogantly self-righteous, almost professionally obnoxious male (the successful photographer Thomas, played by David Hemmings). We don’t know of course how far that extends – maybe a few minutes after the movie ends he shakes it off and snaps back into place – but Antonioni’s superb orchestration of the famous climactic mimed tennis game suggests a permanent shift in Thomas’ relationship to the world, leading to his final erasure from the cinematic image, rapidly followed by the final credits over the ground where he no longer stands. Building up to that, the film has a greater vein of fragility and futility than one may remember; the sense of conspiracy and unseen orchestration (evidenced for example in how his place is ransacked during a very brief absence) may bring to mind Jacques Rivette (as does Thomas’ labyrinth-like live-work space, one of the most endlessly fascinating interior locations in cinema, and one that likewise evidences an environment almost entirely shaped by his whims and desires). The film’s more then-modish aspects - the eye-filling fashions, the appearance by the Yardbirds, the glimpses of “swinging London” – render it spellbinding as cultural history, while also now seeming suffused in transience and alienation, perhaps most succinctly rendered in the moment when Thomas fights a previously deadened-seeming audience for a piece of the smashed-up guitar that Jeff Beck tosses into the crowd, but then finds on triumphantly emerging into the street that he has no use for it, and throws it away. Still, the film teems with the vibrant possibility of creation and connection in the here and now, even as that’s offset with an awareness of how little it may all mean later (the fact of Hemmings being only third-billed despite having by far the biggest role now seems like its own kind of taunt).

Wild Target (Pierre Salvadori, 1993)

 

Pierre Salvadori’s Wild Target is a low-profile entry in cinema’s bizarre surfeit of comedies focusing on the hitman trade, etching strictly minor variations on the done-to-death concepts. In concept, its main character Victor (Jean Rochefort) is a deeply sad character, who we understand was basically forced into the family business by dominatingly cold-hearted parents (his mother's in a care home but still knocking off the odd person); he’s now in his fifties and still unsure about his sexuality (the movie has a distinctly homophobic vein), his obsessions and tics rendering him all but incapable of spontaneous enjoyment. On impulse, he decides not to kill Antoine (Guillaume Depardieu), a delivery man who inadvertently witnesses one of his kills, taking him on an as an apprentice instead (the movie omits the scene in which the men reach this unlikely pact, as it would probably be impossible to make it even vaguely persuasive), and then also can’t bring himself to finish off his next target Renee (Marie Trintignant), who’s flagrantly placed herself on a gangster’s wrong side by selling him a forged painting on which the paint wasn’t even dry, the three of them becoming the targets of the gangster’s henchmen and his replacement hired killers. There’s a lot of potential fun to be had in persistent amorality, but that’s not realized here: much of what’s presumably intended as deadpan seems merely low-energy, and one often wonders whether the actors are even aware of each other. That’s a particular shame given the sad resonances attaching to both Depardieu (seen here just a couple of years before a fateful motorcycle accident that contributed to his death at 37) and Trintignant (murdered some ten years later by her boyfriend); in a better film so preoccupied with death, their presence might have been heart-rending, rather than shrug-inducing.

Hotel (Mike Figgis, 2001)

If nothing else, Mike Figgis’ Hotel chomps with relish on creative possibilities: it has the resources to bring in the likes of John Malkovich and Burt Reynolds for a day or two’s work, thereby swimming in six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon oddities; it plays with split or four-quadrant screens (in the latter respect building on Figgis’ immediately preceding, more tonally conventional movie, Time Code), sometimes to observe the same action from different perspectives, at other times to counterpoint the main action with art-house erotic or otherwise alluring distractions; it crams in references from both high culture (preeminently The Duchess of Malfi) and.low (celebrity gossip TV). The film has a foot in Grand Hotel-type territory, drawing on the location as a site of criss-crossing lives and possibilities, but primarily focuses on movie-making itself, on a Venice-set production of Malfi, temporarily derailed when its near-feral director (Rhys Ifans) is shot and sent into a kind of coma, eventually replaced by its producer (David Schwimmer). The movie at various times evokes vampirism and cannibalism and lycanthropy, all of them potential metaphors for the less convivial aspects of movie-making; at other times it evokes cinema’s dance-like aspects (the apparent ultimate power behind the film, played by Reynolds, is identified in the credits as “Flamenco Manager”) or jazzier free-form connotations (bolstered by Figgis’s light, pulsating score); the final scene identifies itself as a “trick,” but it’s one underlaid with menace and foreboding. For all its attributes, the film often feels overly dour and withholding and pleasure-starved (it cites the Dogme mentality, a big thing at the time), no doubt taking some impish satisfaction in being among the least conventionally ravishing productions ever set in Venice. Hotel may have more or less marked the end of Figgis’ commercial viability – since then his filmography is mostly a stream of under-seen shorts and obscurities and one-offs – but that only adds to its defiantly reckless allure.

Alexandria...Why? (Youssef Chahine, 1979)

 

An early scene in Youssef Chahine’s Alexandria…Why? might sum up its likeable haphazardness: a group of friends goes to the movies in 1942 to see Ziegfeld Follies, a movie which wasn’t made until 1946, and which is represented here in part by scenes from a different movie, and in clips lifted from a 1970’s That’s Entertainment compilation, even leaving in a snatch of Gene Kelly’s voice-over narration about Eleanor Powell. It’s an early tip-off that the movie is best taken as a tumble of unreliable memories, one in which basic narrative details are frequently unclear; the extreme over-reliance on stock footage is objectively a weakness, but one which embodies the often uncomprehending distance between people and the events that shape their lives. The main focus is on teenage Yehia, fixated against the odds on becoming an actor (his specific obsession with studying at the Pasadena Playhouse would seem weirdly arbitrary, absent the knowledge that Chahine himself studied there and is channeling his own life experience); the quest made all the more quixotic by Mohsen Mohieddin’s often wild overacting in the role; other plotlines include a wealthy uncle who abducts a drunken British soldier and then falls for him, a Jewish family that leaves for Palestine, and various bits of espionage and resistance. The storytelling is often extremely choppy, major demarcation points coming and going, characters and concerns popping in and out, ultimately all ending in rushed celebratory fashion as the family and its contacts works every angle to help Yehia fulfil his dream, excess sentiment held at bay by an utterly goofy final shot. In terms of the evolution of Chahine’s work, the film holds up less well than its immediate predecessor Return of the Prodigal Son, which exhibits many comparable weaknesses/oddities while attaining greater overall resonance, the memory of its astounding, bitter blood-spattered finale causing Alexandria…Why? to feel almost like doodling by comparison.

Bleak Moments (Mike Leigh, 1971)

 

Almost too aptly titled, Mike Leigh’s debut film Bleak Moments revolves around Sylvia, a thirty-something secretary in a small accounting firm who lives with her developmentally-challenged sister Hilda, being very slowly and ineffectually wooed by Peter, a teacher. Anne Raitt is fascinating as Sylvia, sometimes strikingly severe looking, as if about to step into a Gothic melodrama, probably overly reliant on cigarettes and sherry, but with ample hints of a playful inner life, a faint smile drifting across her face as she softly tweaks the conversation with comments that don’t quite find an audience (such as introducing herself as the President of Venezuela, or asking a visitor if he wants some nuts before admitting she doesn’t have any). The lives on display are all highly constrained: by their drab and cramped living and working spaces; by inescapable circumstances (Sylvia’s colleague and friend Pat joylessly cares for her bed-ridden mother); by hang-ups and anxieties (Peter seems to find every word a struggle, regurgitating things he read in books without conveying any deep engagement with them); by sexual naivete and inadequacy (there’s no sex in the film, but that’s the point). It frequently shudders with awkward silences: a date night between Peter and Sylvia, depicted in excruciating detail, moves from the most atmospherically challenged Chinese restaurant imaginable to a strangulated and somewhat poignant aftermath in Sylvia’s living room. But Leigh also allows glimpses of small beauty and possible transcendence: Sylvia and Hilda are both captivated by the tentative but sincere singing and guitar-playing of a man who rents their garage, and Pat is drawn to a faith-healing group, becoming convinced that Hilda might find a cure there. Sylvia vehemently opposes this fancifulness (it’s the most emotion she displays about anything) but the ending suggests she may be tacitly allowing Pat to take a shot, a concession more likely however to extinguish one of the film’s few shards of hope than to fulfil it.

Benedetta (Paul Verhoeven, 2021)

 

It’s not hard to see why Paul Verhoeven’s Benedetta was viewed in some quarters as blasphemous or insensitive or offensive; the director’s lusty approach to religious-themed material all but invites those judgments. But by the same token, its vividness and brashness, its embrace of the shocking and scandalous, gives it the feeling of playing for high stakes: in depicting a devout believer who nevertheless embraces transgression (particularly in matters of sexual pleasure), then it posits faith as something full and complex and, for all its deprivations, scintillating (in this respect at least, Bunuel sometimes comes to mind in watching the film). Set in the 17^th century, the film starts with Benedetta’s childhood admission to the convent: as a young adult, evidence of her potential saintliness accumulates, and she’s eventually named Mother Superior; one of the film’s delicious ambiguities is that while the Mother she displaces (Charlotte Rampling) is more correct in her behaviour and her devotion to the institution’s well-being, Benedetta (despite her highly reciprocated sexual desire for a novice nun) is the truer believer and more likely instrument of God’s will. The film is as propulsive and gripping as any of Verhoeven’s high-voltage Hollywood works, with action scenes of comparable impact (several of them built around visions of a very dynamic Jesus); the lead actress Virginie Efira is extraordinarily and fully present, not least in the very frank love-making scenes. The film’s intense physicality manifests itself in multiple ways: the deep-rooted fascination of stigmata (amplified here by unanswered questions about whether Benedetta’s bleeding wounds are self-inflicted, and even if they are, does that inherently reduce their God-given significance), a focus on bodily orifices and excretions, on the details of sexual pleasure, on the can’t-look-away horrors of the plague that threatens the surrounding country, all contributing to a startling overall viewing experience.

Aspen (Frederick Wiseman, 1991)

 

Frederick Wiseman’s 1991 Aspen differs from comparable studies like the Boston-set City Hall and Monrovia, Indiana in spending little time on the community apparatus: there’s nothing here of council meetings or ski resort management discussions, and the de rigueur aspects of the project (ski slopes, ski lifts, skiers) are dispensed with fairly cursorily. Instead, Wiseman’s emphasis is on spiritual questioning and searching, taking us into several extended discussions and lectures on such topics on reconciling oneself to divorce from a religious perspective, or on whether capitalism can be reconciled with religious teachings on justice (inevitably, the contributions to these discussions occasionally carry a note of anxious self-interest). Some of what we’re shown is unseemly or borderline absurd, such as a rather ridiculously mentored art class in an over-the-top house, or a plastic surgery presentation seeming to disproportionately focus on undesirable “ethnic” features; others, like a lively discussion of a Flaubert short story, are sincere and committed, if disproportionately populated by seemingly well-to-do retirees with ample time on their hands. In contrast, a fortieth wedding anniversary party held in an apparently much more low-budget and functional location reverberates with genuine human warmth and spontaneity, whereas a group of immigrants worries even about the availability of basic housing (and, again, about the relative advantages of having paler skin). The film’s final sequence, an eloquently conceived and delivered sermon about the building of religious community, provides a note of hope that these disparate outlooks and circumstances might somehow find common purpose (an optimism unfortunately not much borne out by subsequent decades). In a tiny concession to Aspen celebrity-spotting, the film includes a brief shot of CBS newsman Ed Bradley amid others in a local gym, and (I think) British newsman Jon Snow among those playing a cozy (and somewhat ribald) game of charades.

Baba Yaga (Corrado Farina, 1973)

 

Corrado Farina’s two best-known directorial works, They Have Changed their Face and Baba Yaga, both feature supernatural themes in a modern-day setting (vampires and witches respectively): a quirkier similarity is that they both contain pseudo-intellectual citations of Jean-Luc Godard and feature odd parodies of product commercials (for LSD and detergent respectively). The former is the more narratively robust work, its slow build-up of Nosferatu mythology taking a sudden swerve into sharp corporate satire, but Baba Yaga is, if nothing else, the more stimulating visual experience. The film’s most direct reference is Antonioni’s Blow-Up: another photographer (in this case a woman, Valentina, played by Isabelle de Funes) who hosts a succession of models in her home studio: the studio is an eye-candy marvel, from the zebra skin on the wall above the bed to the transparent telephone to the library-worthy stock of art books. Walking alone one night, Valentina encounters a strange older woman (Carroll Baker, with very few lines, which is probably just as well) who rapidly takes a close, sensuously-tinged interest in her, including giving the gift of a creepily-staring doll which may have the power to come to life and cause mayhem; it’s all somewhat hampered by brevity though, Valentina and her boyfriend extricating themselves in 80 minutes more easily than seemed likely, and without any very meaningful explanation or aftertaste. Still, it’s an arresting exercise in competing female willpowers, contrasting de Funes’ open, searching appearance against Baker’s Gothic witchiness, Valentina early on asserting her sexual self-determination, and thereafter fighting to retain the power of the look against a reality perpetually disrupted by fantastic visions (paralleled by how the film itself is regularly disrupted by series of still photographs or comic book frames, or in one instance by a sudden digression into gangster action, which turns out to be the aforementioned commercial shoot).

The Palace (Roman Polanski, 2023)

 

Roman Polanski’s The Palace is at once anarchic and exhausted, familiar-seeming while aggressively withholding much fulfilment, let alone closure: its relentless ugliness and complete absence of eroticism jarringly contrasts with What?, perhaps its closest cousin in Polanski’s oeuvre, but one in which its lead actress Sydne Rome was almost constantly completely or partially nude (as if to underline the point, Rome briefly shows up in The Palace too, far less strikingly). The film partially draws its ruined mood from being set on New Year’s Eve in 1999, with some characters believing the Y2K bug will strike and do its worst, others oblivious to it; the film reminds us that it was also the day of Boris Yeltsin’s resignation, providing clips of an impossibly benign-seeming Putin on his first day of succession. The film seems to suggest that the end of the world, or at least this corner of it, might be a proportionate response to humanity’s dreggy state: virtually every wealthy female face (and at least one male one) made grotesque by plastic surgery; one off-putting display of entitlement and obliviousness following another; rampant financial corruption; a degraded focus on petty whims and indulgences. But of course the end of the world fails to arrive, and the same goes for narrative closure: the film’s most intriguing structural element is its open-endedness, perhaps suggesting that one layer of idiocy will always be replaced by another, perhaps implicitly chiding the audience for even hoping to extract superficial clarity from such underlying wretchedness. Still, the point would probably have been better made by more sprightly writing and handling, for example with less focus on human and animal excrement, and with more energetic casting (for instance, the no-longer-funny John Cleese achieves little as an ancient Texan billionaire, although his performance gets more enjoyable once his character dies and starts getting lugged around in the manner of Weekend at Bernie’s).

Monrovia, Indiana (Frederick Wiseman, 2018)

 

Donald Trump is never mentioned in Frederick Wiseman’s Monrovia, Indiana – there’s barely any sign of politics at all – but one's sense of the film surely shifts with the knowledge that it’s located in a county where Trump won some 76% of the vote in both 2016 and 2024. The town appears to be no duller or uglier than the vast majority of small towns, and hence an embodiment of a certain kind of good place to live: the town council diligently works to balance growth and sustainability, spending extensive time on such matters as the placement of a new bench or the availability of fire hydrants; the grocery and liquor stores are well-stocked in the modern consumerist manner. And yet there are ample signs of an insularity that could easily become malleable. The community is startlingly homogenous (at least by modern urban standards), with only the slightest sprinkling of non-white faces; the town’s gun store may have a wider range of inventory than its restaurants have menu choices. The film observes a Masonic event at which a member receives a fifty-year pin, rendered inadvertently funny since no one seems capable of getting through the ornately prescribed wording and ceremony without stumbling; later, a preacher prompts a funeral gathering to sing Amazing Grace, which falls flat as he’s seemingly the only one who knows the words, at least to the second verse. These hollowly executed rituals don’t suggest much active questioning of parameters (in addition to the many who seem to have lived in or around the town forever, there are references to others who moved away and are now returning): the highest cultural activity on display is a school band rendition of the theme from The Simpsons - and yet those council meetings are intelligent and well-informed; the preacher’s sermon is articulate and even moving; whatever we might think of all that Trump support, the film doesn't suggest it would be based entirely in callousness or ignorance. As always, while Wiseman doesn't aspire to tell an entire story, the one he tells is satisfyingly complex and implication-heavy.

Deception (Arnaud Desplechin, 2021)

 

At least for most English-language viewers (those more familiar with the Hollywood convention of, say, a Napoleon filmed in English than with Fassbinder’s German-language Western) it may not be easy to orient oneself within Arnaud Desplechin’s adaptation of Philip Roth’s Deception: the film is set in London, depicting the relationship between a Jewish-American author called Philip Roth and a British woman, both played by French actors (Denis Podalydes and Lea Seydoux) in a film that feels entirely French despite the odd scene in the pub and suchlike. The effect could be somewhat distancing, if not for the vivacity of the performers, and for the many striking points of specificity and immediacy: a recurring preoccupation with Judaism and Israel, and also with Czechoslovakia, embodied both by the author’s cherished memories of past travels and by ongoing relationships in the present. The film’s “reveal” of sorts, not an unfamiliar one in an age of meta-reality concepts, is that Seydoux’s unnamed character may be imagined (at least that’s what the author tells his wife when she reads his notebook and reacts with outrage); the beauty of sorts is in how little it matters whether or not that’s true, how the purely imagined may be more truthful and piercing than the mundanely “fact-based.” For instance, early on in the film, the woman with her eyes closed is able to describe the studio in which they meet and have sex in improbably precise detail, which paradoxically bolsters the sense that it may be imagined; the final scene introduces further distance and displacement, intermingled with tenderness and delight. The film overall isn’t as transporting as Desplechin’s grander canvases, its energy level necessarily lower (notwithstanding various moments when Podalydes seems to be channelling the director’s signature actor, Mathieu Amalric) but it’s enjoyably elegant and fluid, engaging most intelligently with the challenges of adapting Roth.

The Vampire Happening (Freddie Francis, 1971)

 

At the start of The Vampire Happening, the Hollywood star “Betty Williams” flies to Transylvania, surrounded by passengers who are being titillated and shocked (in those pre personalized viewing days) by a screening of one of her own raunchy movies; she’s returning to reclaim her ancestral title of Baroness, notwithstanding that a previous holder of the title continues on in an undead state, the two soon criss-crossing paths as the area’s vampire population steadily grows. Blood isn’t the bodily fluid that most defines the movie’s tone though: it has sex on the brain to a rather endearing degree, deploying whatever might cross its path (desserts, tree branches, stick shifts) in the most suggestive way available, and taking particular pleasure in depicting the corruption of an adjacent Catholic seminary. The film has a few modern trappings (it culminates in a party where Count Dracula arrives in a helicopter, which one would like to take as a small tribute to Demy’s Donkey Skin, but presumably isn’t) but feels largely displaced, set in no plausible time or place; it often has the sense of setting out mainly to amuse itself. That’s bolstered by the bland yet tragic lead actress Pia Degermark, the last time she would star in a film, gamely taking on not one but two roles defined primarily by undressing and ever-changing wigs, but not in truth making a very lasting impression (she’s marginally more striking as the dead woman than the live one). And then, for further curio value, the film’s director is Freddie Francis, who according to IMDB has exactly the same amount of cinematographer and director credits (37 of each), the high-end double-Oscar sheen of the former barely seeming connected to the lurid genre-trolling of the latter. The Vampire Happening may not be his directorial highpoint, but it’s well-sustained on its own low-end, sheen-deficient terms.