Caligula: the Ultimate Cut (Tinto Brass, 2023)

 

Even in its restored “ultimate cut” version, Tinto Brass’s Caligula is mostly a joyless one-note slog, its almost three-hour length often feeling static and repetitive. The film’s signature move sets its main actors against multi-layered backdrops of eye-filling activity: people juggling, fire-eating, (very often) copulating or masturbating, or just hanging around with sex organs exposed, none of this yielding much sense though of circus-like decadence, let alone of historical engagement or exactitude. Malcolm McDowell easily embodies the ruler’s perverse, wayward self-righteousness, but his performance is pitched throughout at the same impervious level, allowing little sense of the unraveling that causes his downfall. The narrative starts with him in bed with his sister (Teresa Ann Savoy), proceeds through his murder of the ailing emperor Tiberius (Peter O’Toole, wearily ranting and made up to look ravaged) and spends much time on his selection of and apparent increasing co-dependency on a wife (Helen Mirren, seeming to be exploring a parallel universe in which her career became mired in Euro-trash). One perks up a bit on a few occasions when the movie shakes things up, such as in depicting Caligula’s perverse fixation on the wedding of one of his soldiers, which he disrupts in depraved fashion, or in the sequence of his would-be invasion of Britain, consisting of traveling a few miles from Rome and sending hoards of naked men into the water to reap papyrus, which he then brings back as “proof” of his triumph. Time and again, the movie pushes its people into strange poses and gestures and interactions, the sum of which might have cast a mysterious displaced spell if it didn’t all seem so arbitrary: sometimes one wonders if it would have been happier dispensing with any pretense of narrative, organizing itself instead as a series of ornate fragments. At other times, studying the dutifully but mostly unexcitingly staged creations, I started thinking about Peter Greenaway might have done with all this (and without even cutting back on the nudity…)

Death Becomes Her (Robert Zemeckis, 1992)

 

Seen now, Robert Zemeckis’ Death Becomes Her might almost be a prequel to Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, the latter film taking Zemeckis’s themes of overpromising and grotesquely misdelivering remedies to aging, and of reluctantly co-dependent women, and ramping them up for an even more sensation-seeking audience. The comparison especially comes to mind given the blandly rarified Hollywood setting of both films, and the reliance on female protagonists with no apparent inner life or aspirations other than youth itself; Fargeat at least provides the sense of a concept pushed to the very edge, making Zemeckis’ film feel even blander and complacently hysterial than it already did. The plot, such as it is, introduces a lifelong rivalry between two women (Meryl Streep’s Madeline and Goldie Hawn’s Helen), unaccountably coming to a head over plastic surgeon David (Bruce Willis, going through the motions as if under his own kind of life-depleting spell) who breaks an engagement with one to marry the other; eventually they both separately find their way to the mysterious Lisle von Rhuman (Isabella Rossellini, doing her own barely-clad thing), whose anti-aging remedies come with awful and unavoidable side effects. The film’s squandered concepts and assets (in addition to its one-note lead actors) include the notion that all of Hollywood’s legendary premature victims (Monroe, Dean etc.) are still alive and youthful-seeming, executed with all the panache of a half-hearted flick through a Madame Tussaud’s brochure; the special effects are inevitably somewhat dated, which wouldn’t matter as much if they were used to more enjoyable ends. Further low points include the cringe-inducing depiction of Helen in her overweight cat lady phase …well you get the point. An early musical number, performed by Madeline in an ill-fated Broadway show, is one of the more enjoyable sequences, but it’s apparently intended to be so bad that half the audience walks out, so even that doesn’t work as intended.

Cries and Whispers (Ingmar Bergman, 1972)

 

Cries and Whispers ultimately stands among Ingmar Bergman’s most unsettling, pitiless films, such that a character’s closing memory of a day of happiness with those she loved most seems drenched in cruel self-delusion, a scavenging of scraps from a largely desolate life. The film is built around three sisters: the unmarried, dying Agnes (Harriet Andersson, whose screams of pain penetrate to the bone), cared for in her final days by Karin (Ingrid Thulin) and Maria (Liv Ullmann), and by a maid, Anna (Kari Sylwan), the person on whom Agnes is most functionally dependent, sometimes cradling the dying woman against her naked breast. The scheme includes glimpses of the past, and scenes of Karin and Maria’s married lives, both involving incidents of desperate self-harm: Karin’s husband is shown to be particularly insufferable in his self-righteous formality, embodying a hypocritical society mired in rigid expectations and judgments (a scene where Karin’s maid helps her undress illustrates clothing as a medium of this layered oppressiveness). The stunning blood-red décor that dominates the film’s first section seems to express all that’s repressed and unsaid, while also inviting the violence and breakdown to which the film often feels on the verge of succumbing. But the film is as bleak in its small cruelties: Karin and Maria seem for a while to repair their long-fractured relationship, talking deep into the night, expecting to move forward on a better basis, but in the last exchange between them we see old micro-aggressions creeping back, albeit now in somewhat different form. In this regard, the film’s close-ups of clock hands heavily moving, and an early scene in which Agnes gets up from her sickbed to adjust the time, apparently just to produce a single chime, speak to a milieu divorced from its most basic capacities for measurement and control, for evaluation and action.

Casino Royale (John Huston, Ken Hughes, Val Guest, Robert Parrish, Joseph McGrath, 1967)

 

The James Bond “spoof” Casino Royale, with its five credited directors, is frequently almost aggressively shoddy, with dashed-off special effects, a lurching plot, and little or no attempt to impose tonal consistency, which just sometimes, if you manage to orient your head the right (or should that be the wrong) way can seem like a loose-leaf radicalism. With multiple characters identified at various times as James Bond, the film suggests that the label and the myth already outpace the reality, and that as such the right of entry to the role of Bond might transcend calculations of age or gender or basic competence (in this respect the real world might still only partially be catching up, with the vague buzz over whether the character might next time be incarnated by something other than a white man). In tune with that philosophy, the film often feels almost randomly assembled: for example Peter Sellers is seen in the opening moments before disappearing for the best part of an hour, then later gets dispatched so offhandedly that one could miss it (lack of actorly cooperation apparently contributed to the choppiness, but maybe it’s all for the best); Woody Allen has a couple of disconnected scenes early on before popping up to dominate the end stretch; it’s a film where one scene might feature Oscar winners like John Huston and William Holden, and another might be given over to TV-level shtick delivered by the likes of Ronnie Corbett. The climactic showdown has the Americans arriving in the form of Cowboys and Indians, and the French as led by Jean-Paul Belmondo, and George Raft in a tuxedo delivering a single line, and two clapping seals, and Allen hiccupping up blue clouds, and it’s a mess that’s frankly very little fun to watch, but one truly wonders if anyone ever seriously imagined that it would be, or (more probingly) whether in truth watching Bond films has ever been. Burt Bacharach’s indelible score does its best to impose a buzzy sense of unity, but of course it could never be enough.

The Protagonists (Luca Guadagnino, 1999)

 

Luca Guadagnino’s 1999 feature debut The Protagonists is in part a sober investigation into and commemoration of a shocking crime that took place some four and a half years before the making of the movie, in which two privileged British youths killed Mohamed El-Sayed, an immigrant they’d never previously met, leaving few clues until one of them confessed a month or so later: the film includes interviews with some of the investigating police officers, a medical expert, and El-Sayed’s widow, much detail on the actions leading up to the crime and several reenactments of the thing itself, all of which goes to construct an appropriate sense of informed horror. But at the same time, it frequently has the flavour of a caper movie, showing the group of young filmmakers flying from Italy to Britain, to work with Tilda Swinton (who shows up with her two real-life kids) as the figurehead, at times dramatizing events in a playful or even titillating manner. And further, the final stretch verges on the (overused as the term may be) Lynchian, setting the duo’s search for a suitable victim (their original idea was to find and kill a pimp) in an erotically abstracted environment rather than the low-end dive of reality, introducing a homoerotic communal shower scene, and imagining the earlier meeting of El-Sayed and his wife as an urbane, almost Bond-movie-type spectacle. Overall, The Protagonists feels fresh and engaged and alive, immersed in the streets of London, in its people and its ideas, in invention and connection and music, such that one intermittently wonders whether the film is becoming untethered from its core purpose. But at the same time, it speaks by its very existence to its immersion in the loss of El-Sayed, and at the end one feels his life has been elevated, explored and repositioned in the manner normally applied only to the most revered of the departed.

Bird (Andrea Arnold, 2024)

 

By conventional measures, the father in Andrea Arnold’s quietly extraordinary Bird, Barry Keoghan’s Bug, isn’t much of a parent (his best idea for making money is to cultivate psychedelic toad venom), but his affection and engagement are real, and he’s at times hilariously pragmatic and non-judgmental; his 12-year-old daughter Bailey, with whom he lives in a somewhat dilapidated building, is deprived or neglected in some ways (the movie doesn’t mention school at all) but has preternaturally strong instincts, and an acute connection to the natural world. As the movie continues, this becomes the foundation for a near-catalogue of possible modes of growth and transcendence, encompassing everything from a local vigilante gang that seeks to make the world better by beating up one unworthy person at a time, to deeper appreciation for music (useful in getting the toad to do its stuff) and family, to magic realism elements ranging from wild birds doing Bailey’s bidding to the title character, a stranger who latches on to her and whose presence, backstory and even basic nature defy any clear explanation. And it’s an explicitly and complexly female vision, with the androgynously-named Bailey early on cutting her hair and thereby seeming more superficially masculine, but from there experiencing her first period, experimenting with make-up, embracing her role as older sister to the siblings that live with their mother, and even agreeing to attend a wedding in a hideous catsuit she’d earlier spurned, and yet despite all these markers of growing womanhood becoming someone more evidently self-defined and unreadable. The choice to run the end credits alphabetically by first name, making no distinction between large and small contributions, accompanied by various snippets of goofing around, ends the film on a note of celebratory inclusivity, and it is indeed a thrillingly uplifting viewing experience, even as one remains aware of the underlying financial and social precariousness.

I'll Be Alone After Midnight (Jacques de Baroncelli, 1931)

 

Jacques de Baroncelli’s I’ll Be Alone After Midnight gets off to a cracking start, with a montage of aggrieved individuals attacking their adulterous spouses, including a woman throwing sulphuric acid in her husband’s face, and a defence lawyer speaking up for crimes of passion; it then focuses on Monique, a moneyed woman afflicted with perhaps the all-time cheating husband, deciding after he storms out to get her own back by spending the night with a man. Her friend and neighbour Michel is more than willing to fill the role, but she seeks something more transient, and ends up buying up a balloon vendor’s entire stock, releasing them with her card and the titular message attached to each, entrusting her immediate sexual fate to the wind. Monique and Michel are the only characters identified by name, the others defined (apparently as much to them as to us) by their function – a soldier, a clerk, a thief and so on. Beneath the farcical surface, there’s something distinctly sad about the idea of so many men twisting their lives into a knot for the sake of what from today’s perspective seems like at best a mechanical and soulless quickie, counterpointed by the somewhat pitiful Michel, early on seen inscribing photographs of Marie with messages he wishes he’d received from her, and then displaying them around his living room: when she succumbs to him at the end, it seems just one step removed from coercion, with almost no possibility of enduring. The inclusion of a Black musician among the prospective suitors might have seemed moderately progressive, if he wasn’t portrayed as a tiresome, illiterate idiot who mainly only communicates through his saxophone. That aside though, there are some bouncy musical sequences, and the whole thing wraps up in under an hour without even seeming that rushed about it.

Zoo (Frederick Wiseman, 1993)

 

Frederick Wiseman’s observation of the Miami zoo isn’t among his more satisfying works, seeming mostly content to record interesting events and sights, without particularly probing their ethical, financial or other underpinnings. Of course, given the setting, this makes for a frequently fascinating chronicle: the film includes among much else a rhinoceros giving birth, a gorilla having its teeth cleaned, and a hunt for feral dogs that penetrated the fences and killed several animals. There’s a “circle of life” aspect to how we see one of those dogs, tracked down and shot dead, thrown into the same incinerator that earlier saw the end of the sadly stillborn baby rhino, but while Wiseman captures such correspondences and echoes, there’s nothing in the film that interrogates the basic artificiality of the enterprise, the propriety of (say) clubbing to death an emblematically cute white rabbit so it can be fed to a snake that lives its whole life in not much more than a glass box (perhaps Wiseman would have said the film provided sufficient information for the viewer to form a judgment, but that would underestimate the complexity of the issues). The greatest ambiguities of all, of course, are between observers and observed, the gaze of the animals sometimes seeming (at least) as intelligent as that of the visitors, the (again, under-explored) difference of course being the explicitly captive nature of the former. A brief glimpse of a management meeting suggests the conversations at that level are most about donors and bringing in money, although it’s too fragmented to tell. The movie ends on an enjoyable but not very taxing piece of parallelism, the sights and sounds of a “Feast with the Beasts” black-tie fundraising event effortlessly evoking earlier scenes of animal-feeding. Some of what Wiseman records (the performing elephants being a prime example) would no longer be viewed as favourably; in such respects the film again feels (in contrast to other Wiseman works) somewhat complacent, reduced by the passage of time.

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.