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.

The New York Ripper (Lucio Fulci, 1982)

 

Lucio Fulci’s The New York Ripper is an exercise in dualities, starting with the strange tension between the heavily stressed authenticity of its locations (especially enjoyable in the time capsule shots of the Times Square region, with marquee attractions ranging from Carbon Copy to Revenge of the Bushido Blade) and a gratingly dubbed soundtrack (interiors were filmed in Rome) consisting largely of curtly declamatory dialogue. The film constructs its narrative on a standard sicko killer premise (the weird casting of British stalwart Jack Hedley as an absurdly hard-bitten detective creates its own sense of displacement), while also seeming largely sympathetic to the spectrum of human desire, whether manifesting itself in middle-class thrill seeking or in obsessive porn accumulation; its graphic depictions of knifing and blood-spurting and maiming exploit human frailty and capacity for pain while denying the audience any protective distance, with the unseen killer’s weirdly duck-like speaking style all the more destabilizing for its absurdity. The film’s strangest and most productive tension may be between impulse and deliberation: the killings (for instance, inside a car parked inside a ferry during a crossing; in the back room of a sleazy sex club) look like the opportunistic outbursts of a madman, but are ultimately attributable to a poignantly damaged back story, to a wrecked psychology exercising its revenge on the world in a complexly mediated manner (inevitably, the ultimate explanation is overly rushed and not likely to address all the viewer’s questions); the sense of multi-layered threat borders on the Fritz Lang-ian. In a film preoccupied with looking, there’s a strangely ethical quality to Fulci’s cinema, his brutality feels almost scientific in its precision, and the film insists on the validity of female desire and self-determination (albeit of a submissive and/or doomed variety). Even so, the nastiness rapidly becomes draining, and the film isn’t exactly enjoyable, but it never feels easily dismissable.

Breakout (Tom Gries, 1975)

 

Within the first fifteen minutes of Tom Gries’ Breakout, we see Mexican authorities set up a murder and then swoop in to arrest American businessman Jay Wagner, who in what appears to be the sketchiest and most evidence-deficient trial of all time is convicted and sentenced to twenty-eight years in a Mexican prison; we rapidly learn that some unspecified aspect of Jay’s approach to business threatened the interests both of the company headed by his grandfather Harris and of the CIA, the old man collaborating in framing his grandson on condition that he be kept alive, however meagrely. The fact of Jay being played by Robert Duvall and his grandfather by John Huston might have lent this highly shaky set-up a patina of class and persuasiveness, but their presence in such low-grade, functional roles remains bewildering to the end. The primary focus is on pilot Nick Colton (Charles Bronson), engaged by Jay’s wife (Jill Ireland) to get her husband out; Bronson is genial and amused, at the centre of much easygoing banter and knockabout comedy, his portions of the movie in no way coalescing with the conspiracy-heavy framework. The film lacks much atmosphere or tension, with a highly sanitized portrait of the prison, its deprivations mainly conveyed through a sense of Wagner’s strength ebbing away (although in this case that’s hard to distinguish from actorly disinterest); the action scenes are crisply executed but hardly plausible, and the ending strangely fails to close the loop on the overriding narrative, lacking for example any confrontation between Wagner and the conniving old man. The film slightly departs from the usual Bronson-Ireland paradigm in firmly attaching her character to another man, but then can’t resist hinting at a mutual attraction between her and Colton; Ireland’s stiffness is far outshone though by Sheree North in the role of another team member, even if much of what she’s given to do and say is distinctly demeaning.

Oedipus Rex (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1967)

 

Pasolini’s version of Oedipus Rex is as mesmerizing as any of his works, seeped in his extraordinary visual vitality: his people intensely and vividly present, all the more so for their lack of actorliness (even the film’s star presence, Silvana Mangano, is used primarily as a blankly impassive canvas), the settings and trappings tangibly present in all their dusty, sweating, crumbling, threadbare glory. The film’s boldest device places the historical recreation within a modern-day framework, underlining the story’s eternal urgency and ominousness, the relevance of its implication that societies built on myth-based idolatry will collapse into perversity and corruption, and also (in how the closing modern-day section emphasizes people going about their business, with even Oedipus’ guide distracted by kids playing soccer and the like) the near-impossibility of ensuring that such a message will reach the ears of those who need to hear it. For all the story’s reliance on coincidence and oracular revelation, Pasolini emphasizes rationality and investigation, spending no time on the reign of Oedipus the king, but patiently setting out the events and exchanges by which he learns the truth of his past, and how the prediction he took such steps to avoid – that of being destined to sleep with his mother and kill his father – ensnared him nevertheless (the long sequence in which Oedipus’s encounter with a party of travelers turns murderous indicates that Pasolini could have cut it as a director of action). But the film doesn’t particularly dwell on the incest: in this rendition the details of Oedipus’ fate are perhaps less impactful than the dawning sense that his self-determination was always illusionary, that his great choices and acts of courage were irrelevant to a predetermined entrapment that gradually reveals itself, Franco Citti’s Oedipus visibly straining to understand how this could all be, his ultimate self-imposed blindness an inevitable (if inadequate) response to a world far beyond his capacity to understand or to shape.

Skip Tracer (Zale Dalen, 1977)

 

The most abiding impression left by Zale Dalen’s 1977 Vancouver-set drama Skip Tracer is of basic cheerlessness – there’s perhaps not a single scene in the film when anyone seems to be experiencing any very deep or meaningful pleasure (even the scene set in a strip joint is about as drab as they get). The film focuses on John Collins, collector for what we take to be a predatory lending agency (the title fits a little oddly as the film doesn’t depict too much difficulty in tracking down his targets, and it seems his workload also encompasses taking loan applications); he’s won the company’s “man of the year” award three straight times and is gunning for a fourth, but there’s little sign that the relative success does much for him, as his vehicle and apartment are both fairly non-descript and there’s no sign of a meaningful personal life. In the somewhat over-conventional closing stretch, Collins is faced with brutal evidence of the human cost of his efforts and quits after a final act of rebellion; the details aren’t particularly convincing though, either in terms of his own moral awakening or those of the actions he takes (from today’s perspective, it’s poignant to note the relative modesty of the delinquent amounts for which lives are ruined). The film is at its best in depicting the deadening office culture, in which women are habitually called “sweetheart” and there’s never a vague suggestion they might fill anything more than support roles, and in which Collins one day finds that his coveted personal office has been taken away at the behest of the unseen “kids with business degrees” who seemingly treat the experienced (but not formally educated) likes of Collins merely as manipulable data points. And as in so many Canadian films of the period, one strongly senses that the malaise and drabness extends far beyond the film’s narrow parameters.

Out 1, noli me tangere (Jacques Rivette, 1971)

 

Jacques Rivette’s twelve-hour-plus Out 1, noli me tangere richly justifies the investment made in watching it (and that even goes for multiple viewings - I’ve completed it three times), even if it’s confoundingly difficult to summarize how that is. To make just a few random and inadequate points, the great length, and large blocks of time in which very little happens (nothing at all by conventional narrative measures) exists in tension with a sense of temporal fluidity and uncertainty: for example, the fact of so many characters wearing exactly the same clothes in scene after scene suggests a recurring state of stasis (while also constituting a kind of coding, and also channeling the recurring sense of limited economic resources); even more than usual, a cut from one scene to another in no way indicates here that the linked events are taking place simultaneously. The film follows two sets of characters working on classical texts, differing in their methods but neither seeming to approach a performance (the leader of one group, Thomas, mentions at one point that three days have gone by without really dealing with the material); the tightly focused nature of these projects contrasts (and intertwines) with two other characters preoccupied by hints of a mysterious group of thirteen that may or not actually exist, and if it does, may or may not be of much import (we eventually learn that the group did exist in a formative stage but is now dormant, its purpose never fully formulated, the fact of the investigation itself possibly inadvertently prompting it back to a kind of life), their efforts likewise carrying recurring aspects of play and performance (the film at various times references chess, solitaire, numerology, secret messages, dress-up and other forms of play). Likewise, while there’s no sex in the film as such, the rehearsals often crackle with erotic possibility (even from the very first shot); conversely, the few scenes that most seem to be heading toward carnal intimacy usually trail off into stilted, melancholy-tinged game-playing. There’s a constant sense of reinvention: a character wins a million francs and briefly speculates dizzily on what might change before the money is stolen, he and his friends then channeling their efforts into searching for the perpetrator, a project carrying, in an albeit limited way, a renewed sense of experimentation and improvisation (in these scenes, as in many others, we’re often aware of passers-by staring at the film-makers, which adds to the sense of vivid engagement with the possibilities of the immediate). Ultimately, the film confirms certain aspects of possible conspiracy while leaving others open (the prime mover “Pierre” is never seen or heard, although it’s tempting to think he’s in effect director Rivette, or an avatar or derivative thereof); it moves closer to intimations of the supernatural; it positions some characters for apparent fulfilment while leaving others dead or bereft, with a final shot reminding us of something we witnessed (much) earlier and which was never adequately explained, indicating that the end of the film, even one as long and stimulating and mind-altering as this one, is a merely contingent thing.

The Falls (Peter Greenaway, 1980)

 

For all the inherent absurdity of its premise, Peter Greenaway’s The Falls often almost convinces you to take it at face value, as a public-service-oriented alphabetically-ordered three-hour-fifteen-minute cataloguing of 92 people affected by a “Violent Unnamed Event” that among other things left its victims bearing mutations and afflictions both minor and outlandish (including in some cases being rendered immortal), and spawned multiple new languages; the film’s persuasiveness lies largely in its very existence, because if it weren’t in some respect true, or at least necessary, who would ever think to invent it? The Falls is in part then a great cinematic joke, maintained beyond what anyone else would judge to be reasonable (this is the only respect in which someone like Andy Kaufman comes to mind), its inventions often objectively funny, but never delivered in a way that encourages or even allows laughter. Indeed, the accumulation of so many ordinary-looking faces in dull interiors, of mundane traveling shots along inner-city London streets, of outdated typefaces and technologies, of so many references to birds (which in some way may have been responsible for the Event) and other recurring motifs constructs its own sense of entrapment, of being trapped in a work which might be not so much cataloguing as embodying the trauma (Borges is a compelling reference point). One of the film’s final case histories, involving a professional storyteller, cites an uncertainty over whether his creations were received primarily as allegories or as metaphors: similar questions might be applied to The Falls itself, being both a parody of the classically well-made, po-faced British documentary tradition and a near-ultimate application of it, exhaustingly trivia-obsessed and grandly all-seeing, studded with alluring mysteries (including the citing of other Greenaway works, such as The Tulse Luper Suitcases, which wouldn’t exist until decades later, as if transcending normal rules of chronology and causation).  

To Be Twenty (Fernando Di Leo, 1978)

 

Near the start of Fernando Di Leo’s To Be Twenty, Lia and Tina meet on a beach and immediately bond over their shared mantra of being “young, hot and pissed off,” joining up to hitch a ride to Rome, with some petty shoplifting along the way. Based on that set-up, and on being told that they make a way to a commune where they’re expected to pay their way largely by having sex with the male residents, the film sounds like low-level exploitation, and indeed provides large dollops of ogling, gratuitous nudity, and coupling. It has other things on its mind too though, including providing a surprisingly thorough immersion into the commune’s odd ways (and it should be noted that the men, mostly all stoned, show little interest in the proposed arrangement), allowing the women space to talk about their bumpy personal histories (although it’s staged as a performance and it’s not necessarily clear how much can be taken at face value), and spending extended time on a police raid and subsequent interrogations (this is the portion of the movie that most obviously evokes the action-oriented bulk of Di Leo’s work), in the course of which Lia and Tina are summarily dismissed as “airheads” and kicked out of the city. The final act is genuinely unpleasant to watch, providing a climactic dose of potentially titillating activity while rapidly stamping out any sense of ensuing pleasure (the ending burst of jaunty music seems like a particularly cruel touch), plausibly straddling expectations of an inevitable “come-uppance” for Lia and Tina’s often caution-shedding exuberance, while painting the coldly self-righteous, violent men who deliver that fate in a properly wretched light. Although the film is on its face a major outlier in Di Leo’s oeuvre, it could also be seen as an extension of the sociological curiosity evident in a film like Caliber 9, and of his frequent sympathy for the women occupying the edges of the masculine-dominated action.

Enemies, a Love Story (Paul Mazursky, 1989)

 

Paul Mazursky’s filming of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Enemies, A Love Story is a flavourful, intelligent pleasure, its well-balanced complexities placing it almost incalculably above most of the director’s coarse later work. In likely his best screen role, Ron Silver plays Herman, living in Coney Island in 1949, married to Yadwiga, the Gentile former servant who helped save his life during the war, while having an affair with Masha, a camp survivor separated from her husband, and then suddenly learning that Tamara, the wife everyone assumed was dead, is alive and also in New York: the situation is inherently comic and sometimes played as such, but it’s a comedy based in the Holocaust’s terrible, multi-faceted, ongoing proximity. It’s tangibly present, in the tattoos on several forearms, as visible and unremarked on as vaccination scars, in thoughts and conversations and speculations; when Herman sees Tamara after so many years, the magnitude of the secular miracle overwhelms his ability to welcome it as such, gratitude or joy overwhelmed by logistical panic. The film balances between a sense that almost all things might properly be allowable in the wake of such suffering, and the practical fact of laws and ethics and the human propensity to judge and envy and gossip remaining unchanged; Herman initially seems exultant at what he’s getting away with, the stress of keeping the balls in the air all part of the transgressive thrill, but by the end he’s hemmed in to the point almost of total erasure. The subtle ending suggests the possibility of new structures and allegiances though, with two of the women bringing up the absent Herman’s daughter together, while also indicating the persistence of old hierarchies (although the child is Yadwiga’s, she retains her old subservience to her former employer Tamara, almost seeming like a maid engaged to assist the real mother).

Passion (Ryusuke Hamaguchi, 2008)

 

If Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Passion - essentially a student project, remarkably – pushes its characters and situations too hard at many points, it’s perhaps only out of a surfeit of infectious earnestness and curiosity. It would be worth seeing if only for an extraordinary central sequence in which a young teacher, Kaho, leads her class in talking about a classmate who recently killed himself, taking them through a consideration of modes of violence and appropriate responses. It seems doubtful that Kaho’s reasoning and conclusions are entirely coherent either to the film’s audience or to the pupils, and yet the process succeeds in prompting one classmate to volunteer that he had bullied the dead boy, and for others to follow, an early example of Hamaguchi’s interest in shifting and synthesis. The intertwining of choice and instinct and responsibility also informs the film’s main narrative, focused on the possibly misaligned desires of Kaho’s fiancée Tomoya and of his two friends, one of whom almost certainly loves Kaho more fully and alertly than Tomoya does himself, but without her reciprocation. That’s one of the movie’s many points of confusion and absence: it’s notable that the dead boy is never seen, or even referred to before that scene, echoing against a much-referenced cat, also deceased just before the events in the film, who when alive influenced the living arrangements of several characters. Passion has a playful side, but frequently seems to teeter on the edge of greater anger and danger, or of more fully expressed emotion and sexuality in general, albeit often with a sense of throwing stuff out there just to see if it works (and then, if it doesn’t, of leaving it in the final cut regardless). Still, the film is more absorbingly provocative than many more fully-achieved works (even some of Hamaguchi’s own, possibly).

The Ladies Man (Jerry Lewis, 1961)

 

Jerry Lewis’ The Ladies Man certainly lives up to its reputation for innovative design and technical elements, embodied in the early single-take scene in which Lewis’ character Herbert wanders through the seemingly empty house in which he’s just been employed as a handyman, the frame taking in the large central lobby and staircases rising therefrom, three floors of bedrooms on either side, and unseen to him, in the bottom right corner of the frame, a dining room crammed with young women, the very thing that Herbert had pledged to avoid. The movie’s main premise, that the women collaborate in keeping him busy to avoid him from leaving, strangely fails to land though, in part because Lewis, in typical style, plays Herbert in good and bad times alike as barely functional and always on the edge of becoming demented; it follow that the movie lacks any kind of sexual charge, the women barely registering as individuals (both as director and in character, Lewis seems more comfortable with the two older members of the set-up, a former opera singer who provides a home for aspiring performers, and a motherly housekeeper). The film amply illustrates the bizarre duality of Lewis’ creative sensibility: on the one hand engaging with relish with the then novel notion of live TV broadcasts and the attendant chaos, and luxuriating in spatial possibilities (extended further by the fact of one door which appears to open onto a world of pure imagination); on the other hand aggressively assaulting the viewer with his unbound narcissism and excruciating mugging. The aggregate effect is as troubling as it is funny, which of course amounts to a recommendation, supplemented by an all-time-great opening title sequence, and a weirdly affecting cameo by comedian Buddy Lester, his tough-guy character reduced to blubbering mush within minutes of encountering Herbert, in its way the movie’s most pointed illustration of the near-extortionate subtext to Lewis’ antics.

La vie revee (Mireille Dansereau, 1972)

 

Early on in Mireille Dansereau’s pioneering La vie revee, two young artistically-inclined women, Isabelle and Virginie, meet in a workplace washroom, exchange a few remarks about make-up and jewelry, and within moments of screen time become all but inseparable friends, summing up the film’s still-striking confidence and lightness of touch. They start to talk about bringing up a child together, and Isabelle has a father in mind, an older married man with whom she says she’s in love; eventually she and he get together and it’s a big letdown, but the friends rapidly realize that the release from their mythic three-corner structure (evoked in some of the film’s many brief fantasy sequences) opens up new possibilities, ending the film on a celebratory note. Among much else, the movie energetically serves as a fascinating Montreal time capsule, from recognizable landmarks to an economically quite wide-ranging survey of residential streets and neighbourhoods (there’s only one English-speaking character in the film, and pointedly he’s the man who fires Isabelle); there are multiple references to and visual hints of past family traumas, and almost every issue of the day (Quebec separation, abortion, woman’s equality) gets a passing mention. One rather regrets the ending, both because it doesn’t seem necessary for the film to be over yet (it’s actually too short!) and because the closing sense of liberation manifests itself in tearing down all the self-generated artwork decorating the apartment, as if it had been all along a manifestation of entrapment and limitation rather than meaningful expression (not an invalid idea, but one seeming to warrant more exploration, if that’s the intention). But on the other hand, the film retains a beguiling degree of mystery, contrasting an easygoing approach to female nudity with a refusal to explicitly define the parameters and potential limits of Isabelle and Virginie’s relationship.