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).