Un conde (Yves Boisset, 1970)

 

Even by the standards of the many films in which an officer of the law bends the rules, Yves Boisset’s Un conde (The Cop) is often breathtaking in its cool transgressiveness, with its protagonist Inspector Favenin (Michel Bouquet) methodically and pitilessly evidencing his willingness to shoot unarmed suspects dead, to commit extreme perjury, to issue any kind of threat in pursuit of the goals he considers righteous. The effect is all the more chilling for Favenin’s unprepossessing nature, austerely dressed in black suit and tie, barely expressive and saying no more than he needs to: he describes the police as efficiently disposing of the waste inevitably produced by a well-functioning system, a metaphor that in its lack of glamor seems to place him somewhat outside the core sociological machine. But then the film evidences a near-symmetry on its opposing sides of the law: both Favenin and his main quarry Dan Rover motivated by deep loyalty to a colleague they assess as worthy and reliable, both ultimately placing revenge over almost all other considerations, and even sharing a deep antipathy for the politically-connected criminal “Mandarin” who straddles both worlds (perhaps being all the more contemptible for that), his bidding carried out by notably ruthless thugs. As the film reaches its conclusion, Favenin appears to perceive that his actions have exceeded what can be rationalized, and tries to resign, but it's rejected (his boss clearly being motivated primarily by political and image-conscious considerations); his situation as the film ends is deeply uncertain, placed in an almost liminal suspension between opposing sides of the law and the vastly different futures they embody. Boisset would explore this broad territory further in films such as L’attentat, a work largely populated by self-satisfied men in dark suits charged with stoking the mechanisms of law and order and transparency, notwithstanding their deep immersion in self-dealing and manipulation.  

The Quatermass Xperiment (Val Guest, 1955)

 

Val Guest’s The Quatermass Xperiment, a movie version of Nigel Kneale’s pioneering TV series (six episodes were transmitted live, four of them now lost), holds up quite well, spanning large-scale technological spectacle and intimate body horror, benefiting from its feeling for everyday locations and personality types. The film starts with the return of a spacecraft launched under the supervision of the titular Dr. Quatermass, crashing into a farmer’s field, two of its three-man crew mysteriously vanished and the other, Richard Caroon, in poor shape which only worsens from there (and that’s putting it mildly). The film benefits significantly from Richard Wordsworth’s performance as Caroon, suggesting depths of anguish beneath a scarily drained exterior as he wreaks increasing havoc (the film makes diverting use of a zoo in particular), and contrasting nicely with a host of no-nonsense British presences. The climax comes in Westminster Abbey during a live television broadcast, thereby fusing the alien menace with escalating technological home invasion, suggesting the potential symbiotic multiplicity of modern threats to one’s stability (presumably this was even more effective in the original TV transmission, but the climactic episode was among those lost). Viewed from a modern-day perspective, those threats might include the choice of an American actor, Brian Donlevy, to play Quatermass, in the original another Brit, the resonances only deepened by the knowledge that it was prompted by commercial considerations, the actor’s initial bulldozing intransigence (which softens a bit as the movie goes on) only deepening the sense of unwelcome disruption (which nevertheless is mostly met with British subservience; it’s notable that Quatermass launched the space vessel without waiting for official permission). And if that’s not enough, the film may nowadays evoke thoughts of something like the Covid lab-leak theory, in its depiction of inadequately ring-fenced science spawning a potentially exponentially expanding contamination...

La chimera (Alice Rohrwacher, 2023)

 

Alice Rohrwacher’s wonderful La chimera has a predominantly bucolic, sun-baked feel about it, but it teems with unforced inventiveness and audaciousness. Its central character, Arthur (Josh O’Connor), is a classically conceived enigma, most often clad in a rumpled white suit, a trained archaeologist who’s thrown in his lot with a group of Italian grave robbers, living largely hand to mouth, his behaviour significantly molded by the memory of his dead love, whose aging mother (Isabella Rossellini) seems to be his main ongoing human contact. The film is in part a chronicle of a man rediscovering his own sense of purpose and ethics, by removing himself from prevailing human timelines and considerations, ultimately in a sense aligning his own fate with that of the objects he’s plundered and exploited. But before that scheme fully emerges, Rohrwacher demonstrates her immense facility, cycling through musical sequences, silly camera tricks, montages of past escapades that might almost form the credits sequence of a weekly network show, bits of quasi-magic realism, and some enjoyably broad plotting (the group is duped into giving up its biggest ever find, via a simple ruse by a rival gang). The film’s most startling moment comes when the group finds a large ancient statue of great beauty and immeasurable value, and a member casually lops off its head (albeit planning to reattach it later) for ease of transport; we subsequently see how such commercial rapaciousness crafts its own value-creating narratives, with the headless statue ultimately being marketed to collectors as a “new Venus de Milo.” But partly through his shock at such desecration, Arthur starts to shift toward a truer version of himself, and although the ending is objectively grim, it glistens with a sense of arrival that may surely infiltrate and elevate the viewer.

Body Snatchers (Abel Ferrara, 1993)

 

Abel Ferrara’s Body Snatchers might prompt the (of course too easy) comment that the main body to have snatched must be that of Ferrara himself, given the generic nature of the material and, for the most part, the director’s handling of it. This telling of the story confines the action almost entirely to a military base where the main focal point, teenage Marti Malone (Gabrielle Anwar) arrives early on with her family, relocating for as long as it takes her father (Terry Kinney) to carry out an environmental assessment. The evocation of a location seemingly dense in toxic materials suggests the malady might have a more organic origin here than in previous versions, but this turns out to be a misdirection (unless one intuits that the high chemical levels contributed to the aliens’ choice of their ground zero). Likewise, an initial suggestion that the film might focus on fractured family relationships comes to very little, other than that Marti’s stepmother, who she apparently tolerates rather than likes, succumbs far more easily than the rest of them (the potentially wrenching fate of Marti’s younger brother is significantly undermined by sub-standard special effects).The film runs under an hour and a half, resulting in storytelling that blurs the line between efficiently concentrated and merely cursory, the aliens for example seeming improbably easy to fool at several key points. Among other weaknesses: the use of voice over at the beginning and end seems oddly displaced, and the insertion of female nudity largely risible; Forest Whitaker's couple of showy scenes seem barely integrated with the rest of the movie. It’s always interesting enough though, and its closing moments are effective, the barrage of combat footage against a backdrop of existential uncertainty now almost seeming to anticipate Ferrara’s recent treatment of the Ukraine war in Turn in the Wound.