Themroc (Claude Faraldo, 1973)

 

Claude Faraldo’s Themroc is likely to strike you more as a connected series of assorted provocations than as a meaningfully sustained vision, with an occasional sense of throwing stuff out to see how much sticks: happily, it works better than might have been expected. Broadly summarized, the film follows a blue-collar painter (Michel Piccoli) who one day snaps and starts trashing his apartment, inspiring a few others in adjacent buildings to follow suit, with the authorities largely powerless to intervene; he also has sex with his sister, among others, perhaps engages in cannibalism, and in general arrives at, at least for the short term, an alternative, seemingly satisfying mode of living. The film is set in a version of then present-day France, providing ample footage of drab-looking, bottled-up people stuck in dull and repetitive lives, much that could be either documentary or a Candid Camera-style bending of it, but strangified by the absence of any intelligible dialogue: on the few occasions that people speak at all, they do so in grunts or shrieks or streams of gobbledygook. The casting of Piccoli with his impeccable art-film resonance certainly adds to the intrigue of the film’s implied puzzle, especially when supplemented with that of Beatrice Romand (from Rohmer’s Claire’s Knee!) as the almost perpetually half-naked sister: the two ensure that there’s a strange delicacy at the heart of the chaos. It finds its final flourish in the film’s sweetest sequence, in which they gently seduce a bricklayer (Patrick Dewaere) who’s working on repairing a wall, luring him into joining them in kicking down his own handiwork and in the subsequent sexual ecstasy. Ultimately, the film doesn’t have too much to offer as analysis or diagnosis or social prescription, but the weirdly deliberate specificity of the whole thing easily keeps boredom at bay.

Shy People (Andrei Konchalovsky, 1987)

 

Andrei Konchalovsky’s Shy People is a lumpy concoction, not really satisfying in any respect at all, but generally strange or eventful enough to maintain one’s interest. Diana (a not very effective Jill Clayburgh), a New York-based writer for Cosmopolitan, travels to the Louisiana bayous to seek out some distant relatives, thinking she can get an article of it, with her teenage daughter Grace (Martha Plimpton) tagging along. The family lives up-river, way away from it all (at times evoking a scuzzier version of the French plantation in the extended version of Apocalypse Now) under the stiflingly tight control of matriarch Ruth (Barbara Hershey), who for example keeps one of her kids locked up like an animal; Diana’s arrival coincides with an increase in tensions between the family and local poachers, with events at times approaching Deliverance-level feral, at others edge-of-horror grotesquerie. For all that, it often seems that the movie’s main point is simply to wallow in the contrast between the two women, big hair and clunky jewelry versus never-seen-a-comb and rotting teeth, but the closing stretch seems to be hinting at a form of spiritual exchange or transmigration, with Diana drawing her errant child closer even as Ruth loosens her grasp over her brood; adding to the sense of the quasi-supernatural, Ruth’s husband, who she treats as merely missing even while all the evidence suggests he's long-dead, makes an at least symbolic return, in mysteriously transplanted form. But the co-crediting of the screenplay to Roman Polanski’s frequent collaborator Gerard Brach perhaps leads one to detect something more darkly twisted than Konchalovsky actually delivers, and the closing citation of Revelations (because you are lukewarm – neither hot nor cold – I am about to spit you out of my mouth) is more likely to prompt eye-rolling than sage nodding. The film’s more striking moments include the sight of a group of locals sitting at the dock gathered around a battery-operated TV, mesmerized by, of all people, Liberace.

The Girl on the Train (Andre Techine, 2009)

 

Yet another underrated film by the almost brutally undervalued Andre Techine, La fille du RER has been typically summed up in sensationalistic terms: a young woman, Jeanne, falsely claims she was attacked on a train by an anti-Semitic gang, causing a brief national sensation. The opening titles with their marching-to-battle vibe seem to lay the groundwork for something correspondingly confrontational, but from then on, Techine in typical fashion confounds expectations, sowing much mystery as to the film’s basic nature and purpose. Among other things, the incident in question doesn’t even arise until the film’s second half, and hardly seems rooted in what came before it; almost or literally no one who knows Jeanne believes her story and it fairly rapidly falls apart; and Jeanne isn’t even Jewish. Her ex-boyfriend brands her as a compulsive liar, but really only has one example to support that; he blames her for his taking a shady job that lands him in jail, but the film shows how he aggressively pursues her into being with him, her role in the relationship a relatively passive one, almost a blank canvas on which men might project their desires; at the end of the film she’s become a fantasy love object for a much younger boy, a teenager. Despite the title, the defining recurring image isn’t of Jeanne on the train but rather on roller blades, defined by pure movement, shimmering with undefined possibility; it resonates against Techine’s fascination with the mysteries of relationships, ranging here from unrealized hints of a romance between Jeanne’s mother (Catherine Deneuve) and an old beau who’s now a prominent lawyer, to the lawyer’s son and his estranged wife, veering within seconds from hostility to passionate reconciliation. The film carries an additional charge in the wake of the 2023 Hamas attacks and the subsequent spike in protest and debate, particularly in its implied caution against under-analyzed position-taking and tribalism.

The Territory (Raul Ruiz, 1981)

 

In Raul Ruiz’s The Territory, four adults and two kids set off on a guided hiking trip, soon starting to argue with their guide about the apparent lack of progress, parting from him and subsequently finding him dead, their plight worsening so that they ultimately turn to cannibalism, their numbers nevertheless continuing to dwindle. Such a summary may make the film sound like a relatively straightforward narrative, and therefore of course in no way represents the gorgeously strange, disorienting experience of actually watching it. In Ruiz’s singular hands, even the basic details of who these people are, where they are, why things happen the way they do, are elusive; for every moment of apparent clarity, there’s another in which the film takes a startling lurch, introducing new characters out of nowhere, or providing odd tidbits of information which may or may not be seen as “clues” of a kind. Without claiming that these ever yield a corresponding solution, an emphasis on literature in the closing scenes suggests that the territory is in a sense a space of pure creative capacity, eventually devouring the artistically repressed, capable of being traversed only through submission to endeavour and extremity, causing permanent ripples in the afterlives of any who emerge from it. But at various points the film could also be taken as an ecological parable, or (noting the use of such artifacts as maps and masks) as sly genre parody, among almost limitless other possibilities I’m sure. At every point, Ruiz blurs the distinction between objective weakness and sly ambiguity: by conventional standards, for example, the actors’ delivery often feels stilted and uneasy, but this rather supports the sense of a commitment to experimentation that blurs the difference between life and art (even the objective errors within the credits, such as crediting John Paul Getty III as “paul Guetty jnr,” seem playfully strategic).