Lonely Hearts

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched Lonely Hearts written and directed by Todd Robinson.

The story involves a notorious murder case in New York in 1949. A con man (Jared Leto) who preys on widows and spinsters hooks up with a femme fatale (Salma Hayek) to prey on widows and spinsters and murder them.

The film structure has a flash-forward, flashback structure, but mostly proceeds in parallel between the pathological relationship between the killers, and the investigation, focusing on the lead detective (John Travolta) who is troubled in his own way.

Credits run over a montage of shots of the period, ending with a scene of a woman who shoots herself in the head over a bathtub. Then we jump forward 3 years, as two detectives Robinson (John Travolta) and his partner (James Gandolfini) arrive at Sing Sing prison to witness an electrocution. Gandolfini’s voiceover narration then brings us back in time and carries us through the rest of the story.

The suicide, he tells us, was Robinson’s wife. After that Robinson, a tough, hard-boiled detective, confines himself to desk duty and won’t go out on cases. Until by accident he is called in on a suicide scene of a woman who slit her wrists in a bathtub. Robinson finds it troubling, and he covers the case. He knows it’s a ‘Lonely Hearts’ case and suspects murder.

Meanwhile Gandolfini’s narration also introduces us to Ray Martin Fernandez (Jared Leto), a con man and swindler who writes letters to lonely widows and spinsters. He gives them his line, takes their money, and leaves. But one time he meets in this way a real beauty Martha Beck (Hayek) who is a real psycho. She falls in love with him but is never fooled by him, and together they embark on their crime spree.

The detectives try to get a line on Raymond and his next victim. And we also see how the couple do it: Raymond sweet-talks the women, Martha pretends to be his sister, but she is driven to jealous fury when she seen him romancing another woman, and ends up murdering the girl. Raymond participates in the killing and disposal of the corpse, and they go on to their next woman.

Robinson, the detective, is troubled. He has a new girlfriend (Laura Dern) but tries to hide it. He can’t move on, he can’t face his son with a new love. His son Eddie is 15 and maybe troubled himself; neither one has fully grieved or come to terms with the wife and mother’s suicide. Because of that memory, Robinson drives himself all the harder to solve the Lonely Hearts murder cases.

In Grand Rapids, Michigan Ray and Martha find a new victim, a young widow with small girl living on a farm. It begins to look like Ray wants to ditch Martha and start over; he’s getting along so well with the widow, and when she gets pregnant he tells her to keep it a secret from Martha. But the widow confides in Martha, who promptly poisons her. The poison is still slowly working when Ray gets back with the groceries. Ray isn’t sure who to shoot, Martha or the widow; Martha challenges him to shoot her or the widow. ‘If I don’t have you I don’t want to live,’ Martha tells him. ‘So shoot, Ray, but do it out of love.’ He puts the gun to Martha’s head, but kills the widow instead.

Then he rushes to bring back quicklime to dispose of the body and is pulled over. He murders the cop who pulls him over, but the cop has radioed in Raymond’s name already. The couple go on to kill a farmer for his dog in a mixed-up effort to appease the little girl. But the girl won’t cotton to Martha, and she ends up dead and slaughtered as well.

Robinson and his partner arrive in Grand Rapids and they help the local cops track the couple to the farm. There they take them alive, and get Martha to confess. She almost brags about it. And so, in the end, Robinson and partner witness the electrocution of both the Lonely Hearts killers – and then he resigns from the force.

The voiceover tells us that Robinson takes his son and the boat he had built for his wife, and moved upstate, married his girlfriend, and took up a normal life again.

The first of the end titles tells us that the writer/director is the grandson of the detective, and dedicates the movie to the detective’s son, the writer’s father.

The movie is well made, a good recreation of the period. It moves rather slowly, and seems lugubrious. Travolta’s performance is quite melancholy, repressing his rage and grief. The only time the movie really comes alive is when Hayek and Leto are playing their games. There’s no joy there either, but Hayek really gives oomph to her insane jealousy, and when she does her sex thing, it’s funny in a sick, sick way. The movie really should have just told the killers’ story, and the domestic difficulties of the detective are a bit beside the point, though Robinson makes a game effort of connecting the two causally. He wanted to pay tribute to a famous story his family was connected with, but the real story here is not the investigation so much as the weird, sick love triangles between con man, victim, and lover.

But the chief problem is lack of any joy (or much vitality) and much suspense. The picture only comes alive when following the twisted lovers in their horrible crimes and ghastly-funny declarations of romantic love. Martha is particularly loopy in this regard. As for suspense, the flashback structure lets us know the bad guys were caught, and the only suspense we really are left with is whether the cops can prevent the killers from killing the little girl on the Grand Rapids farm.

(26 April 2009)

The President’s Analyst

Hi Aki,

Yesterday I watched The President’s Analyst a 1967 picture written and directed by Theodore J. Flicker, and the finest satire on postwar America I can think of.

Story has respected New York psychoanalyst Sydney Schaeffer (James Coburn) being recruited to be the President’s analyst. It seems the weight of the world (unspecified and thus presumably everything that was going on at the time, from riots to the Cold War to the Vietnam War to hippies and desegregation and Civil Rights) is just too much for any one man to bear. Sydney is checked out by the ‘CEA’ (CIA) and ‘FBR’ (FBI) and cleared, although the director of the FBR, a short humorless man, disapproves of Sydney sleeping with his girlfriend.

Sydney is whisked from New York to Washington and he and his girlfriend are set up in a handsome house in Georgetown. This house is of course thoroughly bugged and spied-upon. The President is too busy to schedule appointments, so he signals when he wants Sydney, and Sydney must go to the White House for counseling. This happens when Sydney is eating, sleeping, making love, in the toilet … soon Sydney is getting frazzled. ‘The President has me to talk to, but I can’t talk even to you,’ he complains to his girlfriend.

Sydney starts to acquire paranoid symptoms. He even begins to imagine his girlfriend is spying on him (and, of course – she is). He knows he’s going to crack, so he slips in with a tour group in the White House and talks a New Jersey family (played by William Daniels) into taking him home with them.

This leads to a sendup of the so-called ‘liberal’ family man with his obsession on the latest sound equipment, making good time on the freeways, and guns. ‘When the right-wingers disarm, we liberals will disarm!’

Word of Sydney’s escape immediately reaches all the secret services in the world. Africans, Russians, Chinese, British – everybody wants Sydney.

Sydney tries to call his own analyst in New York, but can’t get through. Meanwhile Jr. is tapping and recording Sydney’s phone conversation, and two FBR goons (all in suits, without humor, and short) come in with orders to kill Sydney on sight. But Sydney has gone with the parents to eat out in the city.

There he slips away from the couple, but the spies are after him and chase him through the streets. Sydney only makes his getaway by slipping into a minibus owned by a stoned rock band, who agree to take him with them back to Minnesota.

There Sydney, now garbed like a fashionable hippie, trips out and makes love to band groupie ‘Snow White’ in the middle of a green field while various spies kill one another competing to see who can capture him.

He is captured by a British-seeming rock band who turn out to be Canadian spies, and sail on a yacht across the Great Lakes. But the FBR goons take over the ship, murder the Canadians, and are about to kill Sydney – but they are out of bullets and must go reload. When they do, Kropotkin, the Russian spy, kills them and drugs Sydney. He intends to sail to the North Atlantic to meet a trawler.

But at last Sydney gets to use his psychoanalytical skills in self-defense. He succeeds in revealing Kropotkin’s hatred for his secret-service-commanding father. With three to seven years of treatment, Sydney promises to cure Kropotkin of his neuroses. Kropotkin says they will take Sydney back to Washington to carry on the treatment; first Sydney should phone the White House and tell the President to stop the FBR.

Sydney tries to call at a phone booth, but the operator is less than helpful. Kropotkin agrees that ‘the phone company’ is hated the world over, and goes back to town to get more change. Meanwhile Sydney finds himself locked into the phone booth beside the highway in the middle of nowhere. Along comes a large truck that scoops up the phone booth with Sydney in it, puts another in its place, and drives off. Kropotkin meets the CEA agent Dan (Godfrey Cambridge) at the site and are baffled at what could have happened to Sydney.

Sydney comes to in the bowels of an advanced underground lair suitable for a James Bond villain. There (still trapped in the phone booth) Sydney is made to watch a smiling, unctuous man’s pitch: he represents the Phone Company, and they have a breakthrough phone as small as the head of a pin. Surgically implanted in the brain, it will allow everyone to call anyone else just thinking of them; people will get the CC chips implanted before they are born, and all names will be replaced with numbers – their personal phone numbers. If Sydney will just convince the President to push through all the needed legislation…?

Sydney calls him nuts, but it doesn’t phase the Phone Company representative. Meanwhile Kropotkin and Dan break in; Kropotkin sabotages the phone lines so that service will be damaged for months, with the Phone Company getting all the blame, and Sydney, the man of peace, finds he enjoys wielding the automatic weapon and killing all the service technicians who arrive to repair the damage. And the ‘representative’ turns out to be a robot, wired to a plug in the floor.

Later on, at Christmas, Sydney is happily installed at his Georgetown home. Since his girlfriend is CEA and has just as high a security clearance as he does, he can confide in her. Kropotkin and Dan come by for a Christmas party, and on the news they see that the Phone Company, blamed for incompetence for the bad service of recent weeks, has agreed to be nicer, and lower rates.

As the four friends celebrate, the camera pulls back: they are being watched on a large monitor by a group of shadowy figures. And behind them are rows of men in suits and vapid expressions, sitting in chairs and wired to plugs in the floor…

This is a very funny movie. Shot in Panavision in bright colors, it had a big budget even though this was only Flicker’s second feature (Flicker had a long career as writer and director, almost all of it on television). The action is staged at a nice balance between seriousness and cartoonishness.

Flicker stages things very well. In one hilarious scene, when the Director of the FBR is giving the order to kill Sydney to a room full of suited, humorless agents just as short as the Director, a man walks in from the back of the room – a very tall man. He weaves his way in and out of the agents, head and shoulders above them, deposits a paper on the Director’s desk, and retreats. The contrast in heights make for a great laugh, but Flicker shoots it all in one master shot, underplaying the gag.

My big question about the movie is casting Coburn. He was undoubtedly the coolest American actor in the period, and lends a hipness to the production. He also was a big star at the time, notably as the parodical American super-spy Derek Flint in Our Man Flint (1966) and In Like Flint (1967), so his participation helped green light the picture. But part of the humor of Analyst lies in the prospect of a middle-aged, sober, serious Doctor coming up against the world of wacky spies, getting turned on, and ending up mowing down men. With this in mind it seems that William Daniels, Wally Cox, or Bob Newhart (or even Jonathan Winters) would have been funnier. On the other hand, audiences had shown they liked to laugh at the spy world with Coburn, and his hipness helped bring in younger viewers who wouldn’t have been so keen to go watch Wally Cox.

(21 April 2009)

Volcano: An Inquiry into the Life and Death of Malcolm Lowry

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched Volcano: An Inquiry into the Life and Death of Malcolm Lowry the 1976 documentary by Donald Brittain that I saw so many years ago, that first introduced me to Lowry and his book Under the Volcano – a book I never read.

The doc is in many ways superior to the John Huston adaptation of Volcano in capturing the book, the mood of the book, the flavor of the book. The problem in making a movie out of that book is that there is a story, but the story is secondary to the manner in which it is told. And the primary impulse in adapting it to film must be to tell the story. For a Hollywood movie, the story is the main and primary thing.

Huston at this point in his life was in failing health. He knew just what he wanted to do, but he was not in total command of his set. More: the movie was shot on location, and the budget was such that Huston and his crew could not remake Mexico. And yet for all that, I thought that the shots of the volcanoes in particular were much better in the documentary than in the film, even though Gabriel Figueroa was a great cinematographer.

The doc quotes extensively from the novel. And it has the great good fortune of Richard Burton’s voice to read all passages quoting Lowry. There is no better voice for the job; it makes me wish for an audiobook edition of Volcano done by Burton. Not only did Burton have a great voice, and a wonderful mastery over his voice, not only was he a great actor, but he knew a thing or two about drinking and alcoholism himself.

But watching it tonight, I was struck by something else. I caught myself wondering how Albert Finney (who starred in Huston’s movie as the semi-autobiographical character of the author) would have read those passages. It seemed to me that Finney would have brought a bit more humor to them – a lot more humor. Even whimsey. This is in keeping with how Finney played the Consul, of course, and it’s quite possible he would have read the book with a heavier take on the thing; but the subject of the tale, of a drunk man’s dying day, is so heavy in and of itself, that the lightness, almost jollity, Finney brings to the part, would have helped a lot with reading the novel.

Burton now began to strike me as overly dramatic, too heavy, too gloomy, almost demonic, almost hateful. Surely there must have been self-loathing in the Consul’s soul, but self-loathing can also be expressed with playful irony. And in one passage Burton read, the Consul is trying to express how it’s important to see the fun of it all, or else we will never understand the appeal of the liquor.

There are many other pieces to the documentary, of course – biographical bits covering Lowry’s family, his school years, his years after Mexico (I was shocked, actually, to learn that Lowry spent only 20 months in Mexico that first sojourn, when he conceived of the story and wrote most of the first draft – it seems as though the Consul must have been there for decades, and that Lowry too must have steeped himself in Mexico for years and years) and the triumph of final acceptance and publication, followed by years of bitter humiliation and defeat, unable to write anything else that was decent, that was even publishable.

I should give you some idea of the shape of the doc also, because shape is everything to a doc; the doc is really written in the editing room as you know. So they begin with Lowry’s death, and they leave it open, unanswered, just how he died. Was it heart failure, was it choking, was it suicide, was it accident? Had he swallowed sleeping pills and overdosed, had it just been an accident that he took them, had he not taken them at all? Had he drowned in his own vomit? Nobody, it seems, knew; the court inquiry came down with a verdict that it was an accident, ‘death by misadventure’ in the legal term.

The doc then takes us to Lowry’s birth family and upbringing, and goes forward, in linear fashion, to his end. Along the way there are many horrors, and Brittain’s crew films the important places Lowry visited in his life – the public school, Oxford, New York, Mexico, Vancouver, and finally back in England. But rather than use archival footage, Brittain does something bold and quite evocative: he films those places as they are today. So the students at Leeds public school have long hair as they did in the 1970s; but they are shown doing all those things that they did in the 1920s (or 1850s for that matter). In New York we see the homeless drunks and the seedy bars Lowry would have known; they are the drunks and bars of 1975 and yet we get much of the flavor of what Lowry would have known – what I imagine Lowry would have known – what I imagine Lowry would have felt about it.

Bellevue, the notorious mental hospital where Lowry was committed, is only shot from the street; I guess they didn’t give permission to shoot inside; but Brittain shows us a strange man walking down the sidewalk in front of Bellevue carrying a sign, I KNOW and shouting to the world, ‘Do you know your name? Do you know what to sign? When you go to work? I know!’ It’s chilling.

From New York the doc follows Lowry’s trail to Mexico, Los Angeles, Vancouver, finally back to England for the final years of his miserable life. There at last the doc resumes the question of his death, offering us more details (though Lowry had cut way back on drinking, on the night of his death he drank half a bottle of gin, got in a great ripping row with his wife, she smashed the gin bottle, he attacked her with a chair, she spent the night in the landlady’s place, and Lowry swallowed two entire bottles of sleeping pills) and determining, to the satisfaction of Brittain at least, that it was most definitely a suicide. (Oddly enough, though he interviews Mrs Lowry on camera, he shows us nothing of her comments on Lowry’s end; did she refuse to talk of it? Or did she not give the answers Brittain wanted to hear?)

So we have a circular or ‘ring structure’ in which the movie comes returns at its end to the starting-point. This I find is often used in biopics, especially when the end of the subject’s life is seen as meaningless or unchosen (see Lawrence of Arabia and Gandhi for other examples of this).

The title An Inquiry Into the Death, etc. supports the notion that the movie is aimed at settling this question. But really – who cares about that matter, whether Lowry jumped or stumbled on that last night? He’d been ‘dead’ literarily speaking for a decade; indeed he was only ‘alive’ to the world of letters for the two brief periods when he put forth his first novel, Ultramarine to ridicule and swift oblivion, and then ten years later or so, the eight years of working up Volcano.

Other choices for structure might have been to begin and end with Volcano itself: great literary éclat – what about this book, now? Who wrote it, under what circumstances, why? Then trace Lowry in Mexico, intercutting bits of backstory – the whirlwind courtship in Paris to the wife who soon fled back to New York, years in New York then down to Mexico, and so forth. From here we can then look forward to his failure to follow on, and then into the rising scholarly interest in the novel.

Maybe the autobiographical bits in Volcano and its intense quasi-self-portrait, interested Brittain more in Lowry than in literary matters. Beginning with the inquest is something of a hook for our interests, and the mystery structure holds up some glimmer of suspense to keep us watching to the end? I felt no suspense, however; I didn’t care whether Lowry suicided or had a heart attack; it was the evocative portrait of a squalid, wasted life filled with wretchedness fog and confusion, and illuminated by this one great flash of light, that appealed to me.

Here’s an interesting bit: I’d remembered the whole movie in black and white. Did I watch it on a black and white television? I don’t believe so. But in particular the Mexican footage I remember in grainy black and white, though it’s in Ektachrome gaudy color. Weird. But that maybe just me. Maybe my mind considers Lowry’s life in the light of The Lost Weekend and that time as only properly seen in black and white photography.

I still don’t want to read the book. Only, if the Burton audiobook edition exists, I would listen to that.

(11 April 2009)

The Last Sect

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched The Last Sect a vampire movie. Looks like it was shot on video, unfortunately. In Hamilton Canada on a sound-stage.

The story has ‘Van Helsing’ played by David Carradine, on the hunt for a vampire sect. It seems that every thousand years (so this was conceived around 2000 I guess) the sect is at its most powerful, drinking lots of blood, storing up energy; then it finds a woman to watch over them while they sleep for 25 years to regain their powers.

Meanwhile a young woman, Sydney, is doing a magazine article on ‘Artemis’ an online dating service run by a mysterious, beautiful woman named ‘Ana.’ This organization also, as it happens, net-casts ‘The Vampire Web’ live videos in which a group of girl-vampires tie a nearly naked man down in a dungeon and drink his blood from cuts all over his body. (It is never explained why they would want to do this; the only possible explanation I can guess is that they have grown so arrogant that they want to boast how easily they do this and get away with it?) Sydney sees the net-cast as Sam, her chauvinistic hunky photographer is a fan, fascinated by it. But Sydney finds it disgusting.

She does not find ‘Ana’ disgusting at all, indeed as is usual in these movies featuring femme vampires, there is strong bisexual/lesbian leanings among the vampiresses and any attractive babe who falls into their orbit. Ana is convinced that Sydney is the perfect candidate for their ‘repository’ girl. But while vampires in this version of the legend can simply take blood from victims by force, the ‘repository’ must willingly, freely, agree to fill her role. Thus Ana must come to Sydney in her dreams as well as in person in attempts to seduce her.

Sydney consults a tarot-reader who gets so upset when she reads the cards that she can’t even tell Sydney what’s in store for her. Sydney also starts watching the Vampire Web net-casts, and in an odd turnaround (and a nice semi-creepy, seductive moment) the vampiresses can see Sydney through her computer web-cam; the lead vampiress unmasks, looking straight into the camera, and it’s Ana; Sydney is sure that Ana can see her.

Sydney is afraid, but drawn to Ana as well.

Meanwhile, Van Helsing sits in his study, discussing these matters with his pupil, a young, rather gay guy who is hip to ‘the internet’ whereas Van Helsing has never heard of an online dating service and has to have it explained to him. But he does have an ace in the hole, an associate rather like the Harvey Keitel character ‘Wolf’ in Pulp Fiction – an almost elderly, frail looking man, who very elegantly dispatches the vampiresses while on the hunt for Ana. By now Van Helsing has identified ‘Ana’ as ‘Anastasia’ a vampiress his grandfather tracked from Konigsberg to St Petersburg in 1906. But what Van Helsing doesn’t yet know is who the ‘repository’ might be, and how to find her and prevent her from succumbing to the persuasions of the vampiress before it’s too late.

There is a final confrontation in the dungeon, as the hapless male victims of the vampiresses, now become bloodthirsty ghouls, battle with the elegant guy – he manages to destroy all of them, and the vampiresses also, until Ana catches him and kills him. Ana then has Van Helsing in her power, and is about to crush him as well, while the two have the traditional discussion of whether vampires are part of the natural order, as Ana insists, or whether they are a violation of the laws of Nature and God, which is Van Helsing’s opinion. Just as Ana is about to twist off Van Helsing’s head, Sydney whimpers (why I don’t know, she’s seen plenty of violence in this scene already) and Ana turns to her, distracted just long enough for Van Helsing to stab Ana in the heart with a crucifix-dagger, his choicest weapon.

Ana falls back and dies, and Van Helsing leaves Sydney to grieve for her. But Sydney kisses Ana just before the last emanation of life-force leaves her, and so receives the essence of the sect, becoming the repository. Van Helsing doesn’t realize this, though, and now Sydney is primed to be a sort of super-vampire, Ana reborn. This sort of final-frame renewal, the last innocent victim turning vampire herself, is the traditional end to the sex-vampire film; the earliest example I know of is Roman Polansky’s parody, The Fearless Vampire Killers, or Pardon Me, But Your Fangs are in My Neck from 1967 (starring his wife Sharon Tate as the victim turned vampiress, and Polansky himself as the vampire-hunter’s assistant who gets bitten in the final frame).

The cast is quite good-looking for their parts. Sydney and Ana are both impressive, both beautiful in just the right way. The elegant killer is a real treat, funny at first, convincingly deadly later on. David Carradine is his usual self, a rather mediocre actor, but it’s great to see him, still around, and he has an impressive screen presence. I don’t really buy him as Van Helsing, and he never convinces me that he’s an expert scholar on anything. But he is a name, and I can see why he has fans.

It’s a shame it was shot on video, stage-bound as it is; with film, and a budget that would’ve allowed for exterior shooting and more expansive scenes, the cast really could have shone.

One interesting twist on the vampire scenes between Ana and Sydney is that they are all in Sydney’s dreams. This leaves a slight ambiguity, or rather it lets the filmmakers have it both ways: Ana gets to kiss Sydney, even to the extent of biting her lip and licking the blood off; and yet since this is in a dream, Sydney is not really ‘bitten.’ The bit about the ‘repository’ is a new twist on the legend to me, and I don’t know whether Sydney must be a vampiress herself to do this, or whether she must be a virgin (the role is compared to the Virgin Mary in Christian myth) or what.

As a sex-vampire video, it’s a bit disappointing, it doesn’t go very far; there are some quick cuts of the girls licking strawberry syrup off the male victims in the dungeon on the net-casts, and Ana and Sydney have some close-up kisses. Ana never, as I recall, gets to don the fake fangs. This is unfortunate, or maybe not: in the couple of shots of the other girls with fake fangs, the prosthetics are not too well done, leaving them with the look of massive, goofy overbites.

As a movie in general, it has a static feeling, mostly because there are only 7 sets, and we just cut from one to another. There is a little camera movement, but it’s typical modern movement, with the actors mostly static. Nothing like Buñuel did in even his cheap Mexican productions. But then, I can’t expect Buñuel here, can I? Ah, what old Luis could have done with something like this – a surreal masterpiece, quite subversive and funny.

The music is good – a few tracks of songs from local bands, maybe, and cut to almost-music-video montages. Editing is the chief tool of the filmmaking here, as they try to cut their way around the limitations of the cheap sets and lack of overall movement. Some cuts are quite clever. The editor did a good job, and the director provided enough coverage to let it happen. I imagine the screenplay was constructed with this in mind, as well.

Did I like it? Hmm, that’s hard to say. I would say that I was saddened to see the first scene, the video, the TV soap-opera level of acting and dialogue. But there were not obvious flubs, nothing to embarrass, and the whole cast looked right. The action was poor, the sex-bites I guess were the most disappointing, these are the scenes that a production like this are built on. But I’ve been writing a lot of words on this, so I can’t say I hated it. Thumbs up – considering what it is – I guess.

(5 April 2009)

Bachanales Sexuelles

Bachanales Sexuelles

Hi Aki,

Today I watched Bachanales Sexuelles, an early 1970s movie from Jean Rollin. He directed this one under his ‘Michel Gentil’ pseudonym that he used for a lot of his porn films.

And this is a soft-core porno. Story involves a secret sex-cult ruled over by the tyrannical Malvine in an 18th-century chateau. Somebody from the cult has stolen pictures from Malvine and is publishing stories revealing the cult’s activities, and Malvine is determined to uncover the traitor and punish him. All she can glean from his publisher, however, is his address.

What Malvine doesn’t know yet is that the apartment in question is now inhabited by the nameless man’s niece Valerie. She got a message from her uncle saying he’d gone to New York for 6 months and asking her to apartment sit for him. But in the huge apartment, adorned with posters for Rollin’s famous vampire movies (maybe it was shot in Rollin’s own apartment?) Valerie feels nervous, so she invites her best pal Sophie to come share the bed with her. Of course a sex scene ensues.

Later that night two women in ninja outfits (one blue, one white) break into the apartment and abduct Sophie. Valerie is so drunk she sleeps through it, but Sophie manages to call her friend Frederic before she is taken. So here comes Fred, who suspects Sophie was playing a trick on him, so he gets in bed with her – only to find out that ‘Sophie’ is actually Valerie. (Of course, a sex scene follows.)

Meanwhile Sophie is dragged before Malvine in the chateau. She tries to tell them she’s not Valerie, but no good; Malvine orders her tortured. Of course the torments get a couple of the cult members excited, so they have to have sex.

Since Sophie won’t talk, Malvine sends Jenny to the apartment disguised as a maid to search out the photos that the mysterious traitor has stolen. Jenny runs into the real Valerie and Fred – of course a sex scene follows. Then the uncle’s real maid appears, and a French maid catfight ensues! At least they get the truth out of Jenny, that she is there for the photos, and the truth is that these photos are blackmail pix that Malvine uses to enforce her wicked will over her acolytes. Fred, who has by accident found the stash where the photo negatives are hidden, lets Jenny burn her incriminating pictures, and in turn Jenny gives them the address of the chateau.

Fred and Valerie go to the chateau. Meanwhile in the picture’s one true Rollin-scene, Malvine is out on the grounds shooting a pistol at some mannequins dressed as women and men, and finally addresses one female mannequin dressed as a man, calling it traitor, telling it she will unmask it at tonight’s ceremony, then fuck him before she murders him. She proceeds to kiss the dummy on the lips and shoot it in the crotch. Truly a demented, surreal scene that lacks only some weird colored lighting to rank in the Rollin hall of fame.

Some more shenanigans follow, and at last at the big orgy-ceremony, Valerie recognizes her uncle, Fred burns all the negatives, and the cultists all flee like vampires at daybreak, leaving only the uncle, a couple of sadist acolytes the uncle guns down, Fred, the twin ninjas, and Valerie and Sophie along with the newest adept. These last three run for their lives and sanity; Fred hangs around to make out with the twins (who also appeared in one of Rollin’s vampire movies he shot under his own name) and the uncle proceeds to do Malvine before, presumably, killing her.

Rollin at his best shows a poetical, surreal appreciation of setting and landscapes. He can make a Paris street look like a rundown street in a forsaken city on an alien planet, without any sort of budget. He loves colored light, and weirdness. He is famous for his vampire films, but how he came to make them is significant: he wanted to make surreal poetry films, but nobody would give him money for them. He did happen to know a couple of theater-chain owners who showed sex films at their theaters, so they said, ‘Put in some naked girls so we can show them at our theaters, and we’ll give you money for production.’ So was born La Vampire Nue his first feature, which he calls ‘the first French lesbian vampire movie,’ even though Roger Vadim had made Blood and Roses some years before. So he went on to do a series of vampire and horror movies with generous nudity, and got a famous French comic strip artist (Drouillet, I think) to draw posters, and those posters are glorious – they’re the reason I first became interested in Rollin’s movies.

Rollin had a gift for the striking image, the disturbing scene. His best films are like fairy tales from Jung. He likes things like circuses and the monsters of his infancy – the ghouls, werewolves, vampires, and so forth. His weakest point is always pace, which is always slow as grass growing. But part of the effect his films have lies in this slow, slow pace – it drives the audience to think deeply on what they see, and start creating scenarios on their own. You always see more in a Rollin film than he puts on the screen, in part because, bored to death, you are mentally trying to make a better story out of what he gives you. How can a man waste such great images on non-stories and nothing?

When Rollin lingers on an image, it does something to me. I find I have to ‘make sense’ of it somehow; I have to conjure up a reason why the image is onscreen so long. In part this comes from an assumption that the filmmaker is rational and does nothing without a valid artistic reason (as opposed to a practical or commercial reason – for example, a low-budget filmmaker might need to stretch every scene so as to meet acceptable feature length).

But it also comes from a phenomenon like the one we experience when we speak a word over and over again. The word loses its meaning and becomes a sound; the sound begins to strike us as strange, weird; eventually the sound itself suggests some other meaning.

Say a movie has a quick shot of a clock on the wall. Then it cuts back to the main action. OK, the cutaway tells us what time it is, and that’s the ‘reason why’ they put in the shot of the clock. But what if the shot of the clock stays onscreen for a long time? Well, it can’t be just to tell us what time it is, we figured that out already. So we start to look at the clock, what make it is, its details. We start to hear the ticking, if the clock ticks. We start to wonder about time itself. We watch the pendulum swing, or the second hand turn around.

Rollin didn’t just give us shots of clocks, he charged his images with religious and other iconography. There seems to be intrinsic meaning in those shots.

Here’s another reason why Rollin gave us so many lingering shots of things, and shots of landscapes. Rollin was dealing with taboo subject matter in most of his movies, and he had to be careful of the censors. If he couldn’t show directly what he wanted, he could show other parts of a scene (like the clock on the wall, an example I’m just making up here) while the soundtrack carries on. And if he gives us enough time on these innocuous, censor-save shots, he encourages us to imagine what is happening. So whether it’s sex, or sadism, or some violent act of a ghoul werewolf or vampire, the setting as mute witness to it all inspires us to create what could not be directly filmed. (This approach is doubly valuable in an age when different countries have different levels of tolerance and artistic liberty; it allows the local versions to be more or less coherent and of feature length.)

And yet one more reason Rollin would have liked these shots. Generally Rollin cast his female leads strictly by their looks. Did their look arouse, interest, intrigue Rollin? As a result, he hired a lot of women who couldn’t act; Rollin wasn’t much of an actors’ director in any event, and the low budget shooting he was condemned to obey meant quick setups and very few takes – if a shot was technically OK (and sometimes even if it wasn’t) then no retake was called for.

This means that the performances in Rollin’s movies were pretty much all dreadful. The best he could get out of his performers was a certain look, and to dress them in a certain way, and more or less ask them to move in a certain way. So in a Rollin movie, you don’t get a good conventional, classical drama ‘scene’ with lines of dialogue, speeches, and emotions. When he tries for such things, Rollin finds his cast just isn’t up to it, and there isn’t time to coach them and do retakes and full coverage.

Later on he drifted into softcore, then hardcore sex films, which are maybe a bit more honest, but in Bachanales Sexuelles at least, the lighting is not up to his usual standard. On the other hand the pace is somewhat better, as the sex scene gives him something to cover and cut, and us something to watch, and it’s a lot more detailed than he gets with his vampires.

It’s interesting to compare this sex film to his vampire films in other ways. The sex cult could easily be a vampire clutch, and Malvine rather than it’s ‘high priestess,’ might as well be the Vampire Queen of La Vampire Nue or his other vampire films. Fucking, or drinking blood, what’s the difference here?

One difference involves tension. In the vampire film, while the not-so-innocent heroines sit around waiting for … we know what: the vampires to drink their blood … we can feel tension. Nothing is happening, but we know what’s going to happen, and we know the girls won’t like it. In the sex film the not-so-innocent heroines sit around waiting for … we know what: the next sex scene with the next person to enter the apartment. But here we know the girls will like it, and so there is not a story-based tension. Instead the tension is more based in the audience, as we fret and wish for the film to get on with it and show us some goodies.

I’ve never seen any of Rollin’s hardcore that he did later in the 70s and into the 80s. I wonder if they are any better.

(21 March 2009)

The Wicker Man

Hi Aki,

Last night I saw the original Wicker Man, a film that is surely a great candidate for a remake: great cast, intriguing idea, but bad direction (rather, wrong-headed direction) which spoilt it all, almost. Hard to really complain with any movie that mocks a strait-laced Christian prude who can’t get it on with naked Brit Ekland dancing in the next room begging him to come join her, or the couples fucking on the lawns, or naked girls jumping over fire, or Ingrid Pitt with a come-hither look as she lounges in her brass tub…

So here’s the story, and I’ll be spoiling it for you, as fair warning.

A Scots police sargent gets an anonymous letter saying that a girl, Rowan Morrison, has gone missing on Summerisle, and enclosing a photo. The cop flies his seaplane out to the island, but all the locals swear they’ve never heard of the girl, and don’t recognize the photo. But queer things are afoot in this island, and the people are clearly stone-walling him.

As he continues to investigate, the cop finds that Christianity has been abandoned here, and the whole populace have gone back to paganism with weird, mad rites (at least they look mad to him). He is sure the girl has been murdered, but finding her grave at last, he digs it up to discover – a dead hare in the coffin.

Act 2 ends on the early morning of the May Day festival. The cop researches in the library on the festival as it was practiced in middle ages, and leaps to the conclusion that last year’s crop failed, and that Rowan is alive … and will be ritually murdered in the course of today’s mayday.

This is the end of Act 2 because the detective has solved the case; it is also, in a story with a bad ending, the ‘bright moment’ when he is closest to understanding what is going on. He now knows what happened to the girl, who is behind it, and why.

He leaps in his seaplane to fly back to the mainland and get help, but the plane won’t start – sabotaged.

So he spends the morning and early afternoon going in every house and building, searching for the girl. An action montage of this search is sequence 7. He doesn’t find her, and instead steals the innkeeper’s Mayday costume – the Fool – and inflitrates the procession. More action as he is mute witness to the festivities, which end at the beach – where the girl Rowan is revealed, dressed in a white shift and tied to a post, clearly meant to be sacrificed.

(It’s possible that this moment is second curtain, and that ‘She’s not dead!’ could be the midpoint. I didn’t time it out.)

He races up to her. The girl is frightened, and begs him to save her. She says she knows the way through the caves behind them, and with the island mob coming up from the beach on the cop’s heels, there’s no other way to go.

Rowan leads the cop through a maze of caves, always upward. The islanders are behind them, but he throws her flower crown down a side-cave and tricks them. Cop and girl reach the top, and climb out on the hilltop…

End of sequence 7, twist into 8:

… to find the island leaders waiting for them. Rowan runs down to Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee in a bad wig) and asks, ‘Did I play it all right?’ ‘My child,’ he answers, hugging her, ‘you played it beautifully!’

Summerisle proceeds to explain the facts to the cop. This is a clever inversion of the traditional scene where the detective gathers all the chief suspects and rehashes the mystery, ending with ‘And you did it!’ Instead it’s the chief suspects who rehash the mystery for the detective, ending with ‘And you’re the sacrifice!’ (which is also a candidate for the twist; I often find things like climaxes, twists, are doubled, but the pairs are placed very close together – in this case, in the same scene. General examples would be the A storyline and B storyline will have their climaxes close together, B then A)

‘Our crops did fail, disastrously. The sacrifice of an animal is good, but a child is better. The sacrifice of a child is better, but better still the sacrifice of the right kind of adult.’

‘One who came to us willing,’ says one sexy wench. ‘One who is the representative of a king,’ says another; ‘One who is a virgin,’ says Brit. ‘One who is a fool!’

This scene is a trifle too long and wordy, complicated by the cop’s assertion that do what they will, they will never shake his faith, and he spits some of his catechism to them. To which Lord Summerisly replies, ‘And so we give you the greatest boon of your own faith, which is martyrdom … you will be able to sit with the saints in Paradise.’

The cop is then stripped by the sexy women, his wounds and dirt washed, his hands anointed, and dressed in a white sacrificial robe. He is then carried up to the bluff where at last is revealed The Wicker Man, a towering figure (Burning Man’s effigy is based on this movie’s close) in which are already tied up chickens and geese, pigs, a lamb, a cow. The cop is tied up in the effigy’s chest, and the whole set afire.

As the sun sinks, and the islanders dance and sing (the movie is perilously close to a musical, believe it or not) with joy on their faces, Wicker Man burns, and the cops spits and screams scripture, until at last the effigy collapses in flames, the sun sinks, and the credtis roll.

I didn’t time it, as I say, but my guesstimate is that it would be a page, 1.5 pages, to find out the seaplane is kaput;

• 1.5 pages of house to house search
• 1.5 pages at the inn to get into the costume and knock out the innkeeper
• 2, 3 pages of rituals
• a page of running through the caves
• 2-3 pages of confrontation with the islanders as truth comes out
• 1.5 pages of burning (maybe call it 2 pages with anointing, washing)

Running time is about 90 minutes.

Chief mistake in direction is to place us more in sympathy with the pagans than the cop. So we are laughing at the fool as he refuses to go on over and fuck Ms Ekland, that he can’t enjoy ogling the teen girls leaping naked over the bonfire, or offer to towel off the busty Ms Pitt, or even to get a clue. Thus, we can have no sense of the wrongness he feels he’s seeing, or the threat, and fear for the ‘madness’ of what is going on in this isle.

Not sure what writer Anthony Scheaffer had in mind. He might himself have been mocking the traditional Catholic, he might have considered the story prophetic at a time of rising paganism, back to nature movements, and the collapse of worship at traditional churches. Movie audiences would have been almost all boomers, hippies and the like, who had cheered the sexually promiscuous Dracula and mocked the virginal boyfriends in the Hammer films. But this makes the movie a more intellectual game, and to pitch us over to the islanders’ way of seeing things would require a total rewrite, letting us in on the secret from the start, and seeing the cop as a potential threat, and the game as dangerous if he manages to get back to the mainland and expose them.

Anyway – you see that act 3 is very short, and there’s very little that happens after the twist. Basically: he gets stripped, washed, and taken to the effigy, and burnt alive.

(26 January 2009)

Soufle au Coeur (Murmur of the Heart)

Hi Aki,

Tonight it was another Louis Malle movie, Soufle au Coeur or Murmur of the Heart – the term for an arrhythmic heart condition which the boy seems to have.

Another coming of age film. Another look back, this time post-war, 1954 in Dijon, France. The French are fighting, and losing, in Vietnam. Young Laurent is a rich kid, spoiled, and the baby. He has two older brothers who are even bigger brats than he is. He is at least smart in school. At least with literature and philosophy. Like the kid in Au Revoir les Enfants he goes to private Catholic school.

Like the other Malle films, this one has a very loose structure, not Hollywood in any sense. A great many small scenes, fragmentary, add up to a portrait of this kid. There is no real structure, but the illusion of a structure is provided by the ‘climax scene.’ This is the scene that when you look back on it, the whole movie has been moving towards – it just didn’t move that way in the Hollywood sense.

In Hollywood all this movement would be on the surface. The hero would say, ‘I want this and I’m going to get it’ and they others would say, ‘You’ll never get it while we’re around’ and then they would struggle and fight over it until the hero either gets it or fails definitively.

OK, so to set this up, let’s look at it backwards the way Malle must have ended up doing: this is the story of a 14 year old boy whose first full sexual experience is with his mother.

So the structure has two sides: the long build up to the incest scene, and the much shorter aftermath.

Malle wants to say, ‘Yes it happened, but it didn’t cripple the kid, it wasn’t bad, it didn’t leave him fixated on his mother.’

So the aftermath scene has the mother telling the kid, ‘It was a beautiful tender moment and nothing to regard with any shame or disgust, it was love, and it will never happen again. It will be our secret, and we will treasure it.’ After this, the same night, the mother falls asleep, the kid gets dressed and goes to the room of a girl he’s been wooing (they are at a spa to take the waters, as part of the treatment for the soufle au coeur (which of course has a double meaning) – isolating mother and son in this vacation setting is part of the strategy to push them into a heightened extraordinary intimacy). He tries to attack helene, but she repulses him. He shrugs. ‘What room is Daphne in?’ he asks, and goes to her, and Daphne does not repulse him. These two scenes tell us that the kid is still interested in girls his own age and not fixated on mom. In the morning he goes back to the room he shares with his mom, and finds his brothers and father have come to visit.

Caught red-handed sneaking back after not being in his room all night, the kid doesn’t know what to do. The father seems mad at first, but his brothers just laugh, and then the father laughs, and the kid laughs, and the mother laughs, and the whole family laughs together. This tells us that the family is not going to be split apart by this secret but they can go on. Indeed, this is the only moment when the whole family seems to be enjoying one another and not fighting – it is as if the tension of the boy’s being a virgin has now left, and that ghost is removed; but I doubt Malle wanted to say, ‘A little incest helps a family’ rather just ‘It didn’t ruin anybody.’

The long buildup involves many many scenes, and they get a little tiresome, as Malle is really pushing it – he shows Laurent and both his brothers as real spoiled rich bastards, and I can’t say I liked any of them or enjoyed their hijinks, though maybe teenagers would enjoy the fantasy of being a brat like that.

The older boys (who are only about 17 and 18 themselves) take young Laurent to a brothel to have his first sex experience, but just as Laurent is on top of the very nice young whore the madam has chosen for him, and he’s going along nicely, in come his drunk brothers and drag him off! So he doesn’t climax, and only counts himself half a virgin at this point.

Then he is after some other girls, but is rather a bashful fellow, just not saying anything then leaping on a girl. But he’s regarded as cute by all the girls, so they don’t get too mad at him.

An interesting strategy Malle uses is to make the mother foreign (Italian), as though he couldn’t imagine a bourgeois French mother going along with it. But I think an American could imagine a French mother doing it, so I think that the strategy works, kind of: the mother being a bit of a free spirit, rather young (35) and Italian kind of makes it ‘all right’ the way we can accept fantasy when it is set in a foreign country or the past.

There was no doubt a lot of discussion and negotiation over how to handle the incest scene. As usual with Malle, the dramatic moments – sex with the mother and then with Daphne afterward – are not what he wants to focus on, so he cuts past both of them. You’ve been in writing groups, you know what showing the script around is like. I’ll bet that the mother was in earlier drafts accepting of the son’s advances on that fatal night. But people reacted in shock and disbelief. The version might even have made it through preproduction into production, and the actress balked, and Malle had to negotiate with her.

So it happens on the night of Bastille Day, and mother is very drunk. Not quite passed out, she responds and kisses her son passionately, many kisses on his head and cheeks before we cut away to the aftermath. But her eyes are closed, she has just broken up with her boyfriend (yes she was having an affair, and son and mother discuss the affair and breakup in a scene that is used to advance the tension between them and bring them more intimacy as one of the final stages of the buildup to the incest scene) – and so we can’t be sure she is even totally aware of what she is doing, does she know who she is with, is she completely in control of her actions? This tends to exculpate her in the eyes of the audience who would otherwise condemn her.

Malle knows he’s dealing with dynamite here, a shocking taboo, and so he has to handle the buildup very carefully.

The movie thus is a good one to study to watch several times if you are interested in the strategies Malle used to try to make this most-shocking, taboo act come off as natural and acceptable and even beautiful.

One final note of interest is the credit given to a co-director. The final credit is ‘written and directed by Louis Malle’ but a few title screens before that there is acknowledgment of the ‘co-metteur en scene’ and I don’t really know what that means, but it is a woman’s name. Maybe she helped with the child actors, which is what I guessed when I saw the title, but at the end now I’m wondering if she was not trying to give the woman’s point of view, and the mother’s point of view. Malle provides the personal recollection or fantasy (I don’t know how autobiographical this might be, but the kid in Au Revoir Les Enfants also had a young, very beautiful mother to whom he was overly attached, and a distant indeed never-seen, father) of the boy.

The whole film is dubbed, which gives it an odd feeling of performances being a little off; but again I was reading subtitles and not seeing the faces too much. The main kid actor can’t act too well, like the kids in Malle’s other films, and so we get the blank looks all too often – they were kind of annoying me in this one. It just seemed like bad acting, bad directing.

The old Hollywood movies when they had child stars, they had kids who could act, but only in the hammy, fake Hollywood style. Malle comes after the Method school changes everything, as well as the new wave, so when he casts kids he’s mostly condemned to amateurs and about the most he can manage is to get a kid who looks right, and then hope that the mosaic of the scenes in the screenplay will add up to a sense of the character that the actor can’t provide.

(written around 10 March 2009)