USA

The African Queen (1951)

André Crous

USA
4.5*

Director:
John Huston
Screenwriters:
James Agee
John Huston
Director of Photography:
Jack Cardiff

Running time: 104 minutes

Today, John Huston’s African Queen might seem tame and innocent, but I can imagine that it was quite a different story when it was released in 1951. It tells the story of a very tightly wound church organist in German East Africa (present-day Tanzania, Burundi and Rwanda), a woman named Rose Sayer, who in 1914, on the eve of the First World War, flees her small village in the jungle when the Germans are rounding up the villagers with a scorched-earth policy to turn them into soldiers and thus protect the area from outside forces.

The only way out is with Charlie Allnut, a Canadian mailman who is used to travelling from one village to the next on his little fishing boat, the “African Queen”. He is played by Humphrey Bogart, and Katharine Hepburn stars as Rose Sayer. In the very first scene of the film, during a service at the church of Rose’s brother, it is made clear that Allnut and Rose are quite different. While she plays the organ, dressed like something out of a Victorian novel, and sings with her brother, who tries to conduct the congregation from the pulpit, the villagers merely mumble along. The service is crudely interrupted by the loud steam whistle of Allnut’s boat, and we see him interacting with the locals in their native tongue.

So, when these two board the same boat, it seems unlikely that it would be the start of a beautiful friendship. And yet, soon enough, we discover that they both have strong, assertive characters that are nonetheless willing to compromise. Most importantly, they are both very likeable. Rose refuses to stay hidden in the forest until the war is over and insists that they make their way downriver to a large lake, where they would blow up the “Louisa”, the German ship patrolling the body of water, and thus make their escape.

Much of the film was shot on location, a remarkable feat for the time – as it would still be today. The cinematography is gorgeous, as is to be expected from Jack Cardiff; the rivers are either sapphire-blue or pitch-black, and the greens of the lush forest foliage are spectacular. For some of the more animated scenes on the river, such as those in which Charlie and Rose have to make their way across the rapids, rear projection was used, making for a less than credible combination of real and staged materials, but luckily these scenes are kept to a minimum. Rather, our attention is directed at Rose, who surprises (and is surprised herself at this revelation) with genuine excitement at the dangers they face together: “I never dreamed that any mere physical experience could be so stimulating!”

How she deals with the river and the quirks of her companion, especially his fondness for Gordon’s Gin, is entertaining because we like to see what conflict results from their inescapably intimate living conditions on the boat. While I didn’t much care for the brief scene in which they are apparently “drunk on love”, including Charlie’s imitation of the animals in and out of the water, their romantic camaraderie is rather affecting.

It was a pleasant surprise to find Peter Bull, who starred as the Russian Ambassador in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, as the German captain of the “Louisa”. His deadpan delivery of very contrasting ideas are hilarious and fit in superbly with the kind of humour that Hepburn and Bogart do so well, and it is a testament to the acting ability of Hepburn and Bogart that they leisurely carry almost the entire film on their own.

With the exception of the rear projection, which is below par, as well as a scene in which the main characters are attacked by buzzing insects, both scenes visibly more defective because of the film’s use of colour, The African Queen receives full marks in every aspect of the film’s production and entertainment potential. Hepburn’s tongue is not as sharp as in some of her other films (such as Bringing Up Baby, and The Philadelphia Story in particular), but while she certainly stands her ground against the dry wit of Humphrey Bogart, she does not overpower him, which makes the romantic union all the more convincing.

New York, I Love You (2009)

André Crous

USA
3.5*

Directors: 
Various (see review)
Screenwriters:
Various
Directors of Photography:
Various

Running time: 102 minutes

How does one review an anthology film? For me, the most important question, given the fact that the film is released as a single feature rather than as separate short films, is whether the world presented by the different films make up a single identifiable world. In other words, do the different stories somehow draw on the same reality? Is there consistency between the different storylines? The answer to this question is a very definite yes.

A thematic follow-up to the 2006 film, Paris, je t’aime, which consisted of 18 short films, the New York version is more streamlined (only 10 shorts), which facilitates better interaction between the different parts. Also, whereas the Parisian stories were all very clearly demarcated by titles, New York, I Love You sometimes cuts between stories and characters. This approach allows the film to feel much more like a single world, as opposed to the many different realities in producer Emmanuel Benbihy’s previous film in this “Cities of Love” series, which will include upcoming anthologies on, among others, Rio de Janeiro, Shanghai and Jerusalem.

The film is structured similarly to Paris, je t’aime in the sense that every episode is directed by a different director with his or her own screenplay, actors and crew, and the episodes are separated by transitions during which we get to see a few images of the city in the title. Having 10 shorts, as opposed to the 18 of the previous film, certainly gives the producer and the editor tighter control over the flow of the film, and while none of the episodes equals the best ones in the Paris film (the divorced elderly couple in the restaurant; an American woman in Paris), none of them is as bad as the worst ones in the previous film either. (Do you remember the vampire story? Or the Chinese hair salon? Some of the shorts in Paris, je t’aime were downright amateurish.)

Despite the many different faces behind the camera, ranging from Fatih Akin, Mira Nair and Brett Ratner to people I’d never heard of before, such as Joshua Marston and Shunji Iwai, the film is consistently funny, and the twists and turns of the different episodes are constantly cute and fuzzy without being syrupy sentimental. But make no mistake, Marston’s film, which comes last, has the same mixture of laugh-out-loud comedy and bittersweet love that made the final episode in Paris, je t’aime – the American woman in Paris, by Alexander Payne – such a treat. Of course, big “New York” directors like Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese were not involved, although Allen might have made a very appropriate contribution. These two directors had already participated in a New York anthology project in the 1980s called New York Stories, with Francis Ford Coppola as the third contributor. The reputation of these three directors notwithstanding, I think New York, I Love You far surpasses the bar set by New York Stories.

Apart from Joshua Marston’s story (which he wrote himself), in which an elderly couple played by the always-ready-with-an-answer Eli Wallach and the lovely Cloris Leachman shuffle towards the pier, lovingly complaining about this and that on what proves to be a very special day, I also enjoyed an episode (directed by Wen Jiang) with Hayden Christensen, who picks the pocket of Andy Garcia, before getting the tables turned on him, and two episodes in which one person tries to pick someone else up on the street – the first stars Ethan Hawke and Maggie Q, and the other Robin Wright Penn and Chris Cooper. These two episodes were both directed by Yvan Attal and strike a wonderfully naughty yet beautiful note.

In a film such as this one, a short will be out of place if it lacks the properties common to the others. The only film that truly feels out of place, and whose 10 minutes go by much more slowly than is the case with any of the others, is the short by Shekhar Kapur, starring Shia LaBeouf and Julie Christie. It is a dry daydream and doesn’t have the wit nor the energy of the other films.

The shorts have the same idea behind all of them: The theme of love is evident in a story that starts off in a certain direction before some twist is revealed, often to the great pleasure of the viewer, who has been duped by the director. The films all fit together very well (except for Kapur’s film) and are a valuable addition to the Cities of Love series.

I look forward to the next instalment.

Directors (in chronological order):
Randall Balsmeyer (transitions)
Wen Jiang
Mira Nair
Shunji Iwai
Yvan Attal
Brett Ratner
Allen Hughes
Shekhar Kapur
Natalie Portman
Fatih Akin
Joshua Marston

Death and the Maiden (1994)

André Crous

UK/France/USA
4*

Director:
Roman Polanski
Screenwriters:
Rafael Yglesias
Ariel Dorfman
Director of Photography:
Tonino Delli Colli

Running time: 102 minutes

Roman Polanski’s career as a filmmaker will always be best remembered for Chinatown and Rosemary’s Baby, but his underrated Death and the Maiden is a stunning film, in large part thanks to the work of Ariel Dorfman, on whose play it is based.

The film is set in an unnamed country in South America “after the fall of the dictatorship”. This could be any number of countries, and since Dorfman has Chilean origins one would expect the country to be Chile and the dictator to be Pinochet, but even if this were true, it has no real bearing on our interpretation of the film. Paulina Escobar (Sigourney Weaver) and her husband Gerardo (Stuart Wilson) are living in near isolation, and she becomes tense every time a strange car pulls up to their house. On the radio, Paulina hears that Gerardo has been appointed the new head of the government’s tribunal that will look into human rights abuses during under the former military junta. However, she remains unconvinced that the guilty individuals will be made to pay sufficiently for what they did.

It is a stormy night, and the power goes out. So, too, do the phone lines. Gerardo is brought back home by a friendly stranger after his car had got a flat tyre. Later in the evening, the friendly stranger appears again: Gerardo had forgotten to take his spare tyre. The friendly stranger makes some very flattering comments about Gerardo and his role in the upcoming investigations, and Gerardo asks the man in to have a drink with him. Hearing the two of them, Paulina flees from the house. In the man’s car, she finds a cassette of Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” String Quartet and decides to push the car down a cliff into the rough seas.

All of this might sound rather odd, but the thrust of Paulina’s mental processes is soon revealed when she goes back to her and Gerardo’s house, ties up the stranger, who is called Dr Roberto Miranda (Ben Kingsley), and accuses him of having raped her several times, while the Schubert Quartet was playing in the background, during her time as a political prisoner. She was always blindfolded, but she claims to recognise Miranda’s voice, his smell, the expressions he uses, his quotations from Nietzsche and, most importantly, his love of Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden”.

These three characters – Paulina, Gerardo and Dr Miranda – are the only people we ever see in the film, except for a prologue and an epilogue in a concert hall, where the title piece is performed. The actors’ performances are all very strong and make the film a wholly dramatic experience.

Viewers will vacillate between trust and distrust in Paulina’s assessment of Miranda’s guilt. Is Paulina, who has clearly been emotionally and mentally affected by her ordeal more than a decade ago, someone whom we can trust? Or is she just out for revenge? Even in the film’s climactic scene (an amazing piece of acting: nearly three minutes in close-up), things are not as clear-cut as they seem to be, making this journey towards the truth so much darker, because we have to decide for ourselves whether we have not been deceived one last time.

The strength of Death and the Maiden lies in the screenwriters’ ability to keep us guessing throughout, while still maintaining absolute control over the credibility of the admittedly theatrical world we see before us. Almost the entire film is set in the Escobars’ house (clearly in a studio), but the camera work by Tonino Delli Colli and the editing by Hervé de Luze create the necessary tension in concert with the actors’ performances. One minor weakness is the house’s lighting: Although the power is supposed to be out, every inch of the house’s interior is lit, and when characters throw five shadows, you know things are a bit fake.

Bambi (1942)

André Crous

USA
3*

Director: 
David Hand
Screenwriters:
Larry Morey
Perce Pearce
Gustaf Tenggren
Director of Photography:
Max Morgan

Running time: 70 minutes

I grew up without ever watching Bambi. I had heard about the fate of Bambi’s mother, of course, and I’ve known about it for 20 years, but having been exposed to many other Disney films over the years – The Little Mermaid, Aladdin and The Lion King, all of which had villains that really scared me, not to mention the film made of Pinocchio – I decided to wait it out. The wait turned into more than a decade, and now that I have finally seen the film, I am a little conflicted about my response.

It is a film of its time, coming shortly after the groundbreaking work initiated by Walt Disney in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and continued, in spectacular fashion, in Fantasia (1940). Its animation rather resembles a moving picture book and very often the animals are the only elements of the frame that are in movement. As the deer play among the tall grass, the grass barely moves, and even though the treetops seem to sway, the grass remains firmly rigid. But these are not my primary objections to the film.

The film starts with the birth of Bambi, a young stag, deep in the forest. He is lying next to his mother, but his father is absent. And his father’s absence is never explained or justified. The father is alive and well, named the Great Prince of the Forest, but he is distant – regal and silent – and only makes an appearance when his wisdom or experience is called for. Bambi’s mother isn’t very actively involved in her son’s upbringing either, and he spends most of his time – including an outdoor trip, when he says his first words! – with his friend Thumper the rabbit, whose father is mentioned repeatedly but never seen, unlike his mother. Bambi spends very little time with his mother: The most significant incident takes place at the meadow, when she warns him that danger lies beyond the forest and that he should take care.

The meadow would be the place where his mother is killed by the humans (whom we never see), but this central event of the narrative occurs offscreen, and since we hadn’t seen Bambi in his mother’s company very often, her subsequent absence in his life wasn’t going to upset our idea of his world all that much.

The most noteworthy scene in the film has to be the big forest fire that breaks out and forces many different animals to flee. The role of humans in this desperate situation is unmistakable, and it is this scene, much more than the death of Bambi’s mother, that would inspire sympathy in the viewers and make us aware of the point of view of the animals.

Without giving away too much, I must say here that the final scene, though meant to be a joyous occasion, has a very eery feel to it, since it can easily be interpreted as another beginning, similar in kind to the beginning of the film, and therefore it plants the idea that the future will be a repetition of the past.

The film has a very appropriate soundtrack, which also tells us when danger is approaching since we don’t see the humans, and I particularly enjoyed the rhythmic effect of the simultaneous appearance of raindrops on screen and “April Shower” on the audio track. However, this film is too short, and it skips over important moments (the death of Bambi’s mother; his grief; his subsequent growing up) while it focuses a long time on relatively insignificant details (playing with Thumper on the frozen lake; and his strange relationship with Flower, a young male skunk who clearly fancies him).

The death of a mother is sad, but in this case, the film cares little about her or her relationship with her son, and therefore it is difficult for the viewer to care much more, beyond a general, universal desire for innocent mothers not to get killed.

The Times of Harvey Milk (1984)

André Crous

USA
4*

Director:
Rob Epstein
Screenwriters:
Rob Epstein
Carter Wilson
Judith Coburn
Director of Photography: 
Frances Reid

Running time: 91 minutes

This film, which won the Best Documentary Oscar, has always been considered the No. 1 document that condenses the life of Harvey Milk and reminds viewers around the world of his importance in the gay rights struggle. In 2008, Milk, Gus van Sant’s fictional account of Milk’s life, with Sean Penn as the gay rights icon, heavily relied on information gleaned from this documentary by Rob Epstein, who would go on to direct an outstanding documentary on gay representation in the cinema, The Celluloid Closet.

Watching The Times of Harvey Milk, it is very clear that Dustin Lance Black, who wrote the screenplay for Van Sant’s film, was inspired not only by the content of the documentary but also by its structure; the two films have exactly the same book-ends – a tape recording of Milk’s will in case of assassination, the announcement by Dianne Feinstein that Milk and San Francisco Mayor George Moscone had been assassinated, and Milk’s famous “Hope” speech. I was a little disappointed by Black’s stencilled duplication of these parts in his screenplay for Milk instead of integrating them into the fictional quilt in some other way.

In touching interviews with many of the people in Harvey Milk’s life – though, unfortunately, many of the important ones, such as Cleve Jones, Dianne Feinstein and Scott Smith, are not included – we get a sense of Milk’s achievements and his perseverance against great resistance, especially during the debacle of Proposition 6, in his first year in office, which would have allowed the Department of Education to fire teachers who self-identified as homosexual. Here, I learned about Sally Gearhart, a gay rights activist with an intimidating intelligence, who debated Jon Briggs in a very factual manner during their televised debates, and I believe her collaboration with Milk helped to defeat the proposed anti-gay initiative. Her words on the role of fear in the campaign explain the central issue very succinctly and are still relevant to anti-gay movements today.

The film provides a lot of detail about the political co-operation between Milk and Moscone, and we can easily understand how it came to be that Harvey Milk was given the opportunity to be elected city supervisor (redistricting provided the city with a much more representative combination of politicians than had ever previously been the case).

However, the film focuses too much on the role of Dan White, who had served on the board with Milk and, after certain disagreements between him, Milk and Moscone, killed the two men. The film spends its final 20 minutes going over perceived discrimination in the trial, the jury selection and the verdict. Of course, one has to keep in mind that the film was made five years after the death of Milk and shortly before White’s release from prison (he would commit suicide a year later, in 1985). But all the talk of White, his conservative values and the lenient sentence that he was given after killing two men in a very obviously premeditated act of violence should not have taken up so much time in this documentary.

Planet Terror (2007)

André Crous

USA
3.5*

Director:
Robert Rodriguez
Screenwriter: 
Robert Rodriguez
Director of Photography: 
Robert Rodriguez

Running time: 105 minutes

It’s a bad night in Texas: The zombies are out. Planet Terror‘s take on the zombie film is much grittier (read: more steamy, more violent, more bloody and less funny) than commercial ventures such as Shaun of the Dead, and what it sets out to do it does very well. The film is made as an homage to zombie movies and the kinds of violent films shown at “grindhouse theatres” in the 1970s. In combination with Quentin Tarantino’s Deathproof, these two films constitute Grindhouse.

The film starts with a fake trailer (which would later be done for real and released under the same name) for Machete, in which one of Mexico’s Federales hacks off limbs with a machete. The trailer sets the tone for the movie we are about to see, although very quickly the main feature reveals itself to be even more blood-soaked, and while there are some moments of comedy by actors who deliver rather witty lines deadpan, the film’s dialogue overall is quite serious.

We meet a number of characters who will soon come together to defeat the zombie uprising, including gogo dancer Cherry Darling. On the night she decides to call it quits at the strip club, she runs into El Wray, a former boyfriend, at a steakhouse with the best meat in Texas. Cherry Darling is played by Rose McGowan, while Freddie Rodriguez is El Wray, who is much more talented in the art of mass murder than he lets on, especially when the victims are undead.

Bruce Willis also makes two brief appearances as a general who wants to immunise himself against the green vapour that turns everybody to zombies; he is presented in a way that evokes a kind of alienation (as far as I can remember, he never interacts with another character in the same frame).

The story, which takes place during one night, is very simple: Zombies arrive; some fight the zombies while others turn into zombies; lots of explosions and bloodletting, led mostly by the unlikely hero El Wray; survivors escape to Mexico. There is also some domestic drama with a doctor (Josh Brolin), his unfaithful wife who is also a nurse (Marley Shelton) and their young boy.

The film was made for its visual effects, and the zombies’ bubbling epidermis is consistently revolting. So too are the instances of cannibalism (although zombies don’t seem to eat other zombies, they do like the taste of human flesh) and the drops of blood on the lens of the camera. The scenes of violence are disproportionately bloody compared with the bodies being decimated, and often the bodies seem to disintegrate on impact with a slow-moving motor vehicle, releasing an amazing amount of blood that gushes in every direction.

Planet Terror contains numerous jump cuts, often timed with specific actions in the film itself, and in this way, the film diverges from the films it pretends to emulate since Rodriguez makes visible his evident manipulation of the film itself, instead of the latter being a work that is affected by random factors such as time, heat, friction, etc. Whether this is a good or a bad thing, the viewer will have to decide for himself or herself.

This world is clearly a part of the Grindhouse world that is otherwise defined by Deathproof, and a number of characters appear in both. Also, the show hosted by Jungle Julia, a character in Tarantino’s film, is mentioned here on the radio. But while Tarantino’s universe was conceivably a slightly manipulated version of a world close to our reality, Planet Terror makes a mistake when it mentions Chris Rock by name, thereby pretending both that the world is close to ours and (in being made with the conventions of a zombie film, including the presence of zombies) that it is not. Whatever the viewer’s reading of these finer points, it remains a very entertaining film, though if one took away the fire and the blood, there wouldn’t be much left standing.

Suddenly, Last Summer (1959)

André Crous

USA
5*

Director:
Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Screenwriters:
Gore Vidal
Tennessee Williams
Director of Photography:
Jack Hildyard

Running time: 114 minutes

It is truly remarkable that this film, whose subject is always implied but never mentioned by name, can have such a strong impact on a viewer who has grown up in a much less restricted era of movie-going. I knew this film from a Gore Vidal interview in The Celluloid Closet, in which he, the screenwriter, admitted that the finale was overblown, and the very visible reference to the demise of Frankenstein’s monster in the film by director James Whale was a bit over-the-top. I knew that the unseen protagonist was gay and killed because of his sexuality, so I did go into the film suspicious of the words about him, wary of things said and particularly of things unsaid. Perhaps this knowledge made me susceptible to a positive bias towards the film. On the other hand, the film pretends to look for the truth and yet persists in obscuring this most basic component of the story, always putting up a smokescreen in front of the viewer. And nonetheless, the film is intriguing from beginning to end.

A young woman named Catherine Holly has been diagnosed with dementia praecox following the death of her cousin, Sebastian Venable, at the hands of a street mob in Cabeza de Lobo, Spain, the previous summer. The reason for the death and the exact way in which he died remain a mystery until the very end, but our suspicions grow about the exact nature of the relationship between the two cousins when Sebastian’s overprotective mother, Violet, wants to have Catherine lobotomised for “babbling” about the events of Sebastian’s final hours. The doctor who is to perform this operation is Cukrowicz, who tries to piece together the puzzle from the fragments given to him by the supposedly insane Catherine and Sebastian’s snobbish mother.

While the screenwriters were obliged to remove references to homosexuality, it is significant that Montgomery Clift was chosen to play Dr Cukrowicz, whom Violet mistakes for her own son. Clift was gay, and even though nothing is intimated about his character’s sexuality, his casting could not have been unrelated to his sexuality. Perhaps that is a sweeping statement, but it makes perfect sense in this film where so much had to be suggestive rather than overt.

By means of imagery such as the Venus flytrap and the painting of Saint Sebastian, the film prepares us for the swallowing of poor Sebastian by the angry mob in the film’s final act. “Nature is not created in the image of man’s compassion”, says Dr Cukrowicz, and this statement, made early in the film, after Violet’s account of the “flesh-eating birds” that ravage the young sea turtles on the Galápagos Islands, paints a truthful though ominous picture of the world that will be revealed to us. “[T]he ones who eat flesh, the killers, inherited the earth. But then, they always do, don’t they?”

Cukrowicz is a serious man who barely ever blinks and is aware of the experimental nature of the work he does. In his very first scene, in the hospital’s operating room, director Mankiewicz heightens the tension with small details, both visual and auditory, that include a constant buzzing in the background. Katherine Hepburn is marvellously stiff-upper-lip as Violet Venable, who has a borderline incestuous obsession with her late son. The character of Catherine is the only place where the film and the story trips up, ever so slightly: She is put, under Cukrowicz’s care, in what seems to be the least protected mental institution in the world, where she roams freely, provoking all kinds of riots among both male and female patients. Elizabeth Taylor, who plays this role, is also in the unenviable position of appearing onscreen for the first time after we have spent a long and poignant scene in the company of Clift and Hepburn, and her acting (or her character) is no match for theirs.

Suddenly, Last Summer is a joy to behold, even more so today, because the care with which Vidal (and Williams, although he distanced himself from the film) removed the references to Sebastian’s homosexuality while leaving in just enough to make us wonder. The casting of Clift and the image of Sebastian being devoured by a mob of young men are equally impressive and give ample food for thought, as they imply what could not be said outright.

Lolita (1997)

André Crous

USA
2.5*

Director:
Adrian Lyne
Screenwriter:
Stephen Schiff
Director of Photography:
Howard Atherton

Running time: 137 minutes

Adrian Lyne’s 1997 adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel plays as a farce, with Jeremy Irons headlining as Humbert Humbert, the middle-aged gentleman infatuated with his teenage daughter-in-law, Dolores, aka Lolita. While the problem of paedophilia – or more accurately, hebephilia, the love of children in early puberty – is certainly serious and consequential, the film deliberately undermines its own seriousness. This self-subversion is sometimes funny, but often it is rather pointless fun. No review of Lyne’s film would be complete without reference to the Kubrick adaptation in 1962, and I shall come back to such a comparison later in this review.

We all know the story of Lolita. Humbert Humbert arrives in New England and prepares to teach French at the university. He moves in with Charlotte Haze, a widow, and her teenage daughter Lolita (a sexually assertive Dominique Swain), with whom he proceeds to fall head over heels in lust.

But the story, as presented by Lyne, is both more complicated and also less interesting. Lolita, who is supposed to be around 14 years old, looks much older. She has a sexual confidence that is lacking in any other female character in the film, save perhaps her mother, and enjoys manipulating Humbert to the point of locking lips with him barely 30 minutes in the film. At the same time, Humbert, who is quite indecisive and weak, allows himself to be dominated by the little nymphomaniac dominatrix whom he first sees in the garden, lying under the sprinklers on the grass, flipping through a magazine, her loose-fitting dress stuck to her wet skin.

Humbert is presented as a much more feeble character than the one in Kubrick’s film. In a scene at the hospital, late in the film, when Humbert finds that Lolita has left him, his behaviour is as erratic as it is pitiful, and one can’t help but laugh at the events onscreen.

According to numerous sources, Lyne’s adaptation is closer to Nabokov’s original novel than Kubrick’s version. Of course, that shouldn’t matter to anybody, since films are judged on their own terms and do not become better because they are closer to a different medium. In terms of character development, the most significant difference from Kubrick’s film is found in the character of Clare Quilty, who, here, cuts a much sillier figure and prances around his mansion in his night robe (which doesn’t always cover him as much as one would have liked).

I would argue that Humbert is taken advantage of by Lolita, who knowingly sexually harasses him for her own entertainment. This fact is the reason why I find one of the film’s final scenes, when Humbert tracks her down, so phoney because Lolita somehow seems to think that she had been wronged by her stepfather and had had no part in her own loss of innocence. Ennio Morricone’s sweeping music also seems completely out-of-place at this point.

The film is comedy, not drama. Sex is as absent as it was in Kubrick’s film, but as far as nudity goes, we get a full frontal of Frank Langella as Clare Quilty – not a pretty sight, trust me. The story has its twists and turns that almost make the whole thing bearable, but the quiet desperation of Humbert in Kubrick’s film has disappeared (because they have sex…off-screen) and, with it, the tension that kept the viewer’s attention.

The Rules of Attraction (2002)

André Crous

USA
3.5*

Director:
Roger Avary
Screenwriter:
Roger Avary
Director of Photography:
Robert Brinkmann

Running time: 110 minutes

Rules of Attraction is mostly about sex. It’s set on the campus of some liberal arts college in New England, where student life consists of parties, intercourse and drugs; in the film’s opening scene, one of the lead characters wakes up while she is being raped by a stranger who proceeds to vomit all over her. We never see any of the students in class, and we see very little class in the students. But the film’s editing is mildly stylised, and one particular shot is unlike any other we have seen before. More below.

Roger Avary co-wrote Pulp Fiction with Quentin Tarantino, and Rules of Attraction is an adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s novel of the same name. Ellis, of course, created the world of American Psycho, which is an extension of the world of The Rules of Attraction. Avary’s film has retained Pulp Fiction‘s playfulness in subverting the time continuum and Ellis’s dark humour mixed with sex and violence. While the film is a succession of parties, the one more debaucherous than the last, we only realise, once we get to the last party, that it is actually the first party and that we have come full circle. This structure, and the presentation of the material (the events often play out in reverse as well), may well be visually associated with the numerous hallucinogens that the students consume over the course of the film.

The four main characters are Paul, Sean, Lauren and Victor. Paul wants Sean, Sean wants Lauren, Lauren wants Victor, and Victor, well, he will take whomever he sees first.

It’s college, students are horny, and people get hurt – physically, emotionally, or both. Ian Somerhalder is perfectly cast as the slightly androgynous Paul Denton, but while Avary might have wanted Dawson’s Creek’s James Van Der Beek to break out of his shell with the role of ultraviolent Patrick Bateman’s drug-dealing brother, Van Der Beek’s character, Sean, is physically presented as a vampire, which turns his performance into something of a farce.

The split-screen is sometimes used to show us two different realities (one really taking place and the other a fantasy), but the film’s most romantic moment is conveyed by means of a breathtaking use of this technical gimmick, when it unites two characters in(to) a single frame. The film has many other clever little tricks up its sleeve, including a gun pointed straight at the camera during a very tense exchange between Sean and his drug dealer.

The Rules of Attraction also contains a horrifying suicide scene, which is more than a little sensational, since the character ending her own life is not a very important character. The film does try to justify itself by pointing out how peripheral she was in the life of the boy she admired, and subsequently also in ours, but the gruesome nature of the act provokes repulsion at the visual instead of the emotional that one would have expected to be concomitant.

The characters’ dialogue sounds right, especially when Sean and Paul leave a party together to go and smoke weed, and the other party guests try to determine whether they have really “left the party together”.

The film is as haunting as Mary Haron’s American Psycho, with the ubiquitous hunger for sex replacing the other film’s desire for violence. Technical gimmicks like the scenes played in reverse do become a little bothersome, but Avary’s approach to his characters is not superficial, and I would love to see what Avary pulls off the next time he is behind the camera, which is way too infrequently.

Machete (2010)

André Crous

USA
4*

Directors: 
Robert Rodriguez
Ethan Maniquis
Screenwriters:
Robert Rodriguez
Álvaro Rodriguez
Director of Photography: 
Jimmy Lindsey

Running time: 100 minutes

Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil was released in 1958. Essentially the most stylish B-movie ever made, with an opening tracking shot that would be studied in film schools decades later, it famously stars Charlton Heston as a Mexican called Vargas, in spite of him having no accent whatsoever. The choice of Heston, who had played Moses two years earlier in Cecil B. DeMille’s Ten Commandments and would portray the title character in the award-winning Ben-Hur the following year, was contrary to all common sense, but it worked because the film permitted such casting lunacy.

Machete offers a similar performance that initially takes the viewer aback but succeeds in grabbing the viewer’s attention for exactly the same reason as in Welles’s film: Steven Seagal, starring in one of the best films of his career, is cast as a Mexican crime boss named Torrez. I’m not suggesting that Seagal is equal to Heston by any stretch of the imagination, and perhaps he realises as much because at least he tries to go for the accent.

Of course, a review of Machete must pay homage to the work done by Tarantino, starting with the two Kill Bill films and, in particular, the Grindhouse double feature that consisted of his Deathproof and Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror. In fact, Machete is a feature-length adaptation of one of Grindhouse‘s fake trailers, which accompanied the full version (as opposed to the separate films) and are available on the DVDs. In terms of the physical action, Rodriguez continues to relish in his exaggerated representations of bloodletting.

The story is set up as a clash of cultures between the Mexicans, who cross the border, and the Americans who lie in wait, ready to shoot ’em up the moment they set foot on Uncle Sam’s soil. A representative of the xenophobia gripping America, but also, we learn, merely a politician, is Senator John McLaughlin, played by Robert de Niro – his best role in more than 10 years (at least, since Great Expectations). McLaughlin is involved in target practice on Mexicans who cross the border during the night, but he himself is betrayed by an over-ambitious deputy, whose involvement in an assassination attempt causes him to become entangled in Torrez’s affairs.

It all might seem like a big mess, but Machete, played by the very ugly Danny Trejo (an amazingly prolific actor, I learn: His profile on the IMDb claims that he starred in 18 films in 2010 alone, including Machete), separates the wheat from the chaff, or the head from the body, with his big machete.

The film’s B-movie feel naturally helps to create the illusion that everything is permissible, and mistakes in continuity or visual effects may be ascribed to the film’s aspiration to be something unconventional. That is a very clever strategy, and it does cover a lot of ground, but the film is not an entirely homogeneous production, and therefore there is still room for improvement. Don Johnson’s role as Von Jackson, the leader of the group of vigilantes patrolling the border, did not shimmer with the kind of rough energy of any of the other characters, and the directors allowed themselves to be carried away by their own desire to produce something better than a B-movie: During a shoot-out at a church, the bloody action is accompanied by a rendering of “Ave Maria”, which is more reminiscent of the baptism in The Godfather, or scenes from The Boondock Saints, and does not fit with the rest of the filmmaking approach in this film.

Machete is bloody bucket loads of fun. The novelty does wear off after a while, but at least Rodriguez tells his story simply and effectively, without the many metafilmic flourishes that Tarantino would have added, and consequently, it feels like the product of someone who is more interested in the story than the format in which it is presented. The machete is a brutal weapon of choice, and even if we have never seen it used in real life, Machete shows us how it is done – as well as other uses for intestines.