2.5 stars

Taxidermia (2006)

André Crous

Hungary
2.5*

Director:
György Pálfi
Screenwriters:
Zsófia Ruttkay,
György Pálfi
Director of Photography:
Gergely Pohárnok

Running time: 91 minutes

How seriously can we take a film in whose first scene a character makes love to a candle and shoots fire out of his penis?

Director György Pálfi has produced a film that doesn’t look half bad but he has put all his eggs in one basket and forgot to fashion a proper story. There are many random episodes of obscenity and downright senselessness, but the film also contains moments that bring to mind a director with visual flair such as Jean-Pierre Jeunet.

Taxidermia is a word that doesn’t mean anything in English, nor in Hungarian, except to suggest the job of one of the film’s characters, Lajoska Balatony, who is a taxidermist. By the end of the film, the viewer will have realised that the title is actually the name of an artwork, the production of which brings the film to a very gruesome climax.

Basically, the film can be separated into three stories that centre on three different characters. Besides the terribly gaunt Lajoska, who is in the last story, we also see his father, Kálmán, a champion speed eater, and Kálmán’s harelipped father (Lajoska’s grandfather), Morosgoványi, who is a soldier by day and pleasures himself at night so that his hard member can either breathe fire or shoot its seed all the way to the stars.

While the first act is all about sex, and ends with a very ambiguous scene in which Morosgoványi seems to fantasise having sex with his lieutenant’s wife before waking up and finding that he has committed an act of bestiality with a dead pig, the second act is about food, and lots of it. Kálmán, who was somehow conceived during his father’s fantasy encounter, was in fact born of a woman but with a pig’s tail. His stepfather, the lieutenant, clips his tail shortly after birth, but then the story skips forward a few decades to a speed-eating championship in Communist-era Hungary, where the event itself is as interesting (and as grotesque) as the post-match purging behind the curtains.

Don’t watch this film if you have an upset stomach.

The main interest of the film lies in its unconventional subject matter and the beauty with which such obscenity can be represented. But for all its interesting little incidents, the film lacks a narrative thread and, most importantly, fails to link the three main characters in any significant way. It is an easy comparison to make, but the taxidermist’s job of removing an animal’s hide, and using it without the original meat that it used to cover, mirrors the film’s hollow innards.

Taxidermia is fond of its extreme close-ups, but very often we cannot easily figure out what is going on because the camera refuses to reveal the bigger picture. However, the special visual sequences, such as a spinning bathtub at the beginning of the film, are dazzling and gorgeous to look at, until we realise that they serve no real purpose beyond the immediate jolt of visual stimulation. I also would have appreciated fewer shots of baby genitals.

The film would have benefited from a more tightly controlled screenplay since there are numerous possibilities to explore, but none is really given the opportunity to develop, until the last act when the film seems to finally settle down and focus on the story and the characters at hand. I applaud this film for coming up with a character even more obese than Gilbert Grape’s mother, and for that character (Kálmán) to deliver the most memorable line of the film: “I had a vomiting technique named after me!” – a source of great pride for the speaker. The instances of body horror are also enough to give Machete a run for its money. However, the film’s final scene, in which a sculpture that looks like a monstrous combination of the Venus de Milo and Michelangelo’s David is offered as a work of art, is dangerously close to pretension.

IP5 (1992)

André Crous

France
2.5*

Director: 
Jean-Jacques Beineix
Screenwriters:
Jacques Forgeas
Jean-Jacques Beineix
Director of Photography:
Jean-François Robin

Running time: 119 minutes

Original title: IP5: L’île aux pachydermes

Poor Jean-Jacques Beineix. Perhaps he thought that this would be his 8½, and that is why he indicated in the title that it would be his fifth film. Supposedly, the letters represent the initials of his girlfriend at the time, supporting the romantic element of the narrative. But ultimately such self-indulgence does little to enhance the experience of watching the film, except to make us shake our head. The film has three wonderfully entertaining central characters, but the director doesn’t quite know whose story he wants to tell, and he ends up failing us on all counts.

The three characters are Jockey, barely in his teens; Tony, in his mid-twenties; and the sage old Mr Marcel, who might just be a tree hugger who escaped from an insane asylum. Tony, played by Olivier Martinez looking like a young Elvis, is a professional “tagger”, a graffiti artist who is constantly on the run from the law but merely wishes to create his art on the walls of his city. Jockey, the son of an always drunken immigrant, lives in the same block of council flats as Tony and wants to have a good time, even if this involves a bit of petty theft now and then.

And then there is Mr Marcel, played by Yves Montand, who died shortly after the shoot. One night, Jockey and Tony steal a car only to discover in the backseat Mr Marcel, a man who very politely but insistently refuses to leave them alone. Mr Marcel is mysterious and presents signs of clairvoyance that might be construed as traces of something divine, but as the film proceeds, this initial hypothesis falls apart rather quickly; unfortunately, the film itself does not provide any useful information to explain his behaviour and especially his insight.

The full French title translates as “IP5: The Island of Pachyderms” and “pachyderm” is a term I know from Eugène Ionesco’s absurdist play, Rhinocéros; it means “thick-skinned mammal”, but alas, we don’t get to see any of them. And it isn’t a certainty that we’ll get to see the island either. The film is about memory and desire, but such a statement makes Beineix’s film sound much more clearly defined than it actually is. While Mr Marcel and Tony are both on a journey to reclaim the loves they lost, their journeys are quite different, and so are the women, and the reasons they haven’t seen each other for 40 years (Mr Marcel and Monique), or, well, barely 40 hours (Tony and Gloria).

The film’s only relationship that we care about, though to a very limited degree, is the one between Mr Marcel and Monique, and once that part of the story has been resolved, we suddenly find ourselves remembering that the film started out being about Tony’s journey, from Paris to Toulouse, to find Gloria. At this point, at the end of the second act, the film starts to drag, because there is no real desire to see Tony’s “love”, based on two or three very brief encounters, when it was made very clear to Tony that Gloria couldn’t care less about his feelings towards her.

As is to be expected from the director of Diva and Betty Blue (37°2 le matin), the colour palette is strikingly beautiful, and there are particularly attractive shots scattered throughout the film, including a moment when Mr Marcel stands, preacher-like, in the middle of the forest during a rainstorm and lets the “lustral rain” purify him while he is lit up like a Christmas tree. This is, however, one time where his crew let him down and one can spot very odd changes in lighting on Montand’s face.

IP5 contains too many coincidences for the story development to be credible, and while Mr Marcel could have had a mysterious air about him that might make us believe in a supernatural force at work, the questions generated by the film are never answered but rather lead to a very banal conclusion that – considering the film’s energetic opening – is not at all satisfactory.

Ulysses’ Gaze (1995)

André Crous

Greece
2.5*

Director:
Theo Angelopoulos
Screenwriters: 
Theo Angelopoulos
Tonino Guerra
Petros Markaris
Giorgio Silvagni 
Kain Tsitseli
Directors of Photography:
Giorgos Arvanitis
Andreas Sinanos

Running time: 176 minutes

Original Title: Το βλέμμα του Οδυσσέα
Transliterated title: To Vlemma tou Odyssea

Theo Angelopoulos has a very seductive visual style that often consists of long scenes and little dialogue, not unlike the work of Béla Tarr. But whereas Tarr uses mud, rain and small episodes presented as very long takes, Angelopoulos’s films are visually very clean, less episodic, and the long takes are fewer and farther between.

When a film isn’t episodic, in other words, when there is a macroplot rather than many microplots, then the overarching narrative better be worth the viewer’s time. In the case of Ulysses’ Gaze, an unnamed director (no, he does have a name: “A”) travels across the Balkan countries to locate three film reels of the first directors in the area, the Manakis brothers. The Manakis brothers worked there at the beginning of the 20th century, and their very first works, according to this film that rewrites history for the sake of drama, as many good films have done, are somewhere in the Balkans, waiting to be discovered. Why have they not been the object of more interest by the different film archives in the Balkans? The film doesn’t say.

A, played by Harvey Keitel, is a director who had grown up in the Balkans and does speak Greek, but he has spent most of his life in the United States producing films that many Greeks, for whatever reason, deem extreme and even “evil”. He learns of the missing film reels and decides to undertake the journey to find these elusive traces of the origins of the Balkan cinema.

In the process, he travels across Greece, Albania, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. The film’s title hints at an Odyssean dimension to the journey, but this is wishful thinking. At one point, he ferries a woman wearing a black cloak across the river, where they find the first signs of destruction in the former Yugoslavia, and of course, this scene is meant to evoke the episode in Hades, either of them being Charon, but the metaphor is tenuous, if not altogether confusing.

He meets various women, all played by the same actress (Maia Morgenstern), but the roles and the acting are below standard as the actress frequently has to portray a woman who is drawn to A without knowing why, and more often than not breaks down in tears for no apparent reason.

No reason for A’s stubborn desire to find these missing reels is provided either, and yet he risks life and limb to track them down, all the way into a war zone. The film was made in the Balkans in 1994, so it’s not very difficult to guess which war I’m talking about. But even though we know that A is on his way to Sarajevo, upon his arrival in a big city that is completely devastated, building shots down to their skeletal remains, armoured UN vehicles, and people running down the streets to avoid sniper fire, A stops to ask these people, “Is this Sarajevo?” It is, of course, a question of identity, a theme that is relevant to the film, but the question seems ludicrous in the context and makes A seem rather thick-headed.

A is a very alienating figure, especially when he recites some of his lines like a grave incantation of some sort. The only moment where his character really seems human is around the halfway mark, when he meets an old friend on the banks of the Danube in Belgrade, who piggy-backs him for a few paces. For the rest of the film, A is a very serious character who almost never smiles.

The film is interested in identity across the Balkans, and there are many scenes where the past slides in and out of the present, as characters change and seem to channel figures from the past. Angelopoulos is going for a kind of magical realism, I suppose, but he doesn’t tell the story very well, and we are left with many questions and never get a firm grasp on A’s heritage.

Ulysses’ Gaze does contain remarkable scenes staged so that they may be noticed as such, including a shot at the beginning of the film in which an audience watches A’s latest film, captivated, standing in the rain as if frozen, everyone in black clothes with identical black umbrellas over them. In another scene, in which A is transported back to the end of the Second World War in Bucharest, Romania, a single shot in the foyer of the family home suggests the passage of five years by means of different small events in the background.

Angelopoulos could have been a great filmmaker if he had spent as much time cultivating his story as the staging of his images. At one point, an enormous statue of Lenin is transported in various pieces on a barge that goes upstream. We don’t know where the statue is headed, and for some strange reason Angelopoulos’s camera seems to worship the colossal monstrosity – even allowing it to face in the same direction as the barge, a strange choice indeed. Overall, the film is thin, plodding along through its more than two and a half hours, but the images are gorgeous. However, compared with his other important film, Eternity and a Day, I prefer the latter.

And one final note: For those who suspect me or the filmmakers of making a mistake: the possessive form of Ulysses is indeed Ulysses’ – without another possessive s, because it is a mythological/classical name. For all other names that end in an ‘s’, spelling depends on your chosen style (i.e. an apostrophe only, or an apostrophe and another ‘s’, are both valid).

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.

Sullivan’s Travels (1941)

André Crous

USA
2.5*

Director:
Preston Sturges
Screenwriter: 
Preston Sturges
Director of Photography: 
John Seitz

Running time: 90 minutes

This is my first Sturges film, and I like the Capra quality of the thing. There is something very warm and fuzzy about the story, even though it deals, albeit obliquely, with the idea of poverty. I also like films that deal with the film industry, and Sullivan’s Travels is a comedy about the commercial infeasibility of making films that deal with socially relevant topics rather than straightforward comedies, which almost inevitably do better at the box office. However, whereas Capra had a comedic way of presenting dramatic and important messages (Mr Smith Goes to Washington: “Stand up for what is right!”; It’s a Wonderful Life: “Don’t ever think that you haven’t made a difference!”; It Happened One Night: “Down with the walls of Jericho! We are in love!”), this film by Preston Sturges doesn’t quite rise above its comedic simplicity.

The film was made at the beginning of the Second World War and was released at the end of 1941, around the time of the Pearl Harbor attack that escalated the American military’s participation. Social issues, such as unemployment and low income, are raised in the film (this was at a time when U.S. unemployment figures, of a population still rattled by the Great Depression of the 1930s, were around 15%), but the central character regards everything from a comfortable distance. Sure, he mingles with the hoi polloi and even shares a table with them, but there is very little – if not a complete lack of – interaction between him and those he wants to represent on the big screen.

In fact, one can easily forget that Sullivan is actually a director. He doesn’t seem very awkward in his scenes with the homeless, and such moments of uneasiness as there are (at the communal dinner table, for example) have very little screen time and do not communicate much except a little comedy. Chaplin dealt comically with the life of a tramp, but even his films have emotions and insight into the life of someone who is homeless to a much deeper degree than anything in Sullivan’s Travels.

Sullivan’s Travels opens with a marvellous scene: Two men, accompanied by very loud, very enthusiastically bombastic music, are fighting on top of a train advancing at full speed through the dark night. This turns out to be the final scene of another film, screened for some producers. Such metatextuality is refreshing, considering the banal nature of most of the rest of the film.

The film contains at least one very bad scene. In prison, where there is a lot of hardship (although the only real hardship we ever see inflicted on anybody is on John Sullivan), the prisoners go to watch a movie one night: cartoons by Walt Disney. The moment the picture starts, the prisoners burst out laughing, to such a degree you might think they are having seizures. It is an absolutely ludicrous way to communicate the message (comedy works, even in hard times), and I found it thoroughly simpleminded.

Based on my experience of Sullivan’s Travels, a film that is supposed to be Preston Sturges’s masterpiece, it is very easy to come to the conclusion that he was no Frank Capra, and while there is some amusing banter between Joel McCree and Veronica Lake, in the spirit of screwball comedies, the film never seriously investigates the social milieu its main character wishes to study.