3.5 stars

The Exterminating Angel (1962)

André Crous

Mexico
3.5*

Director:
Luis Buñuel
Screenwriter:
Luis Buñuel
Director of Photography:
Gabriel Figueroa

Running time: 88 minutes

Original title: El ángel exterminador

The Exterminating Angel demonstrates how elusive explanations for human behaviour can be, and while we can often feel confident that rationalisation will eventually win out, or that time will tell why people behave the way they do, it’s not quite as simple as that. It is true that people have their reasons, but these reasons may be obscured by so many other factors that an explanation, though it may seem just beyond our reach, could in fact be forever out of reach.

The film is surreal, which means the pieces don’t quite fit together unless you allow for the loose traits of a dream. However, unlike more avant-garde works such as Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon, this film by Luis Buñuel has a general plot outline that can very easily be summarised.

At the house of a rich couple, their servants all decide to leave one night just as a whole host of guests arrive for a dinner party. They do so with their own very obviously made-up reasons, but it’s not made clear what their real intentions are. Only the majordomo remains. At the end of the evening, after many backstabbing bits of gossip between them, some drinks and a piece played on the piano, the guests prepare to leave, but then they realise they cannot bring themselves to do so.

They end up spending many days in the house, mostly inside one room, where their once mannered behaviour lapses and they descend to a level of basic needs and uncivilised outbursts, though the actual occurrence of some incidents is brought into question by the presentation of the material in the film.

The first shot of the film shows the name of the street on which this mansion is situated: Calle de la providencia (Providence Street). And the last shot in the film is of the exterior of a cathedral. The role of religion in the film is very oblique, although the title obviously has that connotation. The most straightforward connecting tissue would be the issue of free will and predestination, but Buñuel doesn’t make these themes explicit in any real way.

The easiest solution to the film lies in its inception. Having just left Spain after the controversy sparked by his Viridiana, and suffering under the rule of General Franco, Buñuel returned to Mexico to make this film, and it presents no obstacle to being interpreted as a demonstration of what happens to a group of people cut off from the rest of civilisation, left to fend for themselves in a small space and unable to leave.

The metaphor is problematic, especially because so many of the possible escape routes we think of never get tested, or the film discards them as soon as they are raised, for the example the possibility of pushing someone across the invisible but apparently insurmountable threshold inside the house.

“Life is amusing… and strange,” says one guest shortly after she realises she will be stuck against her will. At first, it seems it is the good manners of the guests that imprison them, as they are all too embarrassed to admit they want to leave, and simultaneously the hosts feel they cannot ask their guests to leave. But this explanation also unravels somewhat once the guests make it clear they truly want to go home. Unfortunately, the situation is summed up very explicitly in a laughable bit of dialogue by the character of the doctor, when he states that “no matter how hard we try, we cannot leave this room.”

One man dies, and two people commit suicide, and while the bodies rot and the stench drifts into the room, people are literally passing out from hunger and thirst. However, whenever they do get a bite to eat or something to drink, the small respite seems to prolong their stay even more – another potentially political statement.

The film isn’t always entertaining, as it has too many different characters who are never properly introduced or distinguished from one another, and the acting isn’t great either, but Buñuel’s ellipses between reality and dream are exceedingly well executed and often keep us in suspense as to the true events.

The Exterminating Angel contains numerous bizarre moments involving animals – among them a bear and a flock of sheep roaming around the mansion, and a bird in someone’s purse – that are left unexplained but never fail to pique or renew our interest in the events on-screen.

As social commentary, the film is biting, and its political slant is also difficult to miss. However, by refusing to explain why certain solutions are not available to his characters, Buñuel often doesn’t answer our questions and it is tough to read the film as a serious work of art. Dialogue scenes are too short and fragmented, and characters who start an important conversation or make a valid point are often interrupted and we are left hanging.

With a very sharp outline, the film’s central premise is difficult to forget, and while the film has its ambiguous moments, most of the plot is presented as if the actions of the characters were taking place according to the physical rules of nature. Determined filmgoers will scratch their heads about many of the events, and Buñuel likes to tease the viewer, as in the scene with a young boy who makes it onto the house’s grounds before, inexplicably, backing away. But all too often, explanations remain out of reach, and parts of the film cannot satisfy the viewer who demands some kind of cause and effect.

Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011)

André Crous

Martha Marcy May MarleneUSA
3.5*

Director:
Sean Durkin
Screenwriter:
Sean Durkin
Director of Photography:
Jody Lee Lipes

Running time: 101 minutes

Martha Marcy May Marlene doesn’t do anything wrong, but there is just not enough to hold on to for the film to become beloved. Its main character, Marcy May, real name Martha and telephone name Marlene, has just escaped from a cult on a farm in upstate New York where she has spent quite a bit of time being “purified”, what many in the audience will call “brainwashed”.

The girl has become a young woman who feels comfortable in her own skin but is now faced with a number of problems that need to be resolved for her to integrate into normal society again. The first is the people she left behind, people who seem to be folk of the land, working on the farm to sustain themselves, but whose rare interactions with the rest of society are cold and haunting.

In one of the film’s very first scenes, we see a group of men eating dinner. In the meantime, the women of the house sit and wait patiently on the steps, only making their way to the dinner table once the men, led by Patrick, have finished and left the dining room. Everything is done without question, as if it is the most normal thing in the world.

We struggle to understand the dynamic here. The film offers very little to explain the relationship between Patrick and his men, though it is clear the women are all damaged in some way. However, the main focus is Marcy May, who takes this name when Patrick tells her she doesn’t look like her actual name, Martha. Especially at the beginning, she is the only person on whom the shots focus, even when other people are in the room with her. And yet, we know nothing about her life before she joined.

Most of the film is spent in the company of Marcy May’s sister, Lucy, and her husband of only a few months, Ted. Their beautiful, spacious home next to a lake in Connecticut would seem to be the perfect refuge for the girl they know as Martha to recuperate after her ordeal, but she is haunted by memories of the events on the farm, and her behaviour often veers from the merely awkward to close to the sociopathic. One can laugh when she takes off her clothes to go and swim in the lake, but it becomes a bit disturbing when she can’t sleep and therefore decides to curl up in bed next to Lucy and Ted while they are having sex.

We realise over time how her words are mere copies of what she has been told by the cult’s psychologically affecting Patrick, who also took her virginity while she was drugged — an act, she is told by the other women, in which she should rejoice, because Patrick is such a great guy who purifies her. 

If the film had dug a little deeper, we could easily have been disgusted at the underlying goings-on. At one point we realise Patrick has fathered only boys with the girls, and the question remains open what happened to the women who were pregnant with girls. But the film has its eye on other things, like the visual motif of the empty room in which Marcy May is consoled after losing her virginity, and the same empty room, later on, in which she tries to console, drugged drink in hand, a girl before she goes to meet Patrick one dark night. In this way, the full story is revealed from many different angles while being visibly, securely grounded and connected by the visuals.

This is the first film of director Sean Durkin, and he treats the subject with the seriousness it deserves, with the exception of one particularly grating outburst of Marcy May during some celebration at Lucy and Ted’s, when the dramatic music takes over the scene completely.

But Marcy May’s past haunts her less than it haunts her sister, who is the real victim here. Having worried for years about her, she now wants to patch things up, but Marcy May won’t let her. Instead, although she is already imposing on her by staying comfortably at her house, she also makes some rude comments about her to Ted and laughs out loud when he tells her they are trying to have a baby.

“If you’re going to live here, you need to be a part of things,” are words of wisdom Patrick had told her that she could have kept in mind, but her lifeless eyes reveal her as being lost and confused. Yet it is frustrating to see Lucy also being too afraid to ask her why she is the way she is, and what had happened to her during all that time they didn’t see each other.

Viewers will talk about the ending, and it is one that isn’t entirely clear. Little of substance happens, but that is a general observation about the film itself, whose events can be read as an ineluctable journey towards tragedy, or merely small coincidences that Marcy May hysterically, but not without reason, interprets out of proportion.

It is possible she is merely hallucinating everything from before she arrived at Lucy’s place, though such an interpretation is itself perhaps a little far-fetched. The many L-cuts (sound that starts in one shot but is actually connected to the shot that starts, in a different time and place, a few seconds later) suggest this might be the case, but you can judge for yourself. 

Martha Marcy May Marlene is a very competently directed, but not entirely solid story that is nonetheless a powerful, memorable film.

Czech Dream (2004)

André Crous

Cesky senCzech Republic
3.5*

Directors:
Vít Klusák
Filip Remunda
Screenwriters:
Vít Klusák
Filip Remunda
Directors of Photography:
Vít Klusák
Filip Remunda

Original title: Český sen

Running time: 90 minutes

Vít and Filip are documentary filmmakers from the prestigious Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (FAMU), who will use their documentary skills over the course of the film to examine the gullibility of the average Czech citizen in 2003 by using an approach with a wholly unreal central object.

In the run-up to the Czech Republic’s decision to join the European Union, the country was inundated by a very well-funded government campaign to nudge (or push) Czechs in the direction of voting “yes” in the referendum. The glossy campaign led Vít Klusák and Filip Remunda, final-year film students, to consider the impact such marketing has on a population, especially when the goal (joining the European Union) is more or less intangible.

They decided to use money from the Ministry of Culture to fund a project that would see them advertise a new hypermarket in Prague. The hypermarket would be called “Český sen” (Czech Dream) and the prices would be a small fraction of those paid in other hypermarkets. This happened around the time the country was first introduced to big shopping malls and chain supermarkets with reduced prices where customers could buy everyday groceries in bulk and find everything they looked for in one store, under one roof.

Using one of the top advertising agencies in the capital, the filmmaking duo proceed as if the hypermarket is real, even constructing an enormous scaffold on an open field outside the city. For the duration of the campaign, the location of the shop is kept a secret, and the marketing approach is playful and unconventional, touting a big surprise for everyone who comes on the opening day and telling potential shoppers everywhere not to spend, not to come, not to bother. So, reverse psychology. 

But the approach is surprisingly effective, and the whole city goes into quite a frenzy about the ridiculously low prices on the advertising pamphlets, including an offer of a colour television set for $25. If things are too good to be true, they usually are, but it’s difficult to kill a dream before reality hits you in the face. The hypermarket also has television spots and even an official jingle, complete with violins and a children’s choir.

We know this can’t end well, with people necessarily being disappointed, but the film’s interviews with a wide range of people, all of whom pitched up one sunny May 31 to witness the opening of, well, not a shopping mall, shows the expected mixture of anger and disillusionment. Walking from the holding area across a large open field to the scaffolding behind which the new mall supposedly lies, one individual already questions whether this is what the country’s future looks like if it joins the European Union, with malls like these, in the middle of nowhere, sprouting up.

Introduced by the filmmakers on the empty space in the suburb of Letňany that would be the location of their prank, we are in on the joke from the beginning, but as we spend very little time with them when they are portraying themselves (rather than acting the parts of the managers of the new mega shop), it is difficult to judge their attitude towards the people they are duping. Do they consider themselves superior? Do they think they are smart and the average Czech is a stupid fool? Or do they ever realise that their marketing campaign was good enough to pique the interest of even the most sceptical potential shopper?

We don’t know, but the opening shot showing Czechoslovaks in 1972 queuing for groceries, which eerily resembles the hordes rushing towards the scaffolding on May 31, 2003, is an indication that the filmmakers themselves don’t think much has changed, although that would be a terrible simplification of the situation.

The film is funny and certainly succeeds in pushing the envelope while it peeks behind the scenes of the advertising business (with those working in the industry memorably claiming that they never lie, and have terrible moral qualms with the filmmakers’ empty promises). Their fellow cameramen are determined to get answers from their interviewees and deserve a lot of credit for their persistence, though ultimately we don’t learn much from this material.

Czech Dream is a film that made a big splash upon its release, because it changed reality in order to be filmed, which can be risky terrain for a filmmaker, and the film’s directors fail by not being more visible in their own work or explaining their motivations. During a final question-and-answer session with furious would-be shoppers, they try to justify their actions, but we are not convinced. The film is based on a clever idea with some nifty details that may be inspired by the production of a fake war in Barry Levinson’s Wag the Dog but suffers greatly from the under-involvement of its central characters. At one point, a mother in a parking lot sings “Hey, ho, nobody home”, a very serendipitous moment caught on film by Klusák and Remunda, and one that is bound to stick in your head as you watch both the crowds walking across an empty field and the filmmakers speaking to the angry mob.

Olympic Garage (1999)

André Crous

Argentina
3.5*

Director:
Marco Bechis
Screenwriters:
Marco Bechis
Lara Fremder
Director of Photography:
Ramiro Civita

Running time: 100 minutes

Original title: Garage Olimpo

Although this makes it all the more frightening, it is refreshing to see a conflict not based on race or religion, but on ideology. The reason this should inspire fear in viewer and character alike is that this kind of setup makes it much more difficult to distinguish a friend from an enemy.

Olympic Garage is set during Argentina’s Dirty War of the late 1970s and early 1980s, during which many Argentines were rounded up, because they’d been denounced by someone as a traitor to the system or an anarchist or a subversive, and tortured before simply disappearing. The mass disappearances of the country’s citizens led to a commission established after this time of military rule called the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons to look into the vast scope of the government’s actions to silence the general population.

What the film manages to convey better than anything else — and there are many scenes of torture and calculated moments of sudden, cold-blooded violence to demonstrate how power-hungry and callous some of the policemen were who enjoyed this civil war against the people they are meant to protect — is that shocking, government-sanctioned acts can take place in the middle of a city without anyone knowing about it.

A great deal of the film takes place underground, in a parking garage in downtown Buenos Aires, and we regularly see people (often, the same people, going about their daily life) walking lazily past the entrance to this parking garage, ignorant of the abhorrent acts being committed inside. In the same vein, there are multiple shots taken from a helicopter that might signal the constant surveillance of the citizenry, but as the sound is cut completely, all we get is a feeling of cars flowing over highways and people walking on sidewalks, unaware of the things their fellow citizens are suffering.

These scenes in the parking garage focus on Maria Fabiani, a girl whose French mother living in Buenos Aires doesn’t know where her daughter is, only that the police came to take her from their home and that she will be at Police Station 23, but she is nowhere to be found, like so many others. Over the course of the film, Maria slowly loses her mind (who wouldn’t?), but actress Antonella Costa isn’t always convincing.

However, her boyfriend Felix, played by Carlos Echevarría, is a study in how to effectively communicate conflicting emotion and convey complexity with few words. While he is her boyfriend in an on-again-off-again kind of way, he never told her that he tortures people for a living in a parking garage (luckily the torture sounds are mostly obscured by a portable radio outside the room whose volume is turned up whenever the pain is about to start), but when she shows up as a suspect he has to fulfil his duty while not alienating or hurting her. It is a delicate balance that Echevarría, in his début feature film, pulls off admirably.

The film has a nice bookend structure involving a man in whose home a bomb is planted right at the beginning of the film, though the woman with the bomb, called Ana — a friend of his daughter’s — is not given any back story nor integrated into the rest of the film, which is a real shame.

There are some nice little details, in particular the relationship (or the beginnings of a relationship) cultivated between Maria and a fellow inmate, a mechanic called Nene, as well as the hints of feelings that Maria inspired in another fellow anti-government activist Francisco, and the observation of how Felix tries to assert power over Maria, but the film is not very strong on story. 

Toward the end, the film becomes very political as the church is implicated in oppressive regime’s horrible deeds and a final title card informs us that many of these people responsible for the disappearance of thousands of innocent civilians today walk the streets freely.

Olympic Garage offers a glimpse of the hardship endured by those fighting for a better life but who were tortured and ultimately ended up dead as a result of their desire to fight, or just resist. The film is not entirely engrossing but it has many points of entry for anyone wanting to know what kinds of things went on underground during Argentina’s Dirty War.

The Adopted Son (1998)

André Crous

Kyrgyzstan
3.5*

Director:
Aktan Abdykalykov
Screenwriters:
Aktan Abdykalykov
Avtandil Adikulov
Marat Sarulu
Director of Photography:
Khassan Kydyraliev

Running time: 77 minutes

Original title: Бешкемпир
Transliterated title: Beshkempir

The films of the countries that used to form a part of the Soviet Union are not very well-known, primarily because there are so few of them and the nascent film industries in those countries in general have neither the money nor the experience to make films that can be marketed to a larger audience outside the country. From time to time, filmmakers from elsewhere come to take advantage of these foreign lands and the vistas that viewers around the world might never have seen on film before and thereby produce small but interesting films, for example, the French production Moi Ivan, Toi Abraham, made in 1993 in Belarus; Tengri, made in Kazakhstan by a French production team that used Kyrgyz actors; or notable films out of Tajikistan thanks to director Bakhtyar Khudojnazarov in the 1990s, before he started making films in Russia.

Kyrgyz director Aktan Abdykalykov, who also goes by the name of Aktan Arym Kubat, is a Kyrgyzstan native who worked as a production designer on some of the films made by the former Soviet Union’s local Kirgizfilm, the films almost always — with a few rare exceptions, mostly in the 1980s — in Russian. The country’s independence at the end of 1991 also heralded the coming of the Kyrgyz-language film industry. The films of Abdykalykov (and more recently, of Ernest Abdyjaparov and the young Nurbek Egen, as well) have been some of the lone cinematic voices in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan.

Like all the other films made in the country since the fall of the Iron Curtain, The Adopted Son is set in rural Kyrgyzstan. The film stars the director’s son, Mirlan, in the role of the young teenage boy Beshkempir, whose life is about to “go berserk”, as his grandmother puts is. But this is not his grandmother: The opening scene, 12 years earlier, shown to us in warm colours, already established that he was adopted at birth, and this fact is about to turn his life upside down.

Cut to the present in black and white, when Beshkempir’s hair is cut and the sound of clippers is suddenly replaced by garden scissors cutting a small branch from a tree. Things obviously do not look good for the boy’s future, and the rest of the film is in black and white, with the exception of some slightly more optimistic shots (rather than scenes) briefly presented to us in colour, almost all of them unfortunately disconnected from the storyline, bringing atmosphere rather than substance.

The other children play with him and he is not socially isolated, but at this age, children have started to show their true colours, and we can see them whispering in each other’s ears, clearly spreading a story about him: the story about his origins that, soon enough, he will discover for himself.

The other strong thread in the film has to do with the sexual coming-of-age of the boys, and as Beshkempir sees another boy, who already has a job as a projectionist at the open-air cinema where they screen Indian musicals from the 1960s, picking up a girl on his bicycle, and he wants to eventually do the same with the girl he has his eye on, Aynura.

But in the meantime, he is frustrated, as first a woman the boys make out of dirt, for them to have their way with, is trampled by a heard of bulls, and then when he lies in bed one morning and his hand slips down to his grown, a bird flies into the room (a hoopoe, whose sound permeates the soundtrack of the film).

Beshkempir tries very hard to be poetic, and while there are numerous important incidents that should energise the narrative, they are all presented as fragments with little or no transition between them, and furthermore the addition of colour, often completely unexpectedly, draws more attention to itself than is required for this particular film. So does the racking of focus from Beshkempir and his father, a bitter man whom we don’t get to know or understand, to water dropping from a makeshift tap in the foreground during an altercation.

The dialogue is post-synchronised, but even so, one of the central scenes, in which Beshkempir is most seriously stabbed in the back by one of his best friends, features a boy whose words are, even in Kyrgyz, delivered very poorly, which makes our empathy with Beshkempir and our interest in the events more difficult.

While the film shows some technical creativity, the narrative is more opaque than necessary, as it leaves many questions unanswered and sometimes even unasked, though the viewer needs more information to know who these people are (most of the characters are never introduced by name) and why they are behaving the way they do. However, despite its shortcomings, Beshkempir is a more-than-adequate contribution to world cinema.

À Nous la Liberté (1931)

André Crous

France
3.5*

Director:
René Clair
Screenwriter:
René Clair
Director of Photography:
Georges Périnal

Running time: 83 minutes (see review below for details)

René Clair’s À nous la liberté (“Freedom is ours”) is a heartfelt film about friendship in the face of capitalist greed. Its one lead is a die-hard romantic and the other is a guy full of ambition who, once given his chance, quickly establishes himself as the businessman of the decade. But the film has become more well-known for the controversy it caused years after its release than for its plot or its technique.

The film was released in 1931. Five years later, in 1936, Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times showed a remarkable similarity to Clair’s film, and the French producers decided to take the Americans to court in a case that was only settled after World War II. On careful viewing, it is clear that Chaplin had not stolen from Clair: The characters and the storyline are both very different, and even the one scene at the root of all the trouble is so enjoyable it would be hard to imagine either film without it.

The scene in question takes place around an assembly line at a factory. It’s one of the first sequences of Chaplin’s film, taking place during the opening minutes, and it shows the Tramp hard at work tightening the screws on some nameless implement the company is producing. He continues to be distracted and as a result comes up against the next person in line, creating a domino effect of chaos.

More or less the same thing happens in À nous la liberté, in that occupational chaos ensues when the aforementioned romantic is distracted at work in the factory. But Clair does not give the mechanical nature of the work environment the same priority as Chaplin; instead, his story looks at the friendship of two former prison inmates. Their work behind bars very obviously resembles the work in the factory — both take place around a conveyor belt, and in both spaces they are watched over by powerful individuals (guards or supervisors) who ensure they don’t steal anything, but Clair doesn’t belabour this point.

The two former prison inmates are called Louis and Émile — when they both attempt to escape at the beginning of the film, only Louis succeeds. He goes on to sell records on the street and in a very quick succession of shots that anticipates the editing of the famous decline of the marriage sequence in Citizen Kane, we witness his meteoric rise to becoming a very wealthy producer of gramophone players.

Émile is not so lucky and remains in prison a while longer. Upon his release, he is found in a field by two police officers and in resisting them he gets locked up again, albeit briefly.

The film’s subsequent handling of the reunion of these two men is smooth though never very profound, as they both seem to instantly revert to their earlier selves, without any real complications. There is a very firm sense that Émile could make Louis’ life difficult as he could tarnish his reputation as an upstanding member of society when he has in fact broken out of jail. But this line is never thoroughly exploited.

Instead, Clair has a very soft storyline that sees Émile fall in love with a girl who shows a little interest towards him at the factory — and whom he literally broke out of jail for to be with. This is where the film’s re-releases become an interesting point of discussion. While the film was initially released with a running time of more than 100 minutes, the current version has had two scenes cut, both available on video sharing sites.

The first scene develops the musical theme of much of the first part of the film by having flowers sing to Émile. The film didn’t really need this scene. The second scene, however, serves to provide some detail on Émile’s appreciation of the girl he has fallen in love with and certainly would have provided a firmer background to Émile’s apparent laissez-faire attitude when it is revealed she will remain with her boyfriend rather than hook up with Émile.

Besides one scene that, in retrospect, seems an eerily accurate commentary on the evil of the workplace (a teacher tells his students, “Work is freedom,” echoing the infamous words of the Auschwitz death camp), À nous la liberté has a humanist slant and is by no means that scathing indictment that Chaplin insinuated with Modern Times. That being said, Chaplin has a much more enjoyable film, and he offers more gimmicks than Clair that, in the end, make for a memorable production. That is not to say Clair’s film lacks importance or interest — the opening tracking shot in the prison is a particularly strong evocation of man’s potential loss of human characteristics in the prison (or work) environment, and in a very well-scripted speech towards the end of the film, someone makes the point that while machines can replace the hand of man, they cannot replace his brain.

Whether that is true remains to be seen, but as far as we can tell from this film, Clair’s heart, head and hand were in the right place at the right time.

Possession (1981)

André Crous

France
3.5*

Director:
Andrzej Żuławski
Screenwriters:
Frederic Tuten
Andrzej Żuławski
Director of Photography:
Bruno Nuytten

Running time: 124 minutes

Not even Linda Blair, starring as little Regan MacNeil in The Exorcist, screamed as much as Isabelle Adjani in Polish director Andrzej Żuławski’s 1981 horror film, Possession. Adjani must have set some kind of record. In almost every scene, she is behaving hysterically, yelling, crying, spinning, vomiting blood or hurting herself so that blood gushes from wounds or even her orifices. It is a truly disgusting sight, and often I couldn’t help myself but simply had to laugh at the sheer absurdity of the staging. But while Possession has its tentacles in many other pies and while the product is a bit of an incoherent mess, the actual experience of watching the film is by no means unpleasant.

Set in West Berlin, very close to the Wall, the film opens on the return of Mark, played by a dashing young Sam Neill, most likely a spy, who hasn’t seen his wife Anna and their young son Bob in quite while. But all is not as Mark remembers it. Anna seems caught unprepared for Mark’s return and very soon he realizes she has been unfaithful to him.

However, this is not a simple story of cuckolding. No, instead of making the beast with two backs, she has been humping one with two backs and many tentacles. Yes, this tale about infidelity turns into a gruesome horror when we finally lay eyes on the beast, but not before the film’s first half has solidly pushed the production in that direction by having Adjani run around her apartment, storm into the street screaming while she slobbers streams of blood, and finally give birth to a mixture of blood and milk in the subway tunnel next to the Platz der Luftbrücke U-Bahn station in the neighbourhood of Kreuzberg, where she writhes orgasmically in liquid puddles on the ground.

Adjani completely surrenders to the role, giving it her all by screaming in bouts that last many minutes at a time, her eyes big as saucers, and seemingly breaks out in cold sweat every time we see her. The performance is as chilling as Neill’s is laughable. He seems to deliver line readings robotically, his actions detached from his words and his movements wholly awkward. He knows this is a joke and he doesn’t much take the role seriously. That is a pity because a more serious approach might have given weight to the psychological trauma one would expect his character to suffer, given his wife’s insane behaviour (at one point, she comes home and starts putting her son’s clothes in the fridge).

Before the arrival of the Thing, when Anna makes the decision to separate from Mark, there is a remarkable scene in Café Einstein when they are seated next to each other on different sides of a pillar covered by mirrors, yet we cannot see their reflections. Żuławski doesn’t emphasise the effect, but once we realise it, the effect is striking as it anticipates the supernatural direction this film is about to take.

The film mixes many different genres, from the most intimate to the most bombastic, and in all cases the camera is used effectively, often hand-held, surging down a narrow corridor or framing the character by a door frame, to make us uncomfortable. 

“Maybe all couples go through this,” says Adjani, referring to their domestic troubles and her feelings of unhappiness. That may be right, but they quickly take a turn for the rather unusual, as her desire for something different means the creation of something truly abominable.

There are many other bits and pieces to the story, including the teacher of the couple’s son, who looks exactly like Anna, and a secret agent with pink socks, who is discussed during a strange business meeting in which the camera very ominously circles all parties involved, and whose identity is revealed towards the end of the film without any consequence.

The film belongs to the blood, the tentacles and to Adjani, whose tenacity in depicting fits of hysteria is something to behold. Her presence in every scene is magnetic, as her silence in the presence of the Thing is as uncomfortable as her outbursts in any other scene. Żuławski’s film is a big mystery, as there are many aspects to the story that are never really examined, yet his staging of many of the scenes is beautifully done. In one particularly tense scene, Neill is on the phone, his wife has disappeared and we do not know how mobile the Thing is. He switches the light of the room he is in on and off, while he is framed by an open door. We expect the worst — for something to appear behind him at any moment — and Żuławski lets the scene play out as long as possible before letting it reach its end: It’s not what we expect, and serves to emphasise that we have been taken hostage by the fear he’s created already.

Possession is bizarre and most of the characters lose their mind at one point or another… if they have ever been normal at all. But Adjani is fearless and ties the film together with her big eyes, her constant screaming and her lust for something bestial. The film is a potent work of horror.

The Housemaid (1960)

André Crous

South Korea
3.5*

Director:
Kim Ki-young
Screenwriter:
Kim Ki-young
Director of Photography:
Kim Deok-jin

Running time: 111 minutes

Original title: 하녀
Transliterated title: Hanyeo

South Korea’s Housemaid is a bizarre, over-the-top melodrama that is as enthralling as it is embarrassing. The acting is wooden on the one hand, completely histrionic on the other, and the story often lacks credibility, and yet there is a continuous sense of psychological anguish that extends to the country’s cinema today.

Made in 1960, the film features a working-class family and, in particular, the husband and father, Mr Kim, a piano teacher and part-time composer. He is assaulted by numerous females, whose obsession with him seems to lead his family to certain destruction, though he never sought to bring such dishonour on his household.

And the females are certainly a force to be reckoned with. Mr Kim leads the small choir at a factory, where young females quickly take a liking to him and try to make a move by attending private lessons at his home. When the film opens, one girl in the choir, Ms Kwak, leaves a love letter for him in the piano, but when he finds it he reports her and she is kicked out of the factory.

Kwak’s housemate, Kyunghee Cho, decides to take a chance and starts paying for private lessons at Kim’s house. Kim’s wife is expecting their third child and they are about to move into a larger house. They need the money, but they also need someone to take care of the new space and at Kim’s urging, Kyunghee finds a housemaid for them: an obviously evil woman who must have been an inspiration for Glenn Close’s character in Fatal Attraction, except this one doesn’t even seem normal at the outset.

Both the housemaid and Cho become more and more unhinged as the film progresses, but theirs are not the only psychological problems that may be detected. Kim’s young daughter Aesoon is suffering from some physical malady and spends the whole film on crutches, which makes it easier for her young brother Chengsoon to tease her and generally be a mean sibling. Aesoon subsequently spends most of the film sobbing.

It must be a terrible traumatic state of affairs, but the absolutely spineless Kim shows no courage or determination to make the house a good environment for his family. He is weak, without any backbone whatsoever, and when the young women start twisting him around their little fingers, threatening to accuse him of rape, he duly becomes a piece of clay in their hands. A woman scorned is nothing to be trifled with, but a lunatic scorned is something you don’t even want to contemplate.

Over the whole narrative hangs the constant threat of rat poison, placed in a kitchen cupboard to repel the rats which cause Kim’s wife to suffer fainting spells so severe she must be dragged to bed every time one of the long-tailed creatures make an appearance. And together with this poison, the probability of someone committing either suicide or homicide is very real and creates notable suspense.

We can ask ourselves at many points why the family doesn’t just kick the housemaid out. Are they so hard up that they absolutely require someone cleaning the house, even if that person is totally insane? Honestly, these are not model parents. Even when they have discovered the housemaid’s pitch-black intentions, they still allow her to roam the house freely, cooking meals for them (which they prefer not to eat, for fear she might have poisoned the food) and interacting with their children.

This is a film about lunatics, and perhaps that was director Kim Ki-young’s purpose, for an opening scene shows the happy couple, before the intrusion of the housemaid, reading about a man elsewhere who had come to a terrible end after his involvement with a housemaid. This scene hints at a Cabinet of Dr. Caligari–style setup, a hint that is only reinforced in the closing coda, but in between these two scenes, there is a very real sense the characters are at the mercy of the housemaid, exaggerated and incredible as her acts may seem.

What does one make of a melodrama as ridiculous as this? One can only laugh. But those bookends are very interesting and if examined through these two lenses, the film takes on a new, insightful and vastly superior tone about the nature of the cinema, since the filmmaker seems to acknowledge his story, which takes place in a world where it rains most of the time and where lightning strikes every time something ominous is happening, is a fabrication. And yet, such exaggeration can be enjoyable. Not because it appeals to our desire to see something real, but because, first and foremost, such a clearly fictional story can evoke very real fears in the viewer.

Metropolitan (1989)

André Crous

USA
3.5*

Director:
Whit Stillman
Screenwriter:
Whit Stillman
Director of Photography:
John Thomas
Running time: 98 minutes

Tom Townsend is not very likeable. He pretends to have very firm ideas about literature and social structures, but prefers literary criticism to actual novels, citing his displeasure at the inherent inventedness of fiction. He reminds me a lot of Jesse Eisenberg’s character in Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale, albeit with fewer father issues.

Tom lives on New York’s West Side and attends Princeton, but when we meet him during the cold winter holidays, wearing a raincoat over his dinner jacket, instead of a proper overcoat, we recognise that he does not share the wealthy lifestyle of the group of friends who, on the spur of the moment, invite him to attend a deb (débutante) party with them. Usually, he would avoid these kinds of events, but since he has little else to do, and he is virtually coerced by the most vocal and self-assured of the pack, Nick, into joining them, he goes along and intrigues the others – all of them in their early twenties.

We know next to nothing about Nick, and over the course of the film, we get to learn very little, except that he has convinced himself that he has a good relationship with his absent father, though we can see he is deluding himself. His lack of expressiveness and straightforward attitude about the things he believes in and those he opposes are refreshing for one timid girl, Audrey, who quickly gravitates towards him. But Nick is blind to her attention and is still hooked on Serena Slocum, a girl who apparently, according to the gossip in the group, was dating as many as twenty boys at the same time.

At first, the group (designated as the “Sally Fowler Rat Pack”, or S.F.R.P.) seems completely isolated from the rest of society, an upper-class enclave that functions on its own, removed from the vast mass of people around them that populate Manhattan, and it is comical, reminiscent of Maggie Smith’s character in Gosford Park, when one girl declares that she “can’t stand snobbery or snobbish acts of any kind”, while someone outside the group is easily labelled as “riff-raff”. But gradually, largely thanks to the character of Audrey, who is the most vulnerable, the group shows signs of humanity, the kind of social interaction that we can relate to, and thaws the very cold façade with which we are initially presented.

The film is mostly a kind of chamber film, consisting of dialogue-heavy scenes that involve only a handful of characters, discussing social interaction and gossiping about others. Very few laughs are to be had, and the most uproarious moment occurs when they decide to dance the cha-cha-cha. But the writing is very good and writer-director Stillman delivers many insightful gems that distil and persuasively relate social wisdom.

Metropolitan provides a nice snapshot of this segment of New York society and the decline and ultimate disintegration of the group is fascinating to watch, made all the more captivating by our realisation that it all takes place over the course of the winter holidays. “You go to a party, you meet a group of people, you think ‘These people are gonna be my friends for the rest of my life.’ Then you never see them again. Where do they go?”, asks an adult, a former Princeton man, towards the end of the film.

The film takes great care not to alienate the audience from the characters but doesn’t do so to the detriment of the characters themselves, who remain complicated despite their failure to recognise their own faults. The actors, most of them amateur players, are very competent and deliver the lines with admirable self-assurance, though Charlie (Taylor Nichols) has some of the most cerebral lines and does not always come across as entirely convincing. Metropolitan strikes a more sombre tone than The Squid and the Whale, but its approach is perhaps more deliberately realistic and certainly worth a look.

The Great Train Robbery (1903)

André Crous

USA
3.5*

Director:
Edwin S. Porter
Screenwriters:
Edwin S. Porter
Scott Marble
Directors of Photography:
Blair Smith
Edwin S. Porter

Running time: 12 minutes

Edwin S. Porter’s 1903 film, produced in the first decade of the motion picture industry, was not the first film to present the viewer with a narrative, but it must have been one of the most exhilarating films of its time, with action scenes that would clearly serve as the blueprint for similar scenes in tens of thousands of subsequent films. As a 12-minute film, The Great Train Robbery moves along briskly to show us the beginning, the middle, and the end of the train heist, focusing almost completely on the action while being indifferent to its perpetrators (the film is much more interested in the victims).

The film consists of a mere sequence of 14 shots, but unlike many contemporary films that have a similar average shot length (in this case, around 50 seconds), no shot feels too long, for the pace is quick throughout as we rush from one action to the next. The actions, as the title makes clear, all revolve around a train robbery and involve gunfights in the forest, fistfights on top of a moving train and chases on horseback. The shots are mostly static, but the action inside the frame will keep your attention.

As I mentioned above, the filmmaker focuses our attention on the very human individuals caught up in the action – for example, the telegraph operator at the train station, who is tied up, unable to alert the authorities of the bandits’ plans to rob the train, or the passenger shot in the back when he tries to escape. In the last instance, the passengers all have to line up to empty their pockets and give up their jewellery, when one man tries to run away. He is shot, but the bandits proceed to rifle through all the other passengers’ belongings; when they finally leave, the camera stays with this passenger, who has been lying motionlessly in the foreground.

Meanwhile, we never learn who the bandits or what their motives for this robbery are. It was not the film’s intention to educate its viewers but rather to entertain them, and it certainly succeeds in doing that, even though its rudimentary editing might seem laughable to a viewer today: in one scene, there is a very visible cut before a man is thrown off the train – what was a very lively individual before the cut suddenly turns into a lifeless dummy after the cut…

The most famous shot in the film is completely gratuitous and contains a close-up of a bandit who looks directly into the camera, points his pistol at us, and fires six shots. The shot comes after the narrative proper, as a kind of epilogue, or coda, and is clearly used for effect rather than serving as a continuation of the narrative. All the bandits having been killed by the end of the film, one could argue that the breaking of the fourth wall is warranted and so is the use of the close-up, which the director had avoided in the rest of the film.

The Great Train Robbery does not outstay its welcome; it is undoubtedly an important historical document that presents us with the origins of the action film, but while one can forgive the film for its technical shortcomings, the narrative still feels too rough around the edges and I would have appreciated a better sense of context and characters. However, as one of the first narrative films, it is remarkably coherent and worth a look, just to see where it all started.