Format: Limited Edition Dual Format (DVD + Blu-ray)
Release date: 19 June 2017
Distributor: Arrow Video
Director: Dario Argento
Writer: Dario Argento
Based on the novel The Screaming Mimi by: Fredric Brown (uncredited)
Original title:L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo
Cast: Tony Musante, Suzy Kendall, Enrico Maria Salerno, Eva Renzi, Umberto Raho
Italy 1970
98 mins
Dario Argento’s debut film is an astonishing piece of work.
The Bird with the Crystal Plumage is an astonishing debut film. As a reviewer who has seen all but one of the director’s movies (1973’s comedy drama Le cinque giornate [The Five Days], which remains unreleased in America and the UK) and both of his episodes of the TV series Masters of Horror, I have to admit that I was beginning to doubt the director’s talent in recent years: my memories of his excellent early films began to fade and were replaced by his recent output, which has gone from the below average Do You Like Hitchcock?, The Card Player and Non ho sonno in the first half of the last decade to the actually unwatchable - Giallo and Mother of Tears: The Third Mother - in the last three years. However, returning to The Bird with the Crystal Plumage after a gap of several years has revealed a film that is still fresh, innovative and deserving of its status as a seminal giallo.
Having not read the uncredited novel by Fredric Brown, I don’t know whether any of the striking set-pieces, costumes and characters can be attributed to Brown, but the plot is significantly different from the novel’s (filmed previously in 1958 by Gerd Oswald), so it’s possible that Argento only kept the book’s basic premise of an artist obsessed by a traumatised woman who is being stalked by a serial killer. There are numerous memorable scenes in the film: the powerless spectator trapped behind glass as he witnesses a murder, the police pathologist who wears dark glasses while a bank of open reel computers process the evidence behind him, a couple having sex while a metronome ticks, the protagonist throwing a cigarette packet to a suspect to see which hand he catches it with, and bizarre lines of dialogue such as ‘How many times have I had to tell you that Ursula Andress belongs with the transvestites not the perverts’!
This is a film that provides a segue from the noir genre that inspired it - the femme fatale and the amateur detective following her - to a new form of filmmaking and storytelling that seems equally inspired by Ennio Morricone’s jazz score (Argento often cut his films to his musical scores) and Freudian dream logic. While Mario Bava can stake a claim as the progenitor of giallo cinema, Argento also looks elsewhere to international filmmaking (he was a professional film critic before becoming a script writer) with chase scenes reminiscent of The Third Man, featuring close-ups and characters lit by car headlights, the familiarity of those elements made strange by Morricone’s discordant strings and the director’s fast zooms and cuts.
Only the final scene of the movie disappoints, as a police expert explains the motives and psychology of the killer; Argento doesn’t have the blank stare of a comatose Norman Bates to juxtapose with the banal monologue, so instead cuts to random shots of planes on runways as the hero sits waiting to leave the country.
This review was first published in May 2011 for the original Blu-ray release of the film.
Writers: Darren Aronofsky, Sean Gullette, Eric Watson
Cast: Sean Gullette, Mark Margolis, Ben Shenkman
USA 1998
84 mins
Mathematics is a difficult topic to film. Ron Howard’s biopic of brainiac John Nash, A Beautiful Mind (2001), was hampered in its attempt to make maths visually interesting by the boring nature of maths itself. Scott Hicks easily managed to make mad genius attractive in Shine (1996) primarily because a mad genius pianist is recognisably brilliant, even to those who don’t play the piano. A mad genius mathematician, on the other hand, looks very similar (to the uninitiated naked eye) to a mediocre mathematician, a merely good one, or indeed a rotten one. All the filmmaker can do is surround his genius with intelligent-looking people whose mouths occasionally drop open in wonder when confronted by a manically scribbled equation (used also in Gus Van Sant’s 1997 Good Will Hunting), or resort to tricks like getting him to write on windows, an image nicked from Howard by David Fincher in a desperate attempt to make the writing of computer code look cinematically interesting in The Social Network (2010).
Darren Aronofsky‘s debut, Pi (1998), is a stumbling success in conveying mathematics as a serious subject matter primarily because the maths is not as important as all that. All of Aronofsky’s films are about obsessive madness. Be it drug addiction, wrestling, scientific research or, most recently, ballet, his films all follow the trajectory of characters tearing themselves apart to get at their obsession, literally tearing themselves apart in most cases: the arm in Requiem for a Dream (2000), the heart in The Wrestler (2008), the fingernails and toenails of Black Swan (2010) and finally, where it all began, the brain in Pi. Shot in a granular black and white and with a close-up intensity that feels like an invasion of personal space, Aronofsky’s film tells the story of mad genius Max (played by Sean Gullette), who shuffles from apartment to subway station and back again, suffers intermittent debilitating attacks and becomes embroiled in two conspiracies, one involving a shady Wall Street operation and the other a bunch of Hasidic Jews searching for a numerical answer to the Torah. Max is given succour and advice by a friendly neighbour (Samia Shoaib) and a wise old mentor called Sol (Mark Margolis), who has himself given up being an obsessive genius to devote himself to dishing out wisdom to Max, games of Go and feeding his fish.
Pi will screen for free at Dalston’s Alibi Film Club in London on 19 August 2013.
Max’s explanations of what he’s looking for have a demented Johnny Ball feel, as Aronofsky supplies illustrations and Clint Mansell pounds away with a soundtrack that feels a bit too cool for the main character. The two forces that approach and seek to exploit Max, the stock market thugs, representing the material, and the frankly mad Jews, representing the mystical, are likewise a threat to the rationalist Max. They are trying to get their hands on the 216-digit number that is the film’s MacGuffin. It is Sol who argues the most coherently that once you focus on a number you will see it everywhere as you filter out all that doesn’t fit in. Sol is the voice of sanity and rational retreat. His voice is, in fact, all too sane, showing Max up for the humourless, dour nerd he really is.
Stylistically, there’s a lot of Eraserhead (Lynch, 1977) in here, but, as with Black Swan, Polanski is the main influence, and especially the claustrophobic madness of Repulsion (1965). In the end, we are left wondering how much of the film is real and how much happens in Max’s own head. The forces conniving against him seem more credible, not only as paranoid illusions, but also as projections of Max’s inflated sense of his own importance.
‘What a terrible place to live,’ muses amateur entomologist Niki Jumpei (Eiji Okada) as he scours a remote desert region for signs of a blister beetle. The protagonist of Hiroshi Teshigahara’s mesmerising masterpiece Woman of the Dunes is a Tokyo-based teacher whose aspirations to become a published academic have led him to take three days of leave in order to visit the sand dunes by the sea in search of the rare bug. After missing the last bus of the day due to falling asleep under the sun, he is offered a bed for the night by one of the residents of the nearby villagers, and rationalises that, by accepting the invitation, he will be able to make an early start on his specimen hunting when he arises the following morning. Although the ‘house’ to which he is taken proves to be a rather unconventional place of lodging as it is located in a deep sand pit and is only accessible by a rope ladder, Niki’s host (Kyôko Kishida) - the young widow of the title - makes sure that he is comfortable and well fed. However, this unusual situation becomes an unanticipated nightmare for the urbanite when he awakes to find that the rope ladder has been removed and that he has been trapped in the pit by the villagers. It transpires that the widow of the house lost her husband and daughter in a sand-slide, and that the villagers have tricked Niki into becoming his replacement; Niki’s daily task is to dig the sand, thereby preventing further sand-slides and enabling the villagers to sell the natural resource to big city developers for construction purposes. Niki’s initial approach to his predicament is to mastermind an escape attempt, but he gradually becomes conditioned to his life in the pit and accepts his share of communal responsibility, while entering into a sexual relationship with the widow.
The community of sand-dwellers who conspire to trap Niki into a life of hard labour initially give him, and the equally unsuspecting audience, the impression that they are a simple bunch of villagers, but it soon becomes apparent that this is a society that bands together to ensure economic and environmental survival. When the teacher first encounters one of the villagers, the local asks him if he works for the government, with Niki replying that he is an academic; the villager then wanders off, safe in the knowledge that the next reluctant recruit is a relatively insignificant employee of the public school system and that his sudden disappearance is unlikely to lead to a search party. The villagers trick Niki with kindness, appealing to his enthusiasm for academic tourism; the teacher likes the idea of spending a night in such a village, considers climbing down a rope ladder to be ‘quite an adventure’ and insists that ‘local food is best’ when tucking into a hearty meal of shellfish broth and bream. As much as Niki is keen to ingratiate himself in the widow’s home, he also shows signs of having a big city ego when expecting his host to re-fill his rice bowl, then laughing at her comments that the surrounding sand is so damp that it can cause clogs to ‘rot within a month’. This self-assurance soon turns into desperate panic when he realises that the locals have the upper hand and Niki’s sense of self-worth is undermined when he discovers that this society does not need his education-based skill set, complaining that ‘a monkey could learn such work’ while shovelling sand. Escape attempts prove futile as, even when Niki ties up the widow and threatens her life, the villagers are less concerned about the safety of a member of their community than they are about the premature loss of a potentially productive worker.
Niki has become an unwilling member of what can be considered a secret society in that it hides in plain sight; the villagers maintain a necessary relationship with the modern world by selling their sand to building companies, but the pit in which Niki is imprisoned is closely guarded, while the area is unlikely to attract more conventional tourists. Teshigahara only shows Niki’s experiences, but the exchanges between the teacher and the widow reveal that the survival of this community is based on captivity; she explains that young people will not stay in the village, ‘because they get more money in the big cities’ and reveals that there are actually multiple pits where other captives are forced to perform the same interminable task. Niki throws around legal terms like ‘illegal confinement’, but this is a community where every household must pitch in to keep the sliding sand at bay, so his protestations do not carry any clout with the villagers who know that he will eventually adapt. On his first night in the pit, Niki asks the widow, ‘Are you shovelling to survive, or surviving to shovel?’ The answer is probably a combination of the two; practicality and routine are the main virtues of this society in that it fights against, yet also deeply respects the surrounding elements, practising what the widow refers to as ‘Love for one’s native place’. Indeed, sand is everywhere to the extent that meals are eaten with an umbrella overhead in order to keep the food clean and Niki’s statement, ‘the sand could swallow up cities, even countries’, acknowledges its power. Members of this society are valued according to their usefulness, and when Niki almost becomes a victim of the environment - sinking in quicksand when trying to escape - he is rescued by the villagers, but only so that they can immediately get him back to work.
All of this suggests that Woman of the Dunes can be read as a critique of closed communities, but Niki’s captivity within this secret society is actually meant to represent man’s struggle with modern social restraints. Woman of the Dunes was written by Kôbô Abe, based on his existential novel, and like the subsequent collaborations between the novelist and Teshigahara - The Face of Another (1966) and The Man without a Map (1968) - deals with freedom and identity in an economically resurgent Japanese society that was forcing men into required roles in order to maintain stability. The society in Woman of the Dunes assigns their captive such a task and puts him to work for the greater good, causing Niki to lose his sense of self as he struggles to escape. Niki ultimately comes to question what ‘freedom’ means in relation to the modern world and accepts that unlimited freedom is not achievable but that, within the parameters of social restraints, some measure of freedom and personal satisfaction is still possible. Rather than fight against his predicament, Niki choses to find fulfilment within it, and discovers a method of extracting water from the sand, while settling into his domestic arrangement with the widow, who becomes his partner. By becoming a productive member of the community, Niki is even able to achieve his ambition of getting his name in print, albeit on a missing person report rather than in an encyclopaedia. When an opportunity to escape the village eventually presents itself, Niki voluntarily extends his stay, with his decision to remain in the dune suggesting that he has decided that it is not such a ‘terrible place to live’ after all. This speaks volumes about the manner in which man becomes accustomed to his environment, but the final frames of Woman of the Dunes also serve to summarise Abe’s thoughts about Japanese society in 1964.
Original titles:Der Tiger von Eschnapur + Das indische Grabmal
Germany 1959
101 + 102 mins
Way back in 1921 young Fritz Lang apparently concocted the screenplay for this bit of exotic adventure, but wasn’t trusted to direct it; studio politics intervened, then an inconvenient Second World War. Cut to the late 50s: émigré Lang has fallen from favour in Hollywood; his last film, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956), was a while back, and the offers aren’t exactly rolling in, when he gets a call from German producer Artur Brauner who tells him his old script has resurfaced, and there’s only one man they want in the director’s chair….
The Tiger of Eschnapur (Der Tiger von Eschnapur) and The Indian Tomb (Das indische Grabmal), the two halves of what became known as Fritz Lang’s Indian Epic are some of his last work, his penultimate film, made when he was approaching 70 and given more freedom and money than Hollywood usually offers its ageing masters. It was a lavish production, given extensive location shooting, an international cast, elaborate sets, crowd scenes and more elephants and tigers than you could shake a stick at. The result is one of the most deliriously unreal slices of cinema that it’s ever been my pleasure to witness.
The story is pure hokum. A German architect (Paul Hubschmid) is hired by the maharajah of Eschnapur (Walter Reyer) to construct a temple on his palace grounds. Unfortunately he promptly falls for dancer Seetha (the, frankly, smoking hot Debra Paget), on whom the maharajah has matrimonial designs, and the two lovers have to flee for their lives. Whereupon the architect’s unknowing sister (Sabine Bethmann) and partner arrive in Eschnapur, and are commissioned to construct a tomb for living inhabitants, full of traps and hazards, while in the wings, revolution is brewing amongst the palace courtiers…
All of this is the framework on which to hang lots of proto-Indiana Jones business: there are traps and escapes and close calls, flaming torches and carved stone. Fate and the ability to avoid it is continually questioned, whether our lives are our own, or in the hands of unseen forces. But it’s primarily a visual experience; nearly every frame looks like the cover to a pulp novel, all coloured back lighting and sweaty muscle. Hubschmid would have made a fine Doc Savage, Paget is a Frank Frazetta dream. India is used as a fount of exotic imagery, of jungle tiger attacks, rope tricks, coloured silk and glowering statues. It’s like a lurid and brutal children’s film, one that can accommodate Seetha’s sinuous, near-naked dance routines and a nightmarish attack by some Romero zombie-like lepers.
As the leper sequences illustrate, this is all undoubtedly loaded with cultural insensitivity and ideological dodginess. Colonial attitudes are present, if not emphasised. All the key Indian roles are played by ‘browned up’ Europeans and Americans, and the whole 203 minutes have no time for the political and social realities of life in the subcontinent. This is an India of the mind, dreamed up for silent film in 1921, and as accurate as Rousseau’s jungle canvasses. It would take an especially humourless viewer to watch this without a grin forming on their face at all the sumptuous fakery. I would say that the first half writes a cheque that the second half doesn’t quite pay out on, with more studio-bound scenes of verbal to and fro to little effect, but I’m quibbling. This is vivid, brilliant nonsense. ‘India is like an intoxicating drink,’ indeed.
The Eureka Masters of Cinema’s two-disc edition has fine-looking transfers of both films plus a host of extras, trailers, commentaries, a documentary, on-set footage and more.
Cast: Jean Servais, Carl Mí¶hner, Robert Manuel, Jules Dassin, Magali Noí«l, Marcel Lupovici
France 1955
122 mins
Since Rififi is excellent and its excellence has been well recognised, critical assessment is probably otiose. Instead let me wonder what kind of film it is. It can be seen as an archetype of the genre now known as the heist movie (in this case, not so much ‘heist gone wrong’ as ‘heist gone right but…’). By many the film will be best remembered for the bravura 28-minute robbery sequence in which not a word is spoken. Stylistically the film seems influenced by a different genre, the American detective noir of the 30s and 40s. Rififi is no policier, however: the man who goes down these mean streets alone is not a detective but a criminal, and the police play only an incidental role. The genre which Rififi ultimately exemplifies is that of the showdown between rival criminals: trouble in the underworld. A close inspiration may have been Jacques Becker’s Touchez pas au grisbi, of the previous year.
The question of what the film is about leads to the question of its title. The British and American distributors gave up on translation and simply abbreviated it to Rififi. Slang of a past era is notoriously difficult to translate. Use slang from the same period for your translation and you risk making what was once vigorous and fresh seem quaint. Use more recent slang and the anachronism will jar. A bland English translation of Rififi would be ‘trouble’. Perhaps ‘rumble’ would make clearer the suggestion of conflict. But an extra layer of sexual innuendo is added by Magali Noí«l’s nightclub song about her relish for rififi with her man. So what would have been a good English equivalent? ‘Rough and tumble’? ‘Naughtiness’? Too jokey. If only I could think of some suggestive and cool-sounding phrase meaning ‘Trouble among the Men’ - but I can’t.
If the film has a theme it is something like ‘honour among thieves’. Overworked and scarcely plausible now is the idea that there is something to admire in the honour-based value system that supposedly governs (or more often fails to govern) the criminal world. But it is memorably embodied in the central character Tony ‘le Stephanois’, played by Jean Servais, his features impassive but still somehow expressive of pain and determination, his recurrent cough a sign that his cards are marked. The film is his, with associates and enemies falling to one side or the other as he drives the drama through each new development to its grim but fitting conclusion.
I think the key to Rififi is its vividness: the swiftness of exposition, the tellingness of the dialogue, the immediacy of the character portrayals. Perhaps these are all lessons learned from the economical ways of Hollywood noir, but add to this a more European visual imagination, meticulous care with choreography of the action and framing of shots, and a delight in the Parisian locations and atmosphere (distinctly pre-teenager, pre-Elvis, pre-Gainsbourg). Amazing that Jules Dassin, creator of this masterwork of French cinema, was in fact McCarthy refugee Julius Dassin of Middletown, Connecticut.
Available now in a miraculously sharp print to bring out its deep chiaroscuro aesthetic, Rififi‘s status as a seminal crime film is secure.
Titles:Kniephofstrasse (1973), Drinnen und Draussen (1974), Illusive Crime (1976), Telling Tales (1978), Brothers and Sisters (1981), Waiting for Alan (1984), Girl from the South (1988)
UK 1973-1988
450 mins
Maintaining its commitment to preserving the disparate underbelly of our post-war national cinema, the BFI has just released a 4-disc DVD box-set of the all too brief output of Richard Woolley, another auteur that never was.
After studying structuralist aesthetics at the Royal College of Art, Woolley won a scholarship to Berlin in 1973, where he joined a group of ‘undogmatic Marxists’ concerned with the angst of capitalism and the inequalities of sexual politics. A determined avant-gardist, he made a few Godardian shorts and let his spare room to Takahiko Iimura, who he says taught him how to make money from being an artist - make it cheap!
Returning to the UK in the mid-70s, Woolley’s first featurette, Illusive Crime, was part funded by Yorkshire Arts, though its geography is far removed from Emmerdale. Filmed mainly in one location, the narrative develops over 12 revolving shots, with non-sync dialogue and off-screen action. The camera, often static and locked off, observes from a distance. It was shot on Ektachrome reversal stock, and there’s an apology/disclaimer at the front of the film for the slight imperfections and edge fogs on the print available here. Beginning with a long typewriter explanation of the film’s exposition, complete with sneezing and spelling corrections, it’s a voyeuristic exploration of a faceless rural housewife as she is sexually assaulted by the police, who believes her to be guilty of the non-existent event of the title, and dismissed as hysterical by her returning husband.
Telling Tales, Woolley’s first full-length feature, continues his exploration of gender and class politics. A middle-class couple bicker on the verge of divorce, while their servant couple grind their coffee and fetch the bottle openers. Framed through faraway doors, the film suggests that ultimately there’s little difference between both parties, all susceptible to money and greed. With Brechtian deconstruction, colour flashbacks and manifesto texts sometimes delivered direct to camera, it becomes a bleak comedy of manners.
In 1980 Woolley got his ‘proper’ break with Brothers and Sisters, a 35mm film funded by the BFI and inspired by the Yorkshire Ripper murders. A more conventional, realist film with professional actors and a quasi-whodunnit plotline, though retaining Woolley’s fondness for framing through doorways and his recurrent class and feminist themes, it achieved a wider distribution, but ultimately suffered from straddling the line between commercial and art-house. A final film, Girl from the South, followed in 1988, about a poor little rich girl who dreams of Mills & Boon, falling for a poor black boy who loves Elgar.
Strangely, by moving to a cosier and more accessible narrative form, Woolley became exhausted by directing and years of frustrated script development (the 1984 short Waiting for Alan is a reference to the Channel 4 commissioning editor). In the 90s Woolley turned to education, setting up the Northern Film School in Leeds, and then to music, and more recently has published three novels. An interview with Woolley on each disc extra includes an amusing anecdote about his encounter with R.W. Fassbinder. In his moment, Woolley had ranked alongside Peter Greenaway and Terence Davies in the pecking order of that elusive, contradictory category, British Auteur, and this box-set is a tragic reminder of how the UK gatekeepers have always missed the boat when it comes to nurturing a cinema of the left-field.
When it comes to revenge, the punishment should not only fit the crime but it should re-enact it. William Wallace’s execution in Braveheart (1995) is a re-enactment of the crimes of which he has been found guilty. He inspires internal rebellion, so his own intestines are ripped out; he wishes to separate the kingdom, then his limbs are racked; he disobeys the head of state, his own head must come off. This is a principle of the law as vengeance, on which public executions used to be based, and which in turn inspired a whole spate of Jacobean revenge dramas, most famously Hamlet. In Kim Jee-Woon‘s new film, I Saw the Devil, vengeance is all, in a full-throated, blood-soaked revenge opera.
The initial murder and the subsequent investigation occupy a slim part of the film and are slickly despatched. The pregnant fiancée of National Security agent Soo-hyun is captured, tortured and murdered by Kyung-chul (played by the Oldboy himself, Choi Min-sik). Soo-hyun tracks him down with relative ease and, unhampered by the niceties of due process, sets about his revenge. It is here the film takes a genuinely perverse turn. Reckoning killing’s too good for this psycho, Soo-hyun sets about a game not so much of cat and mouse as rabid cat and rabid cat, torturing Kyung-chul only to release him so he can be hunted again. Soo-hyun goes about his task with a steely-eyed determination and grimly funny verve, which wins reluctant admiration from the serial killers he comes across even as it risks losing audience sympathy. But who cares about sympathy? This is a world of banal and ubiquitous evil, populated by school children, defenceless women (with one exception), ineptly woeful cops and predatory sadists of whom Kyung-chul seems like a charismatic leader. An old pal speaks of him as if he were a guru from the 60s: ‘We were going to turn the world upside down.’ The ordinariness of Kyung-chul is disconcerting. As in the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), this is a banal evil. Kyung-chul has a disapproving father, an abandoned son and a day job (school bus driver, I know, I know). His victims are despatched with whatever comes to hand, a piece of pipe, a screwdriver, and souvenirs are kept in filing cabinets, rather than a Seven-like shrine.
Soo-hyun’s revenge is grimly witty, but the film, despite the extremity of the violence, never gets bogged down in torture porn. Soo-hyun’s main dilemma is not so much concerned with the morality of vengeance, but rather a technical question: how can the revenger truly replicate the crime to be avenged? How can the pain and fear of the innocent victim be inflicted on the guilty? Surely, if you care enough to want it, you’ve already lost. Soo-hyun’s solution is both blackly hilarious and tragically absurd.
Christopher Eggleston’s cult Ozploitation shocker Long Weekend (1978), released at the height of the Australian New Wave, is an eco-horror movie portraying all aspects of Mother Nature as being interconnected and humanity as a pollutant to be eradicated. Scripted by Everett De Roche, whose other screenplays include Patrick (Richard Franklin, 1978) and Razorback (Russell Mulcahy, 1984), Long Weekend offers up a sinister vision of the planet’s collective ‘immune system’ closing ranks and fighting back against unwelcome foreign bodies. With a tag line reading ‘their crime was against nature… and nature found them guilty’, De Roche’s plot sees crass, macho Peter (John Hargreaves) and cold, neurotic Marcia (Briony Behets), a closeted, selfish and unhappily married urban couple, descend on an untamed coastal area rich in flora, fauna and wildlife for a weekend camping trip arranged to help save their failing marriage. Out of their ‘natural’ city environment and showing ignorant, callous disregard for their new surroundings, the wholly unsympathetic couple upset the rhythm and equilibrium of the area with fatal consequences. Their ‘crimes’ include running down a kangaroo, blindly ignoring a ‘Private - keep out’ sign, destroying plant life, taking an axe to a tree for fun and shooting a harmless sea cow. The ensuing clash, as plant life, wildlife and land, sea and air fight back against the man-made guns, axes and insecticides, dominates the unfolding events and the ostensibly beautiful ancient surroundings turn ugly, a reflected physical manifestation of the couple’s contemporary inner torments. Peter and Marcia, symbolic of mankind’s self-indulgent and rapacious appetites, are watched, judged, rejected and finally coughed up and spat out like an unwanted furball.
Reminiscent of Saul Bass’s woefully under-appreciated ant invasion chiller Phase IV (1974), Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) and William Girdler’s The Day of the Animals (1977), among other loosely related man-against-nature films, Eggleston and De Roche’s imagined scenario has a strong subversive streak running through it. Audience expectations are constantly challenged: the titular break, that cherished extended weekend, becomes a drawn out, tortuous descent into marital breakdown, paranoia and death, the lead characters are the invaders to be repelled and audience sympathy is squarely aligned with Mother Nature’s vicious retribution. By alternately having the camera at ground level among the plants and insects, circling the incessantly argumentative and unlikeable couple in a predatory fashion or assuming the God-like position among the treetops, the director leads the audience to become omnipotent, judgmental and complicit. A combination of striking imagery, tight narrative structuring and impressive use of sound creates an ultra-weird and increasingly delirious sense of paranoia, which the couple simultaneously suffer and are accused of causing. The soundtrack, a mixture of cacophonous, discordant electronica, primal, guttural animal sounds and moments of eerie deathly silence, is an essential factor in creating the tension, off-kilter atmosphere and sense of symbiosis in the film. A repeated aural motif is used to link the differing elements - when one creature or plant is hurt or destroyed an anguished howl of pain/rage is heard coming from elsewhere in the environment. The supposedly dead sea cow exemplifies the disturbing and uncanny events, dragging itself incrementally up the beach and into the couple’s campsite, invading their territory as they have invaded nature’s.
Film critics at the time claimed that Hargreaves, described as ‘the quintessential Australian man’, and Behets, a regular in television soaps, were miscast in their roles, but it is precisely because they seem ill at ease that their unnatural status within the narrative is strengthened. Long Weekend, while not without flaws, succeeds in its exploitation and twisting of genre conventions, with its eco-horror themes and re-positioning of mankind as an alien threat creating an effective, unsettling experience. Eggleston’s film, the subject of an inferior 2008 remake starring Jim Caviezel by fellow Australian director Jamie Blanks, is an enduringly bizarre example of reversed psycho-geography, where the effects of mankind on environment produces extreme and unforgettable results.
Alternative title:A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop
Based on the film Blood Simple by: Ethan and Joel Coen
Cast: Dahong Ni, Ni Yan, Xiao Shen-Yang
China 2009
95 mins
Undeniably one of the most colourful films on offer this month, Zhang Yimou’s Blood Simple is a remake of sorts of the Coen Brothers’ 1984 debut. Moving the action to northern China in the imperial age, the film follows Ni Dahong, the owner of a noodle shop in the middle of the desert, who pays a killer to murder both his unfaithful wife and her squeamish lover. It’s a shame that the banal slapstick and oddball jokes that Zhang decided to employ instead of the black humour of the original inevitably turn his ambitious venture into a comic farce as the plot rolls on, and it is only in the film’s showdown that he manages to get back on solid ground. There are plenty of things wrong with this film, including the wildly varied and exaggerated acting on display, but Blood Simple is nonetheless a visual treat throughout, from the luridly coloured landscapes and floral costumes to the film’s deft cinematography that are clear reminders of Zhang’s earlier work.
As the Pang Brothers, Oxide and Danny have been frustrating filmmakers. For every Bangkok Dangerous or The Eye, there’s been a silly Bangkok Dangerous Nic Cage remake or The Eye: Infinity. So it’s refreshing to see Oxide go it alone and taking on a more adult, complex genre in this downbeat tale of a lonely gumshoe on the trail of a missing girl through the sweaty streets of Bangkok’s Chinatown.
Kwok plays the detective-for-hire Tam, not the smartest tool in the box (in fact, the film’s original title grades him as C+ Detective), but an enthusiastic character who hopes to get by with just a notepad and a camera phone. His case leads him stumbling blindly into apparent suicides that he quickly claims to be murders, much to the annoyance of his weary policeman buddy Chak (Kai Chi Liu).
The story is nothing new; as expected, Tam gets drawn deeper into a tangle of money and betrayal, but Kwok’s charisma pulls you along. He gives Tam a boyishness, a taste for adventure, that leads him down some dark alleyways as he struggles to crack the case despite his own shortcomings. This is where Pang really nails the genre; being a detective isn’t all guns and dames, but constantly going over the scant evidence until something clicks, or you get beaten up.
For Pang, the film is an exercise in evocative visuals combined with sticky tension, punctuated with the odd car chase or surreal comedic moment. Tam even gets a jaunty ‘theme song’ during the opening scenes. Although it goes down the supernatural route during the second half, the focus is always on the detective story, which plays out to a satisfying, if over-explained, conclusion. Thankfully, Pang has resisted breaking out the jump cuts and easy scares and has started an engrossing, mature franchise. In the forthcoming sequel, Tam is even promoted to B+.
Richard Badley
A Deviant View of Cinema – Film, DVD & Book Reviews
