Tag Archives: political film

Kiss of the Spider Woman

kissofthespiderwoman 3
Kiss of the Spider Woman

Format: Blu-ray, DVD, VOD

Release date: 25 January 2016

Distributor: Curzon Artificial Eye

Director: Hector Babenco

Writer: Leonard Schrader

Cast: William Hurt, Raúl Juliá, Sonia Braga, José Lewgoy, Milton Gonçalves

Brazil, USA 1985

118 mins

The story of the friendship between a political prisoner and his gay cellmate remains as potent and provocative as it was in 1985.

Thirty years on from its Cannes-feted debut, Hector Babenco’s adaptation of Manuel Puig’s 1976 prison-based novel has lost none of its dramatic power. Beautifully restored, this anniversary release, complete with a disc of extras (interviews, commentaries, etc), offers a timely reminder of a bold and brassy classic that challenged social and political norms in a magnificent manner.

The plot centres on a pair of seemingly mismatched prisoners: political activist Valentin (Raúl Juliá) and his gay cellmate, Molina (William Hurt). The latter recounts a tale of forbidden love, set during World War II, between a French chanteuse and a Nazi officer – a postmodern device, typical of the time, that offers a noir film within a film, and which also helps emphasise the poignancy of the film’s title. Molina’s real motives for his flamboyant storytelling soon become apparent as the action shifts beyond the pair’s cell into the wider prison complex. The authorities are determined to extract information from Valentin via his cellmate and Molina’s charms are their unconventional weapon.

Hurt’s electrifying performance as the camp Molina came at a time when the actor was hot property in Hollywood (his star shone brightly throughout the 1980s, before being resurrected in the early 2000s). Always one to challenge himself on screen and on stage, his Best Actor prize at Cannes was deservedly followed by a Best Actor Oscar and BAFTA the following year. It remains, in many ways, a career-defining performance for the thoughtful, bookish East Coast star.

Hurt’s co-star, the great Puerto Rican actor Raúl Juliá – whose career was cut tragically short in 1994, following a stroke – similarly offers an intense and sensitive portrayal of the politically engaged Valentin, who forms an unlikely bond with Molina before the two must part. The eventual love scene is relayed with a playful nod to the studios’ infamous Hays Code censorship.

The film appeared at a timely juncture for America, with Ronald Reagan’s right-wing grip on US domestic and foreign policy compounded by his administration’s attitude to the emergence of AIDS. Such was its resonance with audiences, the source material was further adapted for a stage musical in the decade that followed (although it received mixed reviews, it won a Tony Award in 1993).

Today, this much-praised film feels as relevant and provocative as ever, particularly in light of recent developments with LGBT and immigrants’ rights, as well as the sharp rise in inequality in many parts of the West. It’s a theatrical work that defies expectation, offering up a series of very fine set pieces (and performances) that feel as urgent today as they did in 1985.

Ed Gibbs

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The Man in the Orange Jacket

The Man in the Orange Jacket
The Man in the Orange Jacket

Director: Aik Karapetian

Writer: Aik Karapetian

Cast: Anta Aizupe, Maxim Lazarev, Aris Rozentals

Original title: M.O.Zh.

Latvia 2014

71 mins

An odd, upsetting 71 minutes from Latvia, in which an unnamed man, dressed in the utilitarian high-visibility vest of the title, separates from the crowds of similarly attired workers, leaves a plant and makes his way to the house of the industrialist who has just put him and 211 others out of work. There, he uses his toolkit to exact bloody revenge, and maybe steal a little of the luxury lifestyle he feels he is owed. However, something isn’t right; the mansion makes strange noises, the cupboards are bare. Rich food, when he eats it, doesn’t agree with him, cigars make him choke. He’s plagued by nightmares, just-glimpsed figures and the feeling that he’s being stalked. Possibly by a man in an orange jacket…

Partly a twist on home-invasion horror, part old-fashioned ghost story, part politically conscious fable, The Man in the Orange Jacket is complex and unsettling. Bringing to mind The Shining and Jan Švankmajer in some places, The Woman in Black in others, it is not averse to getting properly nasty now and then. Divided into four acts, and largely dialogue free, it eludes simple explanation. Has the act of murder and greed in act one turned the man into his own enemy in the class war? Is he simply a horrible psychopath being tortured by the unquiet shades of his victims? How much of any of this is only happening within his head? Undoubtedly there is an emphasis on the emptiness of bourgeois desire, and on the corruptions of capital, especially in scenes where he treats two (apparently twin) prostitutes he has hired as a ‘rich man’ appallingly, showing his own capacity for exploitation.

Frankly, I’d be lying if I said I had a handle on exactly what was going on at every given moment. What I can say without much fear of contradiction is that the sound design is brilliant and that writer-director Aik Karapetian is a dab hand at evoking nameless menace and delivering brutal shocks. Approach with caution.

Mark Stafford

This review is part of our LFF 2014 coverage.

The Unknown Known

The Unknown Known
The Unknown Known

Format: Cinema

Release date: 21 March 2014

Distributor: Dogwoof

Director: Errol Morris

USA 2013

102 mins

Ace documentary filmmaker Errol Morris is back in familiar territory with this one-on-one exploration of the life and times of George W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, the clearly gifted master of political doubletalk, misinformation, disinformation and perhaps one of the most dangerous, despicable and evil Americans of the past decade. Much like The Fog of War, Morris’s exploration of Robert McNamara, Defense Secretary during the Vietnam War, the veteran filmmaker hits his new subject with tough questions, attempting to paint as honest a portrait as possible of a political mastermind of legal mass murder, or, if you will, the war against terror. McNamara was a different beast, though. He at least seemed to be telling the truth. None of that – truth, that is – appears to be on display here.

The Unknown Known is out on DVD in the UK on 11 August 2014.

With a malevolent grin, Rumsfeld makes you think he’s letting the cat in the bag slip out, but in the same breath, he’s letting you know the cat’s still in the bag, and that his final word on the matter will always ensure that the bag’s indeed in the river. In fact, we never get a clear picture of anything from Rumsfeld. It always seems clear, but never feels truthful. In several contexts, Rumsfeld is caught completely contradicting himself and hilariously ignoring and/or talking his way out of his obvious falsehoods and/or discrepancies. We’re witness to one magnificent turn of phrase after another. The man is a master spin-doctor and, even more astoundingly, he might actually be the best generator of juicy sound bites in the world – ever. Here’s a tiny, but choice grocery list of a few of them:

‘All generalisations are false, including this one,’ he proclaims.

‘The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,’ he opines on weapons of mass destruction, or lack thereof, in Iraq.

Rumsfeld treats us to one of his astounding humdingers (which Morris uses for the film’s title): ‘There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. These are things we don’t know we don’t know. The unknown known, however, is a thing that we know, but are unaware of knowing.’

The whole movie is a hoot from beginning to end, but what we’re ultimately presented and left with is 102 minutes of lies – or, at the very least, what Rumsfeld wants us to hear, even if he knows we don’t believe a word.

The man has no shame. None. He could have been a president.

Greg Klymkiw

This review was first published as part of our TIFF 2013 coverage.

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Investigation of a Citizen above Suspicion

Investigation of a Citizen above Suspicion
Investigation of a Citizen above Suspicion

Format: DVD + Blu-ray (R1/A)

Release date: 3 December 2013

Distributor: Criterion

Director: Elio Petri

Writers: Elio Petri, Ugo Pirro

Cast: Gian Maria Volonté, Florinda Bolkan, Gianni Santuccio

Original title: Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto

Italy 1970

115 mins

An ambitious amalgam of fascist noir and absurdist satire, Investigation of a Citizen above Suspicion has unjustly been relegated to Oscar winner turned semi-obscurity status. The 1970 recipient of the Best Foreign Language film award, it follows the ethical and intellectual disintegration of a recently promoted police investigator.

Played by Sergio Leone favourite Gian Maria Volonté, the nameless Inspector slits his mistress’s throat in an act that, at least initially, appears to be a logical progression of the pair’s increasingly deviant psychosexual gamesmanship, reminiscent of Nicolas Roeg’s Performance. The Inspector then audaciously parades concrete evidence of his own guilt before the Gestapo-like task force he commandeers. Suspense is measured not by how long he can avoid being caught, but by how far his colleagues will stretch their belief in the innocence of their superior.

At least in a surficial sense, Investigation’s conflation of the personal and the political most immediately resembles Bertolucci’s The Conformist, another 1970 film that utilizes a flashback structure to probe the childlike neurosis that cripples the man at the centre of its narrative. Yet Volonté’s inspector, a creature of carnal energy and rabid intelligence who continually succumbs to infantile rages and bestial perversities, is practically the inverse of the soul-shaken title character of The Conformist.

Director Elio Petri, a one-time communist journalist, immerses his central character in a skewed bureaucratic world defined by the sickly, death-pallor humour that percolated just under the skin of Bertolucci’s film. The Inspector offers maxims such as ‘Revolution is like syphilis, it’s in the blood’ to his followers, and maintains an easy rapport with a paparazzo covering the murder case. High-level officials gather to catalogue and scrutinize instances of leftist vandalism in their jurisdiction, and the meeting is ludicrously filled with earnest analysis and pregnant pauses; aside from the typical graffiti favouring Trotsky and Mao, there’s been a curious upswing in pro-Marquis de Sade tagging amongst brutalized revolutionaries.

Yet Petri gamely imbues the proceedings with a genuine sense of Big Brother menace that predicts the post-Watergate nightmares of The Conversation and Alan J. Pakula’s 1970s oeuvre. Creeping zooms from obscure, elevated vantage points suggest a clandestine, all-knowing hierarchy stretching upwards into infinity, while a tour of the police headquarters exposes miles-long caverns occupied by an army of wiretapping professionals and wall-to-wall surveillance equipment. And in the only instance we see the Inspector allowing for self-examination, he torturously sweats over his home tape recorder, feeding it riddles on the nature of power and the law. Of equal import to this balance of vicious satire and omnipresent paranoia is the film’s jaunty yet queasy Ennio Morricone score, referred to by the composer as a kind of grotesque folk music. That Morricone wrote the theme without having actually seen the film somehow only heightens the levels of moral and ideological incongruity on display.

Struggling with the very complexities of the film’s tone, Petri overstrains for narrative tidiness in the final act, employing an unwelcome excess of expository dialogue. Yet the painfully forthright points made about the jealousy, emotional regression and fascist madness consuming the Inspector’s psyche are offset by a spellbinding fever dream finale wholly worthy of the Kafka quote which graces the film’s last frame. And as a riotous gathering of fiery leftist students becomes nothing more than another layer of background ambiance against which the Inspector’s sanity unravels, Investigation ultimately reveals itself as an amber-preserved instant of 60s counter-culture fury transformed into new-decade fatalism.

Michael Wojtas

Violent Virgin

Violent Virgin

Format: DVD box set (Kôji Wakamatsu Volume 3)

Release date: November 2010

Distributor Blaq Out

Director: Kôji Wakamatsu

Writers: Izuru Deguchi, Atsushi Yamatoya

Original title: Gewalt! Gewalt: shojo geba-geba

Cast: Eri Ashikawa, Toshiyuki Tanigawa, Miki Hayashi

Japan 1969

66 mins

Violent Virgin (1969) is one of Kôji Wakamatsu’s early films. Although it is certainly part of his pink film oeuvre the film maps out many of the director’s later concerns. Like other filmmakers working in the late 60s and 70s, such as Melvin Van Peebles and Ruggero Deodato, Wakamatsu used the format of sexploitation as a way into an exploration of other transgressive acts such as extreme violence, amorality and oppression. The film does have a story: a man and a woman are held in captivity by a group of yakuza thugs and the film explores various shifts in power dynamics between the pair and this group and another group of well-dressed yakuza bosses. Yet, as the film progresses the characters appear to be more like symbols acting out relationships in an allegory rather than part of a narrative. Wakamatsu sets these tableaux entirely outdoors in the wilderness. There is no sense of a horizon and, as such, no suggestion of a place beyond this world. From here, it is easy to speculate that Wakamatsu used this form to comment on broader real-life socio-political dynamics. This comment, though, is fragmented and hinted at, and, arguably, purposefully eclipsed by erotic sensation, although it alludes to dysfunction, tyranny and ultimately meaningless struggles for leadership.

What is so refined about the film is that its exploration of domination is slippery and nonsensical. The microcosm portrayed in this dune-scape is constantly in flux. The central male character, played by Atushi Yamatoya, goes from kidnapped victim, to escapee, to killer, to demon and then to oppressor himself. So to with the portrayals of sex. Here both male and female characters go through a range of experiences of erotic pleasure, physical restraint and humiliation. Remarkably for the time and even notable now, there is a depiction of mutual pleasure in the male/female sex scenes that seems to transcend the male perspective. The women characters are seen to be as sexually and violently charged as their male counterparts. However, Wakamatsu stops short of evening the scores fully by only showing the female characters being subjected to rape.

For a film constantly switching between numerous complex sexual and socio-political positions it remains elegantly simple in its poetic rendering. Wakamatsu favours an uncluttered mise en scène. Yamatoya is nude for much of the film or wearing a woman’s slip, and his lover Hanako, played by Eri Ashikawa, is topless and wearing only her underwear. So many shots depict nude flesh against the grassy wilds or bare earth. There is something levelling about this that creates a sense of equivalence between the characters, a grounding that is present at the same time as a sense of fluctuating structures. This suggests that Wakamatsu wanted to show the characters as base essence as if he was somehow trying to get close to the root of the motivations that prompt the members of the group to behave in the way they do. He, like us, is left with a sense of enigma but also the suggestion of myriad social configurations.

Nicola Woodham