Flickhead Film Reviews A-F

This was a big hit in America, and for a moment French comic Louis de Funès appeared on the brink of becoming successor to the throne of Jerry Lewis (abdicated circa Don’t Raise the Bridge, Lower the River). Rabbi Jacob opens with about 40-minutes on his character — a Continental Archie Bunker-style bigot doing pratfalls — and some of this is incredibly funny slapstick. Feature-length comedies often derail at this point, however, when free-spiritedness trips headfirst into convention, and Funès goes from wacky lead caricature to jittery plot passenger. There are very few screenplays successful at bridging this transition, and even fewer actors up to the task. So we go from a man, fresh out of a vat of green bubble gum, covered head to toe in green goo, blowing bubbles out of his sole-less shoes, to a shrill mistaken-identity scenario in which actors feign confusion and yell at one another while somehow, some way, the story attempts realism and address social issues. Watch for Dominique Zardi in the delicatessen scene. The DVD version is trimmed from 100-minutes.

Return to Top

____________________

Baise-moi

Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi, 2001

Controversial less for violence than its brief hardcore sex scenes, Baise-moi (“fuck me”) approaches a number of worthy issues: societal desensitization, the power insecure men wield over insecure women, and the cynicism that erodes trust and romanticism. Directors Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi do not dilute the work to suit conventional expectation, and remain objective toward the actions of the main characters (a pair of homicidal women). The avoidance of hasty dime-store analysis to either justify or crucify them, however, brings with it an immunity to things either cerebral or sensational, and may numb the viewer to a state of apathy. Karen Bach, Rafaella Anderson.

Return to Top

____________________

Cinemania

Angela Christlieb and Stephen Kijak, 2002

Other than King of Comedy and the Star Trek hypnosis of Trekkies, fringe film fandom is a subject woefully underserved by the movies — are filmmakers too timid to explore their own inner nerds? Directed by Angela Christlieb and Stephen Kijak, Cinemania follows a handful of intriguing Manhattan-based movie addicts who schedule days around screenings, their passions extending from Alain Resnais to Roger Corman and anything in-between. We could sit here in our ivory tower and poke fun at their collective dementia, but you know what they say about people in glass houses. (For absolute cinemmersion, watch Cinemania back-to-back with Agnès Varda's Les Cent et une nuits de Simon Cinéma.)

Return to Top

____________________

City of God

Kátia Lund and Fernando Meirelles, 2002

Set behind Rio de Janeiro's picture-postcard façade, this elaborate examination of crime and poverty was based upon actual events. Shifting from the good (a boy who dreams of becoming a photographer), the bad (a decent man gone wrong), and the ugly (a natural born killer), Cidade de Deus is beautifully shot and edited, and . . . rather familiar. Scenes from Los Olvidados (1950) , Goodfellas (1990), and Straight Out of Brooklyn (1991) come to mind as the camera traces the evolution of warring street gangs and the impoverished community deteriorating around them. Curiously, its one profound aspect — the violence, drug dealing and deprivation happening just miles away from the elite vacation hot spot — goes nearly unnoticed by directors Kátia Lund and Fernando Meirelles.

Return to Top

____________________

Cocksucker Blues

Robert Frank and Daniel Seymour, 1972

Much talked about but rarely seen, this documentary of the Rolling Stones and their 1972 American tour was filmed not long after Mick Jagger nearly took a bullet at Altamont. There was an eerie restlessness about that earlier (1969) concert, which found the Stones tossed in a Lord of the Flies mosh-pit, policed by a blitzed battalion of Hell’s Angels.

Gimme Shelter (1970) was the document of that bloody epoch, and it went on to win awards, make the Maysles brothers famous and turn a profit. It was likely instrumental in getting Cocksucker Blues off the ground, too—at least from the distribution end—an opportunity to repeat Gimme Shelter’s success in the eye of a Stones tour and the release of a new album.

That recording, Exile on Main Street, sported a faux-collage cover photograph taken in 1950 by Robert Frank. (It was actually a shot of the cluttered wall of a tattoo parlor.) More of Frank’s black and white images were used below Jagger’s handwritten credits on the jacket, a graphic indication of a turning point for the Stones. Loose, hard and fast, Exile eschewed the tight production of preceding albums, and let the band rip. This lax attitude carried through on Cocksucker Blues, as the camera went backstage, in airplanes and hotel rooms to espy all the indiscriminate sex, drug use and inebriated ramblings of the Stones and their entourage.

The salty title notwithstanding, its nudity, needles and hedonism was supposedly incriminating and the picture was shelved—this during a liberal climate that saw the likes of Cry Uncle! and Chafed Elbows playing in neighborhood theatres. A generic performance film, Ladies and Gentlemen, The Rolling Stones, was released instead, and Cocksucker Blues became a myth.

A more likely scenario would have the financiers and distributors aghast by Frank’s stoned shapelessness. Curiously spare on songs and ostensibly unconcerned with band’s musical process, the film, rather than act as bystander, becomes one with its subject. Haphazardly arranged, Cocksucker Blues is less a film than a chattering cocaine hum.

Frank had developed a unique subjective approach in Pull My Daisy (1958), nurturing Beat sensibility with the joyous participation of Kerouac, Ginsberg and Corso. It was co-directed with Alfred Leslie, as Frank has never been averse to working with others. (Frank and Rudy Wurlitzer’s Candy Mountain [1988] is certainly worth tracking down.) In retrospect, his collaborations have displayed the influence of his partners, and with Daniel Seymour on Cocksucker Blues, a druggy lack of purpose sets in.

Contrary to the buoyancy percolating in the small apartment of Pull My Daisy, backstage with the Stones we find ourselves incarcerated with an oppressive clique. A dreary couple droning on while shooting heroin becomes an extended leitmotif that plays it’s hand prematurely; that Frank and Seymour revisit them—more than once!—is laborious at best. Keith Richards tossing a TV off a hotel balcony is a staged prank that inadvertently exposes the emptiness of the act. That he and his pals prolong it with obligatory chortles only adds to the embarrassment. Above all else is the young pregnant woman eager to give birth while tripping on acid, where Frank is furnished with pathos off the cuff.

Despite flawed mono sound, the raw energy of Exile on Main Street carries over to the frugal concert footage. “Happy” soars while profiling the Jagger/Richards charisma. The demonically charged “Midnight Rambler” maintains its pulsating arc after all these years, and a teaming with Stevie Wonder—where the Stones momentarily stumble on the loose flow of Stevie’s r&b/funk—is nothing less than exuberant. Yet throughout all of this, Frank juxtaposes wide-angle close-ups with tightly packed full-frame shots, where claustrophobia has never been more palpable.

Defenders will point out the value of a filmed record so connected to its subject as to become one with it. Gimme Shelter and Jean-Luc Godard’s Sympathy for the Devil (1968) are impartial and express moments in the Stones’ history. But Frank and Seymour and Cocksucker Blues are jumbled beyond coherence, so subjective it’s almost surreal.

Return to Top

____________________

A Decade Under the Influence

Richard LaGravenese and Ted Demme, 2003

Released by Docurama

A dizzying glance at an intriguing epoch, A Decade Under the Influence possesses a sycophantic spirit. Armed with dozens of interviews and film clips, directors Richard LaGravenese and the late Ted Demme adore their subject — “the 70’s films that changed everything,” according to the picture’s tag line — and run the risk of sacrificing their objectivity. But to be perfectly honest, who cares? Originally a three-part mini-series broadcast on the Independent Film Channel, running a total of 180 minutes, we’d be entranced even if it were triple that length.

It opens with the chestnut about the demise of the studio system, a mid-century passing of the baton when the moguls (Darryl Zanuck, Louis B. Mayer, Jack Warner, etc.) retired and sold their interests to lawyers and accountants. Television and a collective urge away from outmoded values ultimately killed the dynasty of old Hollywood, and it went down in gaudy, graceless denial. LaGravenese and Demme disinter footage taken at the ‘star studded’ premiere of Hello, Dolly! (1969), where celebrities well into their golden years whoop it up for an astonishingly archaic, white elephant of a picture.

“The film business was a decadent, decaying, empty whorehouse, and it had to be assaulted,” reflects Paul Schrader, one of the documentary’s jubilant interviewees. Like many of his contemporaries who either worked in television during the 50’s, or spent perhaps too much of their adolescence going to the movies, Schrader embraced the impending upheaval. “You had that student-film mentality: let’s pick up the banner of Godard and walk in there and take over!”

They had a ready-made audience, supportive of foreign films and apprehensive of the conventional (re: ‘establishment’) thinking that threatened to hitch the 60’s to the conformity of the 50’s. “It was an audience that had been politicized by Vietnam and Watergate, whose consciousness had been changed with drugs,” explains Julie Christie. “It was an open audience.”

Heady films for heady viewers. Approaching the terrain skewed earlier by Peter Biskind in his book, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ‘n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999), A Decade Under the Influence recognizes the groundbreaking advance of adult themes in Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and the progression of John Cassavetes’s improvisational experiments, as American drama became visibly affected by the naturalism of postwar European cinema. The writers, actors and directors who’d be influenced the most were then working at the opposite end of the spectrum, honing their craft in low budget exploitation pictures. Martin Scorsese, Dennis Hopper, and Bruce Dern (here providing a killer Jack Nicholson impression) have no shortage of stories about “Roger Corman’s guerilla university of filmmaking,” as it’s affectionately referred to by Peter Bogdanovich, churning out movies remembered chiefly for their meager budgets and impossibly tight shooting schedules than any aesthetic or socially redeeming values.

As members of what once was labeled “The new American cinema,” this far-from-beat generation have remained enthusiastic about the art and, for the most part, reverent of those who came before them. When asked to name their influences, Bogdanovich replies, “There was Renoir, and” — sweeping his hand to divide rank — “then there was everybody else.” Robert Altman, conversely, uses his own distinct approach: “The filmmakers who influenced me the most, I don’t know their names. Because I would go see a film, hate it, and say ‘I’ve got to remember never to do anything like that again!’”

Young, bursting with ideas, and inexpensive to hire, they were a persuasive lot who finagled a degree of autonomy from broadminded backers and distributors. One important factor that allowed their films a liberal handling of sexuality and vulgar language was the MPAA ratings system, which had been initiated in 1968. Unless we were distracted by all that was going on, A Decade Under the Influence overlooks this milestone entirely.

Without it, no distributor would’ve touched The Last Picture Show (1971) for its nudity, or Deliverance (1972) for its homosexual rape. Without the ‘R’ rating, M*A*S*H* (1970) and The Exorcist (1973) would probably never have been made. And Robert Towne would not have had the dispute he relates here, an amusing quandary with producers over how many times he should use the word ‘motherfucker’ in his script for The Last Detail (1973).

The liberation and creativity under the ratings system enticed Francis Coppola and Sidney Lumet to expand the parameters of drama, and enabled Altman, Hal Ashby and Bob Rafelson to subvert traditional forms. “The director was trump,” says producer John Calley. Studios and financiers and directors, William Friedkin declares, “were all on the same page.” This is not to say that mindless, studio-controlled movies evaporated entirely — it was, after all, the decade of the ‘disaster’ picture. But for approximately seven years, beginning around the time of Easy Rider (1969) and lasting through Network (1976), an environment existed where, to borrow from Sissy Spacek, “the artist ruled,” and generated a branch of cinema that turned the glamour of old Hollywood inside-out.

But the artist ruled for only so long. Metaphysic, satiric, introspective and nose-thumbing, films like Hi, Mom! (1970), The Panic in Needle Park (1971), The King of Marvin Gardens (1972) and Chinatown (1974) could also be intellectually and emotionally draining. Money, power, and excess would soon sour the reputations of ‘superstar’ directors: Scorsese’s New York, New York (1977), Bogdanovich’s At Long Last Love (1975), Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), and Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate (1980) all fell victim to reports of ridiculously excessive budgets and unrestrained egos behind the camera. By the time they hit theatres, there wasn’t damage control enough to woo a paying audience.

After the remarkable popularity of The Exorcist, escapism became the seminal buzzword, and by the time A Decade Under the Influence reaches Jaws (1975), we see the dawn of yet another new Hollywood. Here the documentary virtually palls in tone and spirit: is that grief in the voices and faces of Monte Hellman, Julie Christie, and Francis Coppola? Or merely our take on a distressing situation that’s yet to reverse itself? For almost overnight, mature themes and characters were tossed out like so many unwanted ideas, and American cinema experienced a candy-coated epiphany. Jaws isn’t a bad movie — time may reveal it to be the best thing Steven Spielberg’s ever done — but it opened the door for artlessly pretentious, epic bubblegum. With Star Wars (1977), a picture devised at the lowest rung of Hollywood’s food chain (the vacuous Saturday matinee serial gussied up as celebratory event), the crossover to superficiality was clear, the arrival of the producer as auteur. Which, in turn, shifted the concerns of the media and public from art to capital: budgets, merchandising, opening weekend, franchises, and the double-entendre of ‘back end’ deals.

Richard LaGravenese and Ted Demme close at this point. Where else can you go? Coppola, Bogdanovich, Towne, Scorsese and Friedkin wandered out of the 70’s as if nursing a hangover. Altman dipped into obscure filmed stage plays, Clint Eastwood found his voice as an artist, and Sidney Pollack abided by the rules and earned a fortune. Ellen Burstyn sank below radar, and Dennis Hopper entertained with anger issues (re: Blue Velvet) and yarns about drug abuse. A who’s who in a depressing chapter for a future volume of Hollywood Babylon we hope will never be written.

A Decade Under the Influence neglects some areas — the arresting psychological fringe of the early Henry Jaglom films and Milton Moses Ginsberg’s Coming Apart (1969); the controlled violent horror of Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) — and gives short shrift to the rise and commercial viability of 70’s black cinema. (Gordon Parks and Melvin Van Peebles go unmentioned, while a brief inclusion of Pam Grier concentrates on her “hooties in the jungle” exploitation movies for Roger Corman.) Though these omissions are not minor quibbles, LaGravenese and Demme shouldn’t be faulted for shortsightedness. (At the end, they apologize for any exclusions.) It was a long, arduous decade, and the uneasy alliance of high- and lowbrow films is too vast a subject for any one documentary. A Decade Under the Influence is miraculous for covering as much ground as it does.

Return to Top

____________________

Dillo con parole mie / Ginger and Cinnamon

Daniele Luchette, 2003

Released by Film Movement

Set on the Greek isle of Ios, presumably the sacred mating grounds of pubescent party animals, Daniele Luchette’s Dillo con parole mie (Ginger and Cinnamon) continues with the atmosphere of sun and sex he used in La Settimana della sfinge (1990).

His new film follows fourteen-year-old Meggy (Martina Merlino) as she sheds her Girl Scout uniform on a quest to lose her virginity. All she needs is to find a guy to do it with. On the way, she’s joined by her thirty-year-old aunt Stefania (Stefania Montorsi), weary and cynical after her frustrating relationship with Andrea (Giampaolo Morelli). The two women bond under protest, their sharply conflicting views of men and sex rendered in a comedy of errors.

As it veers into convenience — Meggy is unaware that her pickup target is Stefania’s ex — the scenario points to the disenchantment suffered by idealists. Co-star Montorsi (who is also Mr. Luchette’s spouse) wrote the story the film is based on, ostensibly to comment upon the cultural values dividing successive generations. (The ginger and cinnamon of the title has to do with a recipe confusion that can harmonize disparate flavors.) By the end, though, it seems less concerned with these differences than with a premature nostalgia for adolescence felt by those barely grown away from it.

With the boutique art house hit Y tu mamá también (2001) still relatively fresh, there’s a sense of déjà vu about Dillo con parole mie as its characters balance lust with superficial soul searching. For that matter, it may also stir up memories of some of Eric Rohmer’s summertime romances, or of Liv Tyler’s adventures in Stealing Beauty (1996). While the mind wanders to make these cross references, we should add that Ms. Montorsi bears a slight resemblance to Victoria Abril — which isn’t a bad thing.

There are times when Mr. Luchette yields to a reliance upon thumping jump cuts (supposedly to insinuate absentmindedness), and a rather weird gimmick of breaking the action for real island tourists to introduce themselves to the camera. Swinging back to the story, Martina Merlino gives an excellent performance as the ungainly chatterbox Meggy, as does Ms. Montorsi as the equally long-winded aunt. It’s unfortunate that, unlike Mr. Rohmer’s characters, or Lina Wertmüller’s (another probable influence), what they have to say is infrequently compelling.

As he falters when the script becomes verbose, the director compensates in those moments when Dillo con parole mie hits an upswing, such as a jubilant choreographed musical number set on a bus. Mr. Luchette appears at his most creative and energetic around happy characters. Therefore, he should have perhaps waited to make his film until Meggy or Stefania fell in love.

Return to Top

____________________

The Dreamers

Bernardo Bertolucci, 2003

There’s a scene approximately 100 minutes into the 115-minute The Dreamers where we see the parents of hedonistic twins tiptoe in on a cheesy idyll — their naked 20-year-old progeny entwined with an equally naked young man, all blissfully asleep in a makeshift tent rigged up in the living room of their apartment. Wine bottles and food remnants tossed about, clothing and debris cluttering every square inch as if the place had imploded during one of the numerous orgasms that erupted while mommy and daddy were away. It’s an alluring impression — not for the image of carefree youth, but for the pair of befuddled parents and their obvious, humorous identification with this adolescent Saturnalia.

But it’s a throwaway moment for Bernardo Bertolucci, who was too preoccupied adapting (and altering) Gilbert Adair’s novel to realize that the parents would have made a more interesting movie. He sticks with the kids and, for a moment, has some colorful material to work with.

On the surface, The Dreamers expects you to go in knowing who Henri Langlois was, what 1968 meant to French culture, and tasks your ability to recognize puffy present-day Jean-Pierre Léaud as he’s edited in with 35-year-old footage of himself, long before his face began to harden under the weight of those daunting eyebrows. There are no expository scenes to adequately cover this history, save for a mumbled narration. This has unfortunately fallen victim to high-end digital recording, in which everything audible has been pinpointed to where one’s ear may have difficulty sorting out individual sounds. No matter, the chitchat takes forever to get nowhere…and as droned out through the thick pink lips of star Michael Pitt, it’s slurred in that Toby Maguire-style namby-pamby whine that is absolutely alien to the urgency of the period.

Set in Paris immediately after the golden age of the nouvelle vague, The Dreamers pretends to be about revolutionary film students who discover euphoria in Nick Ray and Sam Fuller and Cahiers du cinéma; and, for a while, we take the bait. But it soon becomes obvious that their obsessing is simply a pretext for puerile sex games and inert political grandstanding. These kids are mere buffs and poseurs.

This may have been the intent — that the movement was used by some people as a means to avoid responsibility — but it still seems odd that Bertolucci would choose this position over a more romantic interpretation, especially given his proclivity for bourgeois bohemian eroticism. Which is a shame, because the impassioned trio — who at first appear like refugees from the party in Rivette’s Paris nous appartient (1960) and storm the Louvre in the spirit of Godard’s Bande à part (1964) — become superficial emblems while so many more engaging things circle around them. The film stumbles into the Persona school of ‘id meld’ (the same trapdoor that swallowed The Sheltering Sky), and while there are all the fixins to replicate Cammell and Roeg’s Performance (an obvious influence on some of the set-ups), the screenplay is clearly not up for the challenge.

Return to Top

____________________

Entre las piernas / Between Your Legs

Manuel Gómez Pereira, 1999

From Juan Galli's ersatz Saul Bass opening credits, Bernardo Bonezzi's faux Bernard Herrmann musical score, and a flutter of twisted red herrings, Entre las piernas is in the mode for Hitchcock/Vertigo-ish duplicity and murder. There's a wealth of good material here, even if director Manuel Gómez Pereira has crammed in enough for two movies. Sexual addiction, blocked authors, mental blackouts, depressed dog-walkers, web-spinning transsexuals, corrupt detectives — you'd better pay attention! Victoria Abril, Javier Bardem, Carmelo Gómez, and the beguiling Víctor Rueda.

Return to Top

____________________

Une femme de ménage / The Housekeeper

Claude Berri , 2002

A tender short story about the loss of love in middle-age, Claude Berri directing with tact and restraint. The Lolita connotation is at hand (lonely man in his late forties falls for girl in her late teens/early twenties), but the scenario prefers to examine the passions for living that emerge from aimless, shattered lives. Best known to Americans for his epic period dramas (Jean de Flourette, Manon of the Spring, Uranus, and Germinal), Berri may be more comfortable with this kind of ‘smaller’ personal production and its lack of obviousness. Excellent performances by Jean-Pierre Bacri and Émilie Dequenne as the temporary lovers.

Return to Top

____________________

La Fleur de mal / The Flower of Evil

Claude Chabrol , 2003

Who did what, and when did they do it? Dark secrets and skeletons in the closet rattle away to distract the attention, but there's no hiding the beliefs of this odd family drama: the bourgeoisie are locked in a state of perpetual consumption, a dragon swallowing itself at the tail. Director Claude Chabrol's focus is an affluent family, forever inbreeding, handing down sins to heirs — simply because no one else could take an interest in their self-centered whims. The picture may be slow going for some viewers, especially those snagged in the game of who's who, but we thought it a fascinating critique. Nathalie Baye, Benoît Magimel, Suzanne Flon, Bernard Lecoq, Thomas Chabrol, and, making a memorable entrance, Mélanie Doutey.

Return to Top

____________________

La Française et l’amour / Love and the Frenchwoman

Various directors, 1960

Divided into seven periods (adolescence, marriage, infidelity, divorce, etc.) illustrating the supposed evolution of the typical modern (c. 1960) title character, this exists far away from the nouvelle vague, using technique closer in style to episodic television. Consistent with the European omnibus movies of the period (Boccaccio 70, Les Sept péchés capitaux, Paris vu par, etc.), individual segments have been assigned to different casts and crews, and the results are a mixed bag. René Clair’s chapter on matrimony, and Henri Verneuil’s bit on adultery (with a fine comic turn by Jean-Paul Belmondo) are amusing. Michel Boisrond’s piece on virginity is appropriately understated, highlighted by Valérie Lagrange’s poignant adolescent. Plus there’s Annie Girardot in a wacky spin on separation; and Martine Carol, languishing and delicious as an ‘old maid.’

____________________

F L I C K H E A D

____________________