Nobody Knows Anything

One cinema visit this week, marked with a *.

“A film that depicts depravity has to be a depraved film.”

– Tinto Brass

Curse of the Golden Flower (2006) *

So if Hero (2002) is a political film, and House of Flying Daggers (2004) is a love story, then the new film from Zhang Yimou is a family drama. In short, Hamlet with ninjas, and who could fail to love that, eh? In fact, it made me think that one of the real shortcomings of Shakespeare as a dramatist is his failure to deploy a gang of ninjas ascending from the ceiling on ropes at apposite moments in the play. Sounds like a job for the RSC to me.

Salon Kitty (1976)

My week of 70s style Euro depravity begins with this, somewhat alarmingly based on real events. It does seem wildly implausible that the Nazi regime would set up a brothel stocked with loyal party members employed as prostitutes to entice top ranking Nazi officers to verbal indiscretions which were relayed via microphones to a team of eavesdroppers in the basement. And yet they did. And does Tinto Brass take every opportunity to portray this lurid slice of real history in as bizarre and tasteless and exploitative a manner as possible? Oh yes. The sight of twenty naked women disrobing on a stage turns up pretty early, and once past that, you’re kind of prepared for anything, which is just as well. Because it’s simulated sex with midgets and amputees next.

The Damned (1969)

It would seem that the grandfather of the Nazi chic/exploitation vein which ran throughout the 70s is this film directed by Luchino Visconti. The film seems to take place over a longer timescale than it does, but actually it’s only a couple of years from the Reichstag fire in 1933 to the Night of the Long Knives in 1934. This is still plenty of time for a respectable family which owns a steel mill to plummet into chaos and disorder through their embrace of the Nazi regime. It’s Macbeth with swastikas, a moral bloodbath with nobody left standing uncorrupted or dead.

Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (1975)

Meanwhile, in Italy, Pasolini is demonstrating the evils of fascism through the extended metaphor of one of the most notorious books of the Marquis De Sade. Four establishment types round up, imprison, molest, abuse, torture and kill a group of young people made compliant through their own acceptance of the fascist regime that has decided to destroy them because it can. Pasolini uses every distancing device in the directorial book: the film mostly takes place in long shot, there is no characterisation for the victims, and the four establishment types communicate only in sentences of long-winded debate that will be familiar to anyone who’s ever read any of the Marquis’ work. It certainly hasn’t become any easier to watch, but nor would footage shot by a documentary team on location in Camp X-Ray, Guantanamo Bay or Abu Ghraib Prison.

la grande bouffe (1973)

A lot of these films are about what men do, and most of them were made alongside the rise of feminism. Although there are key female characters in the above three films (and the three below), this effort from Marco Ferreri is the only one to show some awareness of this, even if only slyly. Four men (I wonder if Pasolini saw this film before he made Salò) eat themselves to death over a weekend in a satire of the bourgeois. Although they employ three prostitutes to spice things up at first, it is another woman, Andréa Ferréol, who is the only one to see them all to their deaths. Whereas there is something clearly pathological about the male obsession with food here, Andréa’s character is able to eat without angst.

Immoral Tales (1974)

So either Walerian Borowczyk is a genius liberating cinema from narrative through an animator’s obsession with details and metaphors, or he’s an exploitative hack concerned only with photographing as many naked women as he can before he dies. After this film, I remained undecided. Perhaps the scene in which thirty (or is it forty) naked female teenagers tear a pearl encrusted dress off Picasso’s daughter, Paloma, inspired the mass disrobing in Salon Kitty. It’s kind of hard to tell. A lot of the naughtiness seems awfully tame today, and the lampooning of religious figures and religion in general has certainly lost whatever bite it once possessed.

La Bête (1975)

On the other hand, this is a work of some kind of genius. So I’m prepared to cut the old boy some slack. Walerian Borowczyk’s follow up to the above film was sufficiently shocking to the British censors that it remained uncertificated for 26 years. And yet the film isn’t so much shocking as very funny. It’s the Carry On film that was never quite made. The 200 year old flashback in which la Bête (a man in a big furry suit) has its way (shall we say) with a young woman (Sirpa Lane) was originally a short film that caused quite a stir when it was first shown as part of a work in progress version of Immoral Tales. Borowczyk went back to this short after completing Immoral Tales differently and constructed a modern day frame in which, in classic horror movie style, an unsuspecting bride (Lisbeth Hummel) arrives at a remote castle to be wed to something that isn’t quite human. Since this is 1975, the bride masturbates with a rose at a late point in the narrative, which I have to say would not be my flower of choice (all those thorns). As well as the groom, the castle is packed (in a low budget kind of way) with a team of eccentrics right out of the Carry On universe. My first favourite is Sirpa Lane’s pursuit through the woods in which the branches of the trees are mysteriously able to remove all of her 18th Century costume; I’m convinced this was a Benny Hill bit. My second favourite is the butler who’s never able to come when he’s called because he’s too busy having sex with the daughter of the father of the groom; when he gets up to get dressed, he leaves the unsatisfied daughter to finish herself off with a large knob on a bedstead; it’s that kind of film.

Last Tango in Paris (1972)

Where would the late night erotic thriller be without Last Tango? What would the unemployed saxophone players of Los Angeles do for work if there weren’t all those tastefully softcore sex scenes to embellish with their haunting solos? And in the end, it was the film that featured Marlon Brando’s last acting performance and turned Maria Schneider into a drug-addicted lesbian. Allegedly.

Conclusion

So what have I learned from a week of depravity, 70s style?

1. Pubic hair is very, very good, but if it’s shaved off a man, it makes his penis look longer (ref. Helmut Berger’s sauna scene in Salon Kitty).

2. No one ever took any exercise (and looked all the better for it), and no woman had any plastic or chemicals injected into any part of their bodies (and looked all the better for it).

3. The Nazis were bad, and fascism was evil. Duh.

4. It really, really helps to know that in a scene where the characters are either a) eating shit, or b) sat in a giant tub of shit, that the shit was made out of chocolate and orange marmalade.

5. That it probably isn’t a good idea to meet a stranger in a flat, have sex with them for a few days, and then attend a dance competition drunk out of your mind.

6. It won’t end well, mark my words.