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.

After this lengthy update of the films I saw in the first 14 days of February, I’ll switch to a weekly posting procedure. I thought it would be nice to post daily immediately after I see every film, but then I thought, do I want a life, or do I want a blog? Anyway, none of these films were seen in the cinema, all were watched on DVD.

House of Flying Daggers (2004)
Zhang Yimou may have made these films (see Hero below) as a lark between more serious fare, but quite honestly, we could do with more directors taking time outs like this.

Leon (1994)
For the record, this is the longer version of the film from America with the disc of extras. Being French is what allows Luc Besson to get away with what he does in this movie. And isn’t it interesting that no one films America better than directors from Europe?

Bull Durham (1988)
In 1990, I wrote my MA dissertation on Hollywood films of the 1980s, and divided them into a number of categories: politics, women, business and foreign policy. The section I didn’t include at the time (because I only came up with it years later) was a section called people, and this is where a film like Bull Durham fits perfectly. There’s a tendency in nostalgia to oversimplify the past. If you have everyone dressed like Don Johnson in Miami Vice, you can point to it and say 80s, but the truth is, I don’t remember anyone dressing like Don Johnson in the 1980s. Tim Robbins comes pretty close though in an early scene in the bar. I was inspired to watch this again after reading Stewart O’Nan and Stephen King’s book, Faithful, about the 2004 baseball season during which the Boston Red Sox won the World Series (which naturally only involves American teams). This is something of a big deal for Red Sox fans, and the book is absolutely soaked in esoteric baseball arcana and lingo which makes it read more like science fiction than anything else. The simplest way to parallel it in the UK would be to imagine a world in which Birmingham City win The Champions League. And anyway, this isn’t really a film about baseball, it’s a film about people, about starting out, and finishing up, and what you do in the middle.

Shaun of the Dead (2004)
My sister doesn’t like zombie movies. She says, “This isn’t one of those movies where they go uurrgghh uurrgghh, is it?” And I’m like yes, and she’s like I can’t be doing with that, but I did like 28 Days Later. “But that’s a zombie movie,” I protest. But it does no good. What I liked most about Shaun of the Dead is that Simon Pegg has his hero make a lot of the same mistakes that Duane Jones makes in Night of the Living Dead. Even though Duane is meant to be the hero, his actions mean that most of the people he’s ostensibly protecting end up dead. I like the idea that Shaun’s brilliant plan is to go to the one place where there will be the most danger, and something horrible will happen to someone he loves. This may have annoyed frivolous people who like their horror served with a big dose of stupidity, but it makes Shaun into an actual film rather than an empty collection of injokes.

The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
What a surprise. I like this too. The thing is, though, I’ve liked this since that day sometime in 1983 when I read Stephen King’s original story, and was gobsmacked by the turn in the narrative that I did not see coming. Some of the best news I’ve heard lately is that Frank Darabont is going to direct The Mist, King’s exceptionally fine 1980 novella that was originally published in an anthology called Dark Forces. I wonder if Frank Darabont has mixed feelings about having his directorial career tied so closely to one writer. “Why do they call you Red?” “Perhaps because I’m Irish.”

Day of the Dead (1985)
More brains. I must have more brains. And guts. George A Romero reckons this is his best work, and maybe it is.
To Live and Die in L.A. (1985)
At a Memorabilia event at the NEC, one of the traders once tried to sell me the vinyl soundtrack of this film for £10 when you could buy it on CD very easily for £5. Some people just don’t get it, do they? This is one of the great undiscovered gems of 1980s cinema, and one of those times when William Friedkin hits instead of missing. This has one of those music scores which is great because it’s horribly dated: every time the syndrums and sequencers start pounding away, your attention is commanded and held.

Hero (2002)
Obviously, this would be the R3 director’s cut with the 6.1 DTS ES discrete soundtrack. You can hear every thwack of an arrow. This movie plays much better with the 10 minutes Harvey Weinstein had removed from it rather than without them.

The Hudsucker Proxy (1994)
Unexpected tribute to Anna Nicole Smith. Okay, she wasn’t much of an actress. But here’s a spooky thing. This was the day she’d died or the day after it, and I’d decided it was time to watch this film again. And I had completely forgotten that Anna Nicole was even in this movie, and about halfway through, there she was. Cue X-Files theme. She was only two months younger than me, you know.

Desperately Seeking Susan (1985)
Anna Thomson is in this movie as the magician’s first assistant (before Rosanna Arquette gets the job). She’s an interesting character well worth googling, also goes by the name of Anna Levine. She is, like Jerry Lewis, very popular in France. Madonna is really a character actress, and would have had a much better film career if she’d concentrated in that area. All of the times she’s played a character part, she’s been great: this movie, A League of Their Own, Dangerous Game, Evita. All the times she’s played a leading role (Shanghai Surprise, Body of Evidence, The Next Best Thing) she’s stunk up the place because she’s not a lead; she doesn’t have what it takes. And to those who would say that Evita’s a lead role, I say you’re wrong, it’s a character part. And you can dance, for inspiration.

Yojimbo (1961)
Not the new Criterion re-releases, but the older BFI discs.

Sanjuro (1962)
I think this is the equivalent of John Woo’s Once a Thief, a fun movie knocked out just for the audience. In which case it also has something in common with the two Zhang Yimou movies mentioned hereabouts.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)
I was clearly having a samurai thing in the first half of February. Some say that Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon isn’t really about anything in the way that Hero is a political drama and House of Flying Daggers is a love story; all Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is about is a green sword. I will end with Steve Martin’s fantastic joke from the 2001 Oscars (and I may not have this absolutely correct but I’m close): “I went to see Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon with a friend and she complained that there weren’t any tigers or dragons in it. Don’t you see, I said, the tigers are crouching and the dragons are hidden.”

Battle Royale (2001)
Obviously this was the two disc extended director’s cut. Considering I hate reality television with a passion, I’ve gravitated towards a number of films which take a satirical view of the whole reality TV phenom, and draw dark conclusions from it. Films like My Little Eye and Series 7: The Contenders. Although the events of Battle Royale aren’t televised, you feel that it won’t be too long before they are.