“It finds a role in the body.”

Lines spoken by a pivotal character late in Gyorgy Pálfi’s Taxidermia, they could mean anything. A commentary on pre- and post-Soviet Hungarian individual and cultural identity or which filmic genres are stirred into this surreal mix.

Adapted from Hungarian short stories and owing directorial debts to Gilliam, Saura, Jeunet et al., but never derivative, Taxidermia is a stunning, darkly enjoyable absurdist treatise on family dysfunction and ambition. Graphic and not for the faint of heart but whimsical, satirical and even affectionate towards the characters presented, Pálfi gives us an alternate reality that could have been a collaboration between Samuel Beckett and Damien Hirst filtered through Emir Kusturica. But then isn’t all post-fall-of-the-wall Eastern Europe an alternate reality?

Taxidermia presents three men in three different eras, each more grotesque than the one before. It begins with Vendel, a browbeaten, sexually frustrated army orderly stationed in the hinterlands who sires an international competitive eating champion. Then there’s the story of Kalman, whose triumphs in sport eating and romance of Gizella, another competitive eater, prove his undoing. In the end he’s a corpulent shadow of what he once was, delusional and at odds with his own son, a rail-thin taxidermist named Lagos. In this the final chapter, and as happens with fathers and sons, their destinies intertwine.

The film moves through these generations at a brisk clip, yet slightness of character and narrative are never sacrificed. Much like a well-crafted short story, all the elements must come together in filtered, concentrated eloquence. Pálfi is an assured director whose camera work is more like a conjurer’s sleight of hand than a technician framing a scene and even the most disturbing sequences are never unfeeling and never voyeuristic for their own sake.

Again, this film isn’t for the faint of heart, but the most cutting, vital art never is. Leavened with humor and skill, it allows uncomfortable stories to be deservedly and richly told. – [DVD]

Comedy/Drama/Horror

Not Rated

DVD Release Date: 4/6/10

Francis Bacon

The film Séraphine, like the real life artist, is not instantly engaging. It opens just before the First World War in the French town of Senlis. Séraphine Louis, a cleaning woman, earns barely enough to survive. A hulking, eccentric but oddly competent presence, actress Yolande Moreau portrays Séraphine not as an untrained talent who will blossom under proper tutelage but as a person on a mission with instructions from her guardian angel. Her face is still, almost leaden at times but can break into a slight smile. Her eyes are bright and fierce, sometimes twinkling but also mask-like. She is a childlike cypher albeit with an occasional sharp tongue. She gathers materials when and where she can. Blood from the butcher shop, oil from devotional candles. She grinds and mixes her own colors with inexpensive white paint, sings hymns as she uses her fingers to spread pigment and creates Cezanne-like still lifes of fruit and flowers. As her skill grows, so do the sizes of her canvases and so too her subject matter. Tangles of foliage that are lush and dense, undulating and otherworldly but at the same time precise. Powerful and hypnotic, but devotional works in her eyes only.

She becomes the cleaning lady for Wilhelm Uhde (Ulrich Tukur), a German art collector staying in Senlis and a champion of Picasso and Rousseau who sees in Séraphine the same out-of-step, self-taught genius that probably won’t be appreciated until years later. Separated by WWI, then reunited years later, throughout the film Séraphine and Uhde carry on a pithy, intuitive relationship. “Do I look like the type to mock?” he asks. Her reply, “…a bit.” Uhde, a gay man living in another country whose artist lover dies, perhaps understands Séraphine’s deliberate separateness like no one else can. Séraphine’s past is never fully gone into, and the film is the better for it, but the vision from on high that fuels Séraphine’s art pulls her in two directions: towards the desire for more of the small financial success she’s found and to the fevered completion of this artistic mission given by the angels.

Not bravura cinema like Pollock or Lust for Life and leaving a good portion of clichés in that mixed bag, Séraphine has its own delicate holy fire. – [DVD]

Biography/Drama/War

Not Rated

DVD Release Date: 3/23/10

In No Impact Man writer/blogger Colin Beavan decides he and his family will make no carbon impact on the environment for a year, cutting off electricity, only shopping locally, no new purchases, no toilet paper, etc. His altruism has a mixed message since this will be the basis for his next book. Leavened by his questioning his own motives throughout the film, his “madness” only the kvetching angst of warmed-over liberal guilt, he cops to all this but then passive/aggressively nudges his wife Michelle Conlin along on this eco-adventure. From the outset it’s obvious this year will affect Michelle and their 2-year-old daughter Isabella the most. A case of one person’s quest is another’s “where’s my latte?” since Michelle does like her iced espresso and shopping excursions.

The film and project feel only half thought out. Colin has a timeline and has done research, but Michelle is always caught a little off guard when each step is sprung on her. She works at Business Week so how did they press her suits? Witness the refrigeration experiment, and was doing the laundry in the bathtub that much fun every time? There’s never a point where either wants to rend their American Apparel clothing in frustration, but the ability to suffer setbacks with good grace and courtesy only means you’d never be on “real” reality TV and it’s a little hard to sympathize with people trying something like this who have good jobs and live in New York City. It’s been said that if you really can’t afford to live organic or green, you’ll buy the Wonderbread when food needs to go on the table. There’s an impression of a loading of the dice in the message, that off camera it was all harder than they let on, yet the year seems to end up a series of small bumps by the light of beeswax candles on the fair trade/greenhouse gas-limiting road.

Michelle and Colin are an easy-going couple, intelligent and good natured, trying a different direction for their lives. Colin is insufferable one moment then insightful and humbled the next, as we all can be. He’s genuinely enthused, especially when talking with young people about the project, and they’ve made permanent changes in their lives. He’s in no way the worst example for a cause, but in the end it’s preaching to the converted. At least it’s done without a Michael Moore solar-powered bullhorn. – [DVD]

Documentary

Not Rated

DVD Release Date: 1/19/10

Lemon Tree (Etz Limon)

Its artistic merits include the moving performance of Hiam Abbass, who plays Salma, and the not exactly moving, but nuanced performance of Rona Lipaz-Michael, who plays Mira Navon, the Prime Minister’s wife. All of the supporting actors, without exception, do a fine job as well.

The story was very interesting to me and I forgave its imperfections as I watched this drama unfold and waited to see how it would end. One of these imperfections for me was the inclusion of improbable circumstances to move the plot along. An example of this was the Prime Minister selecting for their home a potentially dangerous location that was right on the border of Palestinian West Bank. Another was the Prime Minister’s caterer “forgetting” the lemons for a party, and needing to go and take some from Salma’s grove. But my biggest complaint with the film was the lack of development of the relationships between the characters. Salma and Mira have moments of seeming connection, but the potential for this story element was never fully realized. Nor was the relationship between Mira and her husband, or Salma and her lawyer. Another interesting facet of the film that might have benefited from more attention was the children in each family–how they were different or alike their parents in how they viewed the conflict.

Despite these disappointments, I was very pleased overall by the viewing experience of Lemon Tree and recommend it to those who enjoy foreign dramas, and especially those who have an interest in the long-standing conflict between these peoples. – [DVD]

Drama

Not Rated

DVD Release Date: 11/3/09

Comedy

Not Rated

DVD Release Date: 8/19/09

As the title sequence of Roman Polanski’s Repulsion suggests, with its violation of the human eye in closeup by thin striations of text, the film we are about to watch is one concerned with altered perceptions. Like the infamous razoring scene from Luis Buñuel’s surrealist masterpiece Un Chien Andalou (1929) to which it harkens, where a woman’s eye is bisected with a blade, a visceral call to arms by the director that we abandon old habits of viewing, this opening credit roll acts as an immediate declamation of Polanski’s concurrent aim at a new type of filmic experience. Although his departure will not be as radical as that of the surrealists, whose preoccupation with the disinterested play of thought leads to an often plotless scattering of associations, Polanski does share with the likes of Buñuel, Cocteau and Dali, a sense of the omnipotence of dream, but with a key difference: where surrealism considers the marriage of waking-reality and dream-reality to be the road to truth, Polanski treats this union as the road to madness (though André Breton does pine for the freedom of the insane in his seminal text, Manifestoes of Surrealism (1924), however facetiously).

The eye Polanski draws his name and title across belongs to the very beautiful and quietly disturbed Carol Ledoux (played here with startling vacuity by a twenty-year-old Catherine Deneuve), and the cleaving text acts as much as a departure point from the audience’s traditional modes of filmic experience as it does an entry point into Carol’s troubled world. It does not serve, however, as an invitation into Carol’s mind, for she is very much, despite her sexually aggressive hallucinations, an impenetrable character. This resistant quality can be partially attributed to Deneuve’s playing Carol as a blank slate, someone whose past circumstances and present thoughts are almost entirely vacant, left bare to be furnished by the audience’s own needs and inclinations—our imaginations make monstrous the smallest sound in the night, and by this principle Polanski lets us create our own undoing. More than by Deneuve’s acting, though, this impenetrability exists as a limitation of the medium itself. When it comes to achieving interiority, film, compared to literature, is decidedly lacking. One cannot simply present stream-of-consciousness in narrative film without it assuming the clunky form of voiceover (Janet Leigh’s character in Psycho (1960), for example) or, conversely, presenting itself as a disjointed montage of fleeting images, á la the surrealists. This conventional wisdom does not affect Polanski’s ambition, however, and he does everything within his technical ability to rebel against it, achieving an ultimate proximity to his subject’s interiority that is closer than the cinema has ever come before.

Of the five senses that account for human experience, film is bound, and privileged, to convey only sight and sound, and contrary to the implication of the film’s credit sequence, that it is the eye which will carry us through, Repulsion actually achieves a mimesis of Carol’s reality by way of the viewer’s ear. Take for example the auditory clues during the scene in which Carol murders her would-be suitor, Colin (John Fraser). The film as a whole is frighteningly silent, with the exception of a small handful of recurring sound bites. Some of these are presented rather frankly, the funereal march of a tympani drum that opens the film and accompanies Carol on her aimless walks, or Carol’s Theme, a dulcet though melancholy flute refrain that seems to announce Carol’s solitude as though it was a character in Sergei Prokofiev’s classic composition Peter and the Wolf (a broken bird, perhaps). Others of these sounds are given greater subtlety, existing at muted levels, both arriving and departing without direction. In the murder scene two such recurrent sounds conspire to give the audience an auditory impression of Carol’s imbalance. These are the sound of a child’s fingers clumsily inching up and down the C-scale on a piano, and that of an airplane passing far overhead. Both appear independently at other points within the film, yet they arrive together here at the moment after Colin barges through Carol’s front door and before he closes it for the last time. The aural montage created between the two is one of immense space, the very local, personal sound of fumbling through basic scales on a piano contrasted against the distant and anonymous noise of jet traffic. The source of these sounds, though potentially belonging simply to the ambience of a London flat, seems too specific and aligned to have arisen from anywhere else but Carol’s own memory, which leaves her and the audience, in a moment where rationality could right the situation with Colin, reeling instead in the telescopic distance between the local and the remote. The murder itself then becomes a silent byproduct of her auditory wandering, as Carol’s blank face while blunting Colin with the candlestick similarly reflects her nonpresence in the act.

Despite Polanski’s directorial eye and cinematographer Gilbert Taylor’s deft manipulation of the apparatus, producing some dizzying, confounding distortions of space, these acoustic pings are somehow more amenable to our experience of Carol’s psychosis. It is through auditory hallucination that we first suspect Carol’s madness. “We must get this crack mended,” she says early in the film, looking fixedly out of frame. The sound of broken concrete crumbles into and out of existence, and then the camera cuts to the shot of a crack in the kitchen wall, preformed and unmoving. Even when the theme of cracked walls returns later, with the visual hallucination of the walls physically cracking catching up to her auditory hallucination, it is the sound of their destruction, like the crash of a thunderbolt, which has the more potent effect.

The logic behind this sonic preeminence can be found in the way that we relate to sight versus sound in Repulsion. When we watch the film, the visual component has set dimensions that are informed by the size and shape the screen. The image occupies a certain small percentage of our field of vision and, more importantly, though the film itself is of a three-dimensional space, its projected visual exists in only two dimensions; the image is framed by the edges of the screen and exists separately from the non-cinematic world from which we view it. We see Carol as her dementia mounts pacing circles through an Expressionist iteration of her apartment, but with a clear ability to mark the distinction between her space and our own. This sense of delineation between the cinematic and non-cinematic is considerably blurred by the film’s sound, where even though the source of cinematic auditory stimuli is apparent, its separation from non-cinematic auditory stimuli often is not, as both types of sound occupy the same liminal space. This phenomenon is most quickly demonstrated by a telephone ringing in a film (as they so regularly do in Repulsion) and the viewer turning to see if his own phone has rung. Of course a full-fledged confusion of the cinematic and non-cinematic is rare, and thus a kind of added bonus to the sound department’s exquisite design, but the fact remains that because acoustics extend beyond the flatness of the screen and penetrate us, percuss us, actively violate our sense of hearing, where image, grotesque or beautiful (with Deneuve beneath Taylor’s lens, sometimes both), lies docile in two-dimensional space on the screen, the film’s audio component elicits an exponentially greater degree of empathy for Carol than does its visual counterpart.

Certainly this is not the case with most films. It is a rarity necessitated by Polanski’s aim to show us a woman who is insane but whose insanity is not recognized by those around her; we are the ones who must recognize it. He forces the audience into Carol’s ear, and we are synchronously attacked by the same stringent doorbells and phones, haunted by the same distant shuffling of feet, the same auditory echoes of memory that occupy such a large portion of Carol’s perceptions. Polanski strangles our acoustic space because he cannot constrict the physical walls around us, and the hearing of Repulsion thereby becomes something experiential. This technique is mimicked to similar effect in more modern films such as Darren Aronofsky’s Pi (1998) and Lodge Kerrigan’s phenomenal Clean, Shaven (1993), both of which, like Repulsion, attempt to approach the interiority of a schizophrenic main character.

Ultimately, though, we cannot breach the internal workings of Carol Ledoux, as no method exists, filmic or otherwise, to fully immerse one person into the sensorial reality of another, but the film does come startlingly close at times. What we come away from Repulsion with then is a lingering openness of perception, not exactly paranoid but not accepting either. Sounds are intensified, their origins dubious. As with the other two films in his Apartment Trilogy (Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and The Tenant (1976)), Polanski excels at presenting us with the banal only then to turn it over in his directorial hand and show us its rotting underbelly. He finds corruption in the seemingly uncorrupt, repulsion in the beautiful, and his surgical eye and ear brings the analytical scalpel down across the cornea of our own world, leaving us humming quietly to ourselves and searching the walls for cracks. – [DVD] [Blu-Ray]

Thriller/Horror/Drama

Not Rated

DVD Release Date: 7/28/09

Karina stars as Paula Nelson, a journalist who is investigating the death of her lover, a man named Richard. She is also being investigated for the death of a man named Typhus by a pair of detectives, who… listen, I don’t think any of this really matters, because if you are even remotely familiar with Godard’s work at this time, the ‘plot’ is just a quaint trope on which to hang his cinematic bemusements. What does matter is that this gem is one of the liveliest, and most colorful, films that Godard ever filmed. Every frame is stuffed with cultural references and allusions (characters are named after 1950’s film stars, directors, French political figures and martyrs, and pulp writers of the era; It-Girl Marianne Faithfull appears briefly to sing an a cappella version of ‘As Tears Go By’ for no apparent reason). The film’s star, Karina, was herself a mod icon of the mid-1960’s. The comic book look and pop art schematics-Karina’s co-star may well be the color red-would hint at a salute to the work of Robert Rauschenberg. What makes so much of this curious is that, whereas someone like Quentin Tarantino uses this material as a fetishist, Godard generally despised the pop culture riffs that he so ably employed. It was all most likely intended to satirize the time period with a sneer, but Karina’s charm is so involving, and her seeming indifference to the words she was saying so amusing, that if the Standells had done the soundtrack, in many ways Made in U.S.A. could easily pass for a release by the legendary 60’s junk dealers American International Pictures. Except for all the commie stuff, of course.

Godard’s political viewpoint, or what he struggled to formulate as one, was always evident in his pictures, but it is here that his communist leanings become most apparent. Godard’s voice ruptures out of a tape recorder during the film, extolling the virtues of what he, and many Europeans at the time, saw as the only answer to the neo-fascism of the right wing, and the ineffectual ’sentimentality’ of the left. It is a topic that would come to consume his filmmaking for years on end, leading to the Dziga-Vertov period of the early 1970’s that would alienate his audience, critics and colleagues and essentially put the kibosh on the idea of Godard as a ‘commercial’ filmmaker for decades. (Much of it is available here on DVD, by the way, and well worth investigating if you know what you’re getting into. It’s much more freeform and experimental; one even stars Jane Fonda.)

To call this a lost masterpiece would be further diminishing the word ‘masterpiece,’ although I don’t know if that’s even possible any longer, but it is good fun, and any fan of the Nouvelle Vague, Godard, mid-60’s pop art, or just looking at Anna Karina for ninety minutes (ahem) would be a fool to miss out. This is it, folks. The cupboard is now bare. – [DVD]

Crime/Mystery

Not Rated

DVD Release Date: 7/21/09