Movie Review: Suspiria (1977)

Italian director Dario Argento purportedly wrote the classic horror film Suspiria with his girlfriend, actress Daria Nicolodi, based upon a combination of a dream that she had once had and a scary story that her grandmother once told her. The screenplay was originally to star a cast of twelve-year-olds, but when producers balked at the idea of exposing children to graphic violence, the screenplay was changed to accommodate a cast of young adults without changing a single word of their immature dialogue or a single act of their childlike behavior. The result is one of the worst screenplays ever filmed.

The convoluted, plot hole-riddled story tells of a German school founded in the late-nineteenth century by a Greek immigrant, Helena Markos, who was actually a powerful mistress of the dark arts, Mater Suspiriana ("Our Lady of Sighs"). The school she founded was a combination school of dark arts and witchcraft-slash-classical ballet studio, but following public outrage and the death of Markos, the witchcraft department was removed from the curriculum, leaving only the dance school. Or so we think! New student Suzy Banton (Jessica Harper), with the help of Scooby Doo-style clues, physically impossible revelations, an idiotic and easily spooked friend who insists upon solving a mystery that doesn't even seem to be a mystery, and a chance encounter with a professor of occult studies who has literally written the book on Markos, connects the complicated and ridiculous dots and realizes that Markos is still alive, in some way planning something that's probably dark and possibly even powerful. So Suzy kills her by, of course, thrusting a glass feather into her shadow, which causes the entire school and all the evildoers within it to explode.

Most critics these days don't spend much time discussing the obviously absurd and inane plot of Suspiria, insisting that its set pieces offer chilling horror despite a lack of overall plot structure. I don't buy that. Supposedly, original audiences of The Great Train Robbery in 1903 would scream and hide under their seats when the villain pointed and fired his gun at the camera. A century later, such a gimmick doesn't scare a single spectator because most of us need more than visuals and camera trickery to feel a visceral, emotional response to the film reel. We--some of us more than others--need something that allows us to transcend the knowledge that we are merely watching a film. We need a heartfelt theme, a believable character, a raw conflict--something that tricks at least a tiny part of our brains into believing even if only for a few minutes that we are perceiving a meaningful reality and not simply twenty-four frames a second of contrived filmmaking. This is what the "suspension of disbelief" is. It's not just believing that pigs can talk or vampires fly at night; it's believing that anything at all in the film is something real. It's that tiny bit of movie magic that sells us the deception that we are no longer on a couch or in a theater staring at a flickering screen.

Argento never achieved that with me in Suspiria. I often speak of being "taken out of a movie." By that, I mean taken out of total immersion in the film's world and thrust back into my seat, abruptly jolted into the reality that I'm just a guy consuming a movie. A good movie is a sustained act of hypnotism; a bad movie consistently reminds you that you're being hypnotized. Though Suspiria starts strong with a storm-soaked, dreamlike establishing scene, it quickly devolves into confusion. The idiotic setting of Suspiria (the "coven-slash-ballet academy"), the atrocious characterization (fully grown young women who speak and act like bratty children), the ludicrous plot structure (a key revelation revolves around Suzy being able to count the distance and direction of footsteps throughout a massive building), the lack of motivation (what exactly are these witches trying to accomplish? what are they even capable of accomplishing? what have they accomplished aside from killing a few people they don't like?), the over-the-top, unrealistic effects of the grisly murder scenes (you can plainly see that the barbed wire in one memorable death doesn't have any barbs), the disoriented editing (cut to: a scene in which a bit character, a blind man, is killed far from home for reasons that have almost nothing to do with the plot), the hammy exposition (Suzy meets a professor at a pivotal moment who just happens to be able to answer all of her questions), the bad accents: all of these elements and many more constantly prevented me from feeling that Suspiria was anything more than a horribly made horror film.

We go into a horror movie prepared to be scared. In doing so we build up our defenses against being scared. A good horror movie tricks us into feeling fright anyway; Suspiria never does. At its best, it gets two things right: lavish, otherworldly sets painted in gorgeous, nightmarish Technicolor strokes of mutant green and blood red and a theme song by Goblin that--while much overused--is effectively unnerving. These elements save Suspiria from the vast, swampy dregs of the worst horror movies, but they're not enough to make it scary or a classic film. Why have Entertainment Weekly, Bravo, and Total Film named it one of the scariest movies of all time? Why has the Village Voice called it one of the hundred best films of the twentieth century? Why does the They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? list of the greatest movies of all time list it at #484?

I have no idea.

Suspiria (1977)
d: Dario Argento w: Dario Argento, Daria Nicolodi
(Jessica Harper, Joan Bennett, Udo Kier)
TSPDT?: #484
4/10

Movie Review: Winter's Bone (2010)

Debra Granik's Winter's Bone is in a category of its own. Daniel Woodrell, who wrote the novel from which the film's screenplay is adapted, coined the term "country noir" to describe his genre of crime novels, which take place in isolated regions of the Ozark Mountains in Missouri. But I think Winter's Bone is more suitably seen as a fantasy adventure tale, with the major distinction that the film's landscape is not an imaginary world of vampires and orcish humanoids but a gritty reality unknown to most of us, a rural subculture of meth-addled monsters who live off the radar. Jennifer Lawrence, as the film's heroine Ree Dolly, does not wield a sword or possess telepathic abilities; her superpowers are honesty, determination, and a strong desire to hold onto her humanity as she journeys from a cold, bleak world into a darker, more terrifying underworld and then back to the surface.

Lawrence is convincing as Ree, a seventeen-year-old farm girl who has been forced to care for her younger siblings, nine-year-old Sonny (Isaiah Stone) and five-year-old Ashlee (Ashlee Thompson), after her mother loses her mind and her father Jessup, an infamous methamphetamine manufacturer, disappears. Ree, technically still a child, shows signs of wishing she could be free of the unwanted responsibilities of raising two children (and an incapacitated mother) and running a financially strapped household. But if she ever considers abandoning her life to chase after a better dream, she never shows it. Her commitment to keeping the kids safe, well-fed, and as happy as possible remains strong, even as she passes the point of desperation. When a drug dealing, duplicitous cousin, a small-time criminal ringleader, makes Ree an offer to purchase the boy and "raise him up," she responds with outrage even as she secretly wonders if an immoral life of crime and addiction might be preferable to a freezing death from starvation. Instead of taking easy paths, Ree struggles by with support from her neighbor Sonya (Shelley Waggener), a stern but compassionate mother figure, and her only friend Gail (Lauren Sweetser), a teenage mother and wife. They offer Ree all they can afford, but in a world of far-reaching poverty, that assistance isn't much.

When the local sheriff (Garret Dillahunt), a young man disliked, untrusted, and nearly powerless in an outskirt community that puts more faith in family ties, militias, and the right to bear arms than they do in the local law enforcement, arrives with news that if father Jessup does not show for his court date in one week the house and the land will be taken as forfeited bond, leaving the family homeless, Ree embarks on an epic quest to discover the whereabouts of her derelict father.

This quest takes her to increasingly strange realms as she encounters colorful outlaws with names like Teardrop (John Hawkes), her hardened but helpful rogue uncle, a dilapidated compound of smoking trailers and lean-tos gated by chicken wire and possessing its own primitive surveillance system, the charred ruins of a burned down meth lab, a noisy cattle auction, smoky bars, and a horrifying excursion to uncover the secrets that lie in the middle of nowhere. In the process she is lied to, threatened, beaten, and left in the cold. A few times her life comes dangerously close to ending. She has no weapons and she can hardly fight back, but sincere words, a stony expression, and her determination to care for her siblings keeps her one step above disaster.

I don't know whether to praise Granik, Woodrell, co-screenwriter Anne Rosellini, or maybe even the actors for the dialogue, but what these characters say is fresh, interesting, and always rings true. The film shines with authenticity. I've never been to the grimy world Winter's Bone depicts, but I don't for a moment doubt that it exists precisely as Granik, cinematographer Michael McDonough, and production designer Mark White have presented it. What we see tantalizingly hints at a vast universe of traditions, crimes, rules, and villains. We never see Jessup, but we receive a full, complex portrait of his many roles as a charmer, a talented musician, a disastrous family man, a trusted scientist, and a coward. We barely see Blond Milton (William White), the portly, gray-bearded kingpin of the film's criminal universe, but his brief presence resonates with frightening power.

The actors, some of whom were actual impoverished Missourians, ring true at every turn, with an especially memorable performance from Dale Dickey as Merab, a burned-out matriarch of the clan barely retaining the last shreds of her humanity. Merab abides by the clan's animalistic rules even as her face betrays tiny inklings of compassion. Degradation and filth have pushed her far past the boundaries of normal human thinking and behavior, yet a scene in which she wordlessly puts her coat around a terrified Ree is one of the most touching moments in the film.

Winter's Bone is a unique adventure, a journey into a nightmarish alternate reality. Though bleak, the movie is illuminated by the presence of Jennifer Lawrence as Ree Dolly, a role model who despite innumerable obstacles remains stronger, kinder, and more optimistic than most of us can ever manage. Winter's Bone is a story about never giving up, and so far it is one of the best films to be released this year.

Winter's Bone (2010)
d: Debra Granik w: Debra Granik, Anne Rosellini
(Jennifer Lawrence, John Hawkes, Dale Dickey)
8/10

Movie Review: The Gold Rush (1925)

The proper way to eat a shoe.

The easiest type of movie review to write is one about an awful disaster of a film. Writing such a review taps into the insult comic within us all, and it usually consists of quoting laughable dialogue, pointing out absurd plot consistencies, stringing together insulting hyperbole, and deriding any offensive content.

Next on the scale of easiness is the review about a beloved gem, either a recent film or an obscure older film that the reviewer has seen and loved. The reviewer can still take a sense of ownership over such a film because it has not yet been dissected and devoured. Reviewing such a film is like writing a travelogue about previously unexplored terrain; the reviewer, a trailblazer, feels as though what he says can be treated as authoritative gospel because it's never been said before, and this praise isn't hard to put words to because the reviewer desperately wants to share his new-found love, to figure out what has so moved him.

Somewhat harder is the review of a supposed masterpiece that the reviewer didn't like. These reviews fall into two categories. The critic can either stand firm in resolving that the film is horrible, expressing bafflement that the idiotic masses would be gullible enough to buy into it, or he can throw his hands in the air, earnestly wishing to know what went over his head, what other people saw that he couldn't see, what his own problem is that he's unable to recognize a masterpiece.

But the hardest review of all to write is the review of a classic masterpiece that the critic knows is a masterpiece. What hasn't been said before? How many television documentaries, film studies classes, countdown lists, and scholarly books have already explored every facet of such a film. The critic's words, if he doesn't have some fresh new insight into the film, are repetitive, obvious, and irrelevant.

Charlie Chaplin's iconic comedy The Gold Rush came out eighty-five years ago, and yes, it's hilarious; yes, it's well acted; yes, it's memorable and touching and important and a masterpiece. What can I add to the critical material about this movie?

Perhaps it's best to keep it short and stick to the moments in the film that meant the most to me.

There's a classic scene in this film where Charlie Chaplin boils and eats his own shoe. Chaplin is the Lone Prospector, a silly little tramp braving the elements of the nineteenth century Klondike in search of gold. Caught in a terrible snowstorm, he holes up in an isolated cabin with a wanted criminal named Black Larsen (Tom Murray) and a burly fortune hunter named Big Jim (Mack Swain). When Larsen leaves in search of food, the two prospectors wait and wait, slowly starving. When all the food and the candles and everything else edible is eaten and their stomachs can take it no longer--to the point that Big Jim begins hallucinating that the little tramp is a giant, succulent chicken--the Lone Prospector throws his leather shoe in a pot with snow and boils it for dinner.

This is a very old joke by now, and it was even an old joke and a cliche when the film was made in 1925. What makes it hilarious, though, is how Chaplin goes about eating the shoe. With the shoe on a dinner plate, using a fork and knife, salt and pepper, he carefully removes the shoelaces, cuts apart the heel from the top, removes the cobbler nails and sucks on them, and piles the discarded nails, like bones, on a small dish. He eats the shoe with grace and precision, with nary a hint of desperation. He picks it apart as though it were a fish or a steak, as though there were a traditional method for eating a shoe, with customary rituals and procedures. He follows all the rules of etiquette for the eating of shoes.

The scene was shot using licorice and sugar candy designed to look like a boot. Chaplin, a perfectionist and a diabetic, supposedly shot the scene more than sixty times. By the time he had perfected it, he had suffered from insulin shock and needed to be rushed to the hospital. His suffering paid off, though, the scene is one of the most memorable comedic movie moments of all time.

What also moves me about The Gold Rush is the sad romance between the Lone Prospector and Georgia (Georgia Hale), a beautiful dancer who knows she is beautiful and uses the prospector's shy affections to her own advantage, giving him false hope and making him false promises so that she can make her rivals jealous, make her friends laugh, and make herself feel better. The prospector's childlike persistence in loving her and his naive willingness to be duped make the scenes in which he is humiliated especially sad. Here is a good man with a pure heart who hasn't yet realized that love can be cruel.

What's great about the love story is that his persistent faith in love forces her, if only temporarily, to see the ugliness within herself. She, too, though perhaps only for a moment, remembers that love can be something more than a game. Her transformation is visible, believable, and touching. Of course, her decision to be with him is also coupled with the fact that by the film's end he has become a millionaire. Their love may not be blessed with a happy ending in the years to come, but it is undeniable that the flames of love blaze at the film's end.

Charlie Chaplin is said to have wished that The Gold Rush would be what he was remembered for. With the film as his second highest rated movie on the They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? list of great films (it's #32, with City Lights at #25), he may have got his wish.

The Gold Rush (1925)
d/w: Charlie Chaplin
(Charlie Chaplin, Georgia Hale, Mack Swain)
9/10

Movie Review: Code Unknown (2000)

There were some parts of Code Unknown (Code inconnu: Récit incomplet de divers voyages) the specifics of which I did not understand. Some of these same parts, I think, were intentionally inaccessible. That's okay. Tonally, the film makes perfect sense. Though the title literally refers to an apartment building access code, the title more generally refers to the complex, unintelligible cipher of our emotions. Michael Haneke's film is about the emotional retardation of the present age, an era in which it has become increasingly difficult to understand our own emotions and their consequences and nearly impossible to interpret and respond to the feelings of others. Code Unknown is a complex portrait of various people unable to comprehend that they do not live in a void but within an interconnected society.

Suitably subtitled Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys, Code Unknown offers numerous snapshots of the lives of people from around the globe. At the center is an incomparable Juliette Binoche as Anne Laurent, a rising actress whose brother-in-law Jean (Alexandre Hamidi) is a sullen, rebellious teenager. Jean's aging father's dream is that Jean will inherit the family farm, a beautiful and prosperous estate, but though Jean has no dreams of his own and though he needn't continue to run the farm once his father dies, he refuses to cooperate. The father (Josef Bierbichler) bribes him with a motorbike and with soft words, and he quietly excuses himself to the bathroom so that he can cry alone in the dark while flushing the toilet. He does not want the family legacy to cease.

But Jean uses the motorbike to run away and disappear, leaving a terse note that he does not wish to be found. While walking the sidewalks of Paris on a drizzly day, he absentmindedly throws a half-eaten croissant into the lap of a homeless, older woman (Luminita Gheorghiu). Though most passers-by would probably not even notice or care about this rude treatment of a disheveled vagabond, and though the woman scarcely even responds herself--happy just to have food and not surprised at being treated with contempt--an astounded Amdaou (Ona Lu Yenke), a young man of Malian descent, pursues Jean, insisting that he apologize to the woman for his awful behavior. Jean refuses, a scuffle ensues, and the police arrive on scene. Handsome, white Jean is dismissed, black Amadou spends a night in prison, and the homeless woman is deported.

The film delves into the lives of all parties involved. We see Amadou's father, a cab driver, abandon his family to return to Mali. We see one of his fares treat him with entitled annoyance without realizing that the cab driver is a human being facing an emergency. We see Maria, the panhandler, in her native Romania, unable to tell her closest friends and family members that she was destitute in France and did not return of her own free will. We see Jean's father worriedly telling Anne and Anne's husband Georges (Jean's older brother, played by Thierry Neuvic) that Jean has disappeared. Stressed and depressed, he picks at crumbs on the tabletop with his fidgeting hands. When Anne tries to comfort him by placing her hand over his, he abruptly rises and leaves the room. Even when others do reach out to us, we do not know how to respond.

The beautiful, natural, and extremely talented Juliette Binoche is the focal point of the film, and we variously see her in all positions of the emotional divide. We also see her in the only three melodramatically, intensely emotional scenes of the film, three scenes in which she is performing as an actor: first in a thriller film, where she has just found out that she is about to be slowly murdered by a psychopath and responds (very convincingly) with confusion then desperation then tears, second in a stage comedy in which she laughs riotously while revealing her true feelings about a rival, and finally in a romantic drama in which she reacts with fear, tears, and love when her fictional son nearly falls off a twenty-fourth floor balcony. These scenes illustrate what we typically see in art and what we often expect from our own lives and relationships--passion, honesty, argument. The scenes in which Anne is not acting illustrate what we more often get in reality, such as the aforementioned scene where Anne tries to console her father-in-law but is cut off.

In another scene, a neighbor turns to her via an anonymous note for help in protecting a violently abused child. Earlier we witnessed the abuse second-hand. Anne is ironing while watching the television and hears agonized screaming in the distance. She mutes the television, worries over the screaming, but continues ironing. The screaming stops, some moments of silence pass, and Anne turns the volume on the television back up. She continues ironing. When she receives the note, she deliberates with Georges over how to respond to the worrisome note. This conversation turns into an argument; Georges doesn't want to think about the problem since the note wasn't addressed to him, and Anne accuses him of being heartless. In the end, Anne does nothing about the troubling situation, and the child is killed. Anne attends the funeral.

In the film's climax (though to call it a climax implies that the film has a plot, and Code Unknown really doesn't have a narrative-driven structure... when I say climax, I mean the most emotionally powerful scene, which is almost at the end of the film and which is also the last scene with audible dialogue), we see Anne in need of help herself. On the train, she is accosted by a suave Arab teenager (Walid Afkir), who presumes that she is a wealthy, racist, and arrogant bitch and then simultaneously flirts with and verbally assaults her while a friend stands nearby, laughing at the bully's antics. There are several other people on the train, but except for an old woman who disapprovingly looks at the boy and then turns away, nobody says or does anything. Anne remains silent, ignoring the boy as he belittles her, not wanting to acknowledge his rudeness with a response. She rises and walks to another seat, but he follows her. She continues to ignore him as best she can, and finally he sits beside her, silent, normal. The train comes to a stop, the doors open, and he spits on her face at close range. As he bolts out the door, an older Arab man (Maurice Bénichou) trips him. The boy responds with anger, calling the gentleman a fool. The gentleman calmly--though with obvious nervousness--removes his eyeglasses, wordlessly hands them to Anne across the aisle, and rises for a fight, yelling at the boy in Arabic. The boy backs down. The man sits back down and continues staring forward, as before, as though nothing has happened. Anne hands him back his glasses, then wipes her face. The train continues moving, with the boy off-camera, and all is silent. The train comes to another stop, and the boy exits with a loud and frightening threat directed toward the man. Crisis averted, Anne breaks into tears. All she can manage to say is a sob-choked "Merci" to the man who stood up for her, but he does not respond, does not know how to respond, just continues staring forward as people do on a subway.

This genuine and emotionally resonant scene is filmed in one long cut with the camera acting as an inactive eye witness. The point-of-view is that of someone riding the train but refusing to act, just as all of the other passengers witness Anne's dilemma but pretend to remain ignorant. The boy is just a boy and it doesn't take much to put an end to his hatred, yet no one is willing to offer the slightest assistance. They all pass the buck to fate or to more noble heroes. Would we do anything if in the same situation? How much injustice do we see daily that we pretend does not exist? How often do we convince ourselves that we are not the hero-type, that some crises are better left resolved by others? When the gentleman stands up for her, he seemingly does so before he even realizes that he has resolved to do it. Afterward, he remains speechless and uncomprehending, still unable to talk to or even look at the woman he has just saved, unable to share words at a time when words would mean so much.

Code Unknown speaks volumes about the war-torn landscape of our emotions; this review has only scratched the surface, without examining Georges's career as a wartime photographer of atrocities, Amadou's acceptance-seeking white girlfriend, Amadou's superstitious mother, or the deaf children who bookend the film with a guessing game of charades in which they act out complex, enigmatic feelings. One of Michael Haneke's best films, Code Unknown is a rich movie that perfectly captures our current crisis of disconnect.

Code Unknown: Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys (2000)
d/w: Michael Haneke
(Juliette Binoche, Luminita Gheorghiu, Ona Lu Yenke, Thierry Neuvic, Maurice Bénichou)
9/10

Movie Review: Funny Games (1997)

Sometimes a great movie is ruined by its message--not because it's an offensive message, but because it's an obvious, an unnecessary, or a heavy-handed one. And at times like those, the viewer begins to suspect that he is being insulted or condescended to by the filmmaker. While Michael Haneke's direction of tension and editing of suspense is top-notch in Funny Games, his philosophical intent is obtuse and obnoxious.

Funny Games is a study of theodicy, a story of inexplicable evil and gratuitous violence. An upper middle class family, vacationing at their sunny, charming lake house for a weekend, is visited by two polite but aggressive young men, who hold the family hostage and unleash unchecked physical and emotional violence upon them throughout the night. That's what Funny Games is about on the surface, but the film is really about itself, an examination of its genre, an eye trained on violent entertainment that demands viewer involvement in the disturbing crime. Not merely a thriller to be consumed, Funny Games attempts to deliver consequences to the viewer, to ask him what possible enjoyment he expected from watching unbridled misery?

The typical thriller film relies on a number of conventions. First, we must be able to see the contest between the good guy(s) and the bad guy(s) as indicative of some greater moral or philosophical struggle. While they needn't be one-dimensional, the good guy(s) must represent some virtue (masculinity, justice, faith) while the bad guy(s) must possess some vice. This vice usually is revealed in some back story, serving as the instigator of the bad guy's turn to crime. Drug abuse, jealousy, greed, insecurity--it's often not anything believable. In Funny Games, the maniacal Peter and Paul have no back story, though they jokingly offer a number of stereotypical reasons for their fall from grace--heroin addiction, envy, abusive childhoods. Life is a continuous chain of countless causes and events, many of them minute, some of them irrational, millions of them undetectable; in reality our motivations are not so easily traced as in the movies. Our lives do not so easily fall into philosophical dichotomies and moral juxtapositions.

Furthermore, if Paul and Peter, the ambiguous villains of the film, have no discernible cause for their evil, then what virtues do Anna, Georg, and their young son Schorschi represent? Economic security? Lesiure? Minding their own business? Being courteous, but only to a point? They're a traditional, happy family unit, but they're hardly virtuous for being so. There's nothing vile about them, but neither is there anything emphatically great about them that forces us to root for their survival.

Which brings me to another convention, an obvious one that was actually codified in the Motion Picture Production Code from 1930 to 1968: the good guys always win. Purity, even if flawed, always triumphs, and crime never pays. As a correlative, children--who are always pure except in cases of temporary satanic possession--are always to survive. A good guy or two might fall in the process, but at least one hero always remains standing.

Well, Haneke doesn't bother with this expectation. The good guys don't always win in reality, and whether they do or not, it more often is a result of chance than of storytelling justice. Even the most common of cinematic conventions Haneke subverts. A major plot occurrence, the first murder, suddenly happens off-screen while the camera follows Paul into the kitchen to make a sandwich. Paul frequently winks at the camera and speaks to the audience, inviting them to participate in the game and take wagers on what the film's outcome will be--something that all viewers do subconsciously while watching any film, but without ever being accused of it. When Anna begs the sociopaths to kill them quickly and get it over with, Paul complains of the loss of entertainment value and the fact that they have not yet reached feature film length. (In other words, we need to give these sadistic viewers what they paid for.) Following the first murder, the film ceases to speak in "film language"--cuts, close-up, music, action--and instead depicts a realistic portrayal of the aftermath of horror: a mostly silent, static, ten minute long-distance shot of the two exhausted, speechless survivors too battered and stupefied to comprehend their misery while the bloody corpse lies in the corner of the frame. A typical thriller rarely pauses, and never for this long. As a result, the typical thriller never gives the viewer much time to think, never allows the viewer a chance to allow the reality of violence to sink in. In this ten minute, utterly disturbing sequence, the viewer is forced to reflect on the violence he has willingly volunteered and paid to see, to wonder what enjoyment he expected.

Arno Frisch invites us to join in on the fun.

But the most startling break from convention is during the climax, when Anna seizes an opportunity to kill her captors. After shooting and killing Peter, Paul coldcocks her, hunts for the remote control, and rewinds the film. When the opportunity arises again, Paul intercepts her and maintains the upper hand. This may outrage many viewers. That's breaking the rules! You can't do that in reality! He's not allowed to have so much control! But, of course, this isn't reality, there needn't be the same rules, and all control has lied in Michael Haneke's hands throughout the film.

I needn't say that this is an unpleasant film. Haneke has tried his hardest to make it so, and he has succeeded rather marvelously, stripping every ounce of entertainment and hope from this movie. A skillful director, he ratchets up the tension between the opposing parties in their struggle for power. From the film's opening credits--when a beautiful aria is cut off by screaming spazzcore as the film's English title slams onto the screen--he threads the movie with discomforting hints that something is wrong. An awkward conversation with neighbors, an unnecessary pair of gloves, a suspicious and almost insulting clumsiness, the far-off squeal of a dog, a rude imposition phrased in the politest of terms--Haneke knows how to shove needles into the viewer's spine. The acting perfectly suits the film's intent. Arno Frisch, who plays Paul, has dark, vacant eyes and a nihilistic contempt, yet he projects a handsome, charming exuberance; we almost like him, despite how horrible he is. Susanne Lothar as Anna is likable enough and pretty enough, yet she's also a bit cold and snobbish; we almost don't like her. And Ulrich Mühe as Georg is the antithesis of our desired action hero: inactive, crippled, indecisive, and ineffective--yet, for all of that, never unlikable. Would we, after taking an unexpected blow to the knee with a golf club, be any more courageous than him? The film is certainly well made.

Yet by the time it was over, I found myself wondering why Haneke had bothered with such a ham-fisted expose. If he thinks that violent entertainment is a recent phenomenon, then he's mistaken. Violence has been relished in art and literature since the dawn of history. The supposition that violent entertainment begets violent actions and thoughts in reality is unprovable but, in my opinion, false. Sleep experts theorize that the wackiness, horror, and violence of our REM dreams is to prepare us to encounter and survive any such obstacles we may come across in our waking lives. Horror movies, thrillers, and action flicks, I think, sometimes serve a similar purpose, forcing us to think about the most unexpected of occurrences so that if we come across them in our lives we won't be like deer in headlights, too surprised to react. If Haneke thinks that violence is so inexplicable and unwarranted, striking random people whether they deserve it or not, then maybe it's not a bad idea to be prepared.

Anyway, it's hard to side with a filmmaker who wants his viewers to suffer simply for wanting to enjoy his film.

Funny Games (1997)
d/w: Michael Haneke
(Arno Frisch, Susanna Lothar, Ulrich Mühe)
7/10

Movie Review: 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994)

Given how interesting The Seventh Continent and Benny's Video were, 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance, the final film in Michael Haneke's "Glaciation Trilogy" about the frigidity of modern society, is a huge disappointment. I suppose someone could surmise that from the awful title, which accurately sums up the content of the film: seventy-one brief scenes (including television news clips) leading chronologically to a random act of violence.

The seventy-one scenes, excluding the news clips (which detail ethnic violence, foreign invasions, ethnic clashes, IRA bombings, genocidal war, and child abuse), relate six exposition-free stories about a handful of characters we know nearly nothing about. These are the stories, in no particular order:

-A young army cadet robs the base armory and sells the weapons and ammunition to the black market, only to have his barracks ransacked by martial detective.

-A young boy who has escaped drugs, prostitution, and poverty in Romania illegally hitchhikes to Austria because a girlfriend informs him that people are nice to children there. He instead encounters (with a few exceptions) apathy and hostility as he loiters and pandhandles at a train station, committing small crimes to sustain himself. He eventually turns himself in to the police, hoping to find warmth and refugee status there.

-A married couple that desperately wants a child adopts a foster daughter who is emotionally hardened, fearful, and untrusting. They try to elicit warmth from her, but quickly give up and return her to the agency when they hear the story of the Romanian boy on the local news. They adopt him in her place.

-An armored truck driver who makes bank deliveries grieves over the failing health of his baby daughter. He prays fervently for her recovery, for world peace, for continued safety, and for the end of various other sufferings, yet his marriage and his child's health gradually deteriorate.

-An unhappy bank teller estranges her family from her elderly father, a man of poor health whose lonely life consists of watching television, talking on the phone to the daughter who is uninterested in him, and making monthly trips to the bank in order to withdraw his pensions and see her.

-An impulsive, passive college student whose only passtime is ping pong, though he's not particularly good at it, obtains--through a random chain of events--a gun from his roommate. This was one of the guns stolen by the army cadet. One afternoon before Christmas, he goes to a gas station to fill up his tank before picking up a friend, but he forgets his cash. Hassled by the driver behind him, treated brusquely by the gas station attendant, frustrated by a broken ATM, humiliated by a man in the long line inside the bank, and impatient to pick up his friend on time, he snaps, pulls the gun, shoots up the bank, and commits suicide in his car. Though details are not specified, it is implied that he has randomly killed the elderly father, the foster mother, and the armored truck driver.

The news treats the shooting spree as a random act of inexplicable violence, but the recurring news clips throughout the film, all of which show a steady stream of violence and horror, suggest that the media has created a culture in which people have accepted violence as a regular solution to problems, the only way to be heard in a society that isn't interested in hearing about anyone's minor problems. The details of the film's multiple stories help cement this idea. The bank teller doesn't care to hear about her father's failing health, and she only asks him how he's doing when he shows up at her work because it is instinctive for her to ask this to customers. When he actually answers her, she is annoyed and explains that she doesn't have time to be bothered. The foster family adopts a psychologically damaged girl, but is too impatient to actually help her; she isn't able to quickly fill the spot they've made for her in the way they want it filled, so they easily replace her with another candidate. The armored truck driver prays devoutly to God, but the prayers fail to cure his daughter or save his life. When he quietly and unexpectedly tells his wife that he loves her during dinner, she responds with suspicion and confusion until he slaps her. The only moment of genuine connection in the film is at the train station, when the Romanian boy pretends to be in a swimming pool with another young boy across the tracks. Perhaps these two boys are still too young too have learned apathy and disregard.

The only heartfelt minute out of one hundred.

71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance is a film about emotional frigidity, but the film itself is too cold and impenetrable to be enjoyable. Besides the scene with the two boys at the train station (and another brief moment when the Romanian boy makes friends with an immigrant Polish newsman despite the language barrier), the film is heartless and mechanical. (In one scene, for instance, the future murderer practices ping pong by himself for five or more minutes of uncut screen time. Maybe that's supposed to show us how lonely his life is? But shouldn't any athlete practice his sport? What's really so bad about that?) The Seventh Continent and Benny's Video were disturbing and dreary, but by showing the very worst of lives, those films encouraged us to choose different, happier lives. 71 Fragments is bleak for bleakness's sake, insisting that violence is a part of our world and that meaningless suffering eventually comes for all of us, whatever we do. Someone tell me where the shred of hope is in that because I'm at a loss to find it.

71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994)
d/w: Michael Haneke
(Gabriel Cosmin Urdes, Lukas Miko, Udo Samel)
4/10

Movie Review: Altered States (1980)

Screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky successfully fought to have his name removed from the credits of Altered States. Though the shooting script remained entirely faithful to his story and his words, he felt that his dialogue, when voiced by these actors (William Hurt in his first role, Blair Brown, Charles Haid) under Ken Russell's direction, was rendered incomprehensibly silly and raving mad. His assessment was a fair one, but it's hard to imagine any way in which these lines could not come across as being the words of lunatics. (Take, for instance, this line delivered by a totally drunk William Hurt at a bar to his buddies: "What dignifies the Yogic practices is that the belief system itself is not truly religious. There is no Buddhist God per se. It is the Self, the individual Mind, that contains immortality and ultimate truth.")

I find it baffling that Chayefsky, who wrote Network, one of the most perfect screenplays of all time, just a few years before, produced a script that sounds so written and unrealistic. Perfectly formed sentences using convoluted jargon to express solidly constructed, complex ideas. You can hear the pointedly pronounced commas and semicolons. No one ever falters or stutters here. No one is ever at a loss for words, which is surprising, given the mind-blowingly bizarre subject matter.

Altered States tells the story of Eddie Jessup (Hurt), a young Harvard scientist experimenting with isolation chambers and psychoactive drugs to explore altered states of consciousness. He's a strange young man, extremely driven, obsessively focused, constantly manic, and almost pathologically antisocial. He meets Emily (Brown), a beautiful anthropologist, marries her, and has children, but their life together always takes the back seat to his career, a situation that she knowingly enters. As Jessup secretly experiments on himself with an undocumented tribal drug from Mexico, he begins to tap into genetic memory, collective consciousness, and his primal roots--not just mentally, but physically. On a path to unlocking the mysteries of the self and the meaning of the universe, he takes a crash course backwards through the ages of the cosmos, with brief interludes as a caveman and as a gelatinous blob of primordial ooze. At risk of transforming back into a unicellular being and perhaps even assimilating with the universe in some sort of reverse big bang, he finally looks outside of himself for one moment to see the despair of his wife and realizes that maybe love, companionship, and mere normal existence is preferable to scientific nirvana.

You heard me right. Taking shrooms in an isolation tank physically transforms him into a caveman. And then into a blob. There's some mystical, pseudoscientific explanation for this, something to do with genes never changing throughout the course of history and with the mind/soul having as much direct influence over the body as the body does over the mind/soul. It's absurd, of course, but that's clearly what Ken Russell was aiming for. (Was Chayefsky not aiming for absurdity? If not, then that calls his sanity and brilliance into question.)

Ken Russell, who directed the phenomenally strange and enjoyable The Who musical Tommy, relishes in bizarre imagery and surreal, drug-induced moments of absurdity. Unfortunately, for a movie so surreal, I found the offerings to be rather tepid and customary. Jessup's hallucinations/experiences borrow heavily from loaded Judeo-Christian symbolism. Christ hangs on a cross, his head replaced by a goat's in a nod to J.G. Frazer's theories about Christ as a sacrificial scapegoat (see The Golden Bough). Emily as Eve feeds Jessup as Adam pudding in a rather English garden of Eden while a serpent slithers nearby. Cast out of paradise, they enter brutal reality, wandering into an atomic explosion. There are images of lizards that draw upon the idea of the reptile brain. There are rather stereotypical descriptions of caveman life, and the universe in its earliest stages is seen (just as in the Bible) as a watery Chaos waiting for God to carve into order. It seems to me that bizarre, surreal hallucinations wouldn't be so archetypal, straightforward, and obvious. For a movie that's supposed to simulate a bizarre, eye-opening trip, the visuals are rather pedestrian.

What's most bizarre, in fact, is how nonchalantly the characters respond to to these increasingly impossible revelations. After an extended sequence in which Jessup, transformed into a hairy, goofy, squealing hominid, has raced down corridors, attacked security guards, climbed fences, defecated in public, and killed and eaten a deer, he returns to his normal body, his wife, and his home with only a foggy recollection of the experience. He describes to Emily his motivation during the spree--how all thoughts of the past and the future, all worries and concerns and complicated yearnings had slipped away, replaced with the mere need to survive, to eat, to drink, to sleep, to stay alive. Dewy-eyed and smiling, he tells her, "I hunted, killed, and ate a small gazelle. It was the most satisfying experience of my life."

Needless to say, she is horrified.

Which highlights the only truly interesting quandary in this film: what is knowledge or enlightenment if it removes you from the things that make you human? Is the ending, in which Jessup chooses to stay with Emily and to love her rather than to attain the ultimate solution to his questing, a victory or a tragedy?

Altered States could have been a pretty good movie, but subpar acting from Hurt and Brown (only Charles Haid, as a loudmouthed, Southern-twanged scientist friend, shines in this film) and unrealistic dialogue prevent its message from ever being driven home.

Altered States (1980)
d: Ken Russell W: Paddy Chayefsky
(William Hurt, Blair Brown, Bob Balaban)
5/10