Some others:
First Love, Last Rites (Peretz, 1997)
A movie I dearly loved ten, twelve years ago and probably haven't seen since. No one could have been more surprised than me that not only does it hold up to my memories of it but improves upon them. That's a pretty rare thing though it should be more common than it is. This was the feature directorial debut of Jesse Peretz who was and is probably known best for his Foo Fighters' music videos. That may not inspire much confidence but it is also part of the reason that the revelatory results here are so impressive. Adapted from Ian McEwan's luminous short story and transposed to contemporary rural Louisiana,
First Love doesn't so much tell a story as evoke an atmosphere. But this is not an evasion when the atmosphere it evokes is so carefully rendered, so rich in detail and sensitive understanding. As an illustration of the vagaries of a first erotic relationship, Peretz and his actors get to some remarkable places of genuine insight born out of the reality of contradictory or inaccessible behavior. Other than some dream like images meant to suggest the gnawing doubt developing as to the sustainability of the relationship, Peretz favors a much appreciated quiet serenity from which vantage point he and we observe the small moments add up, not just in the lives of the central characters but also in the lives of those around them. The rat in the wall imagery and its position as a central metaphor never bothered me, partly because it's carried over from the book and partly because the ultimate
meaning of the heavily applied symbol escapes its most obvious designation. Natasha Gregson Wagner and Giovanni Ribisi as the lovers are perhaps the best they have ever been here, so perfectly dialed in to the frequency of these tentative characters for whom so much is passing away before them every day. Ribisi in particular is like the Van Sant protagonist we never got. His natural faltering quality has never been put to better use. It's unusual to see these aspects of any relationship handled at all let alone in a way that rejects easy sentimentality for the more hard won variety: a recognition that the passing away is inevitable, that we are always aware of it on some level, and yet the willingness to assert that what passes away is never irrelevant or meaningless and its very transience may cultivate devotion. As goes the tag line for
Heaven's Gate, "What one loves about life are the things that fade".
Kissed (Stopkewich, 1997)
Similarly attuned to vulnerability but far more radical there's Lynne Stopkewich's infamous "necrophiliac romance". Certainly her film merits the designation however as its tremendous achievement exists in establishing the legitimacy of its protagonist's world view. Obviously material like this will never completely escape a certain perverse association but what's really admirable here is how Stopkewich and her gifted, expressive lead Molly Parker "play it for real". The unique specifics of the Parker character's psychology/pathology is followed toward its inevitable culmination point. And we are expected to sympathize with it and with her, and that unqualified expectation, the lacking of any purely sensationalist drive, exposes us to either the limits of our own understanding or the fluidity of our empathy. Part of this has to do with the fact that Stopkewich wisely pitches her central subject matter as both literal and metaphoric. It is, I suspect, her grasp of the multi-dimensional resonance of this central metaphor which is the source of the film's remarkable, unforced emotional purity and authority. I am always profoundly moved by Parker's final moments in this film and that's because the sentiments she expresses are convincing and persuasive.
This World, Then the Fireworks (Oblowitz, 1997)
Certainly the most underrated and under appreciated of all the Jim Thompson adaptations it's also my favorite by far. Yet another Billy Zane film it's true but it's hard not to see his ultimate effectiveness in the role of Marty Lakewood, the charismatic nihilist at the center of the action. Though
The Grifters and
After Dark, My Sweet are both very good in their own way (
After Dark seems the better picture) neither of them goes nearly as far to match the aggression and virulence of Thompson's prose.
TWTTF absolutely does go all the way, into a frenzied pitch of sustained hysterical excess and it announces that from the beginning with what I still believe is one of the greatest openings of any movie ever--it's a virtually perfect depiction of sociopathology in its infancy. The rest of the film observes that same sociopathology in its more mature form. Zane and Gina Gershon are the amoral siblings and Sheryl Lee does her usual exquisite job charting the depths of naked desperation but still what I love of course is the fact that appropriately there's something far from "mature" about the whole enterprise. David Edelstein, who wrote perhaps the most insightful
piece on this film, gets it right when he points out
Zane's toasty voice and suspiciously good looks already verge on parody. Here, everything he says sounds as if it's in quotation marks; you never know if the narrator is playing mad or is mad or (more likely) both. Often, it seems as if the act is taking over the man, as if what began as a put-on has taken on a schizoid life of its own.
And that's what it gets at so well--not the cynicism, which is easy, but more the pseudo-sophisticated appeal of it, its coolness factor in application and the implications of actually living that philosophy. For understanding that and risking much with its exhilarating moral free fall it deserves to be mentioned in the same post with Stopkewich's audacious accomplishment.
Love Is The Devil (Maybury, 1998)
I have no idea how accurate all the details of John Maybury's vision of Francis Bacon are but what I do know with absolute certainty is how powerful the result is. It's curious to me that of the many people I've shown this film to over the years very few come away from it with much in the way of positive comments. I suppose that to some degree it's due to the dour and dire subject matter, the relentless bleakness of Maybury's approach to depicting the disintegration of Bacon's relationship with George Dyer and the disintegration of Dyer himself. Still, I think it also has to do with the sheer excess of Maybury's aesthetic approach, too; the fact that he is subtle about nothing and that seems to grate those who want only subtlety. But he knows exactly what he's doing (as a student of the similarly pitched Jarman I would expect nothing less); each individual scene feels like its own separate set piece moment designed to contribute to the mosaic of the whole. And, what's more, each moment if allowed to function as it is meant to, has enormous emotional power. I wonder now if that very fact--the raw, severed vein exposed--also brings out resentment in many who don't appreciate what they must see as Bacon reduced to a tragic figure in some sentimental melodrama. But Maybury's vision is far from easy sentiment. He (and Derek Jacobi of course) make Bacon a continually prickly presence, never allowing him to be either simply a hateful prick or an emotionally inhibited tragic case (which is the irony in a man so uninhibited in every other way) but rather these things constantly intermingled. In the end, the portrait they paint suggests a man unable or unwilling to love and that incapability having a great deal to do with the very life philosophy from which his great and savage art emerged. The compositions are the star, however--with bold images like the fighter's blood cast across Bacon's face casting him into a kind of ecstasy, the warped close ups in the bar, Dyer tearing up a painting in a rage in a suddenly empty theatrical space, his own final moments as museum installation piece, his descent down the stairs or fall through the skylight, his profile held in a dissolve as though Maybury's prescient cinematic equivalent of a death mask, etc., etc., etc. Seriously though almost every moment here sings, even if it is in a tone commensurate with Sakamoto's abrasive score and Bacon's own fraught imagery.
The Bed You Sleep In (Jost, 1993)
Quite possibly Jon Jost's finest work. This is saying a lot in my opinion as I see much merit in most of his films. However, this one feels in many respects like the culmination of his aesthetic and thematic interests. Since this time he has gone on to work primarily in digital with mixed results; mixed because Jost is actually a more conventional filmmaker than he realizes and does his best when he integrates his experimental tendencies with his narrative or character based approach. But at any rate,
Bed is a true masterpiece, an almost perfect film as Jost so carefully aligns the rigors of his formalism to complement and deepen the story he is telling. Also, by this point in his career he is capable of foregoing the embittered hostility that marked some of his early films, even great ones like
Last Chants for a Slow Dance. This time the setting is a rural Oregon lumber town and at first it seems as though we will be getting a fairly familiar Jost piece meditating on the pernicious influence of the American business model and capitalism in general. And we do get that as per usual but we also get a very slowly accruing portrait of how and why that model has been able to sustain itself, specifically the superficially benign small town lives of those who accept its underlying moral tenets, who would seek to deny all sense of connective accountability. It's here that Jost proceeds into some very risky, extraordinarily well balanced territory, using his excellent and equally attuned lead Tom Blair to articulate (even more so here than in the almost as great
Sure Fire) the profound sense of ambiguity and unknowability at the heart of a society which does not question enough and buys into too much. His images are more secure and precise than ever (the letter reading scene is shot and edited to absolute perfection--really, it's a master class unto itself) and his trademark longeurs are integrated with great skill and an almost preternatural intuition. Only at the end with a possibly ill considered Emerson quote does the film falter a bit, but by then we are more than willing to overlook it.
The Bloody Child (Menkes, 1995)
I'm still not sure whether this film or
Queen of Diamonds is Nina Menkes' best work but I will, at this time anyway, emphasize this one. As with the Jost here Menkes distills and refines her artistic approach until it emerges in a radiant and perfected state. But this one feels like her most radical work to date as well, especially in the way in which she handles the notion of war and violence. Once again, as with the Jost the approach here incorporates the specifics of a personal event set against a larger socio-economic backdrop in order to give unique insight into the effects of that context. The central event here is drawn from the actual story of a Gulf War vet who murdered and then buried his wife upon returning home. There are shades here of Dumont's later
29 Palms, not just in terms of location associated with violence but, more consequentially, the anthropological dimensions of lived space and the ways in which it not only induces but interacts with emotional or psychic states, enacting or actualizing them. I infinitely prefer what Menkes is doing to what Dumont is doing, though I like his film as well, because her work is much less fortified with philosophic determinism from the outset. In fact, it really doesn't
determine anything. It is purely about, in the best poetic sense, the evocation of a more fully integrated and comprehensive understanding. More than ever Menkes demands we submit to her rhythms and cadence. We never see the specific violent event depicted (the narrative scenes play out backwards and there is very little emphasis on narrative anyway as they almost all center on images of law enforcement vehicles arriving and departing) but we do experience glimpses of attitudes in isolation put into associations that may enlighten or environments which contain or endorse gradations of violence, whether they be physical, psychic or emotional. In the midst of this are the eruptions of unsolicited myth, from the horse that wanders onto the crime scene to the incorporation of Menkes' African/Macbeth footage from an aborted project years earlier. In this way, she alters the manner of our engagement causing us to perceive the meaning and significance of violence differently and ultimately to recognize its resolute permanance as something irresolvable; that the real mystery lies in considering the implications of that.
Close My Eyes (Poliakoff, 1991)
An early and excellent theatrical feature from Stephen Poliakoff. Here we have the opposite of much of what I've been describing throughout this post--the many familiar Poliakoff themes and archetypes in nascent form; which is all the more exciting because their potential seems so boundless at this point. Though it's best known for its sensationalist appeal as a drama of sibling incest, it's what informs that particular drama, the social and environmental context of it that fascinates Poliakoff and, by extension, us. And that's because the primary relationship in the picture serves as a veiled symbol for the potentials of alternate or "perverse" social orders, made remote and inaccessible by the prominence of dominant possibilities. Poliakoff isn't interested in advocating the goodness of his couple's relationship but rather using it to understand what has
become remote and inaccessible. In that way,
Close My Eyes with its vaguely eco-apocalypse future meshed with a barely comprehended aristocratic past feels like Ballard style sci-fi, an imbalanced dystopic reality replete with possibilities unable to be acted upon or understood. All that is most vital here and all that would clarify our understanding remains just out of reach. I'm reminded of something Kenneth Clark said about David Jones: "All the great poets I have known have given very simple explanations of their most obscure passages; all the bad poets have given very profound explanations of their banal ones". Though I certainly don't think of Poliakoff as being on the same tier as Jones, the same idea applies.
Liquid Dreams (Manos, 1991)
Bizarrely perhaps a kind of urtext for me. On its surface Mark Manos' film seems just a lo-fi, sci-fi straight to video B-pic. Going beyond that cursory glance reveals a surprising amount of richness and depth, a skillful and engaged work willing to pursue its thematic ambitions within the limited budget parameters established for it. It's never interested in separating itself from those origins--the presence of people like Paul Bartel, John Doe and Mink Stole ensures that and its debt to Cronenberg is never denied but built upon and put in dialogue with Manos' other obvious source of inspiration, Fritz Lang. However, these things are not what maintains my own fascination. That has to do with the very
Mulholland Drive like scenario surrounding the film itself. Candice Daly plays a woman who tracks her missing sister down to a sinister entertainment corporation which houses its workers in a dorm like facility. Here she finds her sister suspiciously overdosed on some of the same drugs the corporation itself is known to traffic in. Her investigation commences during which she takes on a false identity to infiltrate the cultish group whose primary agenda is driven by the harnessing of sexual power and subjugation often through video surrogates. In real life, Daly was discovered dead of an overdose under mysterious circumstances in 2004. Though she had never had much career success her performance in this film is very empathetic and, in fact, stronger than it really needs to be. It's deeply disturbing on a number of levels to know that her death not only mirrored the one in the film but also that she ended up virtually enslaved and destitute in the house of the man who allegedly was keeping her drugged and captive. A horrifying story that can't help but influence my own reading of this film and the implications buried within it.
And, in brief as I haven't seen it for awhile,
Wide Sargasso Sea (Duigan, 1993)
John Duigan's finest film. A great, rich and insightful telling of Jean Rhys' speculative continuation of
Jane Eyre. The last time I went through this I remember taking a tremendous amount away from it; there is so much here thematically that elaborates upon Rhys' themes (though the film does have its critics in that respect) and just in general carefully builds up the psychological profile of why and how a unique form of vicious hatred could develop (this portrait of Mr. Rochester has always been the far less favored one for what are probably obvious reasons). However, Duigan's film even wares well from a distance after specific memory has faded some. The pronounced and distinctive pull of his images and the profound understanding of how much can come undone in the face of a lack of inhibition, whether sensual or not. I remember the tone shifts now more than anything: faces, water and trees, like a Claire Denis film.
There are still others of course, like
Bliss and
Closet Land, but they are discussed elsewhere.
