DIRECTED BY: Guy Maddin

FEATURING: Kyle McCulloch, Gosia Dobrowolska, Sarah Neville, Brent Neale

PLOT: Villagers of the Alpine town of Tolzbad believe that avalanches will bury them if they are not meticulously careful to keep their voices low and their movements measured.  The film follows the adventures of a family of a widowed mother and her three sons: Johann, who is engaged to be married; Grigorss, who is training to be a butler; and Franz, a mute who never leaves his chair in the attic. Presaged by the appearance of the blind ghost of the father, the family’s repressed emotions eventually erupt into suicide, duels, and even the dreaded avalanche.

BACKGROUND:

• This was Guy Maddin’s third film, and his first fully in color (Archangel featured a few tinted scenes). The chromatic process used in the film mimics the so-called “two-strip” Technicolor which was used before 1932.
• The setting of Careful was inspired by “mountain movies,” a 1920s subgenre popular in the German national cinema, although Maddin admits in the DVD commentary that he had not actually seen any mountain movies when he made the film.
• Long-time Maddin screenwriting collaborator George Toles appears in Careful as a corpse in drag.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: I am tempted by the vision of the mountain mineworkers—women stripped down to their underwear, wielding pickaxes while wearing candle-bearing diapers on their heads—but the film’s most significant image is Johann gazing manically at his mother sleeping under her goat’s-head headboard while spreading the limbs of his massive garden shears.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: If movies themselves could dream, their dreams would look like Guy

Original trailer for Careful

Maddin movies: sludgy jumbles of styles, moods, and melodramatic preoccupations, composed of fragmented images made up from bits of misplaced, distressed celluloid. Like Maddin’s other movies, Careful keeps us at two removes from reality: it displaces us once by its narrative dislogic, and then a second time by its archaic stylization. In Careful the technique is particularly appropriate, since the subject matter—repressed incestuous desire—demands to be buried under layers of mystery.

COMMENTS: Careful begins with what amounts to a pre-Code Public Service Announcement, as an elder of the high-altitude Alpine village of Tolzbad warns, in a calm, hypnotic voice over carefully plucked harp arpeggios: “Children! Heed the warnings of your parents! Peril awaits the uncautious wayfarer, and strews grief where laughter once played.” The dangers of living in a craggy burg are, apparently, legion. There is the obvious danger of falling off the mountain slope. The fear of avalanches is so great that all domestic animals have their vocal cords severed lest they unwittingly bring death from above down upon the town. The citizens make a virtue of caution, so necessary to their survival, and they have perfected it as a habit to guard against the remotest dangers, for the residents of Tolzbad have many sad tales of the tragedies that result from heedless behavior. A baby once lost an eye when his mother foolishly clasped him to her bosom without making double-sure her brooch pin was fully closed. That same child lost his other eye as an adult when he peered too close to a cuckoo clock just as it burst forth to announce the dawn of a new hour. The elders have a rich storehouse of tales of woe with which to educate the young, but no number of cautionary fables can protect from every possible threat, from the “wild uncontrolled sound of nature,” the avalanche-tempting cries of migrating geese and the folly of the undisciplined human heart. That is why the citizens must always be alert, must carve the instincts of discretion and reserve into their bodies and souls, must always be careful.

The warning prologue is delivered, appropriately enough, in a monochrome print tinted a cautionary traffic-cone orange. In his third feature, Guy Maddin works for the first time in color, and like a 1920s German filmmaker given unlimited access to a two-strip Technicolor machine, he seizes upon the possibilities afforded by this new visual dimension to invent new forms of Expressionist storytelling. The Tolzbadians practiced public blandness is belied by the movie’s flamboyant color schemes: their repressed desires bleed onto the screen. Careful‘s visual compositions look like turn of the century Swiss postcards from which most of the dye long ago faded away. Early Technicolor processes usually used a green filter and a red filter, which in combination covered most of the color spectrum and resulted in an image that projected vaguely realistic hues. Throughout Careful Maddin experiments with using, for example, a yellow filter and a pink one, creating chromatic combinations that are as off-key as the concept of the sexually repressed Alpine village itself is.

Early scenes, such as the Feast of St. Mathilde where the village youths serenade a crowd of swooning maidens with a concerto blown on their grotesquely oversized Alpine horns, are rendered in pleasing, if unnatural, pastoral shades of cornflower and periwinkle. These halcyon days glow as pure and blond as the Aryan hair of young Johann, who chastely woos a village maid by the name of Klara. Of course it is not always so; at moonrise in Tolzbad, the amber sun fades away and is replaced by a purple moon. A violet moonbeam casts a blotch on the face of Johann’s older brother Franz, a lame mute who sits covered in cobwebs in the family attic eternally staring out the window. Bathed in lavender revelation, Franz sees a vision of his blind dead father, who warns the shut-in that his brother now “dreams of your mother like a bridegroom; he is confused; his virginity has become a curse,” that his mother’s unfulfilled desire haunts the house, and that poor Johann has “breathed it in.” Such is the moonrise in Tolzbad. In the next scene the once harmonious color palette is completely broken; tormented by his forbidden desire, Johann confesses to Klara “purity sickens me” and wonders if “the sounds of angels singing hymns to our virginal love was in reality a choir from the deepest pits of Hell?” The lovers’ figures are indistinct and shadowy, veiled in a dense color fog that Maddin calls “sickly urine yellow.” From this point on, the chromatic schemes swing as wildly as the characters’ cascading emotions; Klara will go to labor in the purple and gold mines of Tolzbad, Johann’s brother Grigorss will graduate butler school and land a position in Count Knotkers hunter green castle, and we’ll visit the glacial blue heights of Mitterwald’s Tongue and the electric orange peaks of Mt. Uhlander.

The visual exuberance is a sharp contrast to the acting; as in Maddin’s previous Archangel, the characters deliver their outrageously melodramatic lines (“God has left this mountain to the devil. We have all joined his unholy dance”) as if they were half-asleep and speaking in a daze. Here, the narcotized underacting is appropriate to the theme of repression, but it doesn’t help us bond with the characters, and the hard-to-hit tone of buried passion the script requires exposes the amateurism of a few of the cast members. (Franz, whose complete immobility makes him the safest and therefore most exemplary citizen of Tolzbad, is also the film’s exemplary actor; he’s forced to perform like a silent movie star, and his face is free to express an unfettered alarm and bereavement that the others, bound to language, must suppress). The plot, while not awful, is one of Careful‘s few negatives. It lingers too long at the setup. It’s hard to identify with the characters. There’s no one who engages our sympathies, the story switches the main character on us a third of the way through, imposes an unconvincing romance on us in the third act, and the continues after the natural climax of the duel to follow what is essentially a subplot. These failings far from ruin the film, since Careful has more than enough amazing atmosphere, style and psychological queasiness to admire, but to me they do keep it from being one of Maddin’s top works. The extra features of a master work—the deep involvement in Lt. Boles’ amnesiac tragedy in Archangel, the manic energy of Cowards Bend the Knee, the professional exuberance of Isabella Rossellini and Mark McKinney’s performances in The Saddest Music in the World—are missing in Careful, leaving us with little more to enjoy besides Maddin’s extraordinary style and the cleverness of the incest conceit. These minor flaws make Careful more a film for those who are already in the Maddin cult than an entry point into the canon (I recommend newbies start with Saddest Music, which is Maddin’s most accessible movie while still remaining astoundingly strange to the average person).

Like all of Maddin’s movies, Careful is a tragicomedy, and one that succeeds only because the humor is so absurd and dreamlike that it tempers the tragedy without mocking it. Maddin peppers his tepid Freudian melodrama with moments of full-bore Surrealism. An egg drops a fully developed, moving bird when cracked into a frying pan. There’s a confession of incestuous rape delivered during a yawning fit. In Careful, when two characters have a duel, it involves a drawn out ritual of frantically unbuttoning overcoats, interrupted as the contestants blow on their hands to keep their digits from freezing in the Alpine chill, followed by a frantic round of unbuttoning of waistcoats. It’s funny, but it doesn’t diminish the dramatic stakes of the contest: two men are fighting for their lives, and younger combatant could kill his spiritual father. Dead birds fall out of the sky around the victor. He carefully arranges their jumbled corpses into orderly rows. Such are the psychological avalanches of Tolzbad, where it always pays to be careful.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…hilariously bizarre… like some lost masterpiece from a time-warped alternative dimension — a strange artifact that time forgot.”–Hal Hinson, The Washington Post (contemporaneous)

“…the film remains one long ‘look what I can do, Ma,’ drawing attention to the director’s conceits just when the viewer should be focusing on, oh, say, some sort of coherent plot… Too strange for its own good.”–Marc Savlov, The Austin Chronicle (contemporaneous)

“Uniquely weird, subtly macabre, and utterly compelling.”–Time Out Film Guide

OFFICIAL SITE: Careful at Zeitgeist Films – A synopsis, stills, quotes from positive reviews, and a detailed Guy Maddin biography

IMDB LINK: Careful (1992)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Technicolor history – For the technically inclined, here is a discussion of early film color technology that Maddin mimics in Careful

DVD INFO: Zeitgeist’s “Remastered and Repressed” DVD (buy) preserves Maddin’s uniquely bizarre color and sound schemes, faithfully reproducing each imperfection. There is a buried treasure of bonus material; a commentary with the director and under-appreciated writing partner George Toles is of primary interest. There’s also the utterly surreal five minute short film “Odilon Redon” (which can be watched here, though with a different soundtrack). The most impressive extra is the informative one hour documentary Waiting for Twilight, narrated by none other than Tom Waits, which covers Maddin’s early history and was filmed as the nervous auteur was fretting over the production of 1997′s Twilight of the Ice Nymphs.

This title is also available, with all the same features, as part of the four-disc set “The Quintessential Guy Maddin” (buy): other movies featured are the aforementioned Ice Nymphs, the Certified Weird movies Archangel (1990) and Cowards Bend the Knee (2004), the 2003 vampire ballet Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary, and the magnificent Surrealist/Constructivist short “The Heart of the World.” “Quintessential” is the only box set available anywhere to date containing an incredible three Certified Weird movies. At the time this review was published the compilation was priced at only a few dollars more than the single disc, making it an almost irresistible bargain.

Careful is also available for online purchase or rental (rent).

(This movie was nominated for review by Eric Gabbard, who argued “Careful ‘out-weirds’ both [Archangel and Cowards Bend the Knee] easily. In fact, I would definitely put it in my top 10. Such dreamlike photography puts you in a trance.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

DIRECTED BY: W.D. Richter

FEATURING: Peter Weller, John Lithgow, Ellen Barkin, Jeff Goldblum, Christopher Lloyd, Vincent Schiavelli

PLOT: We are first introduced to Buckaroo Banzai as he rushes by helicopter from completing a delicate neurosurgery to test-drive a trans-dimensional race car in the Nevada desert. Banzai successful breaches the Eighth Dimension with his oscillation overthruster, but the experiment attracts the attention of the mad Dr. Lizardo, as well as a gang of Lectroid aliens who also want the device. Between rock and roll gigs and particle physics press conferences, Buckaroo and his band of scientist/musician/adventurers, the Hong Kong Cavaliers, will uncover an alien conspiracy that (naturally) threatens the fate of the world.

BACKGROUND:

• This was writer W.D. Richter’s first directorial effort after having half-a-dozen screenplays produced (including the 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers). Banzai eventually became a hit on VHS but was a huge flop in theaters, losing six million dollars and bankrupting the production studio. Richter only directed one other movie, the 1991 independent comedy Late for Dinner, although he continued to write screenplays (including Big Trouble in Little China). Richter did not write the script for Buckaroo Banzai, however; it was penned by his pal Earl Mac Rauch.
• The name of the evil front corporation in Banzai, Yoyodyne, is a reference to a fictional corporation that appears in Thomas Pynchon’s novels.
• In 2003 Entertainment Weekly ranked Buckaroo Banzai as the #43 cult movie of all time.
• The sequel promised by the end credits, Buckaroo Banzai vs. The World Crime League, was of course never made, although legend has it that Richter is still trying to get it produced to this day. In 1998 pre-production work was done on a Buckaroo television series for the Fox network, but the show was never picked up. The Buckaroo brand has persisted through the years with a novelization and comic book adaptations.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: We require a flashback to show how the Eighth Dimension was originally discovered by a then-sane Dr. Emilio Lizardo—but how to introduce it without disrupting the flow of the story? This movie believes the most natural way to incorporate the memory is to have a now-insane Dr. Lizardo hook electrodes onto his tongue and shock himself so that arcs of lightning fly out of his eardrums. We have to assume this bizarre home-electroshock therapy explains the perfect cinematic precision of the following flashback sequence, because no other sane theory is offered for Lizardo’s act of high-voltage masochism.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Refer to the plot synopsis. Any movie that successfully incorporates

Original trailer for The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eight Dimension

a band of rock and roll scientists, an invasion by aliens uniformly named “John,” the Eighth Dimension, inexplicable watermelons, and Jeff Goldblum as a New Jersey neurosurgeon who dresses like a cowboy—while working inside the Hollywood system, with a $12 million dollar budget—has worked hard enough to deserve a space on the List of the Best Weird Movies ever made.

COMMENTS: According to an unofficial Buckaroo Banzai FAQ, the most frequently asked question about The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai is not, as one might expect, “what in the hell did I just watch?” or “how in the world did this thing get made?” or even “why does Jeff Goldblum dress up like a cowboy if he’s from New Jersey?” but instead, “what exactly is the watermelon doing there?” To those not yet in the know, this query refers to the point in the movie where alien John Bigboote has infiltrated the Banzai Institute to try to re-kidnap Professor Hikita and obtain the overthruster, and Buckaroo and the Hong Kong Cavaliers are prowling the corridors looking for him. As they pass through one lab area, New Jersey asks Reno why there is a large watermelon lodged in an industrial vice. “I’ll tell you later,” promises the senior Cavalier, but he never gets around to it.

No one ever wonders about the fact that, in the very same sequence, Buckaroo passes a fire that’s inexplicably burning in a file cabinet and makes no comment—he simply shuts it with his foot, not even bothering to put out the flames. Nobody asks “what exactly is that spinning plastic musical elephant carousel doing in the middle of a hallway in Yoyodyne corporation?” There are lots of unanswered questions in Buckaroo Banzai—why does Lizardo shock himself on the tongue? Why do good aliens appear as Rastafarians?—but people focus on the watermelon because that’s the point at which the movie draws attention to its own background craziness and pledges to answer one single absurdity. Of course, it never delivers the promised resolution, because this is a case of Buckaroo‘s script explicitly tipping you off to the entire story’s shaggy dog nature. Pressed by fans, director W.D. Richter later concocted an explanation which involved the Banzai Institute working to create a watermelon with a super-hard shell so that the fruit could be clandestinely dropped from airplanes into starvation-plagued regions of third world dictatorships without shattering. A likely explanation; but I have my own little theory about the watermelon, which I’ll provide later in the review.

It’s fruitless to obsess about the watermelon, because large swaths of Buckaroo Banzai make little sense. If you’re not hopelessly confused half an hour into this picture, then you haven’t been paying attention. The script seems to have been edited down from something about three times as long, with subplots that are hinted at but not followed up on and characters who are mentioned but never appear. There’s simply not enough time in the 100 minutes allotted to flesh out all the ideas Richter and Rauch are anxious to get on the page, so the plot rushes by with a heedless recklessness that sweeps you along. Buckaroo has a love interest in the charming person of Penny Priddy, who by a freak coincidence happens to be the spitting image of his dead wife, but he’s so busy dealing with subplots and shootouts he barely has time to romance her between abductions. We never get time to draw a bead on any of Buckaroo’s boon companions and backing band, the Hong Kong Cavaliers. They have names like Reno Nevada and Rawhide, but few distinguishing characteristics beyond uncanny competence and killer chops (both instrumental and karate). Of the Cavaliers, Lewis Smith makes the biggest impression as “Perfect Tommy,” but that’s largely because of his improbably blond mane of hair. With all of these guys standing around in the background just waiting for their moment in the sun, Buckaroo goes out and recruits yet another sidekick who demands his share of screen time, in the person of fellow neurosurgeon named New Jersey, who dresses inconspicuously in a cowboy hat, bright scarlet shirt and shaggy llama-hair chaps. There’s also a helpful Jamaican alien who joins the fray, and a father-son pair of Buckaroo Banzai Irregulars who chip in to put the beatdown on evil. And as if this weren’t enough, the characters reference other characters who never made it into the final script, like Cavalier Pecos (who we’re told is in Tibet).

This colorful army of good guys is opposed by an even more colorful gang of alien miscreants. (Keep in mind that the good aliens are Black Lectroids, and they come from Planet Ten and say “hey mon,” while the bad aliens are Red Lectroids who hail from the Eighth Dimension and carry guns that shoot spiders—got it?) A pair of fine character actors in Dan Hedaya and the angular Vincent Schiavelli are bumbling, none-too-bright foot soldiers in the alien army. The Red Lectroids’ chief lieutenant, John Bigboote (pronounced, he is anxious to remind everyone, “Bigboo-tay,” not “Big-booty”) is memorably portrayed by the great Christopher Lloyd (fresh off his stint as Reverend Jim on “Taxi”). But it’s John Lithgow as Dr. Lizardo (who, we figure out after multiple viewings, is possessed by the spirit of a Red Lectroid named John Whorfin) who steals the show. With bad teeth and an even worse Italian accent, Lizardo is prone to rambling lines like “we’re home free… home is where you wear your hat… I feel so break up, I want to go home!” and “laugh-a while you can, monkey boy!” Lithgow rants like Chico Marx with a God complex and slinks around like Ygor in a Frankenstein movie. Lithgow’s performance throws both good taste and sanity out the window, and he gets more into the spirit of the material than anyone else involved in the production.

Peter Weller, by comparison, is totally deadpan, and to me this is the movie’s greatest flaw. His coolness certainly contrasts with Lithgow’s craziness, but for a guy who’s a combination secret agent and rock star, he shows little charisma, just a bland handsomeness. Weller’s restrained, somewhat arrogant persona is perfect for Robocop, or for the emotionally shut-down writer William Lee in Naked Lunch, but he lacks the spark to portray a larger than life character like Buckaroo. We’ll never know how the film would have played out with a more vigorous Banzai—maybe it would have pumped the movie up too much, to the point where it exploded—but I would have loved to see what would have happened had Weller and Jeff Goldblum’s roles been switched. Goldblum is underutilized as a gimmicky sidekick, and it seems the lead role could have benefited from the nervous energy he brings to the screen.

Halfway through the movie, Banzai recaps the plot thus far for the President of the United States. The Prez’ bemused reaction speaks for the audience: “Buckaroo, I don’t know what to say. Lectroids, Planet 10, nuclear extortion, a girl named John…” There’s another quote near the beginning of the movie that’s even more to the point, considering this venue. Buckaroo has just performed neurosurgery and penetrated solid matter by accessing the Eighth Dimension. He caps off the evening by headlining at a nightclub, soloing on electric guitar, trumpet and piano. He stops in the middle of a rollicking blues number, having psychically sensed that someone in the audience isn’t having a good time. In fact, the stick in the mud is a depressed woman who’s “down to her last nickel in this lousy town.” Buckaroo tries to cheer her up by putting a spotlight on her, advising her that “wherever you go, there you are,” and launching into a cover version of that comforting ballad “Since I Don’t Have You.” As Buckaroo sits at the piano and croons, “I don’t have plans or schemes, I don’t have hopes or dreams” to the sobbing suicidal gal with smeared mascara, one of the backup saxophonists turns to another and says, “This is weird.” To which his companion says, “Sure is.” To which I would have responded, “You’re just noticing that now?”

By the way, the reason that they put a watermelon in the vice is because a grape wouldn’t have shown up on camera.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…Richter doesn’t bring out the baroque lunacy of the material—a kind of fermented parody of M*A*S*H, Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark and the TV series ‘The A-Team’—but though the characters don’t develop and the laughs don’t build or come together, the film’s uninflected deadpan tone is somehow likable.”–Pauline Kael, The New Yorker (contemporaneous)

“…like coming into the middle chapters of some hilariously overplotted, spaced-out 1930′s adventure serial, neither the beginning nor the end of which ever comes into sight. At its best, which it frequently is, it’s a lunatic ball…pure, nutty fun.”–Vincent Canby, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

“Some movies become cult classics by being bad in a charming and/or entertaining way, some by being transgressive in ways mainstream society isn’t prepared to deal with, others by just being flat-out weird. I submit, with great fondness, that The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across The 8th Dimension, belongs to the latter category.”–Danny Bowes, Tor.com (DVD)

OFFICIAL SITE: MGMs Official Site for the Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai – Basically, a one-page ad to buy the film with a trailer, synopsis, cast list and some stills. Of course, most movies this old aren’t given even that much attention by major studios.

IMDB LINK: The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension (1984)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

BANZAI INSTITUTE – This repository of news items and trivia is written in a style similar enough to the DVD supplemental material (e.g., referring to the movie as a “docudrama”) that you halfway suspect director Richter and/or writer Rauch is behind the site

Banzai Institute – Facebook – From the makers of the above site, now conveniently on Facebook for more frequent updates

World Watch Online: The Buckaroo Banzai Mailing List – Another Buckaroo Banzai fan site. There’s a wealth of archived material here for fans to plow through, including downloadable newsletters dating back to 1985!

NYFF: Buckaroo Banzai Intro + Q&A – Complete question and answer session with Peter Weller and John Lithgow, hosted by Kevin Smith at the 2011 New York Film Festival (this YouTube video is over an hour long)

Buckaroo Banzai Frequently Asked Questions – Almost all the Buckaroo minutiae that you would ever want can be found in this online FAQ

Yoyodyne.com – A fake website for the fake corporation in Buckaroo Banzai. Why? The Banzai fan base is just that thorough. You may use this site to email John Bigboote, should you wish.

Rotten Tomatoes Show: Top 5 Aborted Franchises – The Rotten Tomatoes Show names Buckaroo Banzai the top aborted franchise of all time, explaining that it was “a tad to weird for America”

Buckaroo Banzai: Across The 8th Dimension, The Adventures of Easter Eggs – information on accessing the hidden features on the Buckaroo Banzai DVD

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

“The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension: The Novel”- Scriptwriter Earl Mac Rauch’s 1984 novelization of the movie, which adds much-needed backstory and supplemental material to flesh out the legend

“Buckaroo Banzai: Return Of The Screw” – A 2007 Rauch-penned graphic novel continuing Buckaroo’s adventures

DVD INFO: MGM’s 2002 Special Edition of Banzai (buy) did this cult classic right and thrilled even the movie’s demanding fan base. The commentary track features Richter and Rauch, with the director pretending the film is a biopic of a real life figure and Rauch pretending to be one of the Hong Kong Cavaliers. An optional subtitle track serves up additional tidbits of information about the Banzai universe. Many deleted scenes are included, most notably one where Jamie Lee Curtis plays Buckaroo’s mom in a flashback. There’s a 22-minute featurette called “Buckaroo Banzai Declassified” with Richter which, like the commentary track, stays in character, pretending Buckaroo is real. Character profiles provide even more background information on the Banzai mythology, and photo galleries, promotional materials and the original trailer round out a treasury of special features.

Banzai is also the weirdest offering on MGM’s 3 disc “Astronomy 101″ collection (buy), which also contains the mildly weird Killer Klowns from Outer Space and Mel Brooks’ not-so-weird (but inexplicably popular) Star Wars spoof Spaceballs.

Buckaroo Banzai is not yet available on Blu-ray, though it seems like a likely candidate for an upgrade. It is available on Video-on-Demand, for rental only (rent on demand).

(This movie was nominated for review by multiple readers.  Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

“It is tempting, and not unjustified, to speculate that one reason for Marker’s growing visibility and popularity is that, as a culture, we have now finally caught up with works that once seemed like dispatches from another planet…”–Catherine Lupton, “Chris Marker: Memory’s Apostle” (2007 Criterion Collection essay)

DIRECTED BY: Chris Marker

FEATURING: Alexandra Stewart (narrator, English language version)

PLOT: Essentially plotless, Sans Soleil is structured as a series of letters sent from around the world by a fictional director addressed to the anonymous female narrator. The footage shown ranges from the banal to the incredible, and each image sparks a meditation from the letter writer. Among other sights, we view Japanese praying at a shrine to dead cats, the imaginary nightmares of sleeping subway riders, and the bloody slaughter of a giraffe by poachers.

BACKGROUND:

• Sandor Krasna, the cameraman whose letters the unnamed narrator is supposedly reading, is fictional, an alter-ego of reclusive director Chris Maker. The name “Chris Marker” is itself a pseudonym for Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve.
• Marker has said he was born in Mongolia, a claim some film historians dispute. He was a philosophy student before joining the French resistance during the Nazi occupation. After the war he became a journalist, then a documentary filmmaker.
• Sans Soleil was Marker’s first personal film after years spent making a series of Marxist political documentaries.
• The title comes from a song cycle by Modest Mussorgsky; some of the melodies are recreated in nearly unrecognizable electronic versions arranged by Isao Tomita.
• In one section of the film “Sandor Krasna” has traveled to San Francisco to visit locations from Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Remembering the scene where Madeline points to the tree stump, the narrator says “he remembered another film in which this passage was quoted…” The other film, of course, is Marker’s own La Jetée.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: For many, Sans Soleil‘s unforgettable scene is the slice in time when a striking-looking young woman in Cape Verde, who knows the camera is pointed at her but demurely refuses to acknowledge it, briefly makes eye contact; Marker highlights the moment, remarking about “the real glance, straightforward, that lasted a twenty-fourth of a second, the length of a film frame.” (It’s an inversion of a famous bit from Marker’s La Jetée, where every shot is technically the length of a film frame except for a single glance at the camera). As unexpectedly powerful as this brief moment of eye contact is, it’s unfortunately not so weird. So, for our indelible image we instead turn to the video transformation of the ceramic cat idol into an abstract orange and blue blob, a moment where Marker brings two of the film’s diverse interests into a temporary harmony, illustrating how he weaves his seemingly random obsessions into a coherent tapestry.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Sans Soleil begins with an image of three Icelandic girls and

Clip from Sans Soleil

voiceover narration admitting that the photographer can find no other image to link it to, followed by a brief shot of American warplanes on an aircraft carrier, followed by scenes Japanese commuters napping on a ferry. This ADD documentary changes topics every minute or two, with each brief sequence accompanied by a spoken observation that could be read as profound, poetic, pretentious, or even all three at once. Sans Soleil visits cat shrines, the slaughter of a giraffe, and a monkey porn museum in its wanderings. If that’s not weird enough for you, the film takes time out of its busy schedule to recreate the imaginary nightmares of passengers dozing on a Tokyo subway. All of the scenes are accompanied by freaky synthetic electronic sounds percolating up through a video mix that’s often altered with then-avant-garde video transformation techniques. With their feet nailed to reality, documentaries have to strain hard to escape the bonds of gravity and sail to the heights of weirdness, but Sans Soleil is one experiment in nonfiction that manages to soar effortlessly.

COMMENTS: Essentially, Sans Soleil is an arthouse version of Mondo Cane. (For the record, I don’t pretend to be the first person to notice the congruity between these two films—though I did come to the judgment independently). For those not in the know, 1963′s Italian documentary Mondo Cane (“Dog’s World”), made by the filmmaking team of Prosperi and Jacopetti, was a ramshackle, random tour chronicling bizarre behavior around the world that included scenes of insect eating, a modern artist who used paint-splattered nude women as human brushes, and Polynesian cargo cults. Accurate but exploitative, Cane was a huge hit on the drive-in/ grindhouse circuit and inspired a slew of imitators senselessly using “Mondo” in their name in an attempt to cash in on Cane‘s cachet: Mondo Hollywood, Mondo Topless, Mondo Bizarro. This bizarre mini-genre flourished in the 1960s but reached a shameful “peak” with 1978′s smash video hit Faces of Death, a largely faked documentary purporting to show people actually dying on camera that spawned five sequels.

The superficial similarities between Marker’s highly intellectual, meditative film and Prosperi and Jacopetti’s exploitative Italian trash pictures are at times remarkable. Soleil shows members of the drunken Japanese underclass weaving through the streets of Tokyo directing traffic, just as Cane‘s camera focuses on drunken Germans stumbling through the streets of Hamburg during Octoberfest. Cane observes mourners at a pet cemetery, Soleil visits a Shinto shrine dedicated to dead cats. Africa Addio, Prosperi and Jacopetti’s even more disturbing followup to Cane, lingers over loathsome scenes of hunters killing zebras and elephants for sport. Without comment, Soleil presents us with gruesome footage of a giraffe shot through the neck, stumbling around squirting geysers of blood, until it finally collapses and a hunter mercifully fires a bullet into its head. The main differences between Marker and the Italians are that Marker does not focus solely on the bizarre, but provides plenty of scenes of pure beauty and ordinary humans quietly being themselves. He is erudite, citing T.S. Eliot, Jean Jacques Rousseau and Lévi-Strauss. He is witty and poetic, musing that “history only tastes bitter to those who expected it to be sugar coated”; suggesting of memories that “a moment stopped would burn like a frame of film blocked before the furnace of the projector”; and quipping about an exhibit of Vatican treasures in Tokyo that “I imagine [the Japanese] bringing out within two years time a more efficient and less expensive version of Catholicism.” And where Prosperi and Jacopetti are merely cynical, parading their “dog’s world” before us and greedily charging admission to the freakshow, Marker is thoughtful and humanistic, finding meaning, context and connection in every image he presents, however shocking it may appear on the surface.

Despite Marker’s contention that “I’ve been round the world several times and now only banality still interests me,” Sans Soleil is packed with enough exceptionally odd imagery to satisfy the most discriminating devotee of the weird. There are the ceremonial rows of cloned ceramic cats with their paws raised in the black power salute. An African street parade of people dressed as horned beasts, with one passerby holding hands with a pet chimpanzee dressed in human overalls. A stunning montage of classic Japanese horror movies (introduced by an “incommunicable sentence” from Apocalypse Now‘s Colonel Kurtz–”you must make a friend of horror.”) A trip to a combination museum/temple/sex shop with phallic statues and sacred monkey porn. A robotic Asian version of JFK who sells the latest male fashions while a sickly-sweet forties-style vocal groups sings “Ask not what your country can do [ask not!]” on the soundtrack. Footage of student protests and kamikaze missions are fed through a “video synthesizer,” turning them into purple and orange abstract heat map images. And the weird pièce de résistance: Marker’s imaginary creation of the “ultimate film” by stringing together the dreams of subway commuters, which are once again illustrated by scenes from Japanese horror movies, including a wondrous clip where a demon with a snake’s body slowly peeks her starlet head around a translucent standing screen.

Certainly, one of the weirder aspects of Sans Soleil is its short attention span—the way it jumps around in space (moving from Iceland to Japan to Africa to San Francisco), time (contrasting tales of a reluctant World War II kamikaze pilot and a coup in Guinea Bissau with the latest news from Tokyo about the disfigured woman standing on street corners insisting people call her beautiful) and topic (covering everything from memory to colonialism to the power of images to Marker’s utter fascination with Japanese culture and the way ancient superstition coexists beside modern technology). The movie floats along on its own stream of free-associations. Someone with more time on their hands—say, a graduate film student—could doubtlessly fashion a consistent didactic argument out of Marker’s narration. But the film’s peripatetic travels from topic to topic are a large, if not the major, part of its charm. Although the movie is carefully composed—bland and boring ideas don’t make it in—it’s also a mirror of the way the mind works in that one topic, one memory, suggests another, and the film organically drifts towards whatever catches its eye. It’s surrealist in its fascination with juxtapositions and the mysterious meanings conjured by the subconscious at play. Connections pop up by synchronicity: the name of the cat whose lost spirit the bereaved couple is praying for is “Tora,” one third of the Japanese code name for the attack on Pearl Harbor. In his wanderings Marker mentions Sei Shōnagon, author of “The Pillow Book,” and her wonderfully miscellaneous lists, citing especially her list of “things that make the heart quicken.” Perhaps Sans Soleil is best considered as the final edit of things that quickened Marker’s heart as he assembled the film from footage he had gathered in his world travels.

Sans Soleil may be a controversial choice for a list of weird movies. Perhaps this odd, quiet, personal, and obtuse essay film sits uncomfortably alongside bombastic neosurrealist epics like Eraserhead and The Holy Mountain. This is a film that is known to, made for, and enjoyed almost solely by film geeks–not all of whom would appreciate the film being awarded the laurel of “weird.” Yet, Sans Soliel is a singular curiosity; although it’s inspired a few obscure imitators, you’ve really never seen anything quite like it. That alone makes it worthy of the honor of being called weird. It’s a movie you put on and watch in a trance. Even if Marker’s philosophical musings go over your head or don’t always appear to make sense, the same is true of a lot of great poetry. The language lulls and sings nevertheless. It is the most lyrical film imaginable. It’s worth watching multiple times; the ability to slip back into its pleasant, half-remembered dream is a gift to treasure. Sans Soleil rewards inattention: the spell it casts encourages your mind to drift, like a sleeper on a subway car, like the film itself.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…Marker’s impossible, beautiful film is as ultimately unknowable as another person’s heart. But to quote the nonexistent Sandor Krasna, ‘Not understanding obviously adds to the pleasure.’”–Sam Adams, Philadelphia City Paper (re-release)

“San Soleil also focuses on the weird and the titillating (taxidermied animals in sex poses, an animatronic JFK in a shopping mall) but while the Mondo films describe these customs with sensationalism and innuendo, Marker explains what he sees with the curiosity and empathy of an anthropologist.”–David Moats, The Quietus (DVD)

“[Marker] delivers an endless stream of grand, airily magisterial pronouncements on the Japanese character. The triteness of these pronouncements (which boil down to ‘boy, are these people weird!!’) is matched by the triteness of Marker’s juxtapositions: after a close-up of Pac-Man expiring on a video screen, we cut to a solemn funeral. Much of what ‘Marker’ says sounds good, but on further reflection makes little sense at all – as when we’re told that the Japanese are ‘perishable and immortal.’”–Neil Young, Neil Young’s Film Lounge (re-release)

OFFICIAL SITE: Sans Soleil (1983) – The Criterion Collection – The Criterion Collection’s Sans Soleil page contains a clip from the movie, a photo gallery, and essays by Jonathan Rosenbaum and Catherine Lupton

IMDB LINK: Sans Soleil (1983)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Voyage into the Unknown – Profile of Marker by The Guardian‘s David Thomson written to coincide with a re-release of Sans Soleil

DVD INFO: After years of inferior transfers, in 2007 the Criterion Collection finally put out Sans Soleil in a definitive widescreen version (buy), and the “bonus” feature—Marker’s fairly weird 30 minute short sci-fi experiment La Jetée—is of more interest to many than the “main’ feature. The disc offers no commentary tracks, but has two incredibly insightful and impassioned interviews with director and Marker contemporary Jean-Pierre Gorin. Also included is the 9-minute mini-documentary “Chris on Chris,” a profile of Marker, and two excerpts from the French cinema program “Court-circuit”: one, a curious interpretation of La Jetée that suggests the film is Marker’s attempt to “travel into” Hitchcock’s Vertigo, and the other an analysis of the David Bowie video “Jump She Said” (directed by Mark Romanek), which is based on the imagery of La Jetée. There are options to watch each film either in English or in French with subtitles (though it’s worth pointing out that, unlike other foreign films, the English language narration in these two movies was overseen and approved by the director; these are not actors being dubbed). The set also includes a booklet with essays, notes and a rare interview with Marker.

In 2012 Criterion upgraded this set to Blu-ray (buy).

“…to eliminate the borderline between dream and imagination; to invent everything and then to objectify the fantasy; to get some distance from it in order to explore it as something all of a piece and unknowable.”–Federico Fellini on his motives for adapting Petronius’ Satyricon

DIRECTED BY: Federico Fellini

FEATURING: Martin Potter, Max Born, Hiram Keller, Mario Romagnoli

PLOT: Two students, Encolpio and Ascilto, argue over their dual ownership of the handsome slave boy Giton, whom Encolpio loves and Ascilto has sold. Encolpio seeks Giton through a series of adventures that take him across the ancient Roman world, encountering a pompous actor, a wealthy merchant who holds nightly orgies and fancies himself a poet, unscrupulous slavers, and other long dead satirical targets. Eventually Encolpio becomes involved in a plot to kidnap an albino hermaphrodite demigod, is cursed with impotence, and seeks the services of a witch.

BACKGROUND:

• Petronius wrote the rambling, erotic, and highly literary “Satyricon” during the reign of Emperor Nero, 1st Century A.D. It is sometimes considered the world’s oldest surviving novel.
• The original Roman satire survives only in fragments, which explains the often incoherent nature of the story in Fellini’s movie. Fellini invented a few small details (and one major one, in the hermaphrodite character who replaces the penis-god Priapus’ role in the story) to bridge gaps or help the story flow in the direction he wanted to. The director refers to the fragmentary nature of the source narrative by allowing the story to jump forward in time, and even ends a scene in mid-sentence (as Petronius’ surviving work ends in the middle of a sentence).
• Fellini’s name appears in the title not out of vanity, but to distinguish the movie from a competing adaptation directed by Gian Luigi Polidoro which was also released in 1969. Polidoro registered the title Satyricon first. United Artists purchased the international distribution rights to both films and sat on Polidoro’s movie while they promoted Fellini’s more marketable name.
• Fellini used international actors for the main parts (joking that he did so because there were no Italian homosexuals). The director saw that dubbing into Italian was deliberately made slightly out of sync with the actors’ lip movements to create an additional feeling of strangeness.
• Boris Karloff was offered the small but important role of Trimalchio, but was too ill to accept it (Karloff died in February of 1969).

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Picking a single image to represent Satyricon is like trying to single out one scene that captures the essence of a sprawling carnival. The film is a nonstop parade of extreme imagery, grotesque tableaux and freakish costuming.  No one scene sticks out as more bizarre than another, and nothing is supposed to; everything inside  the borders of the known world of Satyricon is as weird as everything else, from the whorehouse at the center of the empire to the blank spot at the edge of the map where monsters be. Forced to select something, we went with the image appearing five minutes into the film of the actor Vernaccio, dressed in a porcine pink helmet with a fin on top, carefully placing a tiny pill-like object on his outstretched tongue. It’s Fellini’s signal to the Summer of Love crowd that the movie is dosing itself right now—strap yourselves in for the trip to come.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Fellini seizes upon the fragmentary nature of his classical source

John Landis on the trailer for Fellini Satyricon

material as an excuse to fly off on flights of phantasmagorical fancy; he sets his camera to observe these imaginary denizens of gluttonous old Rome as if they were alien lifeforms. Satyricon is the work of a master filmmaker at his most self-indulgent—but when tremendous talent indulges itself, the results are typically spectacular.

COMMENTS: The surviving text of the Satyricon begins with randy bisexual student Encolpio in the middle of an argument about literature and education, jumps from one incomplete adventure to another, and ends in the middle of another scene as a Roman is justifying why his will requires his heirs to eat his corpse in order to collect their inheritances.  The pseudo-surreal structure of the half-lost novel, along with its fantastic pagan eroticism, gave Fellini an excuse to indulge his weirdest impulses for a psychedelic age—all the while maintaining some deniability that that’s what he was actually doing. Satyricon may look like a sexually frank, big budget Technicolor drug movie, but the director could position himself as merely adapting a treasured piece of our shared cultural heritage in the only way that would honor the material. If that honor involved orgies of androgynous nude Romans engaging in kinky bisexual sex, hands amputated onstage for the entertainment of jaded spectators, and wild disorienting leaps in narrative logic, then that is the price that must be paid for Art.

With the story so deeply buried that we can’t possibly reconstruct it, Satytricon becomes an almost entirely visual film; it’s like studying an ancient fresco on a wall with large chunks missing. The decadent, exotic, and very weird look of this mythological Rome is so crucial to the experience of the film that it wouldn’t have been totally out of line to give costume designer Danilo Donati a co-directing credit, along with the makeup department and the set designers. Since the movie contains little to dig into in the way of overriding themes—the satire on greed, lust and general hedonism is fairly obvious—-and even less to discuss in the way of story, it’s best to survey and to savor the film bit by bit, scene by scene, as if looking at a collection of scattered relics in a museum.

The “brothel stroll” sequence is a good encapsulation of what’s going on in this movie; it’s a tour through a gallery of grotesques, alien creatures hiding behind strange smiles and stranger kinks. With the help of a Senator, Encolpio has just “rescued” his slave lover Giton from life as a drag queen working for an arrogant actor. Suddenly, in one of the movie’s many unannounced flash-forwards, the pair are holding hands, walking down a dark street in a nameless city (which appears to be a giant catacomb). They look down an alley and see a chariot dragging a giant stone head. They see an old woman they recognize, and ask her, “do you know where we live?” She tells them “you live here;” just then the Senator from the previous scene shows up with a small coterie of followers, one of who points at them and announces “there they are!” The old woman invites them to visit the “little sisters” and waggles her ancient tongue at them seductively; they hustle through the oversized doors, looking behind them at their pursuers with concern. Inside, they walk past a man telling fortunes with sheep livers and take a long stroll past a series of stone alcoves inside which (frequently obese) men and women lounge in lingerie. One contains a couple of women side by side, waggling their nude rears at the camera in unison; inside another room a swarm of small children jump on a grandfatherly man. A woman in a gold bikini wears a giant cubic headdress; outside her cubicle, her pimp leans against the wall in a see-through lavender nightie. The pair tramp along exhibiting little concern and only passing interest in the carnival of degenerate humanity, while the soundtrack mixes science-fiction theremin noises with flutes and drums and nonsense chants delivered in a mixture of Latin, Italian and gibberish by the people they pass. Each person they pass sports unique makeup, an eccentric costume and/or elaborately sculpted hair, usually all three. Suddenly they pass from the red light district into a stable district where livestock roam the streets; down one cubicle in this quarter a nude woman sleeps next to a grazing goat. They eventually make it to a secluded room, where they prepare for a night of lovemaking.

What makes this sequence a perfect microcosm of Satyricon is that there’s little purpose or sense to this entire journey, other than to let us soak in the sights of the bizarre world Fellini has painstakingly created for us. We are sightseeing in a strange land; people watching in a world entirely populated by decadent freaks. The “brothel stroll” sequence comes early in the movie, so that the audience knows what it’s getting into; however, the film never really becomes this weird again. The outlandish costumes and amoral pagan antics persist throughout the film, but things do calm down and become a more grounded. The Trimalchio segment was the keenest moment of satire in Petronius’ original novel (his mocking of the rich and perverse boor who believes himself a poet may have been a disguised attack on the emperor Nero). Fellini keeps the original language and satire of the famous scene intact in his adaptation, but makes Trimalchio’s dinner a centerpiece of a different sort. Knowing we can’t taste the roasted hog stuffed with whole sausages and hens the merchant proudly serves his guests, Fellini turns the scene into an exotic feast for the eyes and ears instead.  The party starts outside, under a painted sky of orange, as a field of dozens of naked people bounce up and down in a giant bath. The action moves indoors for the banquet, where women with massive headdresses (to cover their massive hairdos) and men with faces painted silver and blue (like rabid fans of ancient Rome’s most effete sports teams) lounge in robes of red, green and purple and chat as slaves serve them roast doves and wine. There are more drums, theremins and chanting, and at one point a woman’s voice drones over what sounds like an ancient loudspeaker. Drunken painted matrons in see-through gowns dance provocatively. Trimalchio recites (plaigirized) poetry, and orders a real poet tossed into the giant oven along with the roasting chickens. Guests verbally assault each other for sport. Triamlchio’s wife sneaks lesbian pecks with her companion when hubby is not looking, but complains when he convinces a pretty slave boy to play horsey with him. She gets a heap of abuse and a face full of tomato pulp for her concern. The hedonistic bash wears on until we feel tipsy and bloated from the rich visuals we’ve drank. The soiree ends at dawn under another painted sky, with Trimalchio rehearsing his own funeral so that he can enjoy hearing his eulogy. This segment is very true to the original story, but Fellini adds a sumptuous visual decadence that Petronius could not supply in prose.

We now examine a third segment, a late arriving portion of Fellini’s own invention that, unlike many of the other sequences, creates a plot arc that carries through from one episode to another. What’s remarkable about this segment is that it feels completely organic; at least, as organic any adventure in a work this fractured can be. Without being told about it, you would assume that the tale of the hermaphrodite demigod appeared in the original novel; the satirical themes of selfishness, greed, and the triumph of the profane seem to come straight from Petronius. By this point in the story, Encolpio has been reunited with his old friend and romantic nemesis Ascilto. Traveling through the desert in a distant province after escaping from slavers, they hear tales of a man-woman demigod(dess) who cures the sick from miles around. They enter his/her temple and find another menagerie of Felliniesque weirdos waiting on healing: spastics, the legless, morbidly obese men with laughing sickness, and a trio of sheep. The hermaphrodite god is owned by an old man who charges admission to those seeking cures; the divinity itself an albino with breasts and is so sickly it can’t stand up without help from his owner. With the help of a rogue they meet inside the temple, Encolpio and Ascilto decide to kidnap the god and sell his services themselves; they’re willing to murder to get their hands on him. But the deity proves too fragile to survive the trip through the desert, and dies in a spectacular location, a natural rocky bowl with a dry cracked floor and walls of dusty grey stone. Blaming his young companions for the god’s death, their partner in crime assaults the two younger men with his sword; they barely escape.

In the next scene Encolpio, his companion having again disappeared, is being thrown down a hill by uniformed tribesmen. It’s another elision of the type we’ve become accustomed to; but, we’re still in Fellini’s original material. In a perverse tribute to Petronius, he’s deliberately lost part of his own script, and he now jumps to a scene of his own creation that will eventually pit the hapless youth against a minotaur, and then against the even greater horror of erectile dysfunction. Fellini is no longer adapting the novel faithfully; now, he’s just playing with us. But the additions are as seamless as can be in a story that’s gets a large part of its character from its visible seams, and so we don’t feel tricked or cheated. As a fantasist, Fellini proves himself Petronius’ equal; the uninformed spectator can’t tell where the ancient Roman ends and the modern Italian begins.

Despite it’s high culture sheen, this is a different, more visceral and shameless style of moviemaking than we typically associate with this highly intellectual arthouse director. Its nudity, violence, and frank exploitation of taboos like homosexuality, along with its trippy countercultural appeal, made Satyricon a huge popular hit. There’s none of Fellini’s usual philosophizing, no deep meanings beyond the implicit “look at these grotesque caricatures from a world long past… how like us they seem!” This is Fellini going fully, fearlessly weird. The results are audacious and a stunning success, even if the film is ultimately a curiosity in this director’s most curious canon. Fellini Satyricon is as shallow and degrading—and as enticing and unmissable—as an orgy staged by a modern Trimalchio.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Fellini draws upon his master-entertainer’s feelings for the daydreams of his audience, and many people find this film eerie, spellbinding, and even profound. Essentially, though, it’s just a hip version of Cecil B. DeMille’s The Sign of the Cross… We seem to be at a stoned circus, where the performers go on and on whether we care or not…”–Pauline Kael, The New Yorker (contemporaneous)

“It has the quality of a drug-induced hallucination, being without past or future, existing only in a present that, at best, can be survived… a surreal epic that, I confidently believe, will outlive all its interpretations.”–Vincent Canby, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

“…as hypnotically fascinating as a train wreck in a surrealistic brothel.”–Louis B. Parks, The Houston Chronicle (2001 revival)

IMDB LINK: Fellini Satyricon (1969)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Fellini Satyricon – Roger Ebert’s measured 2001 entry on the film for his “Great Movies” series (the article also contains a link to his original more ecstatic review)

Lawrence Russell: Fellini Satyricon – Short annotated analysis by Russell discussing the film from a postmodernist perspective

The Satyricon of Petronius – a 1930 public domain translation of the original Roman satire by Alfred R. Allinson

DVD INFO: The good news is that MGM has kept Fellini Satyricon in circulation (buy) with a fine print that brings the vibrant colors across with just a touch of weathered grain to add dignity and character. The bad news is that because this DVD is released by a major studio, Satyricon doesn’t receive the gala treatment that a boutique label like Criterion would provide. The theatrical trailer and an option to watch the film dubbed rather than subtitled are the only special features. Nor is MGM likely to make placing this prestige picture on Blu-ray a priority. A pity.

(This movie was nominated for review by “zosia.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth

DIRECTED BY: Werner Herzog

FEATURING: Helmut Döring, Paul Glauer

PLOT: As the film begins we infer that a group of people in some sort of institution, possibly a mental asylum, have revolted, and an “instructor” has barricaded himself in a manor house while holding one of them prisoner. As the instructor tries to reason with the rebels and waits for the arrival of the police, the insurgents vandalize the property in increasingly bizarre ways: lighting flower pots on fire, fixing a stolen car so that it circles endlessly around a track and throwing crockery at it, and crucifying a monkey. All parts are played by dwarfs, although the buildings and props are scaled normally.

BACKGROUND:

• Herzog financed Even Dwarfs Started Small, his second feature, with funds he received when he won the German National Film Award for his first feature film, Signs of Life. Dwarfs was then banned by the German censors on its release.
• The film was shot on Lanzarote, a volcanic island in the Canary Islands.
• Herzog partially attributes the dark influences of the film to the fact that before making it he had been imprisoned in a third world prison while shooting footage for another movie in Cameroon in the paranoid weeks after a coup attempt. While incarcerated he contracted a blood parasite and ran a high fever.
• The production was plagued with problems: one of the dwarfs was struck by the driverless car (he was unscathed), then the same actor caught on fire (he had minor injuries). With the morale among the non-professional troupe low, Herzog promised the actors that if they completed the film, he would jump into a cactus patch and allow them to film it. The actors stuck with it and Herzog fulfilled his end of the bargain.
• A scene of piglets nursing at what appears to be the corpse of their mother is disturbing and proved highly controversial. The sow’s eyes are shut and it lies almost perfectly still, but its legs clearly jerk during the feeding—though perhaps this is just a post-mortem reflex.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Hombre, the tiniest dwarf with the most demonic laugh, nearly chuckling himself to death as he watches a camel struggling to rise to its feet. Watch the scene and share an inexplicable nightmare with millions of other human beings.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Even the title of Even Dwarfs Started Small starts weird. What

Japanese trailer for Even Dwarfs Started Small

follows is a grotesque parade of cannibalistic chickens, insects dressed as a bride and groom, a crucified monkey, a defecating camel, and dwarfs running amok destroying everything in sight. Presented in bleak black and white in a heartlessly cold documentary style, it’s the gloomiest depiction of the triumph of the irrational ever filmed.

COMMENTS: A provocateur knows he is doing something right when he gets criticized from opposite sides of the political spectrum. Shot in the late 1960s, when cultural revolution was as hip as body painting and paisley bedecked bell bottoms, Herzog’s depiction of an unmotivated rebellion of dwarfs at an unspecified institution seemed like it must have been intended a commentary on the times. The remnants of German Fascism were outraged by Herzog’s degenerate vision of man and society, a vision that was antithetical to the utopian purity of National Socialism. They must have seen the film as a call for decadents and freaks to revolt; Herzog reported that he received anonymous phone calls from Aryans bragging about their aim. The Left, on the other hand, accused Herzog of mocking the worldwide countercultural revolution, depicting it as futile, destructive and childish. (They were right, it turns out, although that wasn’t the director’s main purpose).

Those attempting to give Dwarfs a political interpretation—seeing at the institutional rebellion as a metaphor for what was going on in the larger society—were looking through the wrong end of Herzog’s telescope. They should have taken a cue from the diminished perspective of dwarfs and looked down rather than up, inward instead of outward, seeing the absurd insurgency as a metaphor for the human psyche rather than human society. Although Herzog was new to the scene at the time, we now understand that he is personal rather than a political filmmaker; an ecstatic, not a didactic, artist. Dwarfs is a nightmare, and nightmares originate in the self, not in society. The institution is the Self, and the reason we have trouble picking a side in this conflict between the authoritarian, rational instructor and the rampaging rebel inmates is because they both represent parts of ourselves. We lust after the unfettered libidinal freedom of the rebels, yet we fear the dangerous and destructive anarchy they represent; we chafe under the rule of our own internal instructor, while at the same time we hope he will somehow find the strength put down the uprising and restore order to the mad landscape.

We don’t know who is “right” and who is “wrong” in the power struggle that unfolds in Dwarfs. We know that the instructor, and presumably his missing staff, ruled over the residents of the nameless institution prior to the uprising; but we have no idea whether the inmates were mistreated, or merely revolted out of boredom or spite. From the irrational behavior of the freed dwarfs it seems likely that the institution is an insane asylum, although the nomenclature (the instructor refers to his absent superior as “the principal”) suggests a school. The instructor has managed to capture Pepe, one of the rebels, and tied him to a chair. He restrains him, but he doesn’t mistreat him. He warns the mob that unspecified harm will come to Pepe if the rebels don’t calm down, but none of the other dwarfs consider it a credible threat: they see the instructor as a coward with no guts. In fact, he’s restrained by his civilized nature and adherence to rules; he’s too ethical to hurt Pepe. He recites the institution’s motto–”Cleanliness and Order”—and pleads with the mob to be “sensible” or “reasonable.” He is ridiculously, stupidly ineffectual at quelling the rebellion, calling the police on a dead phone and asking the dial tone for help. Impotent and despondent, he sits at his desk fiddling his hands and asks Pepe what he would do if their situations were reversed. Pepe laughs at him. The instructor, the voice of reason, has lost all control, and outside of the citadel he’s imprisoned in, glorious chaos reigns.

If the instructor is too weak to admire, the rambunctious little people are too cruel and unpredictable to love. Their freedom is intoxicating, but they take things too far for any but the most dedicated nihilist. Food fights and breaking dishes are fun, and the truck they steal and rig so that it travels in an endless circle looks like a blast. But they are mean even to their own kind. The gang torments the two blind dwarfs, stealing food from them and laughing as they swing their canes wildly. They watch cockfights for entertainment, and they tie a monkey to a cross and parade him around. Like young teenagers playing sex games, they force the smallest two of them to “marry,” laughing and locking them in a room together hoping they will mate, even as the male, Hombre, struggles to escape and howls that he doesn’t want to. The actors are all obvious amateurs, and their unstudied performances lend another layer of oddness to the proceedings. Disconcertingly, the dwarfs all laugh and giggle uncontrollably most of the time, in those high-pitched voices, whether the situation calls for it or not. Whereas the child anarchists in Jean Vigo’s Zéro de conduite (which, perhaps not coincidentally, also features an ineffectual dwarf in a position of authority) are unquestionably the heroes, Herzog casts a far more cynical and ambivalent eye on revolutionaries. These have no cause and no purpose. The glorious achievement of their revolution is a symbol of futility: a truck traveling in endless circles. Even as their freedom from all conventions fulfills a secret fantasy of the viewer, they are horrifying to watch.

Why dwarfs? The simple answer is the film wouldn’t be half as weird if it did not take place in a world of little people, a world where the exception (dwarfism) is the rule. Dwarfs unavoidably provoke an uncomfortable reaction in people of normal dimensions; they look “wrong,” even while we know intellectually that they are every bit as human as any of us. Against our will, the appearance of a dwarf (or any “freak”) creates a tension in us. We feel guilty about our own instinctual aversive reaction to them. We’re curious, but we don’t want to be caught staring. Yet, Herzog’s movie forces us to stare. A world in which everyone is a dwarf is a world we are unequipped to deal with; the baseline has been wiped out, and there is no longer any normal. The world of Dwarfs is inescapably real, but it frustrates our every expectation. Doorknobs and beds are too high for the inhabitants to use them. Nature itself—represented by the animal kingdom—is out of whack, perverted. The chickens are cannibals. Piglets continue to vainly suck at the teats of their mother after she’s dead (of all the twisted gloomy images in Dwarfs, this is the saddest and most shocking). Here is a disconcerting, frightening universe that shows no regard for our psychic comfort or need for order.

The triumph of irrationality seems so complete at the end of the film that it’s easy to forget that, per the official narrative, the dwarf rebellion was put down. The first scenes show us that Hombre and the others have been re-captured, and the status quo—whatever that was—has been restored. This is hardly reassuring, because our experience as viewers has been quite different: we watch the dwarfs behavior become crazier and more unhinged until finally all reason has been shattered. The insurgents finally force the instructor to come out by throwing live chickens through the windows and by threatening to hang one of their own. The instructor cracks under the pressure; he starts taking his furniture from his office and stacking it on the roof. Suddenly, from nowhere and without explanation, a dromedary appears in the courtyard, kneeling as if to pray. The instructor runs out of his refuge and all is lost; once outside his sanctuary, he’s as insane as the rest. He runs past the dwarfs, past the kneeling camel, and to a dead tree in a field, which he yells at, then enters into a pointing contest with.

Meanwhile, Hombre is chuckling uncontrollably as the beast in the courtyard struggles to stand up. It raises one foreleg, then puts it down, and Hombre laughs and laughs, until he’s no longer laughing out of mirth. The laughter has trapped him and he can’t escape it; he’s laughing himself to death. The camel voids its bowels in distress. Hombre keeps on laughing, until he starts coughing; he wipes his mouth and starts laughing again. Minutes pass. Herzog keeps the camera on the laughing dwarf; if there was ever a joke here, for either Hombre or for the viewer, it ceased to be funny long ago. There is no better way to describe this nightmarish finale than with Herzog’s own words from the DVD commentary track, speaking about Hombre’s long last laugh: “This was frightening for me. He seems to be laughing but it’s getting really out of hand… Sometimes there is no mercy in filmmaking. I mean, it didn’t really do him harm but that was a moment when I thought, ‘Oh my God, I must stop this. I should cut. I should end it.’ And here, the moment comes very, very soon where I couldn’t take it any longer. And I still keep watching, and in a moment I thought, ‘now, I can’t go any further.’ Just stop the camera, end the film, and that’s that. And the pain, hopefully, is over.” Then, mercifully, the screen fades to black.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…[the] images, because of their essential meaninglessness, become their own reason for being. ‘Even Dwarfs Started Small’ eventually is indistinguishable from its Germanic, side-show spectacle, as if it were a movie that had been conceived by the same kind of perverse, uninvolved intelligence that had created the world of the film.”–Vincent Canby, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

“…one of the most bizarre and hilariously disturbing freakshows ever executed by a major director…”–Wade Major, Boxoffice Magazine

“The very definition of a weird movie right to its core… easily lives up to the confusing, peculiar promise of its title.”–Mondo Digital (DVD)

IMDB LINK: Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Herzog jumps cactus.mov – YouTube clip of Herzog discussing Dwarfs and the cactus incident, from the documentary Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe

Even Dwarfs Stated Small: Werner Herzog and the Aesthetics of the Grotesque – Against Herzog’s direct wishes, B. R. Sebok links Dwarfs to the Rabelaisian grotesque tradition for the journal Kinema

Examining the Role of Disability in Herzog’s Even Dwarves Started Small – Politically correct analysis of the depiction of dwarfs in the film, by David Church in the Fall 2005 edition of Disability Studies Quarterly

even dwarfs started small | Tumblr – Stills, YouTube clips and quotes tagged with “Even Dwarfs Started Small” on Tumblr

DVD INFO: The 1999 Anchor Bay DVD (buy) is presented in a full-frame 1.33:1 aspect ratio (close enough to the film’s actual 1.37:1 proportions). It contains liner notes written by Crispin Glover (!) (who was considering making a Dwarfs-inspired film at the time, most likely the movie that became What Is It?). The disc itself features a short but informative Werner Herzog bio and a commentary track consisting of an impressive three-way chat between Herzog, Glover and Norm Hill.

The film is also available as part of Anchor Bay’s 6-disc “Werner Herzog Collection” (buy), along with The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, Heart of Glass, Little Dieter Needs to Fly, and Stroszek. The same commentary track is included on this set.

(This movie was nominated for review by “Gideon.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

DIRECTED BY: Rolf de Heer

FEATURING: Nicholas Hope, Carmel Johnson, Claire Benito, Ralph Cotterill

PLOT: With only a rudimentary vocabulary but a gift for mimicry, middle-aged Bubby has been raised by his mentally ill, abusive mother with no knowledge of the outside world inside what is essentially a fallout shelter. One day an interloper enters their underground hovel, shattering the only reality Bubby has ever known. Eventually he finds himself released into a modern Australian society he can hardly comprehend, but must learn to fit into somehow.

BACKGROUND:

•  Partially as an experiment and partially for practical reasons, de Heer chose to shoot the film with thirty-two different cinematographers, essentially one for every location.
• Bad Boy Bubby uses binaural sound: the film’s soundtrack was recorded and mixed from two microphones Nicholas Hope wore behind his ears, so that the audience would experience the sonic world exactly as it would be heard from Bubby’s perspective. On home video the effect is largely lost, with the end result being only that a few of the conversations in the film sound frustratingly muffled.  The director suggests that the theatrical experience can be reproduced by listening to the movie while channeling the sound through a pair of stereo headphones.
• Originally, the underground scenes were to have the sides matted to create a narrow, claustrophobic aspect ratio, and the film was to expand into widescreen when Bubby surfaces into the outside world.  Director De Heer thought the effect was too intense and made the film “unwatchable” and dropped the idea.
• Bad Boy Bubby won a FIPRESCI International Critics Prize, along with several less significant festival awards.
• We initially passed Bad Boy Bubby over for inclusion on the List, declaring it to be only “borderline weird.” You can read the original review here.
• A search for reviews of “Bad Boy Bubby” on the Los Angeles Times website yields no results, but offers the helpful suggestion, “Did you mean ‘bat boy’ bubbly?”

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Bubby the punk rock front man performance artist, on stage in a priest’s collar, holding a blowup doll with enormous breasts wearing a gas mask, backed by a band whose heads are swaddled in cling wrap.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: In my original review of Bad Boy Bubby, I demurred adding the film to

Short clip from Bad Boy Bubby

the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies by noting that the movie “has a unique tone that’s hard to capture, but the first words I’d choose to characterize it are ‘relentlessly offbeat,’ rather than ‘weird’…  for the most part de Heer chooses to tell his story using a straightforward, realistic narrative style that makes us believe bizarre Bubby is a real person in a real world.” The first words I’d use to describe it are still “relentlessly offbeat,” but on further reflection I’ve concluded that Bubby‘s offbeat moments come relentlessly enough that “weird” is a fine choice for the second word I’d use to describe it. I do not want to be in the business of denying the weirdness of movies that feature middle-aged feral children, cling-wrap murders and bizarre swings in tone, especially when they have rabid cult followings and excellent critical reputations.

COMMENTS: Bad Boy Bubby is a film that moves slowly from deep darkness into light. It is often shocking and depressing, particularly in that dingy first third, where Bubby’s unnatural relationship with his deranged mum in their claustrophobic basement is made into a suffocating reality in which we are forced to share. The saving grace is that the movie always treats Bubby with true affection. Most of Bubby’s misbehavior, such as his tendency to shake a woman’s breast instead of her hand when he first meets her, comes out of childlike innocence. But even when Bubby’s intentionally being a “bad boy,” we understand what he’s suffered—even though he doesn’t fully—and we remain firmly on his side. The script, which could have been ruthless to poor Bubby, rewards him (and the viewer) in the end, and the happy ending feels earned rather than tacked on.

Bubby begins, however, in a relentlessly poisonous atmosphere. Bubby and his Mum live—exist is a better word—in a one-bulb basement, and you can almost smell the mold, stale beans, and body odor. His only playmates are cockroaches and feral cats, neither of whom profit by knowing him. Bubby is washed and shaved, slapped, choked, insulted, lied to, and and used as a sex toy by Flo, his portly and obviously mentally ill mother. His vocabulary is limited, but despite his minimal opportunities for socialization, he hungers for new forms of expression; he listens intently to everything his mother says and parrots it back to her, a skill that the script will play with later. He’s taught that he will die if he goes outside without a gas mask and that the Jesus hanging on the wall spies on him and will tell Mum if he moves from his seat at the table while she’s out. Bubby is abused, but like the children of Dogtooth who are taught that cats are vicious killers and airplanes are toys, he has no way of knowing it; this the only existence he’s ever known. The abuse Mum rains on her bad boy is worse than mere beatings and the name calling: she denies Bubby the chance to be human.

The segments inside the cement fallout shelter are nihilistic and painful to view, and things only get worse when Bubby’s seedy, deadbeat dad shows up in his clerical collar. If events continued in this vein for another hour, the film would be unwatchable. Remarkably, though, de Heer lightens the tone dramatically in the second act, turning it from tragedy to comedy on a dime. The effect should be jarring, but we accept it, probably due to our immense sense of relief when we escape that concrete bunker. Comic possibilities that were buried with Bubby in the basement apartment emerge when he escapes into the relative light of modern Australian society. Bubby’s gift for mimicry raises endless prospects for satirizing the absurdity of modern times (a la Peter Sellers in Being There), but the movie largely skirts these opportunities and instead focuses on fleshing out Bubby’s character and experiences. In this middle portion of the film, after Bubby escapes from the underground and before he finds his place in the world, his wanderings become almost maddeningly random. He accumulates adventures by being picked up by one Good Samaritan—a Salvation Army band girl, a socialite, a struggling rock group, a rich guy who dresses him up and takes him out on the town—and simply handed off to another, usually without much explanation for the transfer. His adventures are picaresque and more than a little incredible, hedging towards the weird side of quirky. He gets laid on his first night in polite society, but it’s a one-night stand. A kindly woman in an eclair shop tries to help him, but after a policeman drags him from her convertible and punches him in the gut for being unintentionally obscene, a musician grabs him and throws him in the back of his van… and so it goes. This second act is in some ways the weakest part of the movie, but just as you’re starting to tire of the aimless episodes, bits of those seemingly random experiences start to recur in Bubby’s life, become integrated into an overall character arc, and cohere into a satisfying ending.

With Bubby, Nicholas Hope has the role of a lifetime, a part like no one else has ever played. It’s an unglamorous role, requiring nudity, cockroach eating, and submission to the gaze of a camera fixated on the greasy, scraggly hair circulating around his bald spot. The performance requires equal parts debasement, comedy, and dignity, and the (appropriately named) Hope realizes the character perfectly.

Bad Boy Bubby is essentially a character study, albeit of an often uncomfortably bizarre individual, but it also invites interpretation as a fable about the process of growing up and discovering purpose in life. Bubby undergoes a muddled religious journey through the course of the movie. The illegitimate offspring of a drunken, disgraceful priest, he begins life suffocated by false dogma about a Jesus who will beat him brainless if he misbehaves. Destitute, he’s exposed to a callous world where no one will truly help him (he’s even screwed by the Salvation Army). His wanderings symbolically lead him to the depths of religious despair when an organ player Bubby encounters leads him from a church to a factory and absurdly lectures the uncomprehending man-child on materialism, advising him that he must “think God out of existence.” A free-associating Bubby repeats the atheistic dogma at a funeral for a cat, but he also puts on a priest’s collar and performs miracles by translating the thoughts of a patient with Lou Gehrig’s disease. Then, after being lectured on the evils of organized religion by a rock and roller who stands on a rug whose design keeps magically changing to reflect the various “mobs” who’ve “cling-wrapped” each other throughout history, in the end he finds peace in the arms of the not-so-subtly-named Angel.

Perhaps Bubby is finally able to find happiness because he’s finally been successful in thinking God out of existence; it’s not entirely clear where all the religious imagery is meant to lead us. What is clear is that Bubby ends up in a happy place. He overcomes his cruel upbringing and finds a place in an alien world: a soulmate, an artistic vocation, and some degree of self-understanding. Back in his hovel, Bubby’s overbearing, omnipresent Mum, who dubbed the long-suffering lad her “bad boy,” was as God to him. By the end, married and running around and playfully spraying his own offspring with a hose in a suburban garden, it’s clear that Bubby has, at the very least, thought Mum out of existence.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Rolf de Heer’s film is pretty much a weirdo… It may be muddled, but one can’t deny its ambitions, or the integrity of Hope’s performance.”–Geoff Andrew, Time Out Film Guide

“No David Lynchian surrealscape or David Cronenberg psychosexual gross out can compare to the stellar, sinister magic director Rolf De Heer (maker of the critically acclaimed 1996 film The Quiet Room) makes in this amazing masterpiece. Certainly he borrows from his demented brothers in arms, but De Heer has a unique style and vision all his own…”–Bill Gibron, DVD Talk (DVD)

“It’s blatantly obvious that director Rolf De Heer was making the film as weird as he possibly could, but yet it all seems to fit together as a whole… a compelling, funny, occasionally moving and undeniably memorable experience.”–Troy Howarth, Eccentric Cinema (DVD)

OFFICIAL SITE:

Bad Boy Bubby @ Rolf De Heer’s Vertigo Productions – An incomplete site, but it contains basic information on the film, many positive reviews, and interesting behind-the-scenes production stills

IMDB LINK: Bad Boy Bubby (1993)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Rolf de Heer Interviews – This archived fan page contains a director’s statement and short interviews with de Heer and Nicholas Hope by film critic Andrew Urban

DVD INFO: Despite being a festival hit, Bad Boy Bubby received little theatrical distribution outside of Australia. The film somehow gathered a small cult following via VHS until Blue Underground’s impressive 2005 DVD release (buy) brought the movie to a much wider audience. Extras include interviews with writer/director de Heer (entitled “Christ Kid, You’re a Werido”) and star Hope (“Being Bubby”). There’s also stills, the theatrical trailer, and the short film “Confessor Caressor,” a mockumentary where Hope plays a serial killer; de Heer said that watching this performance convinced him that the actor was right for the part of Bubby.

2009 saw Blue Underground upgrade Bubby to Blu-ray (buy), with the same special features.

Bad Boy Bubby is also available to rent or buy through video-on-demand and, at the time of this writing, it was available via Netflix streaming service.

(This movie was originally nominated for review by “Una,” who called it a ” weird movie” and a “black++ comedy.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

DIRECTED BY: John Cameron Mitchell

FEATURING: John Cameron Mitchell, Michael Pitt, Miriam Shor, Andrea Martin

PLOT: We first meet Hedwig as she and her band the Angry Inch are performing at a seafood buffet in Kansas City. In flashback, and in music videos, we learn that she was born a boy named Hans in East Berlin, and underwent a (botched) sex change operation so she could marry an American G.I. and leave for the West. Now, she and her band are shadowing the cross-country tour of Tommy Gnosis, Hedwig’s ex-boyfriend turned arena rock star, whom she accuses of having stolen her songs.

BACKGROUND:

• John Cameron Mitchell, then a professional stage actor, debuted the character of Hedwig in 1994 at a drag show at a punk nightclub in New York City. With the help of songwriter Stephen Trask, he built an off-Broadway play—originally staged in the ballroom of a fleabag hotel in Manhattan’s meat packing district—around the androgynous chanteuse.
• In the early drafts of the play Tommy was the main character and Hedwig a supporting player.
• Mitchell’s father was U.S. Army Major General John Mitchell, and the younger Mitchell spent much of his childhood in Berlin where his father was stationed during the later part of the Cold War.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Is it Hedwig’s androgynous Aryan visage, half-hidden under a pound of glittery makeup and a sculpted blond wig big enough to double the diameter of her head? Or is it the animated retelling of Aristophanes fable in “The Origin of Love,” with a squiggly line drawing of Zeus cutting the legs off whales? Fortunately, thanks to split-screen technology, we don’t have to choose; we can get Hedwig’s glacial glam mug on the left and a severed half-moon face yearning to swallow her up on the right together in one still.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  Well, it does feature a rock star who’s the victim of a botched sex

Original trailer for Hedwig and the Angry Inch

change searching for love and vengeance and telling her life story through song while playing on a tour of discount seafood restaurants with her band of Eastern European refugee musicians, which is a plot you don’t see everyday. If that’s not enough to satisfy your weird desires, however, stick with it until the end, when it drifts into a dreamlike series of music videos that see characters swapping sexes and changing into other characters.

COMMENTS: He may not be widely acknowledged as the West’s weirdest philosopher, but Plato has inspired two of the most bizarre movies ever made. His “Allegory of the Cave” was the obvious inspiration for the cavelike reality of the children imprisoned by walls of words in Dogtooth. John Cameron Mitchell pays even more straightforward tribute to another famous Platonic metaphor in Hedwig and the Angry Inch. When Hedwig says, “It is clear that I must find my other half, but is it a he, or a she?” it’s an explicit reference to the myth of love proposed by Aristophanes in Plato’s “Symposium.” In Plato’s account of the contest by Athens’ best and brightest to deliver a speech about love, the hungover, hiccup-suffering Aristophanes, a famous satirist, explains the impact of Eros by suggesting that humans were originally creatures with two heads and eight limbs, two hemispheres fused together back-to-back, and that the angry gods split in half them as punishment for hubris. Each individual then spends the rest of his or her life looking for his or her severed other half, and only feels complete when they finally find them. Aristophanes’ story is partially an attempt to account for the existence of homosexuality, and he therefore awkwardly introduces the idea that there were originally three joined sexes—a man-man, a woman-woman, and a man-woman—in order to explain same-sex attraction. Of course, he also discloses that these creatures used to roll around the ground “like tumblers going over and over with their legs in the air” when they wanted to cover a lot of ground, so maybe we shouldn’t take his account too seriously. (Socrates’ entry in the contest, by the way, propounds that the love of wisdom is more divine than simple erotic love—a footnote that Hedwig‘s script may not be entirely ignorant of).

You don’t have to take my word on the Platonic citation—Hedwig‘s score is explicit on that score. Hedwig herself sings the story to the lobster-bibbed patrons of Bilgewater’s restaurant (Chicago franchise—the Angry Inch has an exclusive contract to play at the budget seafood chain), illustrating the tale of Zeus’ thunderbolts splitting bulbous hermaphrodites in half with storybook slides projected onto a bedsheet hung in front of the salad bar.

You might call “The Origin of Love,” performed as a wistful power ballad, one of Hedwig‘s knockout numbers—except that they’re pretty much all knockout numbers. Stephen Trask’s score is full of earworms and flat-out tear-jerking, butt-shaking, fist-pumping tunes performed with punk panache in an eclectic array of styles. Hedwig might have remained a special interest curiosity, closeted in the gay community, if not for the power of its music to push a universal message about a dispossessed outsider desperate for love. Each high-energy number is tightly tied to the narrative, either coming out of Hedwig’s personal experience or (like “The Origin of Love”) illustrating a central theme. Although we dub the music “punk” because of its insurgent spirit, the score is eclectic; there’s something for everyone, and enough texture and change-ups to keep you interested no matter your musical proclivities. “Tear Me Down” is solid introductory rocker that showcases Hedwig the rebel and, by highlighting her Cold War Berliner origins, establishes her as a divided personality. An American G.I. seduces a pre-op Hedwig (then a “slip of a girly boy” named Hansel) with a trail of candy (including the boy’s favorite, “goomy bears”), a scene which segues into a performance of the country-tinged “Sugar Daddy.” The title song is the punkest number, explaining Hedwig’s dilemma with a literalism that puts the Bilgewater diners off their bread sticks: “My sex change operation got botched/My guardian angel fell asleep on the watch/Now all I got is a Barbie doll crotch/I got an angry inch…” (The performance erupts into a homophobic riot, but the band magically manages to keep playing their instruments even while their fists are flying). As good as all the songs are, it’s hard to point to one song as a show stopper, but if forced to choose many would pick “Wig in a Box.” It’s the production that celebrates Hedwig’s invention of herself as a drag rock goddess: it starts off as a piano ballad and mutates into a poppy doo-wop bubblegum number with a Bowie-esque melody. Hedwig’s trailer wall descends and turns into a stage, and a bouncing wig encourages us to sing along with the lyrics. The musical climaxes with an impressionistic, surrealistic 15-minute medley consisting of the melancholy “Hedwig’s Lament,” the punk-freakout “Exquisite Corpse,” an arena-rock reprise of the earlier “Wicked Little Town” with new lyrics, another intense glam-rocker in the triumphant “Midnight Radio,” and ending with a reprise of “Origin of Love” for the last shot fadeout. It’s one hell of a ride, and the highest compliment you can give the score is to point out that it works as a stand-alone release even without the framing narrative: it almost sounds like a lost concept album collaboration between David Bowie and the Stooges, with Bob Mould on guitar (Bob Mould really is on guitar).

If the rocking tunes are the most obvious factor that pulls Hedwig out of the pure gay-interest genre, we shouldn’t undersell the fact that Hedwig is a damn funny movie. The script is smart and isn’t afraid to lovingly mock its rock influences; the movie’s comic mix of philosophical and pop-culture obsessions is perfectly exemplified by the title of Hedwig’s rejected lecture on “the aggressive influence of German philosophy on rock and roll”: “You, Kant, Always Get What You Want.” Hedwig is full of quotable lines delivered by its laconic, passive-aggresive heroine in her studied Nordic drone: “Tommy, can you hear me? From this milkless teat you have sucked the very business we call show!” Hedwig provokes chuckles when she strings together pop music lyrics or geographical band names into free-associative monologues, or lists the influential Yank singers who touched a young East German girly boy listening to Radio America (including Anne Murray, “who was actually a Canadian working in the American idiom”) alongside the equally intriguing “crypto-homo” artists (including David Bowie, “who was actually an idiom working in America and Canada”). Her comic adventures have her honing her musical skills headlining a band of Korean army wives, before eventually growing big enough to play the folksy “Menses Fair.” With the Angry Inch, she develops a corny (not to say fruity) stand-up routine (complete with rim-shots) to warm up the plump audiences after they’ve loaded their buffet trays before she launches into another ear-blistering gay punk number. She’s smart, droll, and quick with a catty comeback, the kind of person you’d think twice about putting down for fear of a devastating verbal reprisal; her saving grace is that she usually turns her biting wit on herself.

Self-conscious, campy humor—the ability to deal with anticipated rejection through a preemptive quip—is an essential part of the drag queen archetype. Although Mitchell has created a living, breathing character with peculiarities and a nutty backstory all her own, he’s done so within the confines of a positive gay stereotype: the mildly grotesque, mildly bitchy femme who triumphs over society’s ostracism by being too damn interesting to ignore. Hedwig’s story is more than the typical tragically gay tale, though; it’s a positively monstrous one. The surgeon’s scalpel has left her sexless—worse than that, has left her with a inch long lump reminding her that she’s neither man nor woman, not even a hermaphrodite. She has no sexual identity. Her scarred and useless crotch serves as an exaggerated symbol of the stigma and shame many homosexuals feel. It’s no wonder that Hedwig’s response to her circumstance is to don a wig, a mask of makeup, and a larger than life persona that hides her core of loneliness from prying eyes. (The song “Wig in a Box” features Hedwig trying on various personae via hairpieces—the beehive, the Farrah Fawcett, the Dorothy Hammil—until she stumbles upon the rug representing the “punk rock star of stage and screen” and concludes “I’m never turning back”). Mitchell’s performance, honed through years of playing the same character, masterfully captures the full pathos and humor of Hedwig’s dual existence, the facade of gay glitter and the bitter soul underneath.

Hedwig’s story, which begins as a quest for her other half, by the end morphs via music video magic into a Jungian journey of self-realization. For most of the film, Hedwig pursues protégé Tommy Gnosis, her presumptive soul mate, across America on a tour that’s half revenge, half torch-carrying. But the film’s finale jettisons both the rock-and-roll rise-and-fall and the romantic comedy tropes in favor of expressionistic tableaux and psychodrama played out on a glam stage. The conclusion is vague to the point of being mystical, and deliberately invites interpretation (warning: don’t read on if you want to avoid spoilers). After an unlikely series of events Hedwig gets her comeuppance on the plagiarist Gnosis, and finds her talent recognized. What little reality the movie had to cling to is then discarded as Hedwig begins a major concert at “Bilgewater, Times Square.” At the end of the frenetic and fractured experimental punk number where she sings about being “all sewn up,” she rips off her wig and tears off her top to reveal that the two breastlike bumps under her bra were supplied by tomatoes (which she smashes against her flat-chested male torso). Suddenly, the crowd and the band are gone and Tommy Gnosis is singing a song of apology on an empty stage, as the unwigged Hedwig approaches him from afar. Gnosis sings to him/her, “there’s no mystical design/no cosmic lover preassigned…” Gnosis disappears, but the trademark silver cross on his forehead—the mark Hedwig originally gave him along with the stage name that means “knowledge”—now appears on the stripped singer, who materializes on a new stage reunited with the Angry Inch. Hedwig—or Hans?—then gives his wig to his backup singer and reluctant lover, Yitzhak, who puts it on and is transformed into a woman (the masulizing makeup job on Miriam Shor was impeccably done). Hedwig, now unmasked and (at least psychically) merged with Gnosis, ends the film stripped of her clothes and her glamor in a dark alley, marching forward naked into the glare of the streetlights and who knows what new reality.

Naked Hedwig in the alley is like the star child from 2001. She’s transformed through some process of evolution and transformation too profound to be stated in words. There’s almost too much symbolic meat to chew on here, but it seems that Hedwig has cast aside both her need for a mask to hide herself from the world, and her yen for another being to complete her. Aristophanes was wrong—or maybe the comic playwright was only half serious all along. Hedwig has become whole by discovering the wisdom that the him or her half she needed to complete him or herself lay buried deep inside him or herself all the time. That’s a heavy message for a rock and roll musical about a botched sex change operation to carry, but Hedwig finds itself strong and confident enough to bear the load.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Filmed with ferocious energy and with enough sexual variety to match late Fellini, it may be passing through standard bookings on its way to a long run as the midnight successor to ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show.’”–Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (contemporaneous)

“One way of looking at this clever, funny, wildly innovative film tricked out with surreal pop embellishments and Day-Glo colors is to see it as the kind of movie David Bowie might have made had he pushed his early-70′s gender-bending persona to its logical limit.”–Stephen Holden, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

“The film’s not only funny and weird, it’s oddly poignant.”–Desson Thomas, The Washington Post (contemporaneous)

OFFICIAL SITE: New Line Cinema: Hedwig and the Angry Inch – There’s not much here anymore on this one-page site, just the synopsis and six hi-res stills. Even the trailer appears to be missing.

IMDB LINK: Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Hedwig and the Angry Inch | Film | The New Cult Canon – Scott Tobias’ entry on Hedwig for The Onion A.V. Club’s “New Cult Canon” series

Hedwig in a Box [Archived] – An archived version of the large but inactive-since-2007 fan site, with a FAQ and an archived forum with a scary amount of discussion about the play and film. The archived home page even contains a link to an earlier archived version of the site.

DVD INFO: The New Line “Platinum Series” DVD (buy) is out-of-print but still widely available. Extras include a commentary track with writer/director/star John Cameron Mitchell and cinematographer Frank DeMarco, two deleted scenes, the trailer, cast and crew bios, and a long (85 minute) documentary showing the evolution of Hedwig from nightclub character to off-Broadway play to feature film. Thanks to its dedicated cult we would not expect this to stay out of print for very long; a re-release and Blu-ray edition is to be expected.

Hedwig is also available for rental viewing or download on Video-on-Demand (rent/buy).

(This movie was nominated for review by “Funkadelic.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

“If you don’t eat, you won’t die.”–Ugo, La Grande Bouffe

DIRECTED BY: Marco Ferreri

FEATURING: Phillipe Noiret, Ugo Tognazzi, Michel Piccoli, Marcello Mastroianni, Andréa Ferréol

PLOT: Four middle-aged, upper middle-class men (a judge, a TV personality, a pilot and a chef) hole up at a country villa to feast; it is gradually and casually revealed that they plan on eating themselves to death. They gorge themselves constantly, but the pilot can’t stand to go even for a day without sex, so prostitutes are invited to join them—along with a schoolteacher who attaches herself to the group willingly. As the gluttonous orgy continues the whores flee in disgust, but the teacher joins in the bacchanalia with gusto.

BACKGROUND:

• All of the main actors use their real names. All four of the male stars were well-established (Mastroianni, of course, was an international star and sex symbol). Except for Noiret, each had worked with director Ferreri before. Each had also had prominent roles in weird films from other European directors (Mastrioanni, most famously, in Federico Fellini films, but Noiret appeared in Zazie dans le Metro for Louis Malle, Piccoli was a mainstay in Buñuel movies, and Tognazzi had small roles in Roger Vadim’s Barbarella and  Fellini’s Satyricon). The quartet would reunite with the director the next year for a surrealist rendering of Custer’s last stand called Don’t Touch the White Woman (starring alongside another weird favorite, Catherine Deneuve).
• The scatological content of the film scandalized some viewers at Cannes, but the film nonetheless won a FIPRESCI prize for Ferreri.
• At its British showings La Grande Bouffe was protested by infamous decency crusader Mary Whitehouse; her attempts to have the movie banned ironically led to modification of the Obscene Publications Act to exempt films with artistic merit.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: The visions that will probably stick with you when you think back on La Grande Bouffe are scenes of four great European actors stuffing their faces with turkey legs, a castle made out of pâtés, and a pair of matching cakes shaped like breasts. Michel Piccoli dancing with a pig’s head is another strong candidate, as are the numerous gross scatological moments. But, the strangest and most lingering image may be the final one: sides of meat scattered around the villa lawn—a slab of beef wedged in the crook of a tree—and a pack of dogs sitting and looking attentively at the carcasses, making no move to eat.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: La Grande Bouffe takes an absurd premise—four men decide to eat

Brief scene from La Grande Bouffe

themselves to death—and plays it out with illogical realism, proffering no explanations or motives for what happens.  It’s an unnatural but straight-faced parable that suggests nothing about how we’re supposed to take it. It’s a grotesque spectacle, but a strangely engrossing one, with a fascination that comes largely thanks to a dream cast of 1970s Euroweirdos.

COMMENTS: In the course of their Grande Bouffe, the four suicidal gourmands scarf down oysters, kidneys for breakfast, crusty baguettes, cakes, quail served on skull skewers, turkey legs (convenient for gnawing on during sexual congress), a suckling pig roasted over a spit in the garden, Provencal pizza, steaming bowls of tortellini with cream and mushrooms, crepes doused in Cointreau, brioche dipped in milk, and a three-poultry pâté molded into a Faberge-egg cathedral, among other delicacies. The quartet (later quintet) nosh at all moments: in the bedroom, while picking out a tune on the piano, while taking schoolchildren on a tour of the grounds (a poet of local renown once lived there). In the beginning the mouthwatering spread may make your tummy rumble, but even before the gluttonous consequences—Michel’s flatulence, the exploding toilet— show up on screen, you may start to lose your appetite, as you imagine the men forcing all that food down their throats despite being stuffed full to bursting. As they get near the end of their blowout, each succeeding bite becomes a painful trial. Just look at poor sick Michel’s face as he lies on the bed, straining to swallow a spoonful of chestnut purée as his friends goad him on, telling him it’s a question of will and advising him to imagine himself as a starving child in Bombay.

One of the reasons La Grande Bouffe fascinates, even though not much really happens in the film, is because the men have chosen such an appealingly appalling form of suicide. If we have to die (and we do), why not go out with a banquet of food and sex, in an orgy of pleasure? The feast is at the same time tempting and revolting. In our daily food lives we restrain ourselves because we know the downside of overindulgence—indigestion, nausea, vomiting—but these men keep going at it, as difficult as it becomes. It’s a wish fulfillment fantasy for us to vicariously experience their hedonistic excesses; we aren’t given a free ride, though, because Ferreri makes sure we pay a price for our vicarious delight by giving us vicarious revulsion, too. We get an eyeful (and earful, thanks to the most egregious farting soundtrack ever attached to an arthouse film) of the result of that food after it passes through the debauchees digestive systems. The mixture of lust and disgust demonstrated here is the essence of decadence, simultaneously attractive and repellent.

In researching opinions on La Grand Bouffe, I lost track of the number of times viewers either confessed they did not get what Ferreri was getting at, or scolded him for giving no explanation for the men’s desire to eat themselves to death. Because the raw spectacle here is so hard to get a handle on, so unlike what we see in ordinary narratives, people constantly look for a reference point to compare it to.  The most obvious influence is Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel (1962), where the guests at a dinner party find themselves unable to leave (in what may be an explicit Angel nod, Marcello gets disgusted and in fact tries, but fails, to exit the feast). Distancing surrealism is not on the menu in Bouffe, however. The scandalous scatology and perverse sensibilities made some see it as a precursor to the 1975 shocker Salò, but the comparisons don’t go very far. Salò is rife with sadism and cruelty, which is noticeably absent in the genial La Grande Bouffe; all the debauchery is scrupulously consensual, there are no victims anywhere to be found. Bouffe shares many similarities with Peter Greenaway‘s The Thief, the Cook, His Wife and Her Lover (1989), although in that banquet there again is a layer of stylization and allegory standing between us and the material, which is missing in the Ferreri’s unvarnished film. The movie that Bouffe most resembles may be Mike Figgis’ Leaving Las Vegas (1995), where Nicolas Cage steadfastly drinks himself to death, for reasons he’s forgotten, as faithful whore Elisabeth Shue takes care of him in his final days.

Shue’s Vegas hooker may have been the illegitimate cinematic daughter of Bouffe‘s Andréa Ferréol, who plays a similarly nonjudgmental caretaker to the four suicidal epicures. Andréa, a zaftig schoolmarm whose eyes light up at the idea of days on end of continuous eating and fornicating, may be this feast’s most interesting and troublesome character. She’s also a surprise co-star, holding her own against the four male acting titans. The five thespians hold the inherently implausible scenario together; there’s a real feeling of camaraderie between the four men, who seem to have known each other for decades, and the Rubenesque Ferréol convincingly worms her way into the pal’s hearts and beds as a party guest who immediately clicks with the assembly. Tognazzi, who plays the chef, was the least distinguished of the crew coming in to this film and exits with the same reputation, although he has a featured moment doing a Marlon Brando impression. Piccoli shows more depth; it’s slowly revealed that he’s a closet musician and philosopher, and probably secretly in love with Mastrioanni’s character as well. Speaking of Marcello, he has the most fun here, playing off his image as a ladies’ man. In Bouffe he’s ridiculously insatiable, insisting the party expand its roster to include three or four prostitutes because he’s unable to go half a day without sex. He’s also the only one of the foursome to show misgivings about the pact, which are apparent almost from the beginning (watch how, in the space of a second, his face goes from apprehension to bemused resolution after he announces “the feast begins!”)

Along with Ferréol, Noiret emerges as the most fascinating character, and despite his often passive personality he is in fact the movie’s driving force. A judge and the apparent ringleader of the cadre, he’s decidedly odd in his stiff mannerisms and his ironic concern with propriety (he insists on storing a fallen comrade in a meat locker rather than interring him because “the illegal burial of corpses is highly reprehensible.”)  He has a twisted sexual backstory that makes it entirely appropriate for his final meal to be a cake in the shape of ripe bosoms. He stands awkwardly at attention, staring straight ahead like a guard at Buckingham palace, on the two occasions where women service him. He’s repressed and droll, and where the other three men in some sense seem to “regular guys,” Phillipe is “off” by quite a bit, the kind of citizen who’s respectable on the outside but who you would not be shocked to find out is secretly a stalker, sex addict or serial killer. He falls in love with Andréa immediately after she shows him just a bit of attention and asks her to marry him. He persists in his ardor despite the fact that she insists on having regular intercourse with the rest of the company, often as Phillipe lies in the same bed. For her part, Andréa seems to return his affections, even though she seems to be more sexually attracted to everyone else at the party, and despite the fact that she knows he’s soon to depart this world. They make for a strange couple indeed.

As weird as Phillipe is, Andréa remains the most interesting and troubling character because she breaks the movie’s template. The four men are all representatives of the bourgeoisie, the bored and decadent upper middle class. For them to enter into a pact to eat themselves to death seems like the type of simple satirical stab at that strata of society that leftist filmmakers were required to take to retain their credibility. But Andréa is a schoolteacher, presumably a virtuous member of the hardworking proletariat, and she proves as gluttonous and oversexed as the men—actually, more so. She forces the movie to widen its lend to accommodate her, making it more a portrait of humanity’s failings then an attack focused on a particular class. Some reviewers even criticized the inclusion of her character as destructive of the satire, but that’s only the case if you’re convinced going in that the movie should be a satire of the bourgeoisie. Ferreri doesn’t force that view upon us. He deliberately gives us no explanations, and none are needed. It’s obvious, predictable, and comfortable to read the movie as an attack on bourgeois consumerism. But perhaps that’s not the point at all. Perhaps the film is deliberately intended to be as senseless as life itself: you’re born, you eat, and you die.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…the satire is implicit, and the action is strangely devoid of content, comedic or otherwise… a quiet and observant screed, a cousin to Pasolini’s ‘Salò’… laying waste to modern man and refusing to tell us how to feel about the process.”–Michael Atkinson, IFC.com (DVD)

“…no satire, no tragedy or insight, and no message. Just shocking brainless art posing as an allegory.”–Zev Toledano, The Worldwide Celluloid Massacre (DVD)

“…a satisfying piece of surrealist satire, recommended to fans of boundary-pushing art-house cinema.”–DVD Holocaust (DVD)

IMDB LINK: The Big Feast (1973)

DVD INFO: The 2009 Koch Lorber DVD (buy) contains no extras other than a five-minute excerpt from the documentary The Director Who Came from the Future discussing the film and the scandalized reaction to it.

(This movie was nominated for review by “Irene,” who called it a “wonderful and quite bizarre movie… a kind of a modern burlesque, a farce reminding me of the Luis Buñuel films…” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

DIRECTED BY: Luis Buñuel

FEATURING: Catherine Deneuve, Jean Sorel, Pierre Clémenti, Michel Piccoli, Geneviève Page

PLOT: Séverine is a wealthy young newlywed who proclaims she loves her husband, but refuses to sleep with him. Her erotic life consists of daydreams in which she is bound, whipped and humiliated. She decides to secretly work as a prostitute during the day, taking the stage name “Belle de Jour”; in the course of her adventures a macho young criminal becomes obsessed with Belle, and he sparks sexual passion in her, as well.

BACKGROUND:

• The movie was based on a scandalous (but moralizing) 1928 novel of the same name by Joseph Kessel.
• Belle de Jour marked Buñuel’s return to France after his “Mexican exile.”  It was the 67-year old director’s most expensive production to date, his first film in color, and his biggest financial success.
• The director did not get along with the star, and the feeling was mutual. Buñuel resented Deneuve because she was forced on him by the producers. For her part, the actress felt “used” by the director.  Whatever their differences, however, they made up enough to collaborate again three years later on Tristana.
• Séverine’s courtesan name, “Belle de Jour” (literally “day beauty”) is the French name for the daylily; it is also play on “belle de nuit,” slang for a prostitute.
• Too spicy for critics in 1967, Belle de Jour won only one major award at the time of its release: the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.  It now regularly appears on critics top 100 lists (Empire ranked it as the 56th greatest film of world cinema).
• Martin Scorsese was behind a 1995 theatrical re-release of the film.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: The ecstatic look on Catherine Deneuve’s face as, tied up and dressed in virginal white, she’s insulted and spattered with shovelfuls of mud (or is it cow dung?).

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Although the movie weaves in and out of dreams and reality until we

Original trailer for Belle de Jour

don’t know which is which, by Buñuel standards Belle de Jour is a straightforward dramatic film.  Even the dream sequences are relatively rational, unthreatening, and easy to follow, making Belle the favorite “Surrealist” film of people who don’t like Surrealism.  But something about the dilemma of Séverine/Belle’s divided personality, and her uncertain denouement, sticks with you long after “Fin” appears.  The movie’s weirdness is subtle but persistent, like the scent of a woman’s perfume that lingers in the air long after she’s departed the room.

COMMENTS:  Cinematographer Gil Taylor famously said “I hate doing this to a beautiful woman” while filming Catherine Deneuve cracking up and dreaming about imaginary rapists in every corner of her deserted apartment in Repulsion.  I wonder how he would have felt about shooting this same beautiful woman being tied up, whipped and raped, whored-out, and spattered with mud in Belle de Jour.

Actually, he probably would have been fine with it if he wasn’t forced to use a wide-angle lens on her closeups—the source of his misread complaint in Polanski’s film—but stick with the accidental metaphor for a moment.  Appearing in these two movies in the space of three years, glacially blond Deneuve risked becoming typecast as a frigid Freudian pinup girl.  Unlike Repulsion, however, where a cruel irony emerged from the union of Deneuve’s unworldly beauty with her asexual disgust for men, Belle de Jour allows the actress to be a sexual creature, of a twisted sort. When the beautiful Séverine is abused and degraded in Belle de Jour, it is at her own insistence, in fulfillment of her hidden fantasies.

The unusual name Séverine is the feminine of Severin (meaning “severe”), which Joseph Kessel chose for the self-abusing heroine of his novel as a tribute to the masochistic protagonist of “Venus in Furs.” But besides “severe,” the name also connotes “sever” or “severed”: a woman divided. This secondary meaning is accidental, of course, but it must have pleased Buñuel, for whom the deepest and purest meanings are always a result of coincidence. Séverine is torn between her split desires for chaste love and sexual lust, between her husband Pierre and her lover Marcel, between the comfortable life of a bourgeois housewife and the sensual adventures of working girl, and most importantly between dreams and reality.

Séverine is a dreamy lady—inscrutable Deneuve often looks half asleep and detached from her surroundings even during her waking hours—and through Buñuel’s eyes her subconscious world, full of lucid masochistic fantasies, is every bit as significant as her pampered Parisian reality of ski trips, dinner engagements and tennis matches. Belle de Jour begins with a horse-drawn carriage and the sound of jingling bells, and these two elements (along with cats and lilies) recur throughout the film as a clue that Séverine is in a dream state—although, as we will see, Buñuel only sets up these rules so that he can violate them later.  Not counting the finale, there are four scenes that are clearly Séverine’s daydreams.  The opening scene features a romantic carriage ride with her husband that turns into a whipping; as Séverine is being beaten by footmen at her husband’s request, she begs him “don’t let the cats out!” (Like “pussy” in English, the French “chatte” has a vulgar connotation as a euphemism for female genitalia). The “mud” fantasy again features Denueve bound, and again begins with bells (this time cowbells instead of carriage bells); more feline references abound, as Pierre asks his rakish friend Husson (Piccoli), “do cows have names, like cats?” Husson features again in the third obvious fantasy, a short bit at a restaurant; being the most absurd of all, its impossible to mistake for reality and therefore needs no bells to announce it (there is talk of lilies, but no cats).  The carriage appears again for the fourth bondage-related daydream, which involves a duel and which marks a crucial change in Séverine’s attitude that sets up the final act.

So much for the obvious erotic reveries.  But there are two other sequences, both involving Belle’s kinky clients, and both highly unusual but apparently real, that incorporate imagery from Séverine’s fantasies; the appearance of these dream-motifs make us doubt whether the incidents really occur.  The first involves a Japanese businessman who visits Belle at the brothel.  He has a box which he shows to one of Belle’s co-courtesans.  The box buzzes when he opens it.  She shakes her head and refuses him, but Belle accepts his broken-French assurances that she should not be afraid of whatever secret is buzzing inside.  When he strips, he flexes his arms and shakes a cowbell, making a sound exactly like the jingling Séverine’s fantasies.  The second ambiguous liaison finds a carriage pulling up to a cafe where Séverine is sitting alone.  An aristocratic man pops out, walks to her table, introduces himself, and propositions her to come to his manor.  His fetish is particularly weird: he wants Séverine to dress in a black see-through nightie and lie in a coffin while he places lilies on her bosom and bemoans his dead love.  In the middle of the ritual his butler breaks in and asks, “Can I let the cats in?”

Belle de Jour‘s famously enigmatic ending is the apex of this technique of muddying the line between dream and reality. Buñuel is the master of the ambiguous ending (see also The Milky Way). He sets up scenarios where the audience doesn’t merely chose between equally plausible plot options A and B, but where the contradictions coexist; A and B merge and synthesize into something new and mysterious. Belle de Jour‘s last two minutes, announced by the tinkling of bells, the mewing of cats, and arrival of a horse-drawn carriage outside her her Parisian home, are obviously another of Séverine’s dreams. But, the last ten minutes, from the point she’s awakened by a gunshot, may also be a dream, and the final moments only a dream inside a dream.  And the resolution, which like a Möbius filmstrip ends where it began, suggests the possibility that the entire movie is a dream.  Perhaps the incident with the aristocrat and the carriage and the bells and the lilies and the strange dialogues about cats really happened, and Séverine incorporated all those elements into subsequent fantasies? Who knows? (Not Buñuel, who insisted he did not know what the ending he had written meant, just as Séverine repeatedly explains that she does not understand the reasons for her own compulsions). In the end, the entire plot is thrown into confusion, but Séverine’s character never changes: she began as a divided woman and she ends as a divided woman.  But, perhaps she finds a way to reconcile her conscious and subconscious conflicts in her dreams.

The only thing that is clear is that Buñuel views Séverine’s fantasies as a crucial part of her being; they are, in fact, more interesting to him—and to us—than her everyday reality. Her dirty dreams are as much a part of her character as is her bourgeois propriety. And Buñuel treats her dreams with as much respect as her waking moments—and with more love.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The story is a kind of fantasy cryptogram, with countless clues—verbal puns about cats, nonsense syllables, bells, speech with motionless lips, time cues, and so on—as to when we are in a fantasy, and whose… The movie ends with a dark ambiguity about how we are to regard what has gone before, but every detail has been so carefully thought out that seeing it again is like seeing it in another key.”–Renata Adler, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

“…a radical work that reimagines some of the director’s earlier surrealist impulses and anticipates the work of David Lynch… Buñuel understood that dreams, the language of the subconscious, often tell us more about ourselves than our reality.”–Ed Gonzalez, Slant (DVD)

“…[a] surrealist masterpiece, a serio-comedy of manners which exposes the neurotic and artificial foundations beneath normal identity and behaviour.”–Rob Mackie, The Guardian (DVD)

IMDB LINK: Belle de Jour (1967)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Belle de Jour (1967) – The Criterion Collection – The Criterion Collection release page contains scholar Melissa Anderson’s essay, clips from the film, and links to other items of interest

Belle de Jour::Great Movies – Roger Ebert’s essay on the film for his “Great Movies” series

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Belle De Jour – Joseph Kessel’s 1929 (an erotic novel which is by all reports quite different from the movie)

Belle de Jour (BFI Film Classics) – Critic Michael Wood’s companion to the movie for the British Film Institute series

DVD INFO: Belle de Jour was an obvious candidate for the Criterion Collection, and in 2012 they finally landed the rights (buy).  The edition features a remastered print; a new audio commentary by Buñuel scholar Michael Wood; “That Obscure Source of Desire,” a featurette with sexologist Susie Bright and Surrealist expert Linda Williams discussing the film’s sexual politics; a interview with frequent Buñuel collaborator Jean-Claude Carrière, who worked with the director to adapt the screenplay from the novel; an excerpt from the French TV show “Cinéma” with Deneuve and Carrière as guests; trailers; and a booklet with an essay by Melissa Anderson and a Buñuel interview. The Blu-ray offering (buy) contains the same features.

The 2002 Miramax release is out of print but may still be available (buy). It has no extras but features a different commentary track, by film scholar Julie Jones.  Unlike the Criterion disc, it is not presented in anamorphic widescreeen format.

“What is this, a freak out?”–Violet Beauregarde

DIRECTED BY: Mel Stuart

FEATURING: Gene Wilder, Peter Ostrum, Jack Albertson, Julie Dawn Cole

PLOT:  Charlie is a poor boy supporting his mother and four bedridden grandparents with the earnings from his paper route.  When eccentric chocolatier Willy Wonka announces he will be awarding a lifetime supply of chocolate and a tour of his mysterious candy factory to the finders of five golden tickets, Charlie wants to win more than anything.  When he, along with four bratty companions, finally meets the exceedingly odd Mr. Wonka,  Charlie finds the factory, and its owner, far stranger and more magical than anything he could have imagined.

BACKGROUND:

• A note for those who believe product placement and corporate tie-ins are a recent phenomenon in movies: although this film was based on Roald Dahl’s bestelling children’s novel “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” it was retitled to incorporate the Wonka name in order to promote the release of real-life Wonka candy bars (which were still made up until 2010) by Quaker Oats, who financed the production.
• Dahl himself wrote the original script, but it was extensively rewritten by an uncredited David (The Hellstrom Chronicles) Seltzer, reportedly to Dahl’s displeasure.  (It’s worth noting that Dahl, like most authors, pretty much hated every adaptation of his work).
• This was the only movie Peter Ostrum (Charlie) ever acted in.
• The movie just broke even at the box office, but became a cult sensation thanks to television screenings and home video.  In 2003, Entertainment Weekly ranked Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory as the 25th biggest cult movie of all time.
• The score was nominated for a “Best Music, Scoring Adaptation and Original Song Score” Oscar but lost to Fiddler on the Roof.
• Despite the fact that he was rejected for the role of the candy shop owner in the film, Sammy Davis, Jr.’s 1972 rendition of the film’s first musical number, “The Candy Man,” became a #1 hit and a staple of his live shows.
• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Tim Burton‘s 2005 adaptation of the same material with Johnny Depp as Wonka, is somewhat closer to Dahl’s original novel.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Wonka’s face, bathed in flashing red and green lights, as he shrieks incoherently at the end of his terrifying trip down a psychedelic tunnel of horrors.  It’s the capping image of a horrifying scene that’s been scarring unsuspecting children for 40 years now.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  Is it Gene Wilder’s ultra-eccentric performance as the charming

Original trailer for Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory

but vaguely demonic candyman in a purple velvet jacket and burgundy top hat who suavely arranges for wicked children to hang themselves with the licorice ropes of their own vice?  Or the chorus of orange-faced, green haired, dwarf laborers who sing moralizing “Oompah Loompah” tunes after each victim ironically offs him or herself?  No, we all know it’s the bad trip boat ride, where Wonka recites Edgar Allan Poe inspired verse (“By the fires of Hell a’ glowing/Is the grisly reaper mowing?”) as the craft careens down a tunnel of horrors while colored strobe lights flash and avant-garde footage plays on the walls that tips this celebration of imagination into the weird column.

COMMENTS: When I was a kid, they used to play Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory ontelevision exactly once a year (just like that other annual TV staple Wonka so closely resembles, The Wizard of Oz).  The first time I saw it, what lodged itself in my mind was the singing and dancing Oompah Loompahs.  I think “oompah loompah doompity do” must have been stuck in my head throughout the third grade.  When the next year’s showing rolled around, I eagerly tuned in, expecting more hot candy, child jeopardy, and painted-midget action.  The second time around, I remember being disappointed at how long it took to actually get inside the magical candy factory; it was an eternity of waiting, 45 whole minutes of sickly singing, corny comedy, and a weepy family poverty drama before the debonair Mr. Wonka rolled himself down that red carpet and let the kids inside to try way too many experimental confectioneries and have some good, scary fun.

If there’s one legitimate criticism to be lodged against Wonka, it’s my old childhood complaint—it takes too long to get out of dreary reality and into the chocolate factory.  Remember how quickly Oz whisked us out of drab Kansas?  Wonka loiters in a mundane Munich.  As an adult, I find the pre-factory scenes mildly amusing—the worldwide furor over the chocolate contest, the incompetent teacher who multiplies Charlie’s candy bars by a factor of one hundred because he can’t figure out decimal percentage—but the movie, which limps along pleasantly enough to start, suddenly reveals hidden greatness when Gene Wilder somersaults onto the stage as Wonka.  Dressed like a Victorian fop outfitted by Hugh Hefner, quick with an erudite non sequitur (when a girl tells him there’s no such thing as a snozberry, Wonka replies “we are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams”), Wonka is, to say the least, an unpredictable fellow.  Wilder prances about, swinging his cane haphazardly at his guests, plucking hairs from their heads at random, and expressing mock concern for their fates after they disobey his direct orders. (“I don’t understand it, the children are disappearing like rabbits,” he says nonchalantly).  He’s sarcastic, and insults everyone in the tour group without their realizing it, yet he remains a lovable father figure—to Charlie, at least.

It’s partially his sincere, childlike love of “pure imagination” that makes any transgression Wonka commits seem harmless, but mainly its the fact that Wonka reserves his wry wrath for those who truly deserve it.  Besides pure-hearted Charlie, the chocolate mogul has invited along four of the most wickedly bratty children anyone could ever hope to see get their poetic comeuppances, along with their equally despicable chaperone parents.  Each kid represents some sort of childhood deadly sin—gluttony, greed, and, uh, gum-chewing and TV-addiction.  Wonka has filled his candy factory full of deadly attractive nuisances, like a river of chocolate and a teleportation machine, calculated to lure naughty children to their doom.  Each tot meets a nasty fate when they let their baser natures get in the way of good behavior.  One is half-drowned and sent to be boiled; another bloated with juice and threatened with explosion; one falls down a garbage chute leading to a furnace; and the final victim is shrunk and sent to be stretched on the rack.  Even Charlie himself has a moment of weakness that almost leads to him and his grandpa being cut to ribbons by fan blades.  The parents freak out, and Wonka shows an amusingly appalling lack of concern, explaining at one point that a kid’s odds of survival are pretty good, as the furnace is only lit every other day.  There’s an Old Testament pitilessness to the ironic punishments each sinful child endures; there’s a black and white moral lesson to be learned, but kids also thrill to the spectacle of bad kids getting theirs (as long as the good one gets his ultimate reward).  It’s as black of a comedy as most kids can endure, but they savor being pushed to their limits.

That punishment/reward morality play forms Chocolate Factory‘s basic structure, but what lodges the film in the memory is the parade of extravagant, imaginative, and often weird set pieces.  There’s the living coat hangers that grab visitor’s hats off their heads unbidden.  Our first glimpse of the Chocolate Room, with its liquid chocolate waterfall, candy toadstools, and lollipops growing on the banks of a muddy cocoa stream.  The refugee race of Oompah Loompahs, with their orange complexions, green hair, bushy white eyebrows, and synchronized dance numbers.  Violet turning into a blueberry and being rolled off for juicing.  Veruca Salt’s show-stopping, foot-stomping dance tantrum “I Want the World!” (“I want the world, I want the whole world/I want to lock it all up in my pocket, it’s my bar of chocolate!”)  Fizzy lifting drinks.  Wonka’s office with it’s half-lamp, half-clock and half-safe.  “You get nothing!”  And, of course, the cherry on the sundae, the mad boat ride through the chocolate factory’s tunnel of horrors, which looks like what Kenneth Anger would have delivered if he’d been hired to design the “It’s a Small World” ride at Disney World.  Among the images that play on the tunnel walls as the Loompah-propelled gondola speeds heedlessly along are a giant eye, a man with a snake slithering across his lips, and a chicken being decapitated (!)

Willy Wonka likely looks weirder to an adult than it does to a child, for whom it’s splendiferous wonders are just everyday magic.  But—and here’s why the film belongs on a weird movie list—Wonka‘s sugar-rush produces the kind of candy-coated hallucinations that stick with you for a lifetime.  Face it, if you saw this as a kid, a Greek chorus of Oompah Loompahs are forever bobbing up and down in your memory, warning you about the dangers of greed, gluttony, and gum-chewing every time you even think about climbing out on the precarious banks of a chocolate river.  Admit it—the mere thought of a three-course dinner compressed into a stick of gum now fills you with unthinking dread.  This is the sort of delightful lifelong psychological trauma Willy Wonka breeds in us.  It’s what makes it the perfect gateway weirdness for that treasured tyke in your life.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…never finds an appropriate style; it’s stilted and frenetic, like Prussians at play.”–Pauline Kael, The New Yorker (contemporaneous)

“…captures the spirit of Dahl’s children’s literature, which mixed typically bright and cheery flights of imaginative fantasy with unexpectedly dark and bizarre undertones… the film also reflects a sort of last gasp of ‘60s psychedelia: the bright colors of Wonka’s factory would not be inappropriate on a poster advertising a rock festival, and a scary boat ride through a dark tunnel (complete with flashing lights and horrifying images, like a chicken’s head being chopped off) feels like a bad acid trip… The supporting cast (including veteran character actors Jack Albertson and Roy Kinear) does a nice job of embodying Dahl’s weird caricatures.”–Steve Biodrowski, Cinefastique (DVD)

“For all the wonder of a film, with its bouncy, silly songs, art design in candy colors, and mix of innocence and strangeness, there is also an edge to Gene Wilder’s simultaneously weird and warm eccentricities, like a mix of storybook fantasy and Grimm Fairy tale updated to the industrial world of the twentieth century.”–Sean Axmaker, MSN Movies (DVD)

IMDB LINK: Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Golden Tickets to Hell: Willy Wonka – Tour Guide of the Abyss – Good analysis by science fiction author Lou Anders, pointing out Wonka‘s debt to Dante’s Inferno

Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory Fan Club – There are some fun quizzes, polls and so forth on this FanPop page dedicated to the movie

Willy Wonka’s everlasting film plot – A BBC article on Dahl’s reaction to the adaptation of his book

20 Things You Might Not Know About ‘Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory’ – trivia nuggets about the film courtesy of the moviephone blog

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Dahl’s orginal children’s novel

Pure Imagination: The Making of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory – Director Mel Stuart’s account of the making of the film

I Want it Now! A Memoir of Life on the Set of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory – Memoir by actress Julie Dawn Cole (Veruca Salt)

DVD INFO:  As befits a peculiar movie, Willy Wonka has had an interesting video release history.  Wonka became one of the best-renting titles on VHS, far surpassing the popularity of its original theatrical run.  Today the Wonka fan has a large variety of options to choose from to own the film. In 2005, Warner released a “special edition” DVD containing numerous extras including the original trailer, the featurette “Pure Imagination: The Making of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” (named after director Mel Stuart’s memoir), a photo gallery, four karaoke-style sing along numbers, and commentary by the five grown-up child stars.  The odd thing about the release is that, underestimating the cultiness of the film’s rabid audience, Warner originally planned to release it only in a chopped pan n’ scan full screen version; after a letter writing/e-mail petition, they added a widescreen option.  Though now out of print, both of these DVDs are still widely available and can be purchased at bargain prices (Full Screen/Widescreen).

2011 saw Warner do it right (or go overboard, depending on your viewpoint) with the release of a deluxe 40th Anniversary Ultimate Collector’s Edition Blu-ray/DVD combo set (buy) that includes all the special features of the previous release but adds a new interview with director Mel Stuart and a short original promotional film and comes in a collector’s box with a 144 page (!) book, and even includes a pencil case shaped like a Wonka bar.

If you’re not interested in the knicknacks you can save money and purchase the DVD (buy) or Blu-ray (buy) separately (no word on special features available in these editions).

An even cheaper option is to rent or buy the film through Video-on-Demand (Video on Demand).

(This movie was nominated for review by “MCD,” who reminded us it comes “complete with one of the scariest moments in movie history, the infamous boat ride.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)