“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).

FEATURING: Jacques Tati, Barbara Dennek

PLOT: Monsieur Hulot gets lost on his way to an appointment and wanders around a nearly

unrecognizable, technologically transformed Paris.

WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: Play Time is about the alienating, isolating influence technology has on human beings. It’s not the standard elements of plot, narrative, character development or dialogue that pulls an equally alienated audience into this unfurling drama, but the careful choreography of hapless humans navigating a barely recognizable hypermodern Paris.  Play Time is sort of an anti-Brazil.

COMMENTS: Do you remember when watching “Tom and Jerry” on television, there would occasionally be a cartoon showing off a humorous version of cars or homes of the future? There would be no main character, just a narrator describing some startling innovation, and then there would be a sight-gag or funny noise to produce a laugh, and it would move on to the next futuristic comedic set-piece. Play Time is a feature film based on a very similar premise, with two differences:  there is a strong undertone of humanity and history struggling against technology, and there is no narrator to help guide you from one farcical gag to another.

The main characters are French everyman M. Hulot (Tati) and American tourist Barbara, who wander through the modern marvel that Paris has become and are continually obstructed by the technology that is supposed to make their lives easier. Hulot spends a long scene searching haplessly through a (then bizarre-looking but now surprisingly familiar) cube farm to find a businessman with whom he has an appointment. Barbara struggles to take a picture of something uniquely French, not just because pedestrians keep walking between her and the florist she fancies, but also because huge steel and glass buildings have almost completely obscured romantic Paris (the same city Cole Porter lovingly described in 1953, a mere six years before this film was released). With little meaningful dialogue and a tendency to abandon characters to their fates, it is difficult for the audience to make a coherent narrative out of the stark, gleaming, geometric scenes that linger slowly and deliberately on the screen. Particularly during Play Time‘s first half, the series of clever slapstick events that pepper the film supply the only human connection. They allow us to sympathize not only with Hulot and Barbara, but also with innocent cushions that blurt obscenely when sat upon and a broiled fish that is repeatedly heated, spiced, and basted, never to be served.

If discomfort and silly humor were the only features of Play Time, the result would be just like those “Tom and Jerry” cartoons, only bleaker and more disturbing. Fortunately, Tati allows humanity to win over technology, or at least stand on even footing. The citizens of super-Paris do eventually begin to connect with each other. Some of these connections are obvious: Hulot does eventually find his businessman, but he also bumps into several friends from the army, and he also meets Barbara. Some of the connections, though, are subtle, surprising, and hilarious, as when two families engrossed in programs showing on the television sets fixed to the wall dividing their apartments appear to be reacting to the events in the other family’s home. The movie culminates in a riotous party scene—possibly the best I’ve ever watched—at a restaurant slowly falling apart around the revelers due to shoddy construction. Here, technology does its absolute best to ruin the partygoers’ night, but they hardly notice; or if they do, they improvise on the destruction to the advantage of a good time. Meanwhile, a number of seemingly forgotten incidental characters from earlier in the movie—an obnoxious American, a portly sloven, a precise English businessman—come back and become much more alive and interesting amid the chaos. The movie’s weirdness never goes away, but it softens until it gently lands at the conclusion of 24 hours of hectic hypermodernity.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Hulot on the loose in a surreal, scarcely recognisable Paris… a hallucinatory comic vision on the verge of abstraction.”–Time Out Film Guide

FEATURING: Steven Soderbergh, Betsy Brantley, David Jensen, Mike Malone

PLOT: A series of absurdist sketches and nonsense dialogues linked together by a thin plot

about an office worker struggling with an assignment to write a major speech for a cultlike motivational speaker obviously based on L. Ron Hubbard.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: Hilarious witticism characterizing film’s oddness. Cautious disclaimer suggesting uneven satire undermines enjoyability, but granting nobility of purpose and peculiar appeal. Self-aggrandizing non sequitur.

COMMENTS: After Schizopolis bombed at Cannes, writer/director/star Steven Soderbergh appended a prologue where he stood on a stage and introduced the film. “In the event that you find certain sequences or ideas confusing, please bear in mind that this is your fault, not ours,” he advised. “You will need to see the picture again and again until you understand everything.” We are then thrown into the story of Fletcher Munson, a chronic office masturbator suffering from writer’s block as he attempts to pen a speech for “Eventualism” founder T. Azimuth Switters. A third of the way through the movie he meets (and sort of becomes) his exact double, an amorous dentist named Korchek who happens to be having an affair with Munson’s wife, but Korchek (or is it Munson inhabiting Korchek’s body?) falls in love with Munson’s wife’s doppelgänger, Attractive Woman #2. Then, in the movies final act we see the same scenes replayed from the perspective of Mrs. Munson. Interspersed with all of this are bits involving a pantsless old man running away from a pair of orderlies, news reports suggesting Rhode Island has been sold to a consortium of investors who want to turn it into a shopping mall, and a shot of a sign posted on a tree reading “idea missing.” Oh, and there’s also an exterminator who speaks gibberish and seduces local housewives. What’s there to possibly be confused about? Sorerbergh, who started his career with Sex, Lies and Videotape, the movie that launched the indie filmmaking revolution, made Schziopolis as a palette-cleanser after his big budget flop Underneath left a bad taste in his mouth (a fan cleverly described this as Soderbergh’s “second first film“). Working with his friends on a budget of only $250,000, it’s a loose, breezy, seemingly improvised movie. You can sense the crew cutting loose and having fun making it; in fact, you sense they’re having more fun making it than you’re having watching it, but their enthusiasm is infectious. The main running joke revolves around communication breakdowns between men and women: a husband and wife’s rote pleasantries are rendered with abstract literalism (“generic greeting,” “generic greeting returned!”) and another couple exchange nonsensical double entendres (“nose army… beef diaper?”), while later in the film male characters’ lines are dubbed into untranslated Japanese, Italian and French. The movie never develops an overarching theme, however, and always comes across as a series of sketches. The experience is something like watching a feature film made by a television comedy troupe recycling favorite bits and characters when you never saw the original shows. Sorderbergh, who plays the two main roles, turns out to be a surprisingly competent comic actor, and there are enough ideas thrown out to keep adventurous audiences watching. It’s basically a postmodern goof, light entertainment for smart, weird people; a curious frolic by a director who quickly returned to more conventional material.

Schizopolis, which had trouble landing a distributor and sank like a stone on release, was a surprise pickup for the Criterion Collection. The Criterion edition isn’t as packed with extra material as some of their other releases, but it does contain two separate commentary tracks. The first is a conversation between four cast and crew members which is informative but standard, but the other commentary is a very cool treat. On it, Sorderbergh interviews himself, pretending to be a pretentious auteur with a God complex while simultaneously taking the role of an increasingly exasperated interviewer. In the course of the conversation the fake Sorderbergh divulges his second career writing novels under the pseudonym “Stephen King,” explains how he thinks it will be more interesting for people to hear him talking about his artistic process rather than focusing solely on his influence on other filmmakers, and reveals how he strives to create a comfortable atmosphere on set where people will not be too intimidated to compliment him. He also takes calls on his cell phone while recording the commentary. At one point, he says, “I’m all for free speech and all that s**t, but I don’t think there should be critics. I just don’t think it’s right for people to be able to publish their responses to art, especially great art.” Sorderbergh’s self-parody here is  brave and brilliant, and I can honestly say this is the first comedy I’ve seen where I laughed harder at the DVD commentary than at the movie itself.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a real head-scratcher that so insistently keeps jumping all over the place that it becomes impossible to pinpoint its intent.”–Todd McCarthy, Variety (contemporaneous)

(This movie was first nominated for review by John, who described it as “strangely… funny.” 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.

Island of Lost Souls deviates from the original story (which, predictably, prompted H.G. Wells to voice his disapproval), but the film is simply told.  Like 1932′s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Island  is a pre-Hayes code film, and it shows.  Of course, both films were taken from  literary sources, and that too is apparent.  Lost Souls‘ literacy is due to screenwriter Philip Wylie, who also adapted Wells for James Whale‘s The Invisible Man (1933).  The inimitable Charles Laughton, one of the great classic screen actors, plays Dr. Moreua with a classicist’s relish.  Laughton is one of the major reasons for this film’s success, and as director Kenton shows atypical subtlety. These factors, combined with well-crafted sets and make-up, add up to a striking milieu.

Island is almost an old-dark-house genre film, except that the stranded visitor, Edward Parker (Richard Arlen) ends up in a sort of kinky, contemporary Eden.  God is present in the symbolic persona of Dr. Moreau and although he is the antagonist, he is a three-dimensional one.  He is intelligent, crafty, and that naughty twinkle in the divine eye is ever present.  God is creating again, although this time he’s attempting to correct his previous mistake by making man from the image of Eden’s animals.  Eve (a Wylie addition) appears in the exotic Lota (Kathleen Burke, who notably showed up in the following year’s pre-Code Murders in the Zoo).  Lota, AKA Panther Girl, alternately projects innocence and unbridled sexuality, and she is utilized by Moreau to usher forth a new Adamic age, with Parker as the new Adam.  Of course, in every Eden there’s a rotten apple or two, and here it’s Parker’s abroad girlfriend (Leila Hyams, from Freaks) and the Beast Men, Moreau’s ungrateful children who hold a grudge against their creator for little things like torture, brutality, and vivisection.  The Beast Men are led by the Sayer of the Law (Bela Lugosi, who is well-directed). The Sayer calls the creator out for hypocrisy and original sin.  The Beast Men are well sketched here, which is a sharp contrast to the mere animalistic portraits drawn in subsequent versions.  The finale is natural jolt, so much so that no other celluloid interpretation of the tale can match it.  This lucidly told imaginative spin on Dr. Frankenstein’s Eden still holds up remarkably well.

As for the Criterion treatment, most welcome authoritative commentary is given by historians Gregory Mank and David J. Skall, along with filmmaker Richard Stanley (the original director of the 1997 version, who was replaced by John Frankenheimer).  Stanley offers entertaining, honest insight.  A little less welcome are reflections by John Landis and Devo.  Production stills and the theatrical trailer are excellent supplements.  This is a superb release that is essential for classic film lovers.

DIRECTED BY: Jean Vigo

FEATURING: Delphin, Jean Dasté, Louis Lefebvre, Gilbert Pruchon, Coco Golstein,Gérard de Bédarieux

PLOT: Schoolboys stage a revolt at a French boarding school.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST:  Zéro de conduite is an important historical film.  It founded the boarding school subgenre, creating a template used by Francois Truffaut (The 400 Blows) and more weirdly by Lindsay Anderson (If…)  With its dwarf headmaster, disappearing balls and drawings that come to life, the film is as playful and experimental as a mock rebellion staged by schoolboys before Sunday dinner.  Its mildly surreal oddness nudges the needle on the weirdometer, but, despite its near-legendary status, it’s not thoroughly strange enough to make its way onto the List on the first ballot.

COMMENTS:  Jean Vigo’s extraordinary backstory is almost as fascinating as his films.  The son of an anarchist who died in prison, the auteur left a tiny (about three hours’ worth of film) but extremely impressive body of work before succumbing to tuberculosis, the age-old nemesis of romantic poets, at the age of 29.  Adding to his mythological stature is the possibility that he may have contributed to his own demise by laboring on his final film up until his last moments, instead of getting much needed bed rest; he may have actually worked himself to death, literally giving his life for his art.

By banning Zéro de conduite, the director’s film about an imaginary rebellion in a boys’ boarding school, for thirteen years, the French censors only augmented Vigo’s legend.  From the perspective of patrons who are used to seeing political leaders openly mocked and clitorises graphically snipped off in movie theaters as they munch on popcorn, the idea of a movie with only a single “merde!’ and no violence, fetal rape, human centipedes, or even an obvious political target would be banned for over a decade is almost unimaginable.  The film contains hardly audible whispers of schoolboy homosexuality, but it was suppressed not for these but for its “anti-French spirit” and “praise of indiscipline.”  Vigo’s anarchic, anti-authoritarian philosophy, which pervades the film’s 44 minute running time, was too hot and subversive for 1933 sensibilities.

Today, of course, the movie is notably tame.  In fact, if you’ve been exposed to any of the anti-authority movies made since Vigo’s film, you may go in expecting to see Nurse Ratchet-styled psychological abuse and sadistic cane lashings.  But there isn’t even one blow delivered in Zéro, much less 400.  The student’s major complaints are being awakened early in the morning and served beans meal after meal.  Their teachers aren’t madmen and dictators, but ineffectual buffoons.  The headmaster is a dwarf with a fake beard; far from being an imposing figure, he’s at eye level with the boys he lords over.  The lack of any real oppression and outrage here expresses Vigo’s libertarian philosophy far better than if he had overplayed his hand and identified authority with excessive cruelty.  What the school is guilty of imposing on the children isn’t tyranny, but a dreary, drab, linear conformity: the rows of beds, the marching in lines, the short-pants uniforms.  The boys don’t revolt against a corrupt social order; they rebel against the ridiculous notion of order itself.  It’s the purest ideal of anarchy.

Vigo wasn’t a card-carrying Surrealist, despite being a contemporary of the movement.  He nonetheless relied on a few of the same shocking, reality-busting techniques as the Un Chien Andalou crew.  His philosophical anarchism extends to the movie’s form; Zéro de conduite refuses to be restrained by logic or possibility.  There’s a scatterbrained teacher who breaks into a Charlie Chaplin impersonation during recess; a ball that magically disappears and reappears; and a cartoon sketch of a “Mr. Beanpole” who animates and morphs into Napoleon.  The children’s first revolt is a dreamlike pillow-fight with slow-motion and backwards sequences, scored to eerie music: a wordless anthem accompanied by a back-masked accordion.  (The music for this scene was actually written out first, then inverted and performed by musicians in reverse, then played backwards on the soundtrack to restore the original melody in a distorted form).  The ridiculous headmaster keeps his hat under a glass dome on a mantlepiece that’s too high for him to reach without standing on his tiptoes.  The weirdest touch of all may occur at the final ceremony that the boys disrupt as their climactic act of rebellion: the principal and his honored guests and associates sit in chairs in front of bleachers, watching soldiers performing on pommel horses.  The bourgeois dignitaries arrayed behind them are a row of life-sized dolls.

The seldom-seen Zéro de conduite is one of those films you once read about in musty old reference books (or, these days, on a cached blog entry buried deep in your bookmarks) that turns out to be somewhat underwhelming when you finally see it.  The pacing is creaky, the drama underdeveloped.  The grand revolution the film has been building towards consists of about thirty seconds of the boys throwing coconuts and pots down on the heads of the established order, who meekly depart, stage left, without putting up a fight.  It’s a noteworthy and original work, but had the French not banned the film, I doubt it would carry the legendary reputation it has today.  Censors are the best marketing department a movie can have.  Zéro is worthwhile to see for its historical importance, and it’s a work of art, to be sure; but to my mind, it falls just short of masterpiece status.

While its combination of weirdness and reputation make Zéro de conduite the most significant title for our purposes, it’s not the headliner of the Criterion Collection’s “The Complete Jean Vigo.”  That honor goes to L’Atalante, Vigo’s only full-length feature, a masterpiece of sentimental romance about a barge captain who takes his young wife to live on board his vessel.  While this tale of love and betrayal is a surprisingly conventional work from the anarchistic Vigo, there are two famous impressionistic sequences that have a weird-ish poetry to them.  In one, the captain (Dasté, the sympathetic teacher from Conduit) sees a vision of his wife floating in the muddy depths of the Seine; the other is a wispy, sadly erotic montage of the two lovers writhing in separate beds, connected only by a shadowed polka dot motif.  The Criterion disc also contains Vigo’s only two shorts.  Taris is a profile of a French swimming champion.  It features beautiful underwater photography, but shows little true passion, and feels like work done for hire.  Far more interesting is À propos de Nice, an experimental pseudo-documentary (some scenes are staged for comedic effects) on the vacation city of Nice, filmed partly during a street carnival.  Nice features lots of crazy Dutch angles and pans, strange faces, juxtapositions (a shot of a primping woman is followed by an ostrich), and a healthy interest in sex (dig that upskirt camerawork!)  There are a few sequences that qualify as lightly surrealist: tourists who turn into dolls and are raked along with the chips by a roulette croupier, a man with a politically incorrect case of sunburn, and a surprising nude scene.  Like the rest of the disc, Nice won’t be to most modern tastes; but it’s fascinating because it was made before the rules were laid down, by a director making up a visual language as he went along.  It’s novel and enthusiastic enough to catch the interest of anyone serious about cinema.  Vigo scholar Michael Temple provides commentary on each film in the set.  A second disc is full of interviews and documentaries about Vigo, and also contains a (very short) animated tribute by fellow filmmaker Michel Gondry.

Zéro de conduite is in the public domain and may be viewed or downloaded at the Internet Archive, among other venues.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a series of vignettes lampooning the faculty climaxed by a weird, dream-like rebellion of the entire student body. These amorphous scenes, strung together by a vague continuity may be art but they are also pretty chaotic.”–A.H. Weiler, The New York Times (1947 re-release)

Comparisons to Dickens are apt, but Sjostrom’s film casts an even more complex and lugubrious milieu.  The movie is based on Selma Lagerlof’s novel “Korlarlen” and, in contrast to the expressionism popular during the period, Sjostrom opts for a naturalistic setting.  While The Phantom Carriage does not take the easy route of escapist fantasy for adolescent boys, that does not mean it is lacking in intensity.  One scene clearly seeded Stanley Kubrick‘s idea for Jack Torrance in the unsettling “Here’s Johnny” scene from The Shining (1980) .

The cinematography, by Julius Jaenzon, is exquisitely haunting.  Jaenzon’s use of double exposure in the ghostly carriage holds up impressively for a 90 year old film.  The Phantom Carriage was released the same year as Charlie Chaplin‘s groundbreaking The Kid.  Both films are, rightly, considered spiritually progressive, humanist films of the silent era.  However, Sjostrom’s film does not fall into the maudlin sentiment that occasionally mars Chaplin’s premiere feature.

Along with Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, The Phantom Carriage is one of the most important releases of the year.  Sjostrom’s influential classic is also among the most long-awaited Criterion releases of early cinema.

DIRECTED BY: Ingmar Bergman

FEATURING: Max von Sydow, Gunnar Björnstrand, Nils Poppe, Bengt Ekerot, Bibi Andersson

PLOT:  A disillusioned knight and his cynical squire return to a 14th century Sweden ravaged

by the Black Plague; Death comes for the knight, but he entices the Reaper to play a game of chess for his soul.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST:  The Seventh Seal is undoubtedly a great movie, but its weirdness is in doubt.  In fact, trying to decide if this film is strange enough to make it on the List almost makes me feel like Antonius Block wondering if there’s a God out there.  As an existential allegory, the film has a significant amount of unreality in its corner; although much of the movie is a starkly realistic portrait of medieval life, Bergman often ignores logic in minor ways when necessary to make his larger metaphorical points.  He also incorporates the fantastic in one major way, by making Death a literal character in the film, a “living, breathing” character who not only plays chess but also poses as a priest and chops down a tree with his scythe.  That’s not much weirdness to go on, though, and the best external support I can find for considering the movie “weird” is the fact that it’s been (inaccurately) tagged with “surrealism” on IMDB.   I’m torn; the weird movie community will need to chime in on this one.

COMMENTS: The Seventh Seal has a big, imposing reputation as a masterpiece of world cinema, but if you haven’t seen it yet, you may be surprised to find that most of what you think you know about it is wrong.  In the first place, it’s not nearly as gloomy as you may have heard.  True, every frame of the film is suffused with the foreknowledge of death—Bergman is very in-your-face with his message that you are going to die, and it’s going to be horrible—but the grim scenes alternate with lighthearted, comic ones.  The entire dynamic between the drunken smith Plog, and his unfaithful wife Maria, and her unlucky paramour Scat, for example, has a tone of bawdy Shakespearean comedy.  The idyllic scenes where the knight enjoys a meal of milk and wild strawberries with the juggler Jof and his family have a warmth that temporarily drives away the chill—even though there is a skull peering over the picnickers’ shoulders.  The movie is also not as challenging or enigmatic as you may have been led to believe.  While Seal is an allegory, it’s not exactly an obscure one: you don’t need to scratch your head and try to figure out which character represents death.  It’s the guy in the black robes with the skull face who says, “I am Death.”  Characters have deep thoughts about the meaning of life, but they don’t hide them under layers of poetic obfuscation: they say exactly what they think (in fact, they say what we all sometimes think, but are afraid to say out loud).  One final thing that may surprise you is that, despite the fact that the knight’s chess game with Death makes a powerful plot hook, Max von Sydow‘s troubled paladin doesn’t dominate the film.  The Seventh Seal is a true ensemble piece, full of episodes and subplots that simultaneously evoke a believable medieval milieu and give each cast member a moment to shine.  There’s Bergman’s recreation of what a Dark Ages variety show might have looked like, an amazing pageant of flagellants, and a minor villain who threads his way in and out of the story and gets his comeuppance. Von Sydow’s performance is actually a bit theatrical, and the best thing about it is the way at a mere twenty-six years of age he projects a much older figure, one who’s been crushed by the weight of the world. As the earthy squire, Gunnar Björnstrand, a calmly atheistic counterpoint to von Sydow’s tormented agnostic, makes a bigger impression.  He’s more nuanced than the one-note knight, capable of singing a bawdy song one moment and rescuing a damsel in distress the other, and we suspect that Bergman admires the squire’s unflinching defiance of death and refusal to grasp at existential straws (even when he’s about to fall into the void, he exults that he is still able to roll his eyes and wiggle his toes).  One thing about the film that doesn’t belie its reputation, of course, is the imagery.  Gunnar Fischer’s cinematography, with its many subtly unnatural lighting schemes, is a triumph.  The bookend images of Death playing chess, then leading his new conquests on a macabre dance on a hillside by a fjord, burn themselves into your mind’s eye and endure through the ages.  There’s a reason they’ve been parodied in everything from Woody Allen’s Love and Death to Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey, and it’s not because they’re risible or easily forgotten.

The Criterion Collection 2-disc DVD contains all the usual bells and whistles plus a bonus feature, the documentary Bergman Island, an 83 minute series of interviews with the venerable director shot after his retirement to the remote island of Fårö.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The actor’s faces, the aura of magic, the ambiguities, and the riddle at the heart of the film all contribute to it stature.”–Pauline Kael, The New Yorker

(This movie was nominated for review by “Nightingail,” who said, “it’s on a lot of critics’ lists as one of the greatest movies of all time, but it’s also wonderfully weird, I think :-)” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

DIRECTED BY: Andrei Tarkovsky

FEATURING: Donatas Banionis, Natalya Bondarchuk, Jüri Järvet, Anatoli Solonitsyn

PLOT:  In the indefinite future, mankind has set up a space station orbiting Solaris, a mysterious planet covered by an ocean that exhibits signs of consciousness.  Several of the crew members studying the planet demonstrate eccentric behavior and possible signs of mental illness, and psychologist Kris Kelvin is sent to the station to evaluate them and decide whether the program studying Solaris must be scrapped.  On board the satellite Kelvin discovers an incarnation of his wife, who has been dead for seven years, and falls in love with the hallucination.

BACKGROUND:

• For information on director Tarkovsky, see the background section of the entry for Nostalghia.
• Solaris was based on a 1961 novel by Polish science fiction author Stanislaw Lem.  Tarkovsky’s version was actually the second adaptation; the story had been filmed previously by Boris Nirenburg for Soviet television.  Steven Soderberg created an American version in 2002 starring George Clooney; it was a modest success with critics, but a commercial flop.
• Solaris won the Special Jury Prize (the second most prestigious award) at Cannes; the Palme d’or was shared by two realistic, political Italian films (The Working Class Goes to Heaven and The Mattei Affair) that are now almost forgotten.
• Although commentators frequently claim that Solaris was created as a reaction to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, cinematographer Vadim Yusov says that the director had not seen the 1968 space epic until filming had already begun.  We can safely assume, however, that Soviet authorities were aware of the film, likely viewed it as propaganda for the American space program, and were more than happy to finance a 2001 response with cosmonauts as the cosmic heroes.
• Tarkovsky liked Natalya Bondarchuk’s initial audition for the role of Hari, but thought she was too young for the role (she was only 17 at the time).  He recommended her to another director for a different part and continued casting.  A year later Bondarchuk had completed her movie, Tarkovsky still had not cast Hari, and she still wanted the role.  The director was impressed enough with her work and persistence to relent, ignore the age difference between  her and leading man Donatas Banionis, and make her his Hari.  Later Tarkovsky would comment in his diary that Bondarchuk’s performance “outshone them all.”
• The weird seascapes of Solaris’ surface were created in the studio using an acetone solution, aluminum powder, and dye.
• American reviewers gave Solaris largely negative reviews on its Stateside release in 1976; in their defense, however, the version then screened here was badly dubbed and had a half-hour cut from the running time.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: During thirty seconds of scheduled weightlessness, Kris and Hari slowly rise in the air.  A chandelier tinkles, a slow Bach organ chorale plays, and a lit candelabrum and open books float past them as they embrace.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Though Solaris is far from Tarkovsky’s weirdest movie—in fact, it

Original Russian trailer for Solaris (1972)

may be his most accessible—any movie in which a cosmonaut falls in love with an avatar of his dead wife that’s been created from his memories by an intelligent planet starts off on an oddish note.  When Tarkovsky points his dreamy camera at this scenario and applies his typically hypnotic and obliquely philosophical style, the weird notes push to the forefront.  The currents rippling in psychologist Kris Kelvin’s troubled subconscious turn out to be as mesmerizing as the ultramarine undulations of the surface of Solaris itself.

COMMENTS: Thirty minutes into Solaris Burton, a minor character, takes an almost five minute, silent, monochrome drive through the “city of the future” (actually contemporary Tokyo, which looked alien and advanced to Soviet audiences in 1972).  He’s just returned from trying, and failing, to convince Kris Kelvin—the psychologist who will be traveling to the space station orbiting Solaris to assess whether the “Solaristics” project should be shut down—that the planet is self-aware and that we as a species must continue to try to contact it.  The camera focuses on his worried face, shot in blue-tinted monochrome, as he speeds through the “futuristic” city with its tunnels, elevated highways and cloverleafs.  In the background is nothing but ambient highway noise, but as the trip continues, weird electronic acoustics creep into the sound mix.  As his car accelerates the pitch is manipulated, and sounds of unidentified whirring machinery blend with the increasing traffic noise.  Slowly, the alien sounds invade the mix as the audio environment grows more random, anxious and abrasive, until the scene snaps to a close and the action cuts to a silent pond.

I begin a review of Solaris with a description of this scene because it’s indicative of what the average person hates about a Tarkovsky film: the slow, slow pace, the director’s insistence on including long, challenging scenes where it appears that nothing whatsoever is happening (compare the scene where the tree principals sit quietly before the pool in Stalker, or the scholar’s nine-minute attempt to carry a lit candle across a drained pool in Nostalghia).  The point of Solaris‘ long driving scene mystifies even the film’s defenders.  There are theories that the director insisted on footage as necessary in a post-production attempt to justify the budgetary expense of sending a film crew to Japan.  The less charitable propose that the scene is Tarkovsky’s deliberate, anti-entertainment attempt to alienate the audience, to separate the wheat from the chaff and drive impatient patrons out of the theater.

Personally, I doubt both interpretations of the driving scene.  I suspect that, to Tarkovsky, it simply wasn’t that strange of an idea to focus on a single pensive face for four minutes in order to impress a mood of dreamy disquiet.  Did he even comprehend what an audience might have to complain of, when they had ample stimulation in the form of Eduard Artemyev’s sublime ambient electronic experiments humming quietly in the background?  This director thought on a different, more contemplative plane than other filmmakers.  To watch a Tarkovsky movie is to be slowly absorbed into the director’s ponderous dreams, until his subconscious almost imperceptibly becomes your waking reality.

This is not to say that Tarkovsky’s indifference to normal human pacing is unequivocally a good thing.  Solaris suffers from its slow prologue set on Earth.  Little crucial information is divulged during this long introduction, and what clues we do receive are told us in lectures rather than shown to us.  In archival film footage, a younger Burton describes his encounter with the hallucinatory consciousness of Solaris; he flies his craft through a thick colloidal fog cloaking the planet’s surface, and sees a giant naked baby rising from the ocean surface.  Tarkovsky’s budget obviously wouldn’t have allowed him to paint this mysterious vision in any convincing way; still, with the action being conveyed via dialogue we (as non-Russian speakers) are reading on the screen, Solaris seems much like a filmed novel, rather than a movie.  We get more background information on Solaris via a documentary glimpsed on TV, and the long Earthbound sequence, which gives us information that probably could have been conveyed in twenty minutes rather than forty, finally ends with that maddening driving sequence.  But fortunately better, and stranger, times are coming for the viewer, as the action and sense of mystery picks up significantly once Kris lands on the Solaris space station.

When Kris arrives, the sense that he has left Earth’s reality far behind is immediate.  He’s not greeted on arrival, but must wander through the ship’s curved halls alone looking for the crew.  When he discovers the scientist Snaut, the doctor is nervous and elliptical, explaining to Kris that only he and a Dr. Sartorius are left alive but, oddly, warning him not to react too rashly if he sees other figures roaming the station’s corridors.  Sartorius is even less helpful, only willing to speak to Kris through a cracked door—through which a dwarf escapes, only to be swiftly scooped up by the scientist and stuffed back into the room.  Kris then sees a woman in a blue nightgown walking through the ship, though he cannot catch sight of her face; she leads him to the corpse of one of the crewmembers.

Things definitely get weird from this point on, although there is always a “logical” sci-fi explanation for the strangeness—the hallucinatory interludes result from the interfacing of human minds with the consciousness of the planet Solaris, which overlaps the ship like a cloud.  After his disturbing welcome to the space station, Kris retreats to his room and barricades the door with footlockers.  He watches a black and white videotape left by one of the scientists, but Kris’ own reality is now monochrome, just like the video he is watching.  Black and white film stock is often used in color films to denote either memories, flashbacks or dreams, and Tarkovsky follows this convention in his other films.  Here, the sudden introduction of black and white in “reality” suggests that the line between the dream world and the waking world is breaking down.  Indeed, our expectations are subverted when Kris falls asleep and awakens in color: our expectations have been frustrated.  Are we now back in reality, or in a dream?  Complicating matters is the fact that there is now a beautiful young woman in the room, who walks over to Kris’ bed and kisses him; sleepily, he treats this event as if it’s the most natural thing in the world, but then he rises from his bed with a worried look on his face.  He reaches for a gun that’s lying near the apparition’s foot, but she kicks it away as he brushes her heel, saying “that tickles!”  Wandering the room, she discovers a picture of herself among his belongings and asks, “who’s this?”  She appears jealous.  Warily, he tells her he’s going out, but she protests that she can’t bear to be separated from him even for an instant.  He tells her that she can accompany him but she must put on a spacesuit and he tells her to undress.  She asks him to help her and he approaches to undo her dress, only to discover the frock has laces and threads, but no seam.  As he’s cutting her out of the clothes with scissors, he sees the sleeve of her dress is torn and there’s a puncture mark on her arm.

The relationship between Kris and this young woman—soon revealed to be a convincing replica of his dead wife, Hari, created by the planet below, for reasons unknown—becomes the core of the movie.  Hari is an illusion, a hallucination, but a convincing one, and an illusion who is completely devoted to, and dependent on, Kris.  Real or not, she arouses memories and longings in Kris both beautiful and painful.  Their burgeoning romance is even more complicated than a real life affair, for Hari carries metaphysical as well as emotional baggage.  She acts human, but we know she has been created by Solaris.  How human is she?  Is Kris falling in love with a memory, an illusion, a wisp?  Or, since she reacts like a real woman, since she appears to be a self-aware being craving love and acceptance, is it cruel to treat her as something less than human?  Things become even more complicated when the simulated Hari, herself, begins to understand what she is.  She paradoxically becomes more human to us when she begins to grasp and question her own existence.  Yet, there is a tragic fairy tale quality about her doomed love for Kris which echoes myths and folktales of spirits, ghosts and mermaids falling in love with human men.

Kris’ adventures on the satellite grow increasingly feverish as the film goes on; he begins to hallucinate about his mother, whose identity is confused with the similarly dressed Hari.  However strange things get for Kris, however, the central enigma of the movie remains Solaris itself.  What is this planet that seems to be alive, and how and why does it read the minds of those who study it and recreate figures from their past?  Who are the dwarfs that peripherally plague Sartorius? Is Solaris, that blue boiling ocean under a yellow sky, tormenting the cosmonauts, attempting to please them, or just experimenting on them in an attempt to understand them?  Its powers to create realistic, but flawed, homonculi are nearly omnipotent, almost godlike; and the film’s ambiguous ending implies it has even greater abilities, and perhaps even bears some love for humanity.  Is the planet Solaris, for Tarkovsky, an image of the God he was strictly forbidden to mention in film due to the Soviet state’s official materialism?  By making a science fiction picture, is he attempting an end-around on the ban on spirituality, by cloaking it as speculation on the nature of nearly omniscient alien lifeforms?  Tarkovsky’s films exhibit an odd, obscure and indirect mysticism, one that is more concerned with mystery, ambiguity and wonder than with clear answers or dogma.  He would push the obsessions begun in Solaris even further in Stalker, Solaris‘ weirder cousin, a fable about a journey to a strange room that can grant a man’s deepest wish.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a strange, slow but absorbing parable on life and love in the guise of a sci-fi theme…”–Variety (contemporaneous)

“Promising as all this may sound, it becomes apparent after the first few moments that the movie is going to remain stubbornly earthbound. The effects are scanty, the drama gloomy, the philosophy of the film thick as a cloud of ozone.”–Jack Cocks, Time (contemporaneous)

“…Tarkovsky’s eerie mystic parable is given substance by the filmmaker’s boldly original grasp of film language and the remarkable performances by all the principals.”–Jonathan Rosenbaum, The Chicago Reader (DVD)

OFFICIAL SITE:

Solaris (1972) – The Criterion Collection – Features two clips from Solaris, as well as Phillip Lopate’s liner notes for the Criterion release and news snippets about the movie

IMDB LINK: Solaris (1972)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Andrei Tarkovsky on Solaris, Lem, Fellini, and Polanski – 1973 interview with Tarkovsky about the movie.  Many other Solaris tidbits can be found on nostalghia.com, an academic Tarkovsky fan site, though the wealth of articles on the director are not yet organized by movie

The Great Movies: Solaris – Roger Ebert’s essay on Solaris for his “Great Movies” series

Solaris – Information on the original novel from Stanislaw Lem’s official site

DVD INFO: The Criterion Collection DVD (buy) and Blu-ray (buy) releases contain exactly the same features. Criterion originally released a Solaris DVD in 2002.  In 2011 they released a Blu-ray that corrected an error in their original transfer: certain scenes that Tarkovsky had originally intended to be shown tinted blue had been presented in black and white instead. They simultaneously reissued a corrected version of the DVD, with the proper tinting restored.  Other than that change, the updated version is identical to the 2002 release, including the commentary track provided by Tarkovsky scholars Vida Johnson and Graham Petrie (coauthors of “The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky: A Visual Fugue”).  Their reflections are enormously informative, but stiff—the pair sound like they’re reading passages from their book rather than spontaneously commenting on the action unfolding on screen.

On DVD extra features are hosted on a separate disc.  They include nine deleted or alternate scenes; a touching interview with star Natalya Bondarchuk; insightful conversations with cinematographer Vadim Yusov, art director Mikhail Romadin, and composer Eduard Artemyev; and an excerpt from a documentary about novelist Stanislaw Lem wherein the writer discusses his creative differences with the director.  Altogether, the supplementary materials run almost two hours.  The accompanying booklet contains an essay by Phillip Lopate and a Tarkovsky appreciation by no less an authority than Akira Kurosawa, who was touring the Mosfilm studios when Solaris was being made.

(This movie was nominated for review by reader “236 Design.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

FEATURING: Catherine Demongeot, Phillipe Noiret, Vittorio Caprioli, Carla Marlier, Annie Fratellini, Yvonne Clech, Antoine Roblot, Jacques Dufilho, Hubert Deschamps

PLOT: Young Zazie goes to Paris and stays with her exotic dancer uncle; the only thing she

wants to see is the Metro, but the workers are on strike, so she explores the city instead.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: It might make the List thanks to its insane, anarchic soul. A minor character casually kills a waiter by firing a woman’s high-heeled shoe at him, and a parrot transforms into a dog when it’s sprayed with seltzer water; something of this sort happens in just about every detail-packed frame of the film.  Zazie’s transvestite uncle proclaims the film’s manifesto: “All Paris is a dream, Zazie is a reverie, and all this is a reverie within a dream…”

COMMENTS: Raymond Queneau’s 1959 comic novel “Zazie dans le Metro” was a surprise sensation in France; with its wordplay, neologisms and nonsense passages, it earned the author comparisons to a French James Joyce.  When Louis Malle decided to adapt it, he wanted to fracture the language of film in the same way that Queneau twisted words.  Malle used a constant barrage of editing and camera tricks as his main strategy for achieving this goal: speeding up and slowing down the film (sometimes within the same shot), having people unexpectedly pop into and out of the frame, and using rear projection effects and tricks of perspective.  There’s a shot where Zazie’s uncle talks to her as she sits on his right, and then the camera seamlessly swings around to show her now seated on his left; in another bit, one speaker in a conversation inexplicably appears in blackface in a reaction shot lasting under a second.  These editing pranks fit perfectly with the movie’s absurd scenarios: this is a film where the protagonists climb the Eiffel Tower and find a sea captain and a shivering polar bear at the top.  As she wanders about Paris, Zazie encounters a strange cast of characters, starting with her uncle (an artiste who dances in drag) and his wife Albertine (who has a mysterious power to hypnotize men with her beauty), and eventually including a dirty old man, an amorous widow with white and lavender hair, a parrot (who complains about the other characters’ yakking) and the aforementioned polar bear, among other eccentric denizens of Paris (the city is virtually a character itself).  Zazie almost has the form of a satire on 1960 Parisians, but it doesn’t work that way, because the outsider—the little tomboy from the provinces—is actually nastier than the adults she torments.  She has a foul mouth (by 1960 standards) and a habit of kicking her elders in the shin or tossing lit bombs at them; she’s inherently sadistic, and wants to grow up to be a teacher so she can torment France’s future brats: “I’ll make ‘em eat chalk!  Jab compasses in their rear!”  In the context of the film—a child’s dream of the big city—Zazie still emerges as a likable ancestor of Bart Simpson, a prankster whose job it is to destabilize an already crazy world.  One facet of Zazie that may mildly disturb modern American viewers is the film’s attitude toward childhood sexuality.  Ten year-old Zazie’s curiosity about sex is mostly charming: she wonders what a “hormossexual” is, and brags about being a woman already.  But there are darker undercurrents.  She’s stalked by a pervert from the Humbert Humbert school, who butters her up by buying her blue jeans; over a lunch of fries and mussels she frightens him with a tale of how her mother buried a hatchet in her father’s head, and got off scot-free.  This strand of the tale doesn’t exactly come off as wholesome family entertainment, but it is surprising how innocent Malle manages to make it; from the freewheeling, slapstick tone of the film, we realize that no harm can come to Zazie.  This “disturbing” scene is followed by an extended chase that plays like nothing so much as a live-action Bugs Bunny cartoon.  In true slapstick tradition, Zazie climaxes with a pie-fight; true to its own off-center style, the “pies” are actually plates of spaghetti with sausages on top.  Malle may have attempted to “fracture” contemporary cinema with this comedy, but what  he ends up fashioning isn’t so much revolutionary as reactionary.  The camera tricks he uses hearken back to the earliest days of cinema, when every film was an experimental film; the comedy routines are in the tradition of vaudevillians like Charlie Chaplin (an avowed Zazie fan) and Buster Keaton, mixed with the anarchy of 1941′s mad musical Hellzapoppin’ (an explicit influence).  Thank goodness the Metro was closed during the story, because courtesy of Queneau and Malle, Zazie takes a much wilder ride above ground.

Though a cult hit in France, Zazie was all but forgotten in the rest of the world.  The Criterion Collection rescues it from obscurity with the usual top-notch transfer and collection of extras including contemporaneous interviews with Queneau, Malle, and a shy Catherine Demongeot and her parents, as well as reflections by screenwriter Jean-Paul Rappeneau, art director William Klein, and the mini-documentary Le Paris de Zazie.  Criterion issued Zazie as a companion piece to Malle’s other excursion into weirdness, Black Moon (1975), released on the same day.  Both films feature young female protagonists who don’t fully understand the absurd adult sexual world.  Compared to Black Moon, Zazie is less weird, less dark, and (I think) a lot more entertaining to watch.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“To Americans, Zazie seemed to go too far—to be almost demonic in its inventiveness, like a joke that gets so complicated you can’t time your laughs comfortably… some critics have suggested that for Americans this comedy sets off some kind of freakish, fantastic anxiety.”–Pauline Kael, The New Yorker