FEATURING: Pavla Marsálková, Milos Ctrnacty, Frantisek Havel, Josefa Pechlatová, Václav Zák, Vera Mrázkova, Vladimír Boudník, Alzbeta Lastovková, Dana Valtová, Ivan Vyskocil

PLOT: Short adaptations of five stories from Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal: racing enthusiasts

are obsessed with crashes, two old men in a nursing home reminisce, functionaries try to sell insurance to a mad artist, a man who may be a killer meets a bride in a restaurant, and a timid apprentice plumber falls for a fiery teenage Gypsy girl.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Only two of the five segments in this anthology are significantly bizarre, and a paltry 40% weird rate is not going to get your omnibus movie onto the List.

COMMENTS: The Czech New Wave was part of a fascinating period of creativity that resulted from an unprecedented liberalization of film and literature in Communist Czechoslovakia in the 1960s; the movement brought the world the novels of Milan Kundera and the films of director Milos Forman. During this time writers and filmmakers often turned towards surrealism as a way to implicitly critique the absurdity of the totalitarian status quo while maintaining deniability about their political aims (after all, they were merely writing obscure nonsense fiction in the tradition pioneered by national icon Franz Kafka). The New Wave essentially ended in 1968 when, concerned that the rapid pace of democratization might lead Czechoslovakia to exit the Warsaw Pact, the Soviet Union invaded the country and installed a hard-line regime. Based on short stories by New Wave writer Bohumil Hrabal and featuring entries from five of the top directors of the New Wave, Pearls of the Deep is a sort of sampler of this moment in history when Iron Curtain artists briefly wiggled out of the shackles that had bound them to an ideological wall for decades.

In the wild, you have to open a lot of oysters to find a single pearl; something similar is true of feature length anthology of short films, where the entries have an inevitable tendency to average out. Although even Hrabal’s straightest stories contain small doses of absurdism (which show up in non sequitur dialogues or little narrative oddities), only two of these adaptations have conceits baroque enough to form surrealistic pearls. Since our focus is on weird films, we’re going to briefly open and reject three out of these five New Wave oysters before looking more carefully at the two more peculiar specimens.

The first selection, Jirí Menzel’s talky “Mr. Baltazar’s Death” involves three death-obsessed fans who go to a motorcycle race hoping to see a fatality; they do. It’s a strange choice for an opener, since it’s both a bit boring and the only film not from an established director (Menzel was still a film student at the time). In Jan Nemec’s “The Impostors,” two elderly men reminisce about their careers; it ends with an easily guessed twist that isn’t worth the wait. This is the worst and most pointless of the short films, giving no hint of Nemec’s talent. One of Pearls‘ flaws is that the two segments which start the film are the least interesting installments, but at least the final entry, Jaromil (Valerie and Her Week of Wonders) Jires’ “Romance,” is one of the strongest. It compresses a strange romance between a teenage peasant and a young plumber—a relationship that morphs from flirtation into prostitution into an engagement as the manic Gypsy dream girl changes her moods and motives—into a matter of hours. The unreality of this scenario, combined with the fact that the tale ends inconclusively with a surprise shot of a gypsy boy tinkling towards the audience, makes it a borderline weird film experience, but even the most dogmatic cinematic realists will appreciate the genuine chemistry between the two young leads. The unknown Dana Valtová (like most of the actors here, this is her only known role) oozes exotic sex; her seduction of the Czech lad seems not so much easy as inevitable. It doesn’t matter how crazy she acts, she has him from the first moment he glances at her, and she knows it.

The two weirdest pearls are sandwiched in the middle of the film. Centered around a crazy artist who is painting pictures over every inch of his abode (even the windowpanes), Evald Schorm’s “The House of Joy” is the anthology’s least subtle entry, and the only film shot in color. Two Communist functionaries try to sell the obviously deranged painter unnecessary insurance policies; it’s a broad and strange comedy, with aggressively dissonant blasts from a pipe organ deployed at odd points like absurdist punctuation marks. As the artist reveals more and more eccentricities, one of the agents becomes fascinated and repeatedly asks him where he gets his ideas (“it’s inside me, like the inside of a goat” is the clearest answer), while his partner presses ahead with his hard-sell sales pitch. We meet an unexpected muse, and are treated to scenes illustrating the painter’s mad inner life: he dances with a knife in a field of livestock, erects a sheet-metal crucified Jesus at a crossroads in a double-time flashback, and a dream of a line of prepubescent girls waiting to take communion inspires his latest work. It’s a strange, chuckle-inspiring sketch with the take-home message “some things should be left as they are.”

Even weirder is Vera (Daisies) Chytilová’s offering, “Automat Svet” (translated as “The Restaurant the World”). It’s the only pure surrealist segment; it’s also the favorite of many critics, thanks to some remarkable slow-motion black and white photography. The dreamlike plot defies rational explanation, but it involves the discovery of a corpse in a restaurant/bar that forces the patrons out into the rainy city streets. The sounds of revelers singing polkas at a wedding party next door seep into the depressingly empty saloon. A few favored customers are allowed in for a glass of beer while crowds outside wait patiently at the window to be let back in. One of the inner circle is a factory worker/artist who makes industrial engravings with tools and dies, and also crafts death masks for his friends to cheer them up; he tells a involved, wandering tale about his lost fiancée.  The police arrive and then, soaked with rain, the bride from the party next door somehow enters the automat through the locked door, angrily fills her shoe with water from the faucet, and takes a drink from it. It is revealed that her groom was arrested for punching one of the cops in the eye; she’s horny on her wedding night, so she picks up the artist (who likes her because her hair “looks like it was cut at a juvenile detention facility”). In slow motion the newly-minted couple dances away into the rainy street, with the bride’s gown and massive veil billowing magically in the wind. Among other lingering mysteries, we’re left to wonder if the corpse of the woman found in the automat is the artist’s missing fiancée…

Pearls of the Deep is the structural center of the Criterion Collection’s 2012 Eclipse series box set “Pearls of the Czech New Wave.” The compilation contains one feature length effort from each of Pearls’ contributors, for a total of six movies (on four DVDs). Two of the features, Nemec’s unsettling A Report on the Party and the Guests and Chytilová’s psychedelic Daisies, are significantly weird enough to merit separate reviews in upcoming weeks. The other three pieces, in increasing order of interest, are Schorm’s Return of the Prodigal Son (1967) (a bleak drama about a suicidal man that owes a little too much to Western influences like Antonioni and Godard); Menzel’s Capricious Summer (1967) (a chaste Czech sex comedy); and Jires’ The Joke (about an apolitical college student who is sentenced to six years hard labor for writing “long live Trotsky” as a joke on a postcard). The Joke, which only played for a few weeks in the Prague spring of 1968, is likely the most anti-Communist movie ever produced in a Communist country. It was immediately banned after the Soviet invasion; it is a small miracle that this film even exists.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…fascinating omnibus film… based on semi-surrealist tales by national literary lion Bohumil Hrabal… the films look totalitarian life square in the eye, but they’re also living testaments to the era’s lovable, grungy Euro-slacker esprit.”–Michael Atkinson, The Village Voice (DVD)

FEATURING:  Michelle Williams, Bruce Greenwood, Will Patton, Zoe Kazan, Paul Dano, Shirley Henderson

PLOT: A small group of settlers faces an indefinite fate when they gamble their survival on the

veracity of two diametrically opposed guides, each of questionable character.

WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: On its face, Meek’s Cutoff appears to be a steady, plodding historical-fiction drama, a slow, tense tale about the perils of trust and the tedium of uncertainty. And it is…to an extent. But there’s something going on under the surface. When the film refuses to relinquish it’s heavy, solemn tone by employing a musical score or comic relief as the unrelentingly grim and heavy nature of the characters’ conundrum intensifies and hangs on our conscience like dead weight, and as the subtly surreal nature of the setting and the situation sinks in, the weirdness mounts. The effect combines the absurdist, futile tedium of Beckett’s Waiting For Godot, the eerie sense of a malignant grand design of Yellowbrickroad (2010), and the pensive, serenely surreal atmosphere of Housekeeping (1987). The result is unique and unsettling.

The sudden, quietly shocking ending and the location in the story in which it occurs appalls the viewer with a sickening insight. This epiphany reveals that the movie is not about the drama which has been unfolding up to this point, or about how it is to be resolved, but that it concerns something entirely different. Upon grasping the filmmakers’ message, we realize we have had a genuinely weird viewing experience.

COMMENTS: From the first frame, it’s obvious that Meek’s Cutoff is a serious, authentic, carefully crafted story. As is the case with so many independent art films, a majority of viewers may reject it. Audiences who are pining for a reprise of Clint Eastwood’s Pale Rider should skip Meek’s Cutoff and instead opt for something like True Grit. They will find Meek’s Cutoff  boring, and it’s climax confusing, unsatisfying and disturbing.

Viewers who enjoy artfully cerebral movies with ambiguous conclusions however, will like Meek’s Cutoff. The clever ending dramatically drives home the thrust of the film, revealing it to be much more than just a Western genre pic.

In Meek’s Cutoff, three families split away from a larger wagon train to follow a shady rogue scout named Stephen Meek. Meek promises them a quicker, safer route over the Cascades to Western Oregon. Once past the point of no return, Meek reveals himself to be unorthodox, incompetent, and possibly insane.

Vain, full of colorful, sophomoric bravado, nursing a penchant for savage violence, Meek gets the settlers completely and utterly lost on an endless, wasted plain. Desperate, running out of water, and coping with numerous potentially life threatening hardships, the pioneers form an uneasy alliance with a captured Cayuse brave.

Offering rewards, the settlers clamor to entice the warrior to lead them to water, squaring off with an inflamed Meek in the process. Meek tries to kill the Indian, claiming the Indian nearly precipitated a massacre when attempting to report the settlers’ presence to his tribe. The settlers suspect Meek is crazy. Has he been contracted by the Hudson Bay Company to deliberately maroon them in favor of French emigrants? Has the Cayuse tribesman been signaling to trailing warriors bent on overtaking the small wagon train? The homesteaders are split as to whom they can trust.

The three families find themselves at the mercy of two antagonists locked in mutual animosity. Will one man save them, or will both men damn them?

Eastern Oregon’s stark, high desert scrub wastes accent striking cinematography in this quietly tense, plodding, surreal story about faith versus uncertainty. Jeff Grace’s haunting, dreamlike score, combined with the alien setting, gives Meek’s Cutoff the feeling of an odyssey. Rather than shot, the picture seems almost engraved into the blanched, weathered rock and parched loam of the blasted landscape.

The desolate geography, at once romantic and forlorn, forms not only the backdrop for the action, but the backbone of the plot. It brandishes a chilling openness, contradicted by a claustrophobia achieved by the way its hills and dales obfuscate any possible sign of deliverance at the horizon. Recalcitrant, unforgiving, the desert is in collusion with the homesteaders’ nemeses, channeling the settlers to a vague and ambiguous fate. Trekking across an alien, vacuous landscape, the emigrants are like cosmic explorers; like spacewalkers attached to their capsules by an oxygen lifeline, the homesteaders are tethered to their Conestogas by the umbilical reins of their oxen. In this way, the harsh countryside is itself an antagonist, incipiently complicit with the story’s provocateurs.

Time seems to stand still during the families’ sojourn upon the featureless terrain. Progress is measured by reaching a horizon that only reveals yet another one beyond it. The significance of the settlers’ destination becomes subordinated to the minutiae of the routine actions and regimentation of the journey itself.

The minutiae are the journey, and the journey is the story. Repetitive tasks have a grounding effect, providing a measure of the day and a way to combat the disorientation of the wide open plain. Despite the expansiveness of the sky above, however, the travelers’ situation is often claustrophobic: dips, dales, and buttes obscure the view of their surroundings. It seems they are always looking up to the rim of a basin instead of out to the horizon. Long hooded bonnets and wagon covers become blinders.

Meek’s Cutoff can be reminiscent of Beckett’s Waiting For Godot. Time dilates. Resolution fails to manifest. What was predicted to be a two week journey stretches to five. Meek perpetually promises that water is just over the next hill, but it never is.

It’s the conflict between Meek and the Cayuse brave, the ambiguity of the guides’ intentions, and the severity of the situation that distinguishes Meek’s Cutoff from an excruciating absurdist play. We want to see who is telling the truth, who is mad, who is sane, what will come from the animosity between the guides. The serenity of the plain is an illusion. The threat of sudden slaughter and annihilation lurks just beyond the edges of sage covered hillocks.

Meek’s Cutoff is about much more than a quest for water and safe passage. This is where its categorization as a “Western” proves troublesome. The film is an odyssey about trust, doubt and fatalism, its story related through a seamless ribbon of vignettes. These segments emphasize the challenge, tedium and visceral rawness of the daily survival struggle made by desperate people with limited resources and modest technology in a hostile environment. The matches of wits and elements of fate provide Meek’s Cutoff with a unique depth.The point is driven home by a strategic, unconventional denouement. Upon beholding its sudden, heavy, ambiguous ending, we realize Meek’s Cutoff is really about the monotonous hell of perpetual mortal uncertainty.

APPENDIX:

Loosely inspired by, but not based on an actual incident, Meek’s Cutoff is set in the year that a wagon train met tragedy in the central Cascades in what today is known as Meek’s Cutoff. The real life Stephen Hall Meek was born in Virginia in 1807. An experienced mountain man, he hired himself out as a trail guide to settlers traveling the Oregon trail from Independence, Missouri.

In 1845, Meek led 200 wagons, between 750 and 1000 settlers, and thousands of heads of cattle and oxen across the high plains west of Vale, Oregon toward the eastern slopes of the Cascades. Hoping to establish a more direct middle route through the region, Meek attempted to find a shortcut to Oregon City, by following the course of the Malheur River south and then west.

When the pioneers failed to locate water en route, they abandoned their westerly course, turning north. Sending out multiple search parties in a 25 mile radius, the settlers eventually located water at Buck Creek and the South Fork of the Crooked River. By the time Meek’s wagon train arrived in The Dalles in the Willamet Valley, some distance from Oregon City, at least 23 of the pioneers were dead. Weakened from their ordeal, an unspecified number died shortly after their arrival at The Dalles. (Karen Bassett, Jim Renner, and Joyce White. Meek Cutoff, 1845, [Oregon Trails Coordinating Council 1998]; Keith Clark and Lowell Tiller. Terrible Trail: The Meek Cutoff, 1845, [Bend, OR: Maverick Publications Inc., 1966])

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a film ponderously slow in pace yet kinetically charged with insight; starkly realistic yet allegorical too; psychologically astute yet politically resonant.”–Rick Groen, Toronto Globe and Mail (contemporaneous)

Actors Will Patton, Michelle Williams, writer Jonathan Raymond, and director Kelly Reichardt may be familiar to some viewers from the 2008 independent drama Wendy And Lucy.

FEATURING:  Emily Browning, Rachael Blake, Ewen Leslie

PLOT:  A quiet but reprobate student blindly contracts for unconventional assignments with an

enigmatic madam, to cater to the peculiar perversions of the ultra-rich.

WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST:  Sleeping Beauty is not a sex-movie, but rather a tense, eerie multiple character study.The focused, unadorned manner in which it is shot, without a musical score, combines with the bizarre nature of its story to set an unusual mood which demands that we take it seriously. This atmosphere, and the choices the writer and director made in deciding what elements of its story to show us, to make Sleeping Beauty a weird and unusual viewing experience.

(Ignore the website and DVD jacket descriptions of this slick Aussie thriller; because US distributors don’t know how to present unusual efforts to a general audience, the synopses grossly mischaracterize this effort as some sort of racy potboiler. Sleeping Beauty is is not a sex piece, even though Emily Browning looks just like a Real Doll sex doll in the trailer. Sleeping Beauty is not another Eyes Wide Shut. It is not designed to be racy or titillating. Nor is it a murky, confusing David Lynch-style movie, although fans of Lynch’s works will surely love it. Sleeping Beauty is in no way what I expected. It is unpredictable and although it declines to utilize a demented twist ending, I assure the reader he will never guess where it is heading).

For additional fun, be sure to look for an appearance by actor Hugh Keays-Byrne, who played the crazed “Toecutter” in 1979′s Mad Max.

COMMENTS: Wow! What a gem! I was hoping for something different and creepy from the trailer. I was not disappointed! Yet I was surprised. I was expecting something sci-fi or horror, about turning girls into living sex dolls. Sleeping Beauty turns out to be so much more unsettling, sophisticated and subtle. From its opening frames, the somber cinematography and unabashed, close-in concentration on it’s characters makes it clear that you are watching a serious, high-quality effort crafted by a writer and director who know exactly what to do. There’s a controlling sensation that your impressions are being skillfully manipulated by the filmmakers. They are.

Pert Lucy (Browning) studies and works hard. She diligently struggles to hold down two jobs and make ends meet. Despite her disciplined efforts to get ahead, Lucy is secretly morally bankrupt. She leads a double life. She is a quiet, proletariat schoolgirl with a middle-class bearing. Yet with little fanfare, she is capable of almost invisibly slipping into deplorable, high risk behavior.

When a low-key professional outfit sends a “talent scout” to size up her character, they recruit Lucy into an ethereal shadow-land of opulent decadence. Lucy is not fully informed as to the context of her odd obligations, however, and as she executes them, she is drawn toward an uncertain destiny in a perverse world.

We watch nervously, and finally succumb to a mild, muted horror as we behold what she does and what happens to her. With her madam (Blake) overseeing Lucy’s refinement in the social arts as well as painful beauty makeovers, Lucy undergoes a transformation, becoming an object of desire. Now she is a girl of elegance and aesthetics: a living doll.

Sleeping Beauty is an art film, but there is no gimmicky, independent film-style “artiness” in the production. It is an unconventional movie, but it lets its creepy, unusual story and unsettling characters, rather than its shooting style, provide the bizarreness.

Filmed like a serious drama, Sleeping Beauty is anything but. This film is carefully structured, put together in an orthodox manner, yet it is excruciatingly agitating to watch. Delicately macabre characters flicker in and out of quiet scenes which blur the boundaries between suspense, thriller, horror, and mystery.

In the end however, Sleeping Beauty is an exquisitely presented character study of refined unscrupulousness. One of the keys to its effectiveness is its subtlety. Exposition is sublimely furnished, in real time, via strategically revealing scenes of the most vicarious nature. Like coyly spying voyeurs, peering from behind sunglasses or from the corners of our eyes a restaurant booth or a few coach seats away, we behold the participants gently unveiling their most damning personality quirks.

Sleeping Beauty is a study of unexpected contrasts, of anachronisms and contradictions which lurk on the boundary of the dark side of life. They are the types of anomalies we tend gloss over, the verboten sort. Polite decorum dictates that it is not merely unpleasant, but too morbid and ghastly to acknowledge them.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a fantastical mix of formal-dress sex parties, furious perversity and sly nods to the tropes of fairy tales and dreams…  will likely frustrate some, but others will find it all a tantalizing enigma — impenetrable, as it were.”–Rafer Guzman, Newsday (contemporaneous)

FEATURING: Ellen Barkin, Richard Masur, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Sharon Wilkins

PLOT: A teenager falls in with a group of anti-abortionists in her quest to become pregnant.

WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: As if the plot isn’t off-beat enough, Palindromes‘s teenage porotagonist is played by a variety of actors of different ages, sizes, races, and even genders.

COMMENTS: The standout feature of Palindromes is the unorthodox casting of a series of different actresses (and one actor) in the role of Aviva Victor. The variety of thespians allows Solondz to express the evolution of Aviva’s self-image, physically reflecting changes in her emotional state during the movie. When we first meet Aviva, she is played by a young African-American girl who wears her emotions on her sleeves and in her facial expressions. She is the only child to middle class parents (Barkin and Masur) living in an anonymous suburb in the Northeast United States. Horrified at the probable suicide of her cousin Dawn and alienated by the material nature of her mother’s love, Aviva becomes obsessed with the idea of having lots of babies to ensure she has someone to love her. Then, as a Caucasian brunette in her early teens, she has an ill-advised encounter with the son of a family friend, and gets pregnant. As a reedy, red-haired, slightly older girl, she strenuously resists but eventually accedes to getting an abortion. As a more confident and more attractive brunette, she runs away with the help of a truck driver, with whom she has sex in the hopes of once again getting pregnant. Abandoned by the truck driver, she wanders through wilderness in the shape of a teenage boy and then is discovered—now as a large, older African–American woman—by the driven and very Christian Mama Sunshine, who runs an orphanage for children with medical infirmities. Here Aviva is least like herself: in a completely alien environment, she has to lie about her name and her past to fit in, and her self-doubt and anxiety are apparent in her magnified size, awkward movement, and change in race. The plot unfolds from there involving more pedophilia, a quest to assassinate the doctor who aborted her fetus, and a shootout in room 11 of a seedy motel, with Aviva switching from shape to shape, becoming more assertive and mature. At the point where she feels most grown-up, she returns to her family as a world-weary, bedraggled 20-something waif (Jennifer Jason Leigh). She holds her own in an existential debate with her older cousin, Mark, and easily wins arguments with her parents. But, as the title of the movie suggests, things come around: Aviva meets up with the boy who got her pregnant to begin with, reverts mentally through the chain of actors who have portrayed her, until she is once again the vulnerable, out-of-place, emotionally needy little black girl. As seductive as the message is that everything eventually returns to its beginning state, palindrome-like, some things in the film are irreversible: death, certain operations, and murder among them. In the end, it’s these things that will eventually shape the person Aviva will eventually become, but she’s not yet become them yet.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“What makes this strange story even stranger is Aviva is played by eight different performers… Solondz constructs a deadpan sheltering bubble around his film, thereby defusing most of the issues he raises. It’s all one Warholian shrug. Still, ‘Palindromes’ is unlike anything you’ve seen at the movies.”–Bob Longino, Atlanta Journal-Constitution (contemporaneous)

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.)

FEATURING: Viktor Nemets

PLOT: A Russian truck driver veers off the main highway and into a hinterland of institutionalized

corruption and disjointed narrative.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: My Joy is serious, slow, bleak, oblique, and political; put together, all these adjectives coalesce into “important” in the mind of the average film critic or festival programmer. They do not, however, add up to “entertaining” in the eyes of the average viewer. Add to this the fact that the adjective we are most interested in—”weird”—is present in the film only at trace levels, and My Joy is more of interest to cineastes who make it a point to see important films, as well as to those with a special interest in the sociopolitical situation inside modern day Russia, than it is to pure weirdophiles.

COMMENTS: My Joy‘s confusing journey into the Russian heart of darkness makes more sense after a second viewing, although thanks to plentiful narrative elisions there are still many mysteries that are never resolved. After an unexplained funereal opening, the story proper begins when long haul Russian truck driver Georgy slips away from a couple of crooked checkpoint cops as they are distracted by a more attractive detainee. In a brutal flashback to the days of the post liberation of Berlin Red Army, an aged hitchhiker tells him a story of how military bullies stole his suitcase, his wife, and even his name. (It’s not the last time the film will travel back in time to that particular era; this bitter nostalgia suggests both that the current Russian situation resembles those anarchic times and, more fatalistically, that graft and thievery are the way business has always been done in this part of the world). A child prostitute then shows Georgy a detour around an accident, and he finds himself lost in the wilderness with his cargo until he meets a group of petty thieves. At this point, about an hour has passed—very slowly, in the Russian style, with lots of long shots of people milling about and cab-level views of the trucker driving along deserted roads between the sparse action. Suddenly, it seems that Georgy (the only decent and honest man in all of Russia, as far as we have seen) disappears from the story, as we find ourselves trapped without warning in another horrific post-WWII flashback, followed by scenes where we follow unknown parties through various vignettes illustrating oppression and abuse of villagers at the hands of civil servants. In this middle stretch of the film, the action switches from story to story Phantom of Liberty style, with the camera suddenly veering off to follow a minor character and see where his story goes. I usually do not give away major spoilers, but this time I will, just so you don’t make the same mistake I did: Georgy survives his ordeal. He reappears in the story, now with a beard and a vacant, devastated expression that makes him almost unrecognizable from the fresh-faced idealist we saw in the beginning. He looks and acts so differently that I assumed he was a totally different character, specifically, a particular spectral presence who hung around the outskirts of one of the episodes but whose face the camera has mysteriously refused to show. The realization that this bearded wanderer is Georgy, devastated by his experience, makes the plot slightly (but only slightly) less random. Sadly for a film with such obviously noble intentions, My Joy only held my interest tenuously through the first hour, and lost it entirely once the narrative went off the tracks at the midpoint. It effectively paints a picture of a corrupt society where everyone is playing an angle and a badge is viewed as a license to steal, beat, and rape one’s social inferiors. It’s a world where not only could the uniformed visitors at your door be murderers, they are almost certainly murderers, and the only question is whether they intend to murder you on this particular day. If all they want from you is for you to sign a paper bearing false witness against a stranger, then count yourself as lucky. Unfortunately, too many of the sequences wind up as inconclusive bores, and the hopeless cynicism and quotidian despair of each succeeding episode quickly becomes wearying and—yes—ultimately boring. The final scene, however, snaps you back to attention as we come full circle, revisiting the traffic cops from the beginning in a scene of ordinary jobbery that escalates to brutal violence; the direction makes it almost unbearably tense. In the end the ironically titled My Joy emerges as a political allegory cheerily suggesting that official abuse of the average Russian by bureaucrats with guns will inevitably lead to a retaliation spilling the blood of innocent and guilty alike. In that sense, My Joy functions a little bit like an artier, more hopeless, post-Soviet version of Joel Shumacher’s Falling Down.

My Joy is a Ukrainian production from a Belorussian director. The action is almost entirely rural in a generic locale, and although the movie is presumably set in Russia, you get the sense that the events depicted here would resonate in many of the countries of the former Soviet Union.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“My Joy has been described as an extended Twilight Zone episode, but while it creates its own eerie, surreal plane, it’s also far more random, filled with vignettes that connect loosely and ambiguously.”–Scott Tobias, Onion A.V. Club

“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.

DIRECTED BY: Kôji Wakamatsu

FEATURING: Shinobu Terajima, Keigo Kasuya

PLOT: Lieutenant Kurokawa loses all four limbs and is rendered deaf, dumb and disfigured

during the Japanese invasion of China on the eve of World War II; when the Emperor declares him a “Living War God,” his wife Shigeko is ordered to care for the living torso, including fulfilling all her usual wifely duties.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Despite its perverse premise and its superficial similarities to the Certified Weird Johnny Got His Gun, Caterpillar isn’t that weird; instead, it’s an intense domestic drama about duty.

COMMENTS: Lieutenant Kurokawa is a monster. Scarred by the war, unable to hear or to speak (with great difficulty, he can sometimes painfully squeeze out a single syllable), he’s essentially a torso, an esophagus and a fully-functional phallus. Flashbacks reveal that the caterpillar, now revered as a god, was actually a moral monster long before his physique was carved up. The duty to care for the god-monster falls upon long-suffering partner Shigeko, who must feed him, wipe him, and cater to his suddenly insatiable sexual needs.  For the wife, the mangled Lieutenant combines the worst aspects of an infant and a spouse—completely dependent, demanding, and incoherent, but with no compensatory cuteness or tenderness. She lives alone with him in a one-room house of horrors. Yet, perversely, this disaster delivers an unexpected upside for the poor farm wife. She gains social standing in the village as the caretaker for a god. She is sure to wheel him out in his cart daily to shore up the morale of the rapidly depopulating village as all available able-bodied men are shipped to the front to help failing war effort (even as the daily radio broadcasts detail Japan’s magnificent martial victories). On the home front, Shigeko also eventually learns to enjoy the petty power she has to deny the god a little bit of rice or sex, becoming herself a mini-dictator of an empire consisting of one subject on a straw mat. Caterpillar starts slowly but draws you in to the compellingly claustrophobic dynamic between these two unlikely mates yoked together by fate and obligation. Shinobu Terajima’s performance as the wife is brave and sympathetic (she won many awards, including the Silver Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival), but Keigo Kasuya’s turn as the caterpillar is even more crucial to the film’s success. His ability to convey mute fury and desperation with just his eyes, stutters and howls humanizes his role as a symbol of national and domestic fascism. The film never becomes truly exploitative, but there is plenty of caterpillar/human sex, in multiple positions, to titillate the curious. The cinematography is mostly cast in a drab browns that are effective at evoking a backwater rural lifestyle but aren’t particularly pleasing to look at. The budget is obviously tiny: for events outside of the hut and the village, the movie mainly relies on archival footage, along with one war crime recreation with distracting CG flames superimposed over the scene. But the inherent horrific drama and Wakamatsu’s insistent indictment of unthinking duty overcome the cheapness, and Caterillar metamorphoses into an anti-authority parable worth paying attention to.

Like many Japanese directors, Kôji Wakamatsu began his career in the trenches making “pink” films before graduating to more serious features. His filmography contains some titles he’d probably prefer we forgot: movies with names like The Embryo Hunts in Secret, Diary Story of a Japanese Rapist, and Violated Angels. In the 1970s Wakamatsu began slipping more politics into his exploitation films, culminating in  United Red Army (2008), an entirely serious drama about the collapse of the Japanese radical movement in the 1970s, and in this film. Caterpillar was adapted from a 1929 short story by Edogawa Rampo that was originally banned as perverse and unpatriotic.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a sexually charged two-hander with blunt allegorical implications… Audience interest will be limited to Wakamatsu devotees and the kind of cult-oriented audiences who automatically perk up at the chance to see simulated amputee sex.”–Vadim Rizov, Boxoffice Magazine (contemporaneous)