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: David Lynch

FEATURING: Naomi Watts, Laura Harring, Justin Theroux

PLOT:  A woman (Harring) is involved in a nighttime accident on Mulholland Drive and flees into the city of Los Angeles with amnesia; she sneaks into an apartment soon to be occupied by naive young Betty (Watts), who has come to Hollywood hoping to find stardom.  Meanwhile, a film director (Theroux) finds himself pressured by mysterious mobsters to cast an unknown actress in his upcoming project.  Betty helps the amnesiac woman try to recover her identity, but the clues only lead to a strange avant-garde nightclub, a key, a box, and a sudden reality shift that throws everything that came before into confusion.

BACKGROUND:

• Lynch originally intended Mulholland Drive as a TV series in the mold of “Twin Peaks.”  When the networks passed on the pilot, the French producer Studio Canal stepped in with additional financing to turn the pilot into a feature film.  In between ABC’s proactive cancellation of the series and the creation of the film version, all of the sets and props were dismantled, forcing Lynch to come up with a different way to complete the story.
• Monty Montgomery, whose appearance as “The Cowboy” is an uncanny show-stopper, is a Hollywood movie producer (who produced Wild at Heart for Lynch).  Mulholland Drive is his only acting credit (he’s listed as “Lafayette Montgomery” in the credits).
• Lynch insisted no chapter stops be included on the DVD.
• The original DVD release included an insert from Lynch containing “10 Keys to Unlocking This Thriller.”
• Mulholland Drive received significant critical acclaim, nabbing Lynch a Best Director award at Cannes (shared with Joel Coen for The Man Who Wasn’t There) and a Best Director Oscar nomination.  It was voted best picture of the Year by the Boston Film Critics Society, the Chicago Film Critics Association, the new York Film Critics Circle, and the Online Film Critics Society (where it tied with Memento in the voting).  It was also voted best foreign picture by the Academy Award equivalents of Brazil, France, Spain, and Australia.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: The Silencio nightclub, decorated in Lynch’s trademark red velvet drapes and staffed by his trademark subconscious monsters.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: If the massive reality shifts and actresses unexpectedly playing

Original trailer for Mulholland Drive

multiple roles is not enough for you, then the monster behind the Winkie’s, a Spanish version of Roy Orbison’s “Crying” delivered by a woman who collapses onstage, and a mafia-style media syndicate run by a deformed dwarf who uses an eyebrowless cowboy as his right-hand man will convince you that we are deep in that subconscious pit of eroticism, kitsch and weirdness that can only go by the name Lynchland.

COMMENTS:  Oddly enough, what may be the most important scene in Mulholland Drive involves a marginal character, a thick-browed man whose name or profession we never learn.  After this scene we will see him again exactly one time. The man is eating breakfast at a Winkie’s (David Lynch’s mythical version of Denny’s) with a friend.  He’s recounting a dream that he had that occurred in the very diner they’re sitting in.  He goes out of his way to precisely outline the differences between the dream and the way things are now.  In the dream, his breakfast companion was standing in a different place, and he was frightened.  The light was different; it was neither day nor night, but a kind of twilight.  And, most importantly, in the dream there was a man behind the restaurant—”he’s the one that’s doing it”—and the dreamer could see him through the wall.  He’s come to Winkie’s that morning, together with his friend from the dream, to check behind the dumpsters in the light of day and convince himself there’s no one there, to rid himself of that awful fear.

But, this being a David Lynch movie, he doesn’t rid himself of that awful fear.  Quite the contrary.  And because of what happens, we’re left unsure whether this really is his description of the dream, related in the light of day, or is actually the nightmare itself.

Mulholland Drive is a dream of a movie, one with (at least) two sets of realities and characters, inhabited by one set of actors.  Each separate universe is a looking-glass version of the other, reflecting events as if in a funhouse mirror.  $50,000 in cold hard cash is a mystery in one world, and a sin in the other.  And, unlike some of David Lynch’s other movies, there is a solution (of sorts) to the mystery of Mulholland Drive, although it’s a solution that doesn’t betray the film’s mysteriousness.

In terms of penetrability, Mulholland Drive perches somewhere between the eerie off-ness of Blue Velvet and the relative inscrutability of Eraserhead.  This movie is clearly in the tradition of the psychological thriller (a genre that, somewhat surprisingly, Lynch had never tackled before, at least not head on).  And yet, there are plenty of mystical red herrings and pure dream interludes hanging in the heavy Los Angeles air that envelops Mulholland Drive.  Unlike in a typical mystery tale, with Lynch it’s the sumptuous surrealism, not the solution, that puts the thrill in the thriller.  It’s the red lampshade, the phone calls to nowhere, the dwarf in the wheelchair that drive Mulholland.

As always, Lynch releases beautiful, delicate narrative butterflies into the cinemas, but certain fans (you know who you are) insist on trying to catch them, pin them by their wings, and dissect them to death.  This time around, Lynch explicitly (and in my view, perversely) encourages the segment of his audience that prefers to treat his films as puzzles rather than as experiences to analyze the film to death by releasing a flyer called “Ten Clues to Unlocking This Thriller” (thereby negating his own advice, quoted above, to never “demystify” a movie.  No one ever accused David Lynch of a foolish consistency).

Other, more perceptive souls have pleaded with viewers not to try to understand too much of Mulholland Drive. Rather than delighting in Lynch’s clever construction of the puzzlebox, the always perceptive J. Hobermann writes instead that the movie is as “withholding in its narrative as anything in Buñuel” and, after considering that either half of the story might be an illusion, concludes—with a blithe indifference to the carefully constructed plot—”not that it matters.”  In a survey of film critic’s interpretations of the film, nearly everyone resisted the analytical mode.  Roger Ebert insisted, “There is no explanation. There may not even be a mystery”;  Jonathan Ross accepted the standard dream interpretation but demurred that it was “counterproductive to keep analysing it”; Tom Charity offered explanations but worried “I’m not sure if it helps to be so specific;” Neil Roberts was ” wary of over-analysing it,” warning that “[w]e should be careful not to let all this analysis detract from a fantastic film”; and Jane Douglas offered this advice: “in some ways it is better to just watch it without constantly trying to work out what it means.”  After working intimately on the script over a span of two years, Laura Harring concluded, “You want to get it, but I don’t think it’s a movie to be gotten.  It’s achieved its goal if it makes you ask questions.”  And co-star Justin Theroux reminds us “I think [Lynch is] genuinely happy for [Mulholland Drive] to mean anything you want.  He loves it when people come up with really bizarre interpretations.”

For the sake of those who have unwisely followed Lynch’s Ten Clues to their logical conclusion, traversing the entire length of Mulholland Drive, I offer, as a way to recapture the film’s mysterious magic, the following

TEN MYSTERIES THAT RE-LOCK THIS THRILLER

1. Why does David Lynch ask viewers, in his “10 keys to unlocking this thriller” to consider where Aunt Ruth is?  What difference would it make if Aunt Ruth were alive, dead, or never existed?
2. Who is the man who thinks a monster lurks behind Winkie’s?  If he is a dream, then why would Dianne have a dream from the point of view of a total stranger?  Other than its metatextual mood setting role,what reason is there for the man and his nightmare to exist?
3. Why does a second actress (Melissa George) play Camilla Rhodes in the first part of the film?
4. Why is the syndicate so insistent that Adam cast Camilla Rhodes?  The entire conspiracy plotline, which occupies a large part of the first ninety minutes of the movie, gets dropped.
5. Speaking of the syndicate, why don’t they “shut everything down” after Mr. Roque tells them to?  Is “shut everything down” Hollywood gangster talk for “turn up the heat by calling in the Cowboy”?
6. Does Adam ever see the Cowboy again?  (We do, and Diane does, but does he)?  Why draw so much attention to the number of times the Cowboy would appear—other than that, when he says something so strange with such an aura of threat, it’s terribly frightening?  Unless—Diane is really Adam??
7. Why is the director the only main character whose identity doesn’t change (though his circumstances do)?
8. Why do tiny old people come skittering out of a brown paper bag, laughing maniacally?
9. Why does Robert Forster get a special mention in the opening credits, yet appear in the film for less than a minute, doing nothing even mildly important?  Why did he even get a special bio segment on the DVD release?  Is his agent just that good?
10. Seriously, WTF is the deal with Silencio?  Why is there no band?  Why does Betty have a brief epileptic fit while watching the stage show?  And what about the key?  (Why does the hit man think its funny when Diane asks what it opens?)  And the blue box?
11. Are there actually more than ten unanswered questions about Mulholland Drive?

Getting lost in all this talk about the film’s meaning, or lack of same, are the film’s amazing cinematic qualities: the neon-noir cinematography; Angelo Badalamenti’s brooding ambient score, which fits the director’s vision like a well-worn glove and immediately drops the viewer into a Lynchian world; and Naomi Watts’ eye-opening performance, which moves from ingenue to conniving bitch with a seriously invigorating stopover as seductress of both sexes.  There are great individual scenes, including Watts and Harring’s two tender but scorching love scenes, a murder-for-hire that goes comically amiss with a series of human and non-human witnesses that have to be dispatched in turn, and a heartrending, and very weird, Spanish rendition of Roy Orbison’s “Crying” that inexplicably reduces Watts and Harring to tears.   Not only that, but as a bonus you get to see Billy Ray Cyrus cold-cocked onscreen, perhaps the ultimate wish-fulfillment fantasy for millions of Americans who suffered through the darkness of the “Achy Breaky Heart” weeks in 1992.

One of Lynch’s greatest gift is that he skirts the borderline between Surrealism and Symbolism; no one can quite nail him down.  In some movies (this one, for example) lists towards the psychological symbolism end of the spectrum, while in others (INLAND EMPIRE, which is essentially Mulholland Drive on acid) he strives for unadulterated bizarrity.  Most of the time, he mixes comprehensible, relatable psychological symbolism with a deeply irrational and fearful subconscious stream.  He’s pulled off the unique trick of rallying two philosophically opposed film factions: those who treasure the challenge of solving puzzle movies, and those who value the sense of “mysterious fullness” that satisfies precisely because it’s meaning can never be pinned down.  Though claimed by both, he can’t actually belong to both camps.

Can he?

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…the compelling but intentionally inscrutable return of the ‘weird’ David Lynch that will please his hardcore fans even if it has them scratching their heads as well… for the final 45 minutes, Lynch is in mind-twisting mode that presents a form of alternate reality with no apparent meaning or logical connection to what came before… the sudden switcheroo to head games is disappointing because, up to this point, Lynch had so wonderfully succeeded in creating genuine involvement.”–Todd McCarthy, Variety (contemporaneous)

“The movie is a surrealist dreamscape in the form of a Hollywood film noir, and the less sense it makes, the more we can’t stop watching it… The way you know the movie is over is that it ends. And then you tell a friend, ‘I saw the weirdest movie last night.’ Just like you tell them you had the weirdest dream.”–Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (contemporaneous)

“The worst movie I’ve seen this year… a load of moronic and incoherent garbage from David Lynch that… predictably ended up at the New York Film Festival, where pretentious poseurs sit with their eyes glued to any screen as long as the projector is still running. From this bizarro atrocity, they should get astigmatism.”–Rex Reed, The New York Observer (contemporaneous)

OFFICIAL SITE:  Mulholland Drive – some of the features on this ten year old site are broken (like a link to a chat transcript with Lynch), but Universal deserves credit for continuing to pay fifteen bucks per year to renew the domain name a decade after the film’s release—something studios rarely do

IMDB LINK:  Mulholland Dr. (2001)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Everything You Were Afraid to Ask About ‘Mulholland Drive’ – Bill Wyman, Max Garrone and Andy Klein outline the standard (and almost certainly correct) interpretation of Mulholland Drive.  Obviously, this essay contains major spoilers.

Lost on Mulholland Drive – Film fansite featuring guides, essays, a discussion forum for floating personal theories on the film, and even fan-made music videos

Understanding Mulholland Drive: Nice Film—If You Can Get It – Six film critics (Roger Ebert, Jonathan Ross, Neil Roberts, Tom Charity, Philip French, and Jane Douglas)  give their brief interpretations of Mulholland Drive

All You Have to Do Is Dream – Interpretation of Mulholland Drive by Frederick Lane, a Freudian dream analyst, courtesy of salon.com; a fascinating article, although you’ll learn more about dream states than you will about the film

The Naughts: The Romantic Pair of the ’00s – Charles Taylor of the Independent Film Channel selects Betty and Rita as the emblematic romantic couple of the first decade of the 21st century

Sinnerbrink on Lynch -Cinematic Ideas: David Lynch’s _Mulholland Drive_ – An academic treatment of Mulholland Drive from philosophy professor Robert Sinnerbrink, originally published in “Film-Philosophy,” Vol. 9 No. 34, June 2005; insightful but very technical

The Madman and his Muse – From Film Score Daily comes this interview with composer and frequent Lynch collaborator Angelo Badalamenti, focusing on his relationship with the director as well as the score for Mulholland Drive

DVD INFO: As David Lynch eschews both director’s commentaries and chapter stops, the Universal DVD (buy) contains no special features beyond the original theatrical trailer and cast bios (including, of course, one for Robert Forster).  The film is also available for download or rental via video-on-demand services.

(This movie was nominated for review by “MtnGoat,” whgo one year ago complained about a “striking lack of David Lynch” on the site. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

FEATURING: Catherine Demongeot, Philippe 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 nexplicably 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

DIRECTED BY: John Bradburn

FEATURING: Heather Darcy, Mish Boyko, Dave Rowland, Nicola Hardman, Ellie Clemments, Rhian Green, Sean Harris, Aidan Keenan

PLOT: A woman moves in to an idyllic country house to recover from a traumatic event. One

day she rescues a man from crashing his motorbike. She becomes obsessed with him and is slowly drawn into his world in an experimental narrative that flows through reality, fantasy, fear and imagination along different streams of consciousness.

COMMENTS:  Wrists (official site) is more successful in the experimental realm, in communicating mood, than it is in the narrative, which is pared down to the bare minimum.  There’s not much dialog to clue one in on what’s happening; the first spoken word isn’t heard until 14 minutes into the film.  It’s a novel way to immediately involve the spectator by forcing him to construct what’s going on, but it could take several viewings to get the picture.  In my own case, I was fairly certain for the first 20 or so minutes that some artsy apocalyptic disaster had occurred and that the two main characters would be the only ones in the narrative… until the first car and other character appeared.

While providing a minimum of information to allow the audience to work out things for themselves can be stimulating, it only went so far with Wrists.  Combined with its languid pace, the film was very good at inducing a nap midway through the running time.  Twice.  Your own experience may vary.

That said, I do appreciate the approach that the filmmakers took. I probably would have had a greater love for this film had it been half the length (it’s 86 minutes), or if the director had pandered more to my need for more clues to the concrete narrative, such that provided in the official synopsis below:

Wrists follows Julie as she recovers in an isolated rural cottage. Bored she wanders the countryside and tries to waste time. Hearing a noise outside she rescues a mysterious young man – Clark – from a motorcycle accident.

Slowly she becomes obsessed with him and is drawn in to his dark world. He works in a city collecting debts. Clark has never really thought of escape. In meeting Julie he way have met his saviour.

Wrists is not really that weird—the most successful element is its atmosphere and mood, which is very dreamlike due to the lack of dialog.  It’s almost like being in the minds of the two main characters.  The thing is, the characters don’t really do very much, and what action there is was more conducive to going on the nod than to engaging fully with the film—in my case.

This is John Bradburn’s second feature. His first, Kyle (IMDB), about a young man’s attempt to fit back into society after being released from prison, screened in festivals and small venues, and Wrists will apparently follow the same strategy.

An interview with Bradburn looks in-depth into his aesthetic; he also shared his reactions to Kyle‘s reception at its premiere at the Seattle Film Festival in an article for Vertigo Magazine.

A DVD of Wrists, which comes paired with a zine about the production, is available here.

DISCLAIMER: A DVD copy of this film was provided by the production company for review.

DIRECTED BY: Carlos Atanes

FEATURING: Carlos Atanes, Arantxa Peña, Diana de Guzman, Antonio Vladimir Fuenzalida, Manuel Solas, Scott Fitzpatrick

PLOT:  Three short films: a man seeks to collect a debt in a bar with strong S&M overtones;

the director struggles to complete the film we’re watching while a fawning actress tries to keep him from hanging himself in despair; and a man returns to Spain from the U.S., only to find himself trapped in an orgy/melee on a staircase.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: It’s weirdness is unquestionable; in these perverse short films, Carlos Atanes illustrates a profound understanding of the theory of surrealism—including its ability to piss off not only the average audience member, but the average critic as well.  But, although the various casts and crews appear enthusiastic, the technical constraints of low-budget filmmaking hold these three pieces back from cinematic magnificence.  It’s probably a matter of individual taste as to whether the rough edges should rule Codex off of the List of the Best Weird Movies Ever Made, or whether the unpolished underground grit adds a charm that works in the compilation’s favor.

COMMENTS:  Though born in Paris, Surrealist cinema was conceived in Spain, the love-child of Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí.  If either patriarch had lived to see the mirror succubi, the crab-armed women and the staircase orgies of Codex Atanicus, they’d be proud to claim Carlos Atanes as their offspring.  Today, when pure surrealism has been almost abandoned in movies, it’s refreshing to see someone who remains dedicated to probing the mysterious subconscious and carrying on the tradition of Continental Surrealism, despite lack of funding and public indifference.  The three films that comprise Codex Atanicus showa a passion for the irrational and a knack for nailing down the way dream concepts follow their own logic, morphing into new entities and images. Like his spiritual grandfather Dalí, Atanes is unabashedly egotistical to the point of self-parody, coining the adjective “Atanic” to describe his own movies; he’s also unafraid to tap into his own erotic impulses for material. The resulting films are intensely personal, and the effects uneven; but when viewing them, it’s impossible to complain that you’ve been exposed to something ordinary and expected. We’ll briefly describe the offerings in this compilation in chronological order.

“Metaminds and Metabodies” ["Metamentes & Metacuerpos"] (1995) begins with a woman in black (Jesusita), her hair tied to dingy walls by barbed wire, singing an invitation for us to “lull ourselves in her wounds”; a bare chested man (Wicked Ua) objects to the lyrics and threatens to tear up her “contract.”  The camera pulls back to reveal bar patrons watching the performance on stage, and eventually we focus on one drunk who’s waiting to meet a man who owes him money, but whose name he can’t remember and whom he can barely describe. As the performance onstage continues—accumulating a body count that may be real or staged—the protagonist learns from the bartender about the invasion of this world by creatures from the other side of the mirror, meets a succubus, and eventually finds the man who owes him money snorting cocaine and having sex with a woman in a closet.  The two plotlines converge as a flayed Jesusita and the patron both end up threatened by a gang that has invaded the bar.  “Metaminds and Metabodies” is the most confusing (which is saying something) and dreamlike of the three featurettes, and appears to be the only movie shot on film.  Although its very grainy and dark, the “Metabodies” print transfers to video much better than the two later movies do.  Many of the film’s shots are seen in the barroom mirror, and other multifaceted mirrors feature through the film.  “Metabodies” gives off a nightmarish vibe of unhealthy debauchery and sexual humiliation that’s exacerbated by the anxious avant-garde musical score full of atonal strings and electronic blips.

“Morfing” (1996), a sort of underground variation on 8 1/2, is the most comprehensible of the three films and probably rates as the most successful effort.  An actress, Dianam is enamored at being cast in Carlos Atanes’ latest film, “Morfing,” but when she meets the director (playing himself) he’s distant and uninvolved, and even tries to hang himself in the bathroom.  She drags him off to see a financier, who complains about the economy and not having enough money to buy toilet paper.  He nonetheless tells them everything will be okay and sends them off through a tunnel.  Atanes remembers a traumatic love affair with a girlfriend with a crab claw for an arm, and Diana meets an ex-boyfriend involved in a shootout in the passageway (the meeting is awkward for all involved, but the director does lend the ex a much needed a bullet).  The pair emerges from the tunnel onto a film set where Diana interviews actresses who have previously worked with Atanes, who accuse him of being a pervert mostly interested in getting them topless.  Atanes tries to kill himself again and has to be talked down by other underground filmmakers (including Nacho Cerdà, who delivers a inside joke for the benefit of those familiar with his notorious Aftermath). “Morfing” ends with Atanes actually making the film, which involves a woman’s face being doused in a sperm-like cream.  “Morfing” is a much funnier effort than the previous entry, and Atanes, in pretending to be a great, tormented Fellini-esque director, effectively mocks his own affected egocentricity and emerges as a likable character.

“Welcome to Spain” (1999) is a strange case indeed; the finale is more than a little over-the-top, but it impresses itself on the memory.  The first half of the film involves a frustrated expatriate who decides to return to his native Spain.  He’s met at the airport by his dead father (who’s holding up a sign reading “protagonista” to catch his son’s attention).  Our protagonista soon finds himself deserted by dear old dead dad, however, and climbing up a staircase with a banner at the top that reads, “Welcome to Spain.”  As he’s climbing, he’s tackled from behind by a passerby, who’s then joined in the assault by two female antagonists (one with her hair piled high and shaped into two massive horns).  Plates of food appear on the stairs.  Loud instrumental rock plays as the foursome struggle and grapple with each other, with no one making any progress up the stairs, as the camera weaves drunkenly.  The scrum takes on a sexual tone before its all over, but  disturbing images of nails, syringes, chickens and sundry bodily fluids cut the eroticism.  Will el protagonista ever make it up the stairs and be welcomed to Spain?  Can you go home again? The final climb/battle/orgy takes up the film’s final ten minutes, and while it’s impossible to deny it makes an impression, it goes on for far too long for most people’s patience.

Despite nudity, sex and blood, Codex Atanicus pays little heed or attention to modern sensibilities: it’s more of a revival of classical European arthouse surrealism than it is a continuation of newer, punkier trends in underground film.  It’s weird enough to alienate your hippest indie-cinema touting friends, but its ambitions often outreach its budget.

One big strike against Codex, at least in the current form, is that its only available in the US on DVD-R, and the transfer is poor.  There are continual horizontal glitches in the two shot-on-video segments, the images are far from crisp, and the action sequences are blurry.  Even the subtitle translations are subpar, with a few obvious spelling errors and many more times when the translator chooses the wrong English preposition (“for” when it should be “to,” for example).  Whether these flaws detract from the experience or add to the films’ underground charm is for the individual viewer to determine.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a trio of bizarrely demented short films that eschew comprehensible plots, character motivation and just plain logic. They’re also all a hell of a lot of fun.”–Mike Everleth, Bad Lit (DVD)

DISCLOSURE: Screener copy provided for review by Carlos Atanes.

–William Blake, Gnomic Verses

DIRECTED BY: Jim Jarmusch

FEATURING: Johnny Depp, Gary Farmer, Lance Henriksen, Michael Wincott, Robert Mitchum, Crispin Glover, Iggy Pop, Billy Bob Thornton, Mili Avatal, Gabriel Byrne

PLOT: Mild-mannered accountant Bill Blake heads west to take a job as an accountant in the wild town of Machine, but when he arrives he discovers the position has been filled and he is stuck on the frontier with no money or prospects.  Blake becomes a wanted man after he kills the son of the town tycoon in self defense.  Wounded, he flees to the wilderness where he’s befriended by an Indian named Nobody, who believes he is the poet William Blake.

BACKGROUND:

• William Blake, the namesake of Johnny Depp’s character in Dead Man, was a poet, painter and mystic who lived from 1757 to 1827. Best known for Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, he is considered one of the forerunners of English Romanticism.
• Jarmusch wrote the script with Depp and Farmer in mind for the leads.
• Elements of the finished script of Dead Man reportedly bear a striking similarity to “Zebulon,” an unpublished screenplay by novelist/screenwriter Rudy (Glen and Randa, Two-Lane Blacktop) Wurlitzer, which Jarmusch had read and discussed filming with the author. Wurlitzer later reworked the script into the novel The Drop Edge of Yonder.
• Film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum coined the term “acid Western”—a category in which he also included The Shooting, Greaser’s Palace and El Topo—to describe Dead Man. Jarmusch himself called the film a “psychedelic Western.”
• Neil Young composed the harsh, starkly beautiful soundtrack by improvising on electric guitar while watching the final cut of the film.  The Dead Man soundtrack (buy) includes seven solo guitar tracks from Young, plus film dialogue and clips of Depp reciting William Blake’s poetry.
• Farmer speaks three Native American languages in the film: Blackfoot, Cree, and Makah (which he learned to speak phonetically).  None of the indigenous dialogue is subtitled.
• Jarmusch, who retains all the rights to his films, refused to make cuts to Dead Man requested by distributor Miramax; the director believed that the film was dumped on the market without sufficient promotion because of his reluctance to play along with the sudio.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Nobody peering through William Blake’s skin to his bare skull during his peyote session?  Iggy Pop in a prairie dress?  Those are memorable moments, but in a movie inspired by poetry, it’s the scene of wounded William Blake, his face red with warpaint, curling up on the forest floor with a dead deer that’s the most poetically haunting.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Dead Man is a lyrical and hypnotic film, with a subtle but potent and

Original trailer for Dead Man

lingering weirdness that the viewer must tease out.  It’s possible to view the movie merely as a directionless, quirky indie Western; but that would be to miss out on the mystical, dreamlike tinge of this journey into death.

COMMENTS: Dead Man begins on a locomotive as a naif accountant is traveling from Cleveland to a the western town of Machine to begin a new life. We see him on the train playing solitaire or reading a booklet on beekeeping. He looks up to survey his fellow passengers, who meet his glance with indifference. The train’s whistle blows as the scene fades to black, accompanied by twanging chords from Neil Young’s guitar (sounding like abstract, electrified snippets stolen from a Morricone score). The scene repeats and fades back in again and again, each time with the traveler glancing around the compartment to find his companions slowly changing: their dress becomes more rustic, their hair more unkempt; females become rare, firearms common; the indifference in the passengers eyes changes into quiet hostility.

Dead Man is the story of an innocent who becomes a refugee after being caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. It’s a standard story, but the way Jarmusch tells it is strange indeed. This opening scene sets the rhythm for the movie: a series of slow pulses punctuated by fadeouts and anguished bursts from Young’s guitar, the setting slowly shifting from the civilized to the wild. With the continual fading out and fading back, it’s as if the movie itself is drifting in and out of consciousness; an appropriate motif, considering the protagonist is fatally wounded early on. The tale is a series of journeys: the journey to the wild west from the civilized east, Blake’s flight into the wilderness, his wanderings with his Indian companion Nobody in the forests of the Pacific northwest as he is hunted by bounty hunters, and his final canoe journey into the ocean. It’s also the journey of a man from innocence to experience and, more importantly, from life to death—or perhaps from death to afterlife.

Dead Man begs an allegorical reading, as powerfully as it resists one. Jarmusch sets up an obvious dichotomy between civilization and white men (generally bad) and nature and Indians (generally good) inside the mythic structure of a hero’s journey. The English poet and painter William Blake, who came out of the most “civilized” nation in the world but whose sensibility of mystical simplicity made him an outsider among his own people, is a bridge between the two worlds. The character William Blake, the accountant, whom Nobody insists is the dead poet, flees from white man’s civilization into the wild. With the aid of Nobody—himself is an outcast caught between the European and the native worlds—Blake is eventually accepted into the Indian culture, as he breaks with his own people by becoming “a killer of white men.” Ultimately, his destiny is to travel even farther west, father from civilization, all the way into the bosom of the Pacific.

That journey from corrupting complexity into peaceful simplicity is the basic structure of Blake’s voyage, and it obviously suggests a spiritual journey. The title suggests that the trip is a postmortem one. Although there is no reason to doubt the literal story—that Blake comes to Machine, is shot, meets Nobody as he is fleeing white man’s justice, then eventually dies from his wounds—it’s possible, and thematically reasonable, to consider the idea that Blake actually is dead through much of the movie. It’s easy to suspect that Blake dies the first time he is shot: Nobody, who accepts the impossible as obvious, suggests as much with his chilling words when he first meets Blake: “did you kill the white man who killed you?” It’s even possible to see Blake as a dead man from the first minute he steps foot on the train. The locomotive fireman with his coal-blackened face and prophetic pronouncements suggests that the accountant is traveling to is Hell. Although specific spiritual lessons are difficult to divine from the tale, Blake’s entire journey from Machine to the ocean could be seen as the voyage of a dead soul from the gates of Hell through Purgatory to Paradise.

The mainstream film fanatic will find those vague, mystical speculations of less interest than Dead Man‘s once-in-a-lifetime, multi-generational cast. The film is headlined by Johnny Depp in that thrilling post-heartthrob period where he was taking every risky and offbeat role that came his way—and nailing them all. Character actor Gary Farmer lands the role of a lifetime as crusty medicine man Nobody; crusty character actor Lance Henriksen, who always seemed like he was born to play a heavy in a Western, gets his chance here. Dependable Michael Wincott provides welcome comic relief. Quirky Crispin Glover adds another weirdo to his repertoire with his illiterate, portentous railroad employee, who may be the brakeman on Charon’s locomotive. Cadaverous non-actor Iggy Pop adds a touch of novelty as a frontiersman in drag. Rising stars Gabriel Byrne (as a forlorn lover) and Billy Bob Thornton (a year before Sling Blade) contribute small but memorable parts. The great John Hurt leaves us wanting more in his near cameo role as middle-management at the Machine concern. All of this remarkable assembly contributes something without anyone hogging the spotlight, but most of the publicity centered around septuagenarian superstar Robert Mitchum, who commanded the two scenes he appeared in as a frontier tycoon. Delivering iconic genre lines like “the only job you’re goin’ to get is pushing up daisies from a pine box!,” a role as a villainous patriarch in a Western seems like the perfect capper to Mitchum’s storied career. It wasn’t quite his final role, but it should have been.

Due to the crowd of interesting thespians, it would be tempting to consider Dead Man as an actor’s movie, but Jarmusch’s idiosyncratic direction overwhelms everything. As usual with this director, the technical qualities of the film are superlative. The high contrast black and white cinematography (courtesy of Robby Müller) captures the grime and decay of the city as well as the luminous beauty of a white birch forest, and Young’s guitar score is as spare and forlorn as the Pacific wilderness. Jarmusch’s method of fading in and out of scenes adds a dreamlike feel, and his deliberate pacing suits the majestic material this time around, coming across as more solemn than slow. This Western features the most languid shootouts ever committed to film; characters calmly aim and reload their guns without fanfare, or stand by fatalistically waiting to be gunned down. Although the lack of music cues, closeups and other methods of dramatically highlighting violence make for a realistic depiction of combat, the casualness of the technique is so unexpected in a genre picture that it creates an unreal aura. And, as expected, Jarmusch fills his canvas with some of the quirkiest, strangest characters you’d ever hope to see in an oater, including not only a trio of blackly comic foresters and the poetry-spouting Nobody, but also a loquacious bounty hunter who carries a teddy bear, and another who’s the worst kind of cannibal.

On it’s release, Dead Man received mostly negative reviews. It was criticized as too slow and too pretentious, appearing to be thoughtful but actually delivering no ideas worth mentioning. Time has been kind to the movie, however, which has emerged as Jarmusch’s best work to date. In Dead Man, a measured journey into an odd, somber, dark and funny wilderness of the spirit, Jarmusch created a myth with staying power. Filled with poetic images like Johnny Depp reclining with a slaughtered fawn, Dead Man has proven a mysterious power to linger in the memory. It may never yield up its meaning, but that doesn’t make it empty.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a strange, slow, unrewarding movie that provides us with more time to think about its meaning than with meaning.”–Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (contemporaneous)

“…begins with a display of grotesquerie that is so sensational it sets up expectations that the movie might be the surreal last word on the Hollywood western and its mythic legacy. Those expectations, unfortunately, are not fulfilled. The film’s energy begins to flag after less than an hour, and as its pulse slackens it turns into a quirky allegory, punctuated with brilliant visionary flashes that partially redeem a philosophic ham-handedness.”–Stephen Holden, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

“A bizarre, funny, almost mystical take on the Western… an original and very weird account of the American wilderness.”–Geoff Anderson, Time Out Film Guide

OFFICIAL SITE:

Dead Man – An archived version of Miramax’s original 1995 Dead Man page, with stills, sound clips, and links (many no longer active) to information on the American West and William Blake

IMDB LINK: Dead Man (1995)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Dead Man at “New York Trash” – A small but dense archive of Dead Man material, including cast bios, a short but very informative interview with Jarmusch, and movie and soundtrack clips

A Gun Up Your Ass: An Interview with Jim Jarmsuch – Dead Man champion Jonathan Rosenbaum’s detailed interview with Jarmusch for Cineaste magazine, conducted when the film was first released

The New Cult Canon: Dead Man – Scott Tobias initiates Dead Man into the A.V. Onion Club’s cult canon with a perceptive essay and two film clips

Critic’s Picks: ‘Dead Man’ – Video Library – The New York Times – Film critic A.O. Scott reassesses the “hallucinatory” Dead Man, calling it one of the best movies of the 1990s, in this three minute video review (Times critic Stephen Holden originally panned the film)

Blake & ‘Dead Man’ – A discussion of the film from a blog exploring the work of William Blake. Very insightful; it cites an earlier version of this review.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Dead Man – Johnathan Rosenbaum’s book length treatment of the film for the British Film Institute’s “Modern Classics” series, including a chapter on the “acid Western.”

DVD INFO: Miramax’s 2000 release (buy) offers up extras including cast and crew bios, a soundtrack-based music video from Neil Young, the theatrical trailer, and 16 minutes of unused footage. On April 12, 2011, Echo Bridge Home Entertainment released a bargain, bare-bones Dead Man DVD (buy) with no extras; the two cases look almost identical (confusingly, it’s the Echo Bridge release that features the Mirimax name on the cover), so customers should be careful to make sure they are getting the version they want. In the summer of 2011 Echo Bridge followed up the bargain DVD release with a bargain Blu-ray release (buy) which includes the special features from the original Miramax release. Considering that the Blu-ray costs only a couple more dollars than the DVD, it’s definitely the way to go if you have a player.
(This movie was nominated for review by “spalding,” who said “I always thought the film Dead man was a little strange and dark. the soundtrack was great, it was shot in black and white, and it had some odd moments.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

“I do feel regret that my weird visions and ability to draw things in minute detail will be lost, but that can’t be helped.”–from “Satoshi Kon’s Last Words”

DIRECTED BY: Satoshi Kon

FEATURING: Voices of Megumi Hayashibara, Akio Ohtsuka, Tôru Furuya, Kôichi Yamadera, Katsunosuke Hori, Toru Emori

PLOT: A group of scientists invent a device called the DC-mini that allows the user to enter the dreams of those who wear it; they are experimenting with the invention on mental patients as an aid to psychotherapy.  A prototype of the machine is stolen, and the team discovers that it can be used to wreak terrible mischief when one of their number starts spouting incomprehensible babble and jumps out of a window while believing himself to be dreaming.  The situation reaches an apocalyptic peak when the thief uses the machine to absorb others’ dreams, and eventually discovers how to make dreams cross over into reality.

BACKGROUND:

• The movie was based on a 1993 novel of the same name by Yasutaka Tsutsui; at the time of this writing, the original novel has never been translated into English.
• Tsutsui personally chose animator/director Satoshi Kon to adapt his work.
• Kon began his career as a manga illustrator.  He died in 2010 of pancreatic cancer, having completed only four highly regarded animated feature films and the television series “Paranoia Agent.”  Although he was working on a new project at the time of his death, Paprika was his final completed film.
• Kon finished the storyboards before the script adaptation was completed, then wrote the story to fit the images rather than the other way around.
• Voice cameos: Kon and writer Yasutaka Tsutsui speak for the two mystical bartenders who appear in Paprika’s dreamspace saloon.
• The film’s soundtrack was the first to be created using a Vocaloid: all singing voices are computer generated.
• A live action remake is in development with an estimated completion date of 2013.  Director Wolfgang Peterson has promised to tone down the weirdness for a mainstream audience, aiming to create something more like The Matrix than a surreal exploration of dream states.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: The dream parade, which features marching refrigerators, a Dixieland frog band, porcelain dolls, the Statue of Liberty, confetti falling from nowhere, and more.  This toylike promenade tramps through the film, through forests and movie theaters and the streets of Tokyo, growing larger and larger as it absorbs more and more dreams—and it’s as intense an accumulation of imagination as you’re ever likely to behold.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Near the end of Paprika, two characters turn to each other and stare

English language trailer for Paprika

in stunned, silent disbelief.  They’ve just seen a giant naked girl grow to womanhood by inhaling an anthropomorphic smog monster.  Watching Paprika‘s nonstop cavalcade of technicolor fever dreams should fix your expression into the same mask of bewildered disbelief long before that point.

COMMENTS:  Having suddenly grown butterfly wings, Paprika finds herself pinned to a table,the prisoner of an amorous lepidopterist who runs his hand down her body towards her crotch. Suddenly his hand plunges through her jeans; he pulls his fist upward, slitting her from midriff to head.  Paprika is split in half like a cicada husk, and encased between her lifeless shell like a chrysalis lies a naked Dr. Chiba.  Fortunately, Detective Kogawa Toshimi has been watching events on a movie screen; enraged, he presses against the partition separating him from the scene of the violation.  The camera rotates to show the specimen cases lining the walls of the apartment bulging and stretching as the cop pushes his way from one dream to the next.  He bursts through and is able to gather the doctor’s nude body and carry her to safety, as her captor grows a second head and his original noggin explodes into a mass of fluttering blue butterflies.

This scene may be the height of the movie’s delirium, and it’s as good a place to enter the bizarre world of Paprika as any.  It illustrates the permeability of this hallucinatory world, where with a little effort characters can travel into and between each others’ dreams, and between dreams and reality.  It highlights the film’s transformed, dreamlike sexuality, where penetration is always symbolic and unerotic.  And it shows off artist/director Satoshi Kon’s deranged (but not quite perverted) imagination, alongside his peerless technical mastery.  There’s an incredible fluidity to the animation as we watch the detective’s half-visible body slowly appear as he strains to burst through the suddenly elastic wall, bending the butterfly cases until they burst. Paprika is full of such warping techniques, like the rippling carpet that piles up in waves behind a dreamer as he tries to run; the visuals are almost three-dimensional at times, and although they’re technically flat they are in reality far more impressive that the object-flying-at-my-eyeball gimmicks that dominate modern 3-D spectaculars.

Not only are the screen effects three-dimensional, the dream scenarios imagined here are so novel and visionary that they almost add an undiscovered new dimension to our cinemagoing experience. Even the whimsical opening credits—which make us fall in love with the spritely Paprika—are stunning in their invention. Paprika, a cute-as-a-button, flirty young action hero in a pageboy haircut, flits through the city at night, flying into commercial logos and teleporting from billboard to billboard. She skips past a security guard by appeaing as a film projection on a wall, and she almost exists more in the background, as an image on a passing truck or a reflection in a mirror, than she does in the “real” world; she’s undercover and incognito even in fantasy.

Those opening credits, skipping from one fantastical milieu to another, are scarcely less linear as the often-criticized plot. Some critics and viewers found themselves unpleasantly confused trying to follow the ins and outs of the twisty sci-fi narrative. Weirdophiles who are accustomed to surrendering to dream logic are unlikely to have the same objection, but it’s fair to say that telling a coherent story is not Kon’s primary concern in Paprika. In a nutshell, a device that lets you enter into others dreams is stolen; the scientists who devised it want to get it back. The evildoers (whose identities aren’t terribly hard to guess) begin twisting others’ dreams, then show the power to enter into dreams and eventually to break the barrier between dreaming and waking life so that the subconscious world floods over into reality. How, or even why, the latter goal is to be achieved is hardly addressed (the clearest explanation we get is the psychotronic-sounding, “the anaphylaxis of the DC Mini is expanding exponentially!”) Confusing matters further is the fact that characters are often found to be still dreaming when we assume they are awake. They can enter the dream state by clicking on a website and merging with the laptop screen. Viewers demanding straightforward narrative even in their speculative fiction find Paprika a frustrating experience; if plot is all they value, they find it an empty one. (Such viewers should turn to Inception instead, which is a lot like Paprika with the weirdness replaced by plot rigor).

The film is most thrilling in its second act, when Paprika’s search for the DC Mini thief leads her to explore various dreamscapes in the guise of Tinkerbell, a mermaid, or a griffin; she’s chased by a rolling wave of gnarled roots, or swallowed by a whale and spat out its blowhole. When its delivering fantastic visions, Paprika rides high on a crest of wonder; when it makes concessions to ordinary narrative, the film suffers. A subplot involves the resolution of one character’s neurosis; it’s well-done but a ultimately a letdown, because the spectacular nightmare carnival imagery that illustrates the problem is far more compelling than any solution could ever be. Similarly, the conventional good-vs-evil confrontation demanded by genre can’t live up to the weird, unbridled promise of what’s come before; the climax resembles the final showdown in a kaiju movie rather than the freewheeling surrealism we’ve grown accustomed to.

The plot is jumbled, but that adds to the film’s weirdness, creating the possibility of continual surprise. It may be a bit disappointing, however, to find that the film’s themes are even more confused than the narrative. Kon’s attention to minute detail is incredible. You could spend an hour studying a single still of the dream parade, picking out background characters and details that could only register as chaos when they pass before you on the screen in real time. The human characters may be simply drawn using regulation anime stylization, but the backgrounds are incredibly rich. The numerous billboards that dot Tokyo (many hand painted by Kon himself) add richness and depth to the setting; humongous, childlike genius Tokita’s apartment is filled with a confounding mess of toys and gizmos reflecting his cluttered mind; puddles and confetti are individually rendered. The imagery often cleverly reflects the action in ways that aren’t always consciously apparent (at least, not until you’ve listened to the director’s commentary). Smarter characters are lit more brightly, while duller ones stand in the shadows. While one scientist describes the process of dreams merging, we watch raindrops slide down a car windshield and form a stream. Characters have running motifs; one bad guy is associated with trees, another with butterflies. These correspondences work well on a scene by scene level, but fail to add up to a satisfying bigger picture. Just what is it that Kon wishes to say about dreams, and reality?

The villain’s motivation for stealing the dream machine is to preserve the sanctity of dreams from the poison of technology: “Science is nothing but a piece of trash before a profound dream,” they tell us, and later “the dreams are horrified that their safe refuge is destroyed by technology.” Dreams here are also explicitly associated with movies: one of the dreamers is a former filmmaker, movie theaters are visited in dreams and other dreams are watched on the big screen, dreams take the form of a Hollywood Tarzan adventure or a film noir or a romance. The movie’s final shot is a man buying a movie ticket. In Paprika, reality is threatened by a collective dream that overcomes everything before it and draws everyone into a single hallucination. Movies are often considered as collective dreams, Hollywood is called a “dream factory.” If dreams represent movies in Paprika, then the bad guys are Luddites who want to shut down the movies because they believe technology poisons dreams. But the means they use for their dream terrorism is a collective dream, something that looks very much like a description of a movie. Confused yet?

There’s also the issue of Paprika herself. The secondary protagonist, Detective Kogawa, has a complete character arc and a psychological resolution. But there remains a profound mystery—or confusion—about the main character, the scientist Atsuko. She radiates competence, but she’s tight-lipped and joyless (with her hair in a repressed bun and her loose-fitting business wear, she looks and acts a bit like a Japanese version of Lillith from the “Cheers” sitcom). It’s no spoiler to say that Paprika is her dream avatar; we learn early on that Atsuko takes on the form of the vivacious young girl when she enters others’ dreams to psychoanalyze them. It’s also notable that Paprika is unique; no other character in the story has a dream double that has a completely different look and personality. All of the other main players enter dreams, but they always appear as some recognizable variation on themselves, with their own faces, even if they have the body of a robot or a whale. Paprika is lighthearted, adventurous, and sexy where Atsuko is grim, by-the-book and cold; it’s as if the dream girl represents the older woman’s fantasy self, a Mata Hari of the Land of Nod. Paprika is an agent of the freedom and imagination of dreams, whereas Atsuko is the representative of science. The relationship between the two reflects the duality between imagination and science that appears elsewhere in the film.

In psychoanalytic theory, Paprika and Atsuko would represent two sides of the same personality that need to meld and integrate in order to become a whole person: a complete personality with the mind of a scientist and the heart of a hoyden. Yet, the two are presented as quite distinct (if related) entities. Frequently, Atsuko appears to turns into even Paprika when she’s not dreaming; even more disorientingly, they appear onscreen together at other times. Paprika appears in Atsuko’s reflection and talks to her at least three times (addressing her in the third person). Though nominally the script insists they’re the same character, their separateness is continually emphasized; until, near the climax, Paprika is not only vocally asserting her independence, but even implying that perhaps she is the primary personality and Atsuko is in some sense her “reality avatar.” The expected integration of the two halves of the split personality, which would make Atsuko whole again, never explicitly occurs in the story. The closest we come to a resolution is that Atsuko admits her feelings for another character to herself, and the fact that she briefly dreams (significant since she had stopped dreaming her own dreams since inserting herself into others). Paprika, on the other hand, vanishes at the end; whether she continues to exist as a separate entity is left up in the air.

If I were to play amateur Jungian psychologist and analyze the movie as Kon’s dream, I would conclude that Atsuko/Paprika is the character that represents the director. As an artist, he is half inspiration (Paprika, the wild visions he imagines to put onscreen) and half technique (Atsuko, the part that uses complicated technical software to bring that vision to life). If Atsuko and Paprika never merge, it’s because Kon still feels the conflict between those two sides of himself, still feels them pulling against each other. Then again, we aren’t in the Freudian era anymore: the form of dream analysis where every image is a symbol representing some psychological trauma has been abandoned to the sort of people who believe in the healing power of crystals and who have standing appointments to have their chakras aligned every Thursday. Dreams don’t contain clues that can be solved like an Agatha Christie mystery; we can’t expect our subconsciouses to supply the answers that we can’t. They simply reflect our waking fears, desires and preoccupations; the subconscious plays with these ideas, mixes them with images from our daily lives, and spits them back at us in transformed and sometimes unrecognizable shapes. Kon placed his preoccupations with art and movies and dreams themselves on the screen in the form of a dream, letting his subconscious mold the images; the result is that we see a woman whose skin is stripped off like the peel of an orange, to reveal another woman inside. The image comes from Kon’s dream, but let’s not overanalyze it; you kill a butterfly when you pin it down.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a Freudian-Jungian-Felliniesque sci-fi thriller, and an outright challenge to American viewers, who may, in the face of its whirligig complexity, feel almost pea-brained.”–David Denby, The New Yorker (contemporaneous)

“…a gorgeous riot of future-shock ideas and brightly animated imagery… if you keep your eye on the screen and don’t overworry the plot particulars, you will be rewarded with a cavalcade of charming, gently outré and beautiful hallucinations.”–Manohla Dargis, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

“…suffused with a giddy sense of the seething, mutable landscape of the mind, the place where H.P. Lovecraft’s tentacled nightmares jostle for space with folkloric frogs, THE THING WITH TWO HEADS (1972), Tarzan and explosive swarms of electric-blue butterflies. It’s a great place to visit, even if you wouldn’t want to live there.”–Maitland McDonagh, TV Guide

OFFICIAL SITE:

PAPRIKA: A FILM BY SATOSHI KON -The Sony Classics Paprika page contains the trailer, pressbook, a large gallery of stills, and more

IMDB LINK: Paprika (2006)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Paprika pressbook – Production notes and three separate plot synopses: capsule, short, and long

Paprika (2006): But What About the Rest of It? – Emily Yoshida persuasively argues that Paprika is about the movies themselves

Paprika @ Mubi.com – Collection of links, reviews, background information and relevant forum posts

Paprika @ Cinema Is Dope – Here may be found a very cool Paprika desktop wallpaper

Wolfgang Petersen’s Live-Action ‘Paprika’ Adaptation Is On ‘The Fast Track’ -The (presumably bad) news about Wolfgang Peterson’s live-action remake

Satoshi Kon’s last words – English translation of Kon’s poignant final letter to fans before dying of pancreatic cancer in 2010

DVD INFO: A movie as visually sumptuous as Paprika deserved—and received—a top notch video release.  The Sony DVD (buy) allows the viewer to watch the film either subtitled or (yuck) dubbed, and includes subtitled commentary from director Kon along with friend and composer Susumu Hirasawa (the inclusion of the composer on the commentary track means that the music gets more than its fair share of discussion).    Four featurettes round out the main attractions: a “making of” documentary; a 30 minute conversation between Kon, novelist Yasutaka Tsutsui, and voice actors Megumi Hayashibara (Paprika/Chiba) and Tôru Furuya (Tokita) in which they discuss their favorite scenes and their own dreams; and two mini-documentaries on the film’s magnificent artwork, one with Paprika‘s art director and one with the CGI effects supervisor.

The Blu-ray release (buy) (used to compose this review) obviously spotlights Paprika’s impressive, trippy visuals.  Extra features apparently not on the DVD release include dubs for four additional languages (for a total of eight), storyboard comparisons, and previews of coming attractions.

(This movie was nominated for review by reader “Marrissey,” who called it “very trippy and also a good watch.”  Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

DIRECTED BY: Jan Svankmajer

FEATURING: Kristýna Kohoutová, voice of Camilla Power (in English dubbed version)

PLOT: A bored young girl sits in a drab room throwing stones into a teacup when she suddenly sees a stuffed white rabbit in a display case come to life, pull a sawdust-covered stopwatch from inside its torso, and disappear into a desk drawer.  She follows it and winds up in a strange land full of talking socks, slithering steaks, and menacing skull-headed animals with razor sharp teeth.  The girl follows the white rabbit through a series of bizarre rooms until he leads her to a playing card king and queen who order the rabbit to cut off her head with the pair of scissors he carries.

BACKGROUND:

• Alice was Jan Svankmajer’s first feature length film after making award-winning short films for twenty-four years.  After Alice he returned to making shorts for six years before he made his next feature, Faust, in 1994.
• Before branching out into filmmaking, Svankmajer’s primary training had been in building marionettes.
• Svankmajer sneaks a couple of references to classic horror/suspense films into Alice: a scene where Alice is menaced by a flying creature is reminiscent of Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963), and a scene where the White Rabbit takes an axe to a door and then sticks his head through the hole is a blackly funny citation to Kubrick‘s The Shining (1980).

INDELIBLE IMAGE:  Although it’s difficult to top the bony “animals” that look like they were reassembled at random from a jumbled pile of a paleontologist’s relics, it’s the White Rabbit who makes the biggest impression, from the moment he comes to life and pulls his paws out from the display case floor where they had been nailed.  His strangest habit is licking sawdust (his own guts) off the pocket watch he keeps stashed inside a wound-like gash in his torso.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  “Alice in Wonderland” is a nonsense fantasy, a fairy tale of fractured

Clip from Alice

reality; it makes a perfect template for a weird movie, but no adaptation has taken the story so deep into the frightening labyrinths of the subconscious as this uncanny animation.  Carroll’s and Svankmajer’s opposite talents and sensibilities complement each other perfectly, like pure cane sugar mixed with white powder heroin.

COMMENTS:  “Alice in Wonderland” has been adapted for the screen a dozen times, and the reusable framework of an episodic journey to a land of nonsense filled with lovable public domain characters has served as the outline for dozens more movies.  It’s ironic, therefore, that Neco z Alenky, arguably the most artistically successful film adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s classic children’s book, is nothing at all like its source.  Or, to be more accurate, Svankmajer’s Wonderland is almost exactly like Carroll’s, but as a shadow: Svankamjer is frightening where Carroll is whimsical, obscure where Carroll is incisive, visual where Carroll is verbal, internalized and neurotic where Carroll is chatty and sociable.  Despite the fact that the credits tell us that the film was only “inspired by Alice in Wonderland“, many of the incidents in Alenky are taken directly from the book—the sea of tears, Alice growing until she’s stuck inside the White Rabbit’s house, the Mad Hatter’s tea party—but always with a strange, unexpected twist.  The White Rabbit is a taxidermy exhibit, the Caterpillar is a sock stretched on a knob, and in her shrunken incarnation Alice herself turns into a doll baby.  Other passages come entirely from the Czech’s mind, such as the socks that live under the floorboards and bore holes in the planks, but seem to fit perfectly into the new Wonderland these two giants have co-authored.

As in the book, the trip down the rabbit hole (or drawer, in this case) is a dream, but whereas the English lass’ adventures are the product of a pleasant daytime riverbank reverie, the Czech girl’s dream contains uncomfortable elements of nightmare, as if she’d fallen asleep on a hard floor with her back pressed against the spokes of a wooden chair (she has).  Alice begins her dream in a dingy room cluttered with an odd assortment of objects; before she nods off, the camera pans around to show us the everyday, real life items that her mind will twist into the creatures and features of her disturbed fantasy: a mushroom-shaped thread spool, tiny fossils, a teacup, a harlequin’s hat hanging from a puppet head, the rabbit’s Latin nameplate (“Lepus cuniculus” later serves to identify the White Rabbit’s Wonderland abode).  The first appearance of the jerky, bug-eyed White Rabbit, whose teeth are capable of biting through nails, should be terrifying, but in her dream state Alice is merely fascinated, and she turns the tables on him—as in the book, he flees when she accosts him, rather than the other way around.  Such is the topsy-turvy nature of Alice, where expectations stand on their heads.

We can’t be hurt in dreams, and Alice was immune to injury in Carroll’s books; Humpty Dumpty might toss her a few feet with an act of verbal jujitsu, but the danger of looking the fool was about as much as Alice ever risked.  Svankmajer’s Alice, wandering around the decrepit rooms of her own psyche, seems to have a similar immunity to physical injury.  In a scene that didn’t appear in Carroll, but could have, a mouse swims through Alice’s tears (which have risen to her nose) and climbs her hair with his chest of belongings to perch on top of her head, where he begins to cook a stew.  Alice looks mildly uncomfortable as he drives wooden stakes into her skull, but her curiosity to find out what he will do next gets the best of her; her eyes peer upwards in disbelief, even though she can’t actually see what’s happening above her brow.  It’s only when he lights tufts of her hair on fire that she decides “that’s going too far!” and dunks him in the saltwater.  The scene reminds us that, just like in the book, Alice can come to no harm, no matter how strange and scary the world around her turns.  Later, the White Rabbit will cut of the heads of a pair of dueling jacks with his scissors; the decapitation doesn’t effect their bout at all.

We can’t be hurt in dreams… or can we?  Earlier, the White Rabbit had disappeared down a desk drawer; when Alice finally pries the drawer open, expecting to find a portal to another world, she immediately pricks her finger on the point of a compass, screams “ow!,” and sees a drop of blood oozing from her skin.  Objects in dreams may be sharper than they appear.  Our expectations are again thwarted, and we’re not sure whether Alice is in real trouble or not.  This ambiguity comes to a fore when the film suddenly and unexpectedly heads into horror movie territory.  An oversized Alice is stuck in the White Rabbit’s dollhouse as a result of some ink she’s unwisely consumed, and the Rabbit calls to his “animals” to assist him in evicting her.  The “animals” are a bunch of bony fossils—a fish, a lizard, a bird—dressed in red jester caps with bells on the end.  Their skeletal parts are mismatched: one is a skull with two tiny hands that drag what appears to be part of a broken spine behind it. They all have razor sharp teeth.  Alice runs from them and barricades herself in a room, but the White Rabbit breaks down the door with an axe.  They grab at the hem of Alice’s dress and she beats them off with her fists.  Everywhere she turns, a new adversary appears.  A duck-billed skull bursts from out of a jar of brown muck, and the Rabbit summons a flying bed with razor sharp talons to chase the girl up a plank that leads to what appears to be a bucket of milk…  The scene is so intensely nightmarish that we’re immediately reminded of Alice’s opening narration: “A film for children… perhaps?”

Even when the world isn’t actively threatening Alice, things are fairly discomfiting.  Surrealistic interludes, like the pantry where she finds eggs that hatch baby bird skulls, bread that sprouts nails, and a slithering steak that’s crawling about blindly, are weird nightmare moments, despite the fact that Alice isn’t directly threatened.  But the biggest contributor to the saga’s continual creepiness is Svankmajer’s stop-motion animation.  If these visions had been created in today’s seamless, fluid CGI, they wouldn’t have nearly the same impact.  Stop motion is uncanny; it looks simultaneously real and unreal.  Moving almost like a real animal, but not quite—skipping frames—the White Rabbit and his friends and minions are conjured from another world, or from a dream.  Not only are its mannerisms, the way it clicks its teeth and licks its pocket watch and eats sawdust with a spoon, strange, its physical existence itself is an affront to the way we instinctively believe objects should look and behave.  Its face we can’t read, with its bulging, expressionless eyes, adds to the intensely alien effect.  And it’s not just the White Rabbit: all the entities that Alice encounters in her journey to the other side have the same out-of-place, out-of-time feeling to them, as do many of the animate objects.  Alice herself succumbs to the stop motion spell, when she shrinks into a doll, and when he is swallowed up by the desk drawer on her initial plummet into Wonderland.

Lewis Carroll’s tale took place almost entirely under the sun, in woods and open croquet fields.  By contrast, Svankmajer sets his film mostly indoors. Alice travels from one room to another inside some haunted, decaying house.  The prologue is set out of doors by a babbling stream, but Alice, once rebuffed by her mother, soon heads inside.  She briefly chases the White Rabbit across a rocky brown field before diving back indoors through the desk drawer.  There is one other time she is briefly in the open air, when she wanders through a courtyard and is able to see the sky overhead, visible over tall surrounding walls.  The rest of the film takes place entirely inside, in drab rooms that all have bare wooden floors and dingy off-white walls with peeling paint; everything looks covered in dust, and you can almost smell the must.  Carroll’s story is sunny, Svankmajer’s is in shadows.

There’s a claustrophobic effect to these interiors, one that seems to underscore the idea that the action is all taking place inside Alice’s bounded mind.    But these severe peasant rooms and their plain objects also appear very Eastern European; Svankmajer’s Alice clearly takes place behind the Iron Curtain.  In the early part of the century in the West, surrealism had been used to critique capitalism and the middle classes; but it found new life in the East, where censorship was strict and outright criticism of the state in the arts was dangerous.  Surrealism implicitly criticizes the status quo. It’s a way of opening closed eyes, pointing at fantastical absurdities that may bring to mind real outrages, and of implying that reality may not be what it seems.  It says that what seems normal may actually be strange, if you look at afresh; but it makes its points in sneaky ways that fool dull censors into thinking its mere childish nonsense.  Svankmajer grew up in the bosom of totalitarianism, in a world of severity and repression where coded languages were necessary, because speaking your mind outright could get you killed or imprisoned.  In Svankmajer’s Alice, the King and Queen of Hearts try to force the little girl to read a scripted confession (which requires her to beg for the court’s strictest punishment) as a prelude to having her head scissored off by the White Rabbit, now revealed to be the royal executioner.  The film ends on a strange and unexpected note; not only are we suddenly unsure that the preceding has really been entirely a dream, but passive, docile Alice, who’s been pushed around from the beginning of the film until now, reacts to her ultimate discovery with uncharacteristic ruthlessness.  One year after Alice was produced (with the assistance of Western European production companies), the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia stepped down.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…moves from one surreal profusion of images to another.”–Caryn James, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

“Svankmajer’s sinister visual music has an irresistible potency and allure. Watching it, we feel the enthrallment of the irrational.”–Hal Hinson, The Washington Post (contemporaneous)

“…strips Alice to its proto-surrealist core.”–Sam Adams, The Philadelphia City Paper (screening)

OFFICIAL SITE: Alice – First Run Features Alice page doesn’t contain very much content besides a product description and quotes from reviews, but you can find the  four minute “caterpillar” sequence there in its entirety

IMDB LINK: Alice (1988)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Alice: The New Cult Canon – Scott Tobias’ insightful entry on Alice for the Onion A.V. Club’s series on cult films

Czech Horror: Jan Svankmajer’s Neco z Alenky (Alice) – Brigid Cherry’s article examines Svankmajer’s Gothic themes to explain why this non-horror work appeals to horror movie fans

Alice Through the Lens – the British Film Institute’s excellent survey of important Alice adaptations includes a segment on Neco z Alenky (as well as one on Tideland)

Recommended as Weird: Alice [Neco z Alenky] (1988) – Alex Kittle’s earlier short review of Alice for 366 Weird Movies

DVD INFO: The First Run Features DVD (buy) is presented in full frame (presumably the original aspect ratio) and with dubbed English vocals by Camilla Power. There is only one extra on the disc, but it’s a good one: Svankmajer’s 1989 short claymation film Darkness Light Darkness, a witty and macabre story of body parts assembling themselves into a whole person.

There are reports that the British Film Institute is planning to release Alice on Blu-ray and Region 2 DVD, in the original Czech with subtitles (only the dubbed version has been heretofore available in English).  At the time of this writing, however, the Institute had not made an official announcement on the project.

Stephanie: “I adore it!”

Mrs. Miroux: “Really? I’ve always found it rather strange.”

Stephanie: “That’s what’s good.”

DIRECTED BY: Michel Gondry

FEATURING: Gael García Bernal, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Alain Chabat

PLOT: Stephane is a young artist and inventor from Mexico, a man who has always had trouble distinguishing dreams from waking life; he is lured to Paris by his mother with the promise of a “creative” job that turns out to be a position as a typesetter at  a company that makes nudie calendars.  He slowly falls in love with his next door neighbor Stephanie, who is also a creative type, an amateur composer and toy designer.  Their developing relationship becomes complicated and eventually melancholy because Stephane can’t tell if Stephanie returns his affections; whenever he meets her, he can’t even be sure if it’s in a dream or reality.

BACKGROUND:

• The Science of Sleep was Michel Gondry’s feature fiction followup to 2004′s Certified Weird Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.  It was Gondry’s first feature screenplay.
• Gondry stated that the character of Stephane was about 80% based on himself (the other 20% coming from Gael García Bernal’s interpretation of the character).  Many of the dreams depicted in the film came from Gondry’s own dreams; the scene where Stephane has giant, cartoon-like hands came from a recurring nightmare the director had as a child.  In the commentary on the DVD Gondry also implies that the romantic trauma Stephane goes through in the script was inspired by a real life unrequited love.  Gondry also filmed the picture in the house he grew up in a s a child.
• The director said in an interview that he got some of the inspiration for the film’s look from Communist propaganda films aimed at children.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: The two would-be lovers on a gray felt horse with button eyes in a white boat with a forest inside, sailing off on a cellophane sea.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: The Science of Sleep is nearly a straight shot of surrealism

Original trailer for The Science of Sleep

masquerading as a romantic comedy, under the cover of dreams.  In this movie, it’s the reality-sequences that interrupt and inform the dream narrative, not the other way around.

COMMENTS:  In the very first scene of The Science of Sleep, Stephane’s subconscious, broadcasting a variety show for an audience of one from a studio built from egg cartons shot with cameras made from discarded cardboard boxes, does a cooking segment where it describes its recipe for dreams.  It explains that “a very delicate combination of complex ingredients is the key.  First, we put in some random thoughts.  And then, we add a little bit of reminiscences of the day… mixed with some memories from the past…  Love, friendships, relationships, all those ‘ships’, together with songs you heard during the day, things you saw…”  From the subconscious’ viewpoint, as from the artist’s, the function of  everyday reality is to provide the raw materials from which dreams are built.  But as free as they seem, the capacity of the dreams (and art) to break the boundaries of reality is an illusion; dreams can’t make new worlds, they can only jumble up and reconfigure into new forms things that have been seen and heard and felt by the conscious mind.  The dream is imprisoned in bars formed from the limited experiences and memories of its host, and the light that streams through them is shaded by his desires and fears.

We start The Science of Sleep in Stephane’s subconscious, and we almost never leave it; when we do, it’s not for very long.  Because we see the movie almost entirely from Stephane’s point of view, and because he struggles to distinguish his dreams from his waking life, he’s an unreliable narrator; we can’t trust that what appears to happen to him actually happens to him.  The movie contains three types of scenes: those that are clearly dreams, those that appear to take place in the real world until some magical element crops up that cast doubt on their wakefulness, and the rarest scenes of all, the ones that document events that unquestionably do happen outside Stephane’s head.  We’ll deal with that last category first, because these scenes gather the ingredients from which the subjective dream recipe is concocted.

Information about Stephane’s real life is sparse, but here’s what we can definitively ascertain from the scenes with no magical or impossible elements in them.  The sensitive, sleepy man child has moved from Mexico to Paris at the request of his French mother (Miou-Miou), who has promised him a creative job is waiting for him. The work turns out to be as a typesetter for a company that makes calendars. He meets his French coworkers, including Guy (Alain Chabat), who initially mocks him for his hope to publish a “Disasterology” calendar he has painted commemorating a new calamity each month but later becomes an ally, and Martine, a busty, bespectacled office mate who will appear as a sex symbol in his dreams.  (The office scenes are shot with handheld cameras, a documentary-style technique meant to reinforce their reality).  A girl named Stephanie moves in next door; he meets her and her pretty friend Zoe when he accidentally hurts his hand helping the movers try to corral a piano that is about to escape from them on the spiral staircase.  Later, as he is dreaming, Stephane writes his neighbor a letter asking for Zoe’s phone number, then slips it under her door while sleepwalking; when he awakens he realizes what he has done and retrieves the note with a coat hanger.  He spends some time hanging out at Stephanie’s apartment, and goes out drinking one night with her and Zoe and Guy.  Later, he sneaks into her apartment and steals a gray felt horse so that he can install a motor in the toy to impress her.  His employer decides to publish his “Disasterology” calendar, and it’s an unexpected hit; the company throws a celebration party, but a despairing Stephane nearly drinks himself into a coma as he watches Stephanie flirt with a man there.  (If not for the handheld camera and lack of any giveaway magical realist devices, I would assume this sequence was a fantasy of Stephane’s, because the idea of an art calendar commemorating famines and airplane crashes becoming a huge popular success is so unlikely).  As romance fails to flourish between them, Stephane becomes angry and forces an argument with Stephanie, but relents when she agrees to meet him for a coffee date.  He believes that she has stood him up for the date and bangs his head against her door in anger.  Finally, he decides to return to Mexico.

When the story is stripped to its verifiable, objective elements, Stephane seems to be little more than a mentally ill man obsessed with a friendly neighbor, whose behavior verges on stalking.  The viewer never knows for sure if Stephanie returns Stephane’s feelings, though she clearly values his friendship.  There is a second level of the film, however; one seen through Stephane’s eyes that lies somewhere between the waking and the dreaming world.  Most of Stephane and Stephanie’s interactions take place in this in-between realm.  The two connect in this world, but the intrusion of magical, dreamlike elements constantly undercut our belief in the reality of this connection.  Stephane visits her and the two plan to animate a diorama of a boat together; they’re thrilled at their shared creativity.  But when she turns on the water faucet streams of cellophane spurt out, and when she throws cotton balls in the air Stephane is able to make them hover by playing a particular chord on the piano.  At another point the two seem to be having a normal conversation for an extended period until Stephane shows her his latest invention, a time machine that allows the user to travel exactly one second back or forward in time—and it works.  Stephanie forgives the romantic dreamer for breaking into her apartment and stealing the horse because he actually does install a motor in the toy that makes it move.  But when we see the stop-motion animated results, they’re impossible, pretermechanical; the horse cavorts like a children’s cartoon, its movements are neither robotic nor natural, and it even trots across the piano and pecks out a little tune with its rear hoof.  In the final scene, Stephane is saying goodbye as he leaves for Mexico; things seem normal, except that their conversation shifts gears from hostile to heartfelt to playful at the blink of an eye.  Also, a cigarette thrown out the window lights a man on the street below on fire, and the two douse him with a bucket of cellophane (which reverts to water).  It ends with Stephane, who is due to catch his plane, falling asleep in her bed and dreaming of them riding off together on the toy horse.

It seems that we can trust the basic dynamic of their relationship in these shared scenes, but we also know that Stephane’s dream world constantly crosses his brain barrier.  On faulty evidence, he believes that she can share in his dreams, but can she really?  And even in this twilight place between dreaming and waking, she never tells him straightforwardly that she loves him. If levitating cotton balls with your piano skills can’t win a girl’s heart, it’s likely nothing ever will.

If the romantic narrative is uncertain, lacking in mutual passion and, despite the pleasantness of leads Bernal and Gainsboug and some heart-tugging imagery, ultimately unsatisfying, then at least there are the frequent sequences set entirely in dreamscapes to fascinate us.  Gondry is fluent in the language of dreams, handling their subtle shifts with playful pacing and just the right degree of surprise.  He creates a consistent look for the dreams; they’re stop-motion animated and made out of cardboard, crepe paper and other craft-and-hobby materials.  At one point, Stephane dreams a teeming city constructed out of toilet paper rolls.  The high artificiality of the low budget techniques gives Stephane’s subconscious an otherworldly credibility and eccentric heart missing in the too-realistic CGI spaces of mainstream dream moves like Inception.  His stream-of-consciousness technique links one flighty idea to the next with a pseudological flow, and he remains true to the dream recipe laid out in the prologue: random thoughts mixed with reminiscences of the day and personal preoccupations.

Take the first extended dream sequence after the introduction, a dream Stephane has the night after he takes the job at the calendar company.  The boss had complained about his stubble, so that evening he shaved with an electric razor.  The blades pinched him and he threw down the buzzing appliance in anger, startled by a few dying quivers it gave when he thought it was unplugged.  That night, he dreams he is at work trying to glue tiny pieces of paper onto a calendar template, but his hands are too big to handle the delicate work.  His coworkers mull around him making indistinct buzzing noises (Stephane’s French is not good and he has trouble understanding the Parisian natives when they speak to him).  His hands grow to a gargantuan size; he uses them to bat his fellow wage slaves about.  He bursts in on his new boss in his office; he’s sitting behind his desk with the female employee Martine on his lap.  Outside the window a skyline of cardboard skyscrapers bend and bow.  The electric razor is suddenly buzzing in Stephane’s hand; startled, he throws it in the direction of his superior, and the machine sprouts hairy spider legs.  The boss falls down and the razor crawls over his face, making him grow a shaggy beard and long gray mane.  The old man jumps out of the office window but lands safely on the ground, where he grabs a shopping cart full of trash bags and presumably starts a new life as a street person.  Back in the office Stephane rummages through the desk and finds his calendar; he rips out the oversized paintings one by one and tosses them to a smiling Martine to hang on the office walls.  He grabs her and throws her on the photocopier where they have brief, fully clothed sex before he follows the boss’ example and throws himself out the window, where he swims through the night sky over a Paris where Chichen Itza has replaced the Eiffel Tower, before waking up to his alarm.  It’s the first of many admirable, inventive dream dishes that showcase a hearty emotional reality seasoned with just the right measure of spicy impossibility.

The dreams are whimsical and fun, which is necessary because the theme—the impossibility of knowing for sure whether the person you love loves you back—is depressing, in a commonplace sort of way.  Stephane’s dreams interfere with his ability to read the already complicated signals Stephanie is sending him, but that drastic inability to tell reality from reality colored by anxiety and desire is a distorted mirror of an everyday romantic courtship.  Early in a relationship, at least, we all have doubts as to whether the object of our affections feels the same way about us as we do about them.  With Stephane, the doubts simmering in him grow to the point where they start to boil him from the inside out.  This is where the movie fails: Stephane is too weak, too pathetic for the audience to root for.  He whimpers out his need for love, passing the boundary of “sensitive guy in touch with his feelings” into the realm of infantile wimp.  “You need to toughen up a little,” Stephanie admonishes him at one point.  “It’s not attractive for a girl to see a guy cry.”  In what may well be a dream (at the very least, he isn’t awake to hear it) she tells him, “Things will turn out the way you want, if you can just stop doubting I love you.”  Later she advises him, “You have a serious problem of distorting reality.  You could sleep with the entire planet and still feel rejected.”  But Stephane cannot take her advice; he’s all subconscious, and has no way of consciously controlling his self-doubt.  He dreams that she has broken their date, and gets angry at her without even checking to see if she showed up.  In the end, he lies in bed, sniveling pathetically, begging her to just stroke his hair; but she refuses.

It seems as if we are being asked to admire Stephane’s perverse candor in openly displaying his weakness and neediness, but it’s presented as a curse, something he can’t control, not as an emotional honesty that hides a paradoxical strength.  If Bernal is Gondry’s alter-ego here, then there’s a good degree of off-putting self-loathing in this self-portrait.  There’s a ton of imagination but not an ounce of strength in Stephane.  (Compare spineless Stephane to Joel in Gondry’s previous effort, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; at heart, Jim Carrey’s character just as internalized and neurotic, but we can get behind him because he makes one difficult and courageous choice to fight for a doomed love).  By any measure except his dreams, Stephane loses the girl; and not only does he lose the girl, but he deserves to lose the girl.  He proves himself unlovable, just as he always believed deep down in his core.  In reality, a man like Stephane would be unable of having a relationship; his condition makes him completely unreliable.  He can’t hold down a job because he sleeps through the morning, dreaming he’s at work and believing it to be true.  A real woman might be intrigued by such a man as a curiosity, but would never be attracted to him.  As a romance, The Science of Sleep only works because Bernal’s combination of swarthy good looks and boyish charm is irresistible.  A woman may allow herself to be enchanted by the delicate, emotionally childlike character on the screen, but in reality few could muster the patience and indulgence Stephanie shows him.

It’s odd that Gondry, who had directed his previous two features from scripts by Charlie Kaufman and wanted to get out of shadow of the award winning screenwriter and prove himself more than just a technician who fulfills others’ visions, chose to debut with a romance that plays out largely inside the head of its protagonist: it seems like a blatant attempt to remind audiences of his previous success with Eternal Sunshine.  Gondry can’t come up with a fascinating conceit like the memory-erasure procedure, or write a script with the twists, emotional depth and propulsive energy of Sunshine, but he can play to his strengths and focus on the visual flair he developed as an innovative director of music videos for the likes of Bjork and The White Stripes.  If Gondry can’t out-write Kaufman, he can at least try to out-weird him; to make a movie stuffed with all the delicious hallucinations that he couldn’t shoehorn into Sunshine due to the elaborate plot requirements.  So, we get a movie filled with delightful visions: abstract spin art patterns as we transition into the dream state, self-typing typewriters, talk shows from the subconscious, a band singing a torchy love song reluctantly dressed as kitty-cats, toys that come to life, kitschy crepe paper vistas stretching out to the horizon of the mind’s eye.  From the aesthetic viewpoint, the romantic core of the movie is a subplot, something that exists to mainly supply the symbols that get mixed up and regurgitated in dreams; the movie can be a joy when it goes into full-on fantasy mode.  With all it’s faults, The Science of Sleep proves that Michel Gondry is one of our premier dreamsmiths.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a gorgeous, weird, mesmeric movie…”–Cynthia Fuchs, PopMatters (contemporaneous)

“There are no big, profound statements here about romance and fidelity, nor is there the huge emotional punch of Sunshine, but it’s enough to ensure that the film is more than just an exercise in weirdness. That said, if cinematic weirdness is your bread and butter, The Science of Sleep is a feast for the imagination and a triumph of creativity—the kind of movie that’ll lift your spirits and make you think even while it’s rotting your teeth.”–John Hurst, Christianity Today (contemporaneous)

“The surrealism is lightweight confetti; the plot, what little there is, meanders; and the actors have little of importance to say or do… in the end the movie is neither very cerebral nor very charming but more like weird and wayward.”–John J. Puccio, DVDTown (DVD)

OFFICIAL SITE: La Ciencia del Sueño – Neither the English distributor (Warner Brothers) nor the French distributor saw fit to renew The Science of Sleep‘s official website after the DVD was released, but this Spanish language site remains active, although it contains only the trailer, a synopsis and a small image gallery

IMDB LINK: The Science of Sleep (2006)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Will it De Blend ? – extremely odd, short promo for the movie (YouTube)

La science des rêves (The Science of Sleep) – this director-file.com page is the next best thing to an active official site; it contains reviews, links, behind the scenes images, and old news items

Behind the Camera: In Conversation with Michel Gondry – andpop’s Eric Emin Wood provides the most thorough online Gondry interview about Science of Sleep

‘Science of Sleep’ Straddles a Dreaming Life: NPR – National Public Radio’s Bob Mondello’s audio review of The Science of Sleep

MySpace – The Science of Sleep – this official (?) page has not been updated, and many of the links and images are broken or missing

The Science of Sleep – a livejournal sponsored community that was closed soon after the movie’s release; it contains updates on the movie and shared communal dreams

Berlinale, Day 3, Part 2: Gondry’s dreams wow Berlin – this report from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation on the Berlin Film Festival contains quotes from star Bernal and director Gondry about the film

DVD INFO: The Warner Home Video release (buy) has a satisfying level of extras, starting with a commentary track featuring director Gondry, stars Bernal and Gainsbourg, and minor actor Sacha Bourdo (who played the role of co-worker Serge). It’s revealed that the director and the stars disagree on whether Stephanie loves Stephane back, and sometimes debate whether a given scene occurs in reality or in a dream (most of the time Gondry is open to their different interpretations, only occasionally insisting that he intended the scene to be read in a particular way).  There’s also the theatrical trailer, a 40 minute “making of” featurette, and an 11 minute profile of Lauri Faggioni, a prop designer who made many of the stuffed animals and other objects brought to life by the animators for the dream sequences. Filling out the disc are two odd extras promoting cat adoption and hosted by perky Linda Serbu, who runs a feline rescue operation called “Hollywood Kitty.” She’s pretty, vivacious and sincerely devoted to the cause, but after listening to her for just a minute even the most devoted cat lover will want to slap her in the face if she says the word “kitty” one more time.  As much as I hate to get catty, I have to wonder just who Linda slept with to get these two unrelated extras slapped onto the disc.

(This movie was nominated for review by reader “Kristin,” who called it “an extra weird movie from Michel Gondry.”   Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

DIRECTED BY: Jaromil Jires

FEATURING: Jaroslava Schallerova, Helena Anyzova, Petr Kopriva, Jiri Prymek

PLOT:  13-year old Valerie lives with her grandmother in a small rural village in

Czechoslovakia; on the week of her menarche she drifts into a sensual, and at times threatening, dreamworld.

WHY IT DESERVES TO MAKE THE LIST:  This is a gently weird film, as close to representing a dream on film as I have yet seen.  Every shot is a thing of beauty.  The plot is loose but generally true to its own dream logic.  As she approaches adulthood Valerie finds herself the object of desire for men, women and weasel-men alike.  Responding to all the strange occurrences around her with unflappable calmness, Valerie is a passive heroine, but Schallerova oozes charm and is a complete eye magnet whenever she is onscreen.

COMMENTS: A tight, coherent plot is not the strength of this piece, it has to be said.  It’s very much like the moments when you first wake from a puzzling dream, before your conscious mind has started to add little bridging details to try and make sense of it.

Valerie lives with her grandmother, and at the age of 13 has her first period.  Her grandmother tells her that this is the same age as her mother was.  It seems to be an occasion for neither celebration nor shame.  Valerie tells her grandmother that she is excited at the prospect of a troupe of actors arriving in the village and is informed that she’d do better to be excited about the arrival of the bishop and his priests.  You’d be forgiven for thinking that her grandmother is a bit of a party pooper, but like everyone in this film she’s not just what she appears to be at first glance.  Throughout the film religion and sexuality arm wrestle for dominance, but it’s rather like both arms are on the same body.

The performers arrive, as do the clergy.  The bishop has come to deliver a sermon to the virgins of the village, and it’s a pretty inappropriate one.  The bishop himself is a tad inappropriate at times, and has a face not designed to inspire confidence, looking like the hideous love child of Graf Orlak and Bergman’s Death, but with some of the most terrible teeth ever committed to film.  Again though, by the end of the film you’ll see him in different light.

During the course of the film Valerie will see transforming weasels, a hairy priest striptease and the nubile young women of the village will invite her to join them in a game of “hide the fish down your bodice” in the sun dappled river.  She will cure a young women of a strange vampiric ailment by sleeping with her, spy on her grandmother in a odd sexual situation while the toothy bishop lurks at her shoulder and will laugh in the face of being burned at the stake.  Throughout it all Valerie is protected by her mother’s magic earrings and is watched over, in a slightly creepy way by her brother (or would be lover?) Eagle.

Films about girls “coming of age” are few and far between and this is a gorgeous example.  Valerie is surrounded by sexuality both threatening and inviting.  She is on the receiving end of aggressive approaches from the hairy priest and her domineering female cousin, but also sees a guiltless, inviting sensuality in the form of the women in the river, the young woman she spends the night with and the gentle Eagle.

In the end Valerie seems to have explored both the dark and the light of impending womanhood and emerged into the sunlight, where even the toothy bishop seems a bit of a sweetie.

This would make a perfect double bill with Neil Jordan and Angela Carter’s Company Of Wolves, if you fancy an evening of oestrogen-heavy weirdness.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a collection of dream adventures, spurred by guiltless and poly-sexual eroticism. Virtually every shot is a knockout…”–Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader (rerelease/screening)