DIRECTED BY: Joann Sfar

FEATURING: Eric Elmosnino, Lucy Gordon, Laetitia Casta, Anna Mouglalis, Doug Jones

PLOT: Recounts the life of French singer Serge Gainsbourg, from his formative days as a

young Jewish boy in occupied France through his relationships with Juliette Gréco, Brigitte Bardot, and Jane Birkin—and also his relationship with his spindly, scary puppet alter-ego.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: A brave biopic that’s true to Serge Gainsbourg’s rebel spirit, but in terms of weirdness, it only goes about halfway.

COMMENTS: Growing up as a precocious Jewish boy in Nazi occupied France, young Lucien Ginsburg (later to reinvent himself as Serge Gainsbourg) amuses himself by drawing a flipbook fable.  A pianist (like the boy’s father) is constantly rejected because of his “ugly mug.”  The despised musician perversely embraces his detractors’ insults and wills his head to swell larger and larger until it finally bursts and the suavely deformed “Professor Flipus” emerges.  The Flipus character (also referred to as “my mug”) shows up later in life as Gainsbourg’s artistic daemon, a spirit materialized as a puppet with glowing eyes and grotesque, oversized features (the sharp-nosed homunculus looks like a debonair version of the Brainiac).  Flipus’ parents would seem to be Gainsbourg’s Jewish identity—his puppet ancestor is a six-legged, moon-faced anti-Semitic propaganda poster who comes down off a wall to dance with Lucien in the alleyways of Paris—and his insecurity about his own “ugly mug.”  Flipus spurs the budding composer to switch from painting to songwriting by “accidentally” burning up Lucien’s canvases, prods him to seduce various glamorous actresses, and grows jealous and vengeful at the appearance of a healthier muse.  Surreal moments are scattered randomly throughout the movie (an inexplicable cat butler, four costumed men who trade breakfast for a song, and visual puns referencing Serge’s albums “Melody Nelson” and ” Tête de Chou”), but it’s Flipus who provides most of Gainsbourg‘s underlying weird texture, and lifts the proceedings above the ordinary.  As an introduction for those uninitiated in Gainsbourg’s discography and biography, the movie isn’t wholly successful.  If you don’t already know who Boris Vian, Django Reinhardt and France Gall are, you may become confused when they suddenly show up or are referenced.  Gainsbourg’s scandalous music, which begins as witty, ribald chanson and develops through the 1960s into lounge-rock psychedelia, is sampled in fast-moving snippets that make it hard to see the lines of development.  The movie also suffers from the usual drawback of biographical movies: real life produces great characters, but not necessarily great stories (which is why fiction supplanted biography, after all).  Life stories tend to turn into a series of vignettes; fortunately for us, Gainsbourg’s vignettes involve him bedding Juliette Gréco, Brigitte Bardot, and Jane Birkin.  A trio of actresses—Anna Mouglalis, Laetitia Casta, and Lucy Gordon—simmer as Gainsbourg’s succession of sexy muses.  Gordon’s role is most important, but slinky Casta leaves the biggest impression as a spot-on Bardot, first seen walking a dog in thigh-high black leather boots and a leopardskin miniskirt, and later memorably dancing with a sheer bedsheet tantalizingly wrapped around her voluptuous frame.  Constantly shrouded in his own personal nicotine cloud (since the MPAA has started handing out “R” ratings for tobacco use, the chain-smoking Gainsbourg should probably earn a XXX rating), Eric Elmosnino holds his own against his eye-candy co-stars, conveying awkwardness and suavity at the same time.  Unfortunately, historical accuracy requires him to metamorphose from a charming rake into a drunken lout, so our sympathies for the protagonist sag at the end: not the take-home note you really want in a “heroic” portrait.  Still, given the limitations imposed by real life, Gainsbourg is as a successfully hallucinatory hagiography that will please fans, and make newcomers at least curious to sample Serge’s suave discography.

Director Joann Sfar adapted this, his first film, from his own graphic novel.  To his dismay, producers insisted that early versions of the trailer contain no shots of Professor Flipus (though variations have been released since that do show the creation, without hinting at his prominence).  One source reports that Serge’s daughter, weird favorite Charlotte Gainsbourg, was at one time considered for the role of her father.  On a sad note, model/actress Lucy Gordon, who played a convincing Jane Birkin, committed suicide in 2009 before the film’s release.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“There’s a bold splash of the surreal in this inspired portrait of a man whose life really is too big for one film.”–Annette Basile, Film Ink (contemporaneous)

DIRECTED BY: Jean Vigo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

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

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

CONTENT WARNING: This short contains brief, animated nudity and suggestive cross-species sexuality.

FEATURING: Xavier Tort, Anne Céline Auche, Manuel Solás, Marta Timón, Anna Diogene

PLOT:  A mute male slave’s involvement with romance and rebel pornographers lands him in

trouble in a sex-free future ruled by a totalitarian matriarchy.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: After producing a series of wildly experimental shorts in the 1990s (three of the most twisted of which were anthologized for the collection Codex Atanicus), Spanish filmmaker Carlos Atanes scaled back the surrealism for his feature debut, FAQ.  While plenty of weirdness remains (it’s hard to argue that a movie that casually drops dialogue like “unwrap the cat, we’re taking it with us” and includes a plotline regarding “architectural castration” doesn’t push the boundaries of normality), it’s stretched more thinly than in the shorts: it’s like drinking skim milk after having become accustomed to whole.

COMMENTS: “Failure is inevitable,” concedes a rebel, “but it is our duty to keep trying.”  He’s come to recruit Nono, a mute sound collector who’s never far away from his phallic microphone, to record some bird songs for the resistance’s archive of vanishing natural sounds; their ultimate dream is to someday record a breathing human female.  The quote, however, could just as easily apply to the scrappy spirit of independent cinema FAQ embodies.  As a philosophical dystopian science fiction, it’s not entirely successful: it frequently lags dramatically, especially in a languorous episode in the woods; with minimal sets and cheap-looking green screen effects, it struggles at times to hide its budgetary limitations; and it stumbles into a reality-bending non-resolution of an ending.  But the sincerity and professionalism of the production shines through, and the movie shows enough crazy imagination and intelligence to make you forgive its flaws, both budgetary and dramatic.  Some of the weirdest bits in this pretty weird feature involve the Internet porn of the future; adult actresses remain fully clothed at all times, and since human contact is verboten in the Brave New World, a woman touching a man’s bare chest is the height of salaciousness.  For reasons unknown, this forbidden erotica is created in an avant-garde visual style, set on red glowing Dali-esque alien landscapes, and features nearly subliminal English text (the movie is in French) flashing across the screen (words like “orgasm,” “death” and “bastard” are legible).  Other odd highlights include Nono’s mystical ability to peer into lobotomy holes to view a patient’s memories, and the fact that, when charged with crimes by the feminist state, defendants are given the option of electing their own punishments (one man’s pledge to shave his eyebrows, gouge his belly with a spoon, and hang himself within a year is found acceptable to his judges).  Atanes indulges his lust for surreal tableaux in these segments, and also in an out-of-nowhere fourth-wall breaking finale, but even when it’s playing “serious,” FAQ sports an unaccountably odd tone.  Superficially, the movie unspools as a serious science fiction drama, complete with pretentious poetic narration, but the absurdist touches throughout betray the director’s weird predilections.  The idea of the female supremacist tyranny—the Sisterhood of Metacontrol—is bizarre in itself, and Atanes pushes the premise into farce by making the dynamiting of that great phallic symbol, the Eiffel Tower, a major plot event.  The politically incorrect core of the film—its presumption that radical feminists would abolish sex if they ever came to power—is its boldest gambit, but it’s impossible to know exactly how to take this thesis.  It’s hard to know how seriously to take any film where a character makes a serious speech about a higher reality that is watching us, and then, without explanation, put on a red clown nose and gaze reverently skyward.  FAQ’s apparent antifeminist agenda could be seen as a legitimate attack on the Andrea Dworkin strain of radical feminism, or a lampoon of male paranoia about “feminazis,”  or it could be nothing more than a sly reversal of expectations (any society in which absolute power is vested in one of the two sexes would become a dystopia for the other).  Whatever the film’s actual attitude towards feminism, it is legitimately thought provoking and discomfiting, which is a major point in the movie’s favor.  Not fully surrealist and not entirely sci-fi, FAQ is not for everyone, but there can be no doubt that it represents a unique voice and viewpoint in a sea of blahfilm.  Its commercial failure may be inevitable, but independent filmmakers like Atanes have a duty to keep on trying.

Star Xavier Tort also composed the effective music, using a single, wordless female voice to otherworldly effect.  FAQ was released with little fanfare or promotion on DVD in 2007.  It seems that when the rights reverted to the original owners, they chose to re-release it in this “special edition” in December 2010.  The re-release is unfortunately on DVD-R, and the picture quality is acceptable but leaves much to be desired for videophiles.  The special features include seven minutes of interviews with the cast and crew and two deleted scenes, one an expanded clip of futuristic avant-garde erotica with sadomasochistic overtones. The Special Edition of FAQ is not available from disc rental companies like Netflix but is available on Amazon instant video for rental or download. As pointed out by a helpful reader below, the original 2007 Region 1 release without the special features is available through Netflix.

DISCLOSURE: Screener copy provided for review by Carlos Atanes.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…an unpredictable and intelligent treat, comparable with classic arty dystopias like Godard’s ‘Alphaville’ (1965) and Gilliam’s ‘Brazil’ (1985).”–Carl J. Schroeder, MysticalMovieGuide.com (DVD)

DIRECTED BY: Gaspar Noé

FEATURING: Paz de la Huerta, Nathaniel Brown

PLOT: Oscar is a drug-dealer living in Tokyo with his stripper sister.  One day he is shot and killed during a deal inside a bar called “The Void.”  He spends the rest of the movie as a silent ghost, floating around Tokyo and observing his sister and friends, while simultaneously hallucinating and remembering the details of his life.

BACKGROUND:

• Noé wrote preliminary scripts for Enter the Void as early as 1994; the screenplay was consider to expensive to produce until the director’s 2002 success with Irréversible made it appear commercially viable.
• Star Nathaniel Brown, a non-actor, was chosen because of his physical resemblance to lead Paz de la Huerta and because he was interested in directing.  As someone with no acting ambitions, Noé presumed Brown would not be upset by the fact that his face is only seen once in the film, briefly in a mirror.
• Visual perfectionist Marc Caro supervised the set designs.
• The 100 page script indicated the action and described the visual effects, but very little dialogue was scripted; the actors improvised most of their lines.
• The paintings Alex is shown working on in the film were actually painted by Luis Felipe Noé, the director’s father.
• The original run time of the film at its Cannes debut was 163 minutes.  Post production and editing continued after this debut, and, as completed in 2010, the final run time of the film (which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January, 2010) as screened in the U.S. is about 140 minutes.  There is a longer version of the film, however, including a 17 minute sequence where Oscar believes he has woken up in the morgue; this segment occupies reel 7 of 9 reels, and for American screenings the film was simply shown with reel 7 omitted.  The extended cut is available on French DVD releases.
• Noe instructed theaters that the film should be run at 25 frames per second rather than the usual 24 frames (this fact accounts for some of the discrepancies in listed running times).
• At the Cannes premier there were no opening or closing credits.  The film began on a closeup of the none sign reading “enter” and ended with the words “the void.”
• Noé got the idea for the film form watching Robert Montgomery’s noir The Lady in the Lake while on a magic mushroom trip.  Like Enter the Void, Lady in the Lake is filmed entirely from a first-person point of view (actually, in Void the POV is usually from about a foot behind Oscar’s head, though at other times we see events through his eyes).
• Tokyo was chosen as the location of the film partly because Japan’s strong ant-drug laws would make the actions of the police more believable, partly because Noé believed the city, with its abundance of neon, had a “druggy mood.”
• Pioneering acid guru Timothy Leary used to read “The Tibetan Book of the Dead” to voyagers undergoing LSD trips in an attempt to steer the experience in a spiritual direction.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: The opening DMT trip, with it’s multicolored mandalas, floating planetoids, and neon tentacles seems hard to top, but it merely sets the mood.  It’s the pornographic “Love Hotel” scene, with its parade of rutting couples with mystically glowing genitalia, that really impresses itself on the mind’s eye.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: As the most impressive and eye-splintering acid trip movie of the

Original trailer for Enter the Void

decade (by a wide margin), Enter the Void gets an automatic pass onto the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies of All Time.  The fact that the protagonist is dead throughout most of the movie doesn’t hurt its chances one bit.  But the clincher, the sure sign that the movie is weird, is the walkouts.  Less than halfway through the screening I saw, the sexagenarian couple who had stumbled into the film by accident (probably thanks to ad copy suggesting the movie was a sentimental ghost story about brotherly love that transcends death) walked out of the theater, leaving me alone with two same-sex couples with facial piercings and hair that glowed in the dark.

COMMENTS:  Enter the Void is an exploitation piece masquerading as an art installation, eye-candy masquerading as mind-candy; it has all the reckless visionary enthusiasm and delightful audacity of a Ken Russell picture.  With the opening credits—a series of garish, frequently unreadable stills sprayed at the screen like pop bullets from a machine gun projector, set to a pounding techno score—Gaspar Noé warns us to prepare ourselves to see something different, though we have no idea what.  After quickly introducing the main characters, drug-dealing Oscar (from whose POV the entire film is shot) and his stripper sister Linda, the movie segues into a wordless five minute DMT trip, an abstract rainbow odyssey of swirling, melting mandalas and gently waving tentacles.  Oscar emerges from his drug reverie, still fuzzy-eyed, and the film ever so briefly enters the realm of straightforward narrative as he strolls with a drug buddy through the neon streets of Tokyo towards a fatal rendezvous.  Shot to death in a men’s room, the vast bulk of the movie involves Oscar’s passive postmortem adventures, as he floats around the city observing his former friends in the expatriate community, and especially spying on his beloved sister—including, creepily, watching her real time sexual encounters.  Gradually, flashbacks of his life intrude on his disembodied observations, and the movie’s storytelling becomes even more fragmented and experimental.  Although his memory occasionally slips and merges with hallucination—characters change, as when a young Oscar walks in on his parents having sex, and the man plowing dear old mom suddenly sports the face of his best friend doing sis—attentive viewers won’t have much problem piecing together the backstory, which deals with Oscar’s betrayal as well as the vow he and his sister made as children to always stay together after the death of their parents.  The story is serviceable, and served well by slicing it up into bite-sized tidbits; if the tale had been told straight from beginning to end it would be too bland and familiar to choke down in this quantity.

Paz de la Huerta, who after following her role as the aptly named “Nude” in The Limits of Control with this sexy ecstasy addicted stripper is quickly becoming weird movie fans’ favorite pin-up girl, delivers her melodramatic blowup scenes with great conviction.  Despite portraying the protagonist, amateur Nathaniel Brown seems hardly in the movie; since the audience’s view is through a camera positioned about one foot behind him, we only see the back of his head and hear his voice, and for most of the movie he is a silent ghostly presence.  Neither actor stands the slightest chance of upstaging the apocalyptic neon visuals, which are the film’s obvious reason for existing; the camera is the real star, and thanks to the POV style it actually plays the main character, as well.  The movie is basically two hours of drugs and sex, and of druggy sex—especially in the jaw dropping pornographic finale—and perhaps thirty minutes of recycled hippie spirituality, delivered with arch insincerity. Whether you find the mystical glowing genitalia of the orgiastic climax laughably pretentious or ethereally erotic, you’re not soon likely to erase these sights from your mind.  

Visually, Enter the Void is unconditionally stunning, and the movie is best and most honestly enjoyed on a purely sensory level, as the most technically accomplished and accurate documentation of a psychedelic journey ever filmed. The abstract pyrotechnics of the opening trip set up the visual motifs that will recur through the rest of the movie’s voyage: the fluorescent color scheme, the floating perspective, the tunnel vision and sense of being drawn into a circle of light at the center of the field of vision. Every environment in the film is deliberately over-saturated, continually bathed in Tokyo’s neon glow. When Oscar and Alex take a midnight stroll to The Void, the glowing signage makes the night as bright as day, except that the color schemes continually shift from lime to red to peach, depending on which neon font they’re walking past at the moment. Linda’s strip club glows a lustful purple when she’s onstage, changing to a lurid rose for her sex scene. Alex’s friend’s art installations radiate sapphire and ruby jewel tones. The Love Hotel is indigo and orange, with pink and yellow highlights. Even the memory flashback scenes have odd coloration, with unexplained red or golden auras. Every frame of the movie is re-tinted using artificial hues and luminosities. The everyday world is stained in the afterimage of the hallucinatory one; Enter the Void is like staring at a never ending fireworks display.

The floating and tunnel vision motifs first seen in the trip become the primary visual scheme Oscar’s death. Central concepts of the near-death-experience myth are that you become detached from the body and float outside it, and that you die when you “enter the light” at the “end of the tunnel.” Oscar’s astral journey through Tokyo is accomplished through some amazingly long and fluid crane shots; the camera appears to drift through walls, spying on one compartment after another until the camera finds something of interest and swoops in for a closer inspection. The technical mastery of the cinematography here is awe-inspiring; the effect on the viewer is disorientation in space as well as in reality, the feeling of drifting out of one’s own body. Time and time again, at the conclusion of a scene the camera will pick out some circle in the background and dive into it, transitioning into the next vision. We travel into a light bulb on a ceiling, a bullet hole (as in Performance), an ashtray, a burner on a stove top. In each journey we move towards a dot which grows into a tunnel, and when it consumes our field of view we’re treated to strobe effects and mystical abstract visuals that bring that DMT trip back to mind, before we’re spit out into the next scene. The floating into a tunnel motif meets its apex in the penultimate scene, in which we travel inside the human body to into a microscopic world that looks like it has been sculpted by psychedelic substances in a journey into what appears to be a giant planet trailing fuzzy tendrils.

In one form or another, computer-generated imagery was used on almost every frame of the film (if for nothing else but color correction), and Enter the Void is the most artistic use of a technology so far that’s usually employed only to flesh out ranks of troops in battle sequences or to create more “realistic” looking monsters. But although it’s a trippy tour de force and a true brain-bending experience, the film is far from flawless: most obviously, at over two and a half hours it’s way too long for its minimal storyline, even after Noé trimmed 45 minutes (!) from the final theatrical cut.  Although the camerawork impresses, there’s only so much floating through the streets and alleyways of Tokyo that one person can take, several dramatic scenes seem to repeat themselves, and even the brilliant psychedelic sequences would punch harder at a shorter length. 

Furthermore, although we’re supposed to root for Oscar and Linda because of their vows of sibling love, and because they have only each other to turn to in a foreign land, it’s hard to sympathize with the suffering of these adult orphans, since they clearly bring their troubles on themselves with their deliberately sleazy life choices. Linda is petulant and vacuous; if she has depths beyond her need to simulate a family with her brother, they’re not explored. We get to know Oscar much better, but almost wish we hadn’t. He seems a bit dull—he’s unable to grasp the concepts in The Book of the Dead, which his brighter friend Alex patiently explains to him for the audience’s benefit—but maybe the problem is that he’s too stoned to concentrate for long enough to grasp simple concepts. At one point he stresses the importance of having goals in life, but demonstrates none himself, except the desire to scarf every drug he can get his hands on and get inside the pants of every attractive woman he sees. His vision of paradise seems to be a hotel where his friends and acquaintances engage in an eternal orgy. He sleeps with a friend’s mom. seduces formerly innocent Japanese girls with cocaine, and introduces his own sister to ecstasy.

Speaking of sis, their entire relationship is tinged with not-so-subtle hints of incest. Oscar is jealous of other men who pay sexual attention to her, and swears if she gets pregnant by her current beau he’ll kill the baby (he appears to get his wish in the unnecessarily gruesome abortion scene, which treats us to the unlikely sight of Linda’s bloody fetus left lying around in an aluminum hospital pan). He watches her strip and give lap dances; he makes love to women who are strippers, like her. He sniffs her g-string. While disembodied, he twice floats into the position of a man who’s making love to Linda, staring into her eyes as her face contorts in passion. For her part, Linda encourages his unnatural passions. When she first arrives in Japan, he takes her out on a “date” and shows her the sights; they ride a roller coaster, and she kisses him on the neck and sucks his earlobe in a very un-sisterly display of emotion. She gets drunk, juts out her breasts and asks, “Have I grown? I look like a woman now?” (Of course, all these events could just be Oscar’s wish fulfillment fantasies as he lays dying). Beyond shock and provocation, it’s not clear what the entire incest subtext/subplot is supposed to add to the film; it doesn’t mesh with the film’s broader themes of illusion, death and rebirth. It certainly highlights Oscar’s emotional and psychological immaturity—he’s unable to separate love from sex in his mind—but it also perverts and detracts from the purity of their sibling pact, which is the only positive trait either of the two principals ever show.

Finally, the insincerity of the story’s stab at spirituality rubs me the wrong way. When I first saw the film I thought that Noé was trying to create an ambiguous milieu; we could choose to believe that Oscar was really going through the process of reincarnation as described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, or we could decide it was all his dying hallucination. (Such a structure would be analogous to, though less beautifully executed than, the ambiguous ending of Pan’s Labyrinth). The afterlife of the film seems constructed to illustrate either hypothesis. Further reflection and review, and the director’s own words in multiple interviews, have convinced me that the hallucination angle is the only viable interpretation. DMT, the drug that Oscar smokes at the beginning of the film, is possibly the most powerful psychedelic known to man, and is also produced in trace amounts in mammals (it’s unknown if it has an evolutionary function, or is just a byproduct of some other biochemical reaction). Some scientists have speculated that DMT is dumped into the bloodstream at the time of death, producing the effects reported as “near death experiences.” This speculation is presented in the film as scientific fact by Alex, the film’s wisest and most intelligent character; and as described above, Oscar’s post-expiration hallucinations bear a remarkable similarity to the visions he sees under the influence of the drug: the floating, the tunnel vision, the journey into the light. Oscar’s centerpiece hallucination in the Love Hotel takes place not in the real world, or in a spiritual way station, but inside a model built by one of his artist friends, using a sexual conceit that he himself dreamed up one day; it’s inextricably linked to his particular consciousness, not the Universal Consciousness. The film’s final shot is unexpected and undercuts the reincarnation thesis, while supporting the hallucination/near death experience theory (one explanation, though almost certainly a fallacious one, of the tunnel of light phenomenon in NDEs is that it’s a remembrance of traveling through the birth canal). And, if we needed more proof as to the fact that Oscar simply ceases to be and never gets reincarnated, we need only look to the movie’s title.

Many of the movie’s fans, especially younger ones, have embraced the spiritual explanation of the film; everyone wants to believe in immortality, and the sentimentality of the notion that Oscar would reincarnate to fulfill his pact with his sister is understandably appealing. (Of course, those who embrace this interpretation will probably miss the irony that, according to Buddhism, reincarnation is a punishment, not a reward, and Oscar’s extreme attachment to his sister is the primary cord holding him back from reaching Nirvana). But I have to imagine that the atheistic Noé is secretly laughing up his sleeve at those who buy the spiritual interpretation. It’s hard to escape the nagging feeling that, when it comes down to it, Enter the Void is nothing more than a celebration of the romance of an aimless, amoral drug culture, and the exotic mystical notes it hits are offered only as hypocritical justifications for the hedonism on display.  The movie’s point seems to be: death is the greatest trip of all, and religion is the most awesome of hallucinations.  It’s only moral value is as a cautionary tale: don’t be like Oscar. Enter the Void won’t send most youngsters scurrying off to the library to learn about Tibetan Buddhism, but it might send them scurrying off to the nearest nightclub to pop pills, screw around, and hope that tonight’s the night they get to die young.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Not clever enough to be truly pretentious, Noe’s tiresomely gimmicky film about a low-level Tokyo drug dealer who enjoys one long, last trip after dying proves to be the ne plus ultra of nothing much.”–Rob Nelson, Variety (Cannes screening)

“One hundred proof unfiltered weirdness.”–Colin Covert, Minneapolis Star-Tribune (contemporaneous)

“…if you yourself are stoked for a lurid, oversexed, stupid-with-Freud Midnight Movie extravaganza – a trip to El Topo via Mulholland Drive – there are worse ways to spend 2 1/2 hours… The film is by turns self-conscious, ludicrous, maddening and yet exhilarating – yes, there’s no getting around it, we can’t keep our eyes off the screen – exhilarating.”–Stephen Cole, The Globe and Mail (Toronto) (contemporaneous)

OFFICIAL SITES:

Enter the Void – impressively designed site with trippy graphics, but it may take a while to load up.  Contains numerous high quality stills and the pressbook (like the rest of the site, in French).

Enter the Void – IFC Entertainment – IFC’s English-language distributor’s page contains more stills and three short expository clips from the film along with the trailer

IMDB LINK: Enter the Void (2009)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Cannes Pressbook – The pressbook consists of a long and reveling interview Noé.  In .pdf format.

Anatomy of a Scene: ‘Enter the Void’ – There is no director’s commentary on the Enter the Void DVD, but Gaspar Noé did provide comments for the New York Times for this quiet 2 minute scene with Paz de la Huerta

TribecaFilm.com | Features | Enter the Void: Gaspar Noé – Brief analysis of the film by Zachary Wigon, incorporating quotes from the director

Gaspar Noé’s Trip Into the “Void” – The director discusses the films, and the drugs, that influenced him with IFC

Gaspar Noé Interview: Enter The Void, illegal substances and life after death – Another interview with the loquacious Noé; in this one, he reveals his views on religion

Turn on, Tune in to a Trippy Afterlife – Profile of the director’s career and Enter the Void‘s place in it from The New York Times‘ Dennis Lim

Enter the Void Made by FX – Fxguide’s interview with Geoffrey Niquet, Enter the Void‘s film’s visual effects supervisor

Contemplating a Colorful Afterlife – Technical article on the film’s cinematography from the October 2010 issue of American Cinematographer.  The article begins on page 18.

Suddenly The Maelstrom: Gaspar Noé On The Music Of Enter The Void – Commentary on the film’s soundtrack from The Quietus.

DVD INFO: Like the movie itself, the IFC DVD release (buy) is packed with extras which are high on stylish visuals but low on exposition and insight.  The disc contains about 10 minutes of deleted scenes (none of which would have added much to the film).  The DVD also delivers an overdose of trailers: there’s the French trailer, the wordless “world” trailer, the US trailer, eight teaser trailers (some fairly pornographic), and three unused trailers.  (That’s fourteen separate trailers, not counting the numerous previews for other IFC titles!)  “VFX” is an interesting, but ultimately frustrating featurette that shows some of the films visual effects, but with no commentary or explanation of what we’re seeing.  We see the original scene, and then a wipe reveals what the scene looked like before color correction, or shows a grid overlay that suggests how the creators might have rendered a CGI version of the scene for a particular visual effect (you can imagine how this kind of thing might be necessary when the camera is supposed to “dive” into a pot on a stove and dissolve to the next scene, or to flesh out a model of the Love Hotel).  An explanation of how the effects were achieved would have been welcome; this feature presents itself almost as just another trip sequence.  Speaking of trips, two separate DMT-inspired fractal sequences are included, a five minute lightshow titled “Vortex” and a 2 minute “loop” titled simply “DMT.”  These two segments would work well set to repeat and played as wallpaper at a party.  The title sequence is itself so psychedelic that some super-stoned viewers might fumble the disc into the player and sit there hypnotized at it as it plays endlessly without ever watching the movie.  All in all, its an impressive package, as long as you’re not expecting insight into the thought processes behind the film.

Enter the Void is also available in Blu-ray (buy) with the same features.

True Void devotees with access to Region 2 or multi-region players may want to track down the French DVD/Blu-ray releases instead, which includes the extended cut of the film.

FEATURING: Sophie Marceau, Monica Bellucci, Andrea Di Stefano

PLOT: As she struggles to write an autobiographical novel, a writer with childhood amnesia

finds that everything she sees—her apartment, her husband’s face, and even her own image in the mirror—is changing into something unfamiliar.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  The sophomore effort by rising bizarre star Marina de Van arrives as a slight disappointment.  The opening segments are disquieting without being bang-up weird, and by the end the mystery is resolved too completely, leaving nothing to linger in the mind.

COMMENTS:  Don’t Look Back mines the psychological terrain of jamais vu: the strange feeling you get when you enter a room you’ve been in hundreds of times and everything suddenly looks different, or when you look at the face of the person you’ve slept next to for a decade and see a stranger.  Sophie Marceau begins as Jeanne, the woman who finds that her kitchen furniture has been rearranged, the Paris city streets are no longer familiar, and her husband and children are making strange hand gestures when she’s not looking.  Initially she just seems paranoid, but the incidents keep building until finally her entire family has been replaced by different actors whom she doesn’t recognize, and we’re convinced there’s something seriously amiss inside Jeanne’s mind.  The breaking point comes when she looks into the mirror and sees an unfamiliar face staring back at her—on her left side, she still looks like Sophie Marceau, but the right side of the image is the face of Monica Bellucci.  Based on a clue she finds in a photo, Jeanne (now being played by Bellucci rather than Marceau) travels to an Italian village where she finds herself in a situation that’s almost the reverse of Paris: she recognizes the faces she sees as those of her husband, mother, etc., but no one she encounters seems to have a clue as to who she is.   It’s an intriguing premise, and the film is sincere, well-executed, and clever—and it’s also one of those movies where, by the end, you’re puzzled why it’s turned out merely solid rather than exceptional.  Part of the problem is the pace.  The movie starts slow, and keeps piling up weird incidents long after we’ve gotten the point that something’s cracked inside Jeanne and are anxious to get moving towards some answers.  The use of horror movie music cues to inform us that something uncanny is taking place is overdone and gauche, almost to the point of parody.  Containing two episodes of traumatically interrupted intercourse and more than a hint of incest, the movie flirts with ideas of sexual repression and perversion that, in the end, turn out to have nothing to do with Jeanne’s psychology.  And although the movie gets into a nice weird groove in the run up to the finale, where Jeanne now seems to be turning from Bellucci into a third actress at a wild village party, the script explains itself too completely by the end.  Although the solution to the mystery is intellectually satisfying, it doesn’t provide the emotional chills and thrills it should.  Looking back on the “clues” scattered through the earlier parts of the film, you realize that many of them didn’t add up; they were just arbitrary strange occurrences that let you know something was off but didn’t assist you to guess what it was, and so you feel cheated.  That said, the ending is unexpected and should keep you interested enough to keep watching.  The half Marceau/half Bellucci effect is truly novel and uncanny.  And the performances by the two French beauties are superlative: Marceau sets up the character, but it’s remarkable how Bellucci picks her up mannerisms so that you never question that this is the same character inhabiting two different bodies (to a lesser extent, the same compliment can be applied to Andrea Di Stefano and Thierry Neuvic, the two men who play Jeanne’s husband).  The end result is not a disaster, but given everything the movie apparently has going in its favor, it’s underwhelming.

De Van’s previous film was In My Skin [Dans Ma Peau] (2002), a shocking and mysterious portrait of a woman’s obsessive self-mutilation.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a traumatic and reductive incident from Marceau/Bellucci’s past is to blame—hence the title—which makes the entire film feel like the laborious setup for a dopey Twilight Zone twist.”–Mike D’Angelo, Onion A.V. Club (Cannes screening)

FEATURING:  Morjana Alaoui, Mylène  Jampanoï, Catherine Bégin, Robert Toupin, Patricia Tulasne

PLOT: A girl ventures into unknown territory when she helps her lover, a former torture victim,

seek revenge on her one-time captors, in this unusual, bloody tale of madness and sadism.

WHY IT  WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  You may have heard incomplete descriptions of Martyrs in the media or by word of mouth.  Hushed references and whispered gossip might make it sound like a snuff movie, a sado-masochistic tableau, or a scandalous exploration of taboos.  It is none of these things. While Martyrs is a heavy, very violent film with a grim story, it is not a snuff movie or a sensational expose of torture.  It is an offbeat, horrifying thriller, and nothing more.

COMMENTS: When Anna (Alaoui) and her lover Lucie (Jampanoï) embark on a mission of revenge against Lucie’s childhood torturers, the situation quickly spirals out of control.  The couple locates Lucie’s alleged abductors, but did they find the right people?  Lucie is stalked and victimized by the spectre of the mutilated sister she had to leave behind, and Anna is not so sure where the truth lies.  In the process of exacting retribution the landscape changes dramatically and Anna is swept into an incomprehensible morass of hell on earth.

I’m so underwhelmed!  I was expecting a real stick of dynamite, but instead, I got one of those Fourth of July smoldering snake novelties.  Movie site rumors and an ongoing debate over whether or not Martyrs amounts to little more than “torture porn” made me expect a wild ride.  I had hoped to see the ultimate horror movie, or at least something mindlessly vulgar and sensational, but no dice.

What I got was an extremely well-shot, conventionally produced, offbeat story.  Unfortunately, it consists of two loosely linked plot sequences which, once combined, don’t amount to a sum greater than their parts.  Nor do they deliver any sort of soul stirring revelation.  Ho hum.

I found Martyrs to be intriguing, but, well, kinda boring.  Maybe even a little tedious in places.  The movie would better lend itself to being made into a couple of twenty-three minute “Twilight Zone” episodes.

The film’s climax, while innovative, offers an opportunity for something highly imaginative and colorful that never comes.  The idea revealed at the denouement begs for deeper elaboration and exploration.  It turns out to be a discovery which is the very cornerstone of the movie, the justification for everything we have endured.  This paradigm should be central to the plot; but instead, it is a parting note.  Glossed over, it receives only a cursory nod of  acknowledgment for having driven all of the action.  It can be argued that the irony and surprise of the ending hinges on this idea being veiled in mystery, but really it was obfuscated as a writer’s convenience.  The truth of this is apparent because the rest of the film is rather one dimensional otherwise, and can only be redeemed in context by the conclusion.

While horrifying at times, Martyrs is almost a drama, marginally a thriller—a slow, unsuspenseful thriller.  There are a few realistic,  graphic depictions of straight-forward violence that leave little to one’s sense of curiosity, but these are less horrific and gratuitous than what is now standard in many horror and crime movies.  The violence in the Hellraiser movies, for instance, is far more excruciating to watch.  By contrast, the blood-letting in Martyrs is not really the kind we want to see, nor does it provide a satiating thrill for the cruel at heart.  Accordingly, I dismiss allegations that the film is “torture porn.”

There is the fact of torture and we see the results, but not much in the way of the actual act of torture.  Martyrs is a dark, unusual movie that has a few spine tingling moments and flirts with a very wild, mind blowing plot concept, but then fails to explore it.

I would recommend Martyrs as a well-produced, refreshing change of pace from conventional Hollywood crap.  The actors are interesting, the film doesn’t follow a hokey formula, and the sets are engrossing.  Disappointingly, because Martyrs hints at something profound yet does not deliver, it never rises to its potential to be a truly innovative entry in the thriller or horror genres.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Up until the halfway point, the film is straightforward, if numbingly violent and deranged. However, it then takes an abrupt twist, becoming a bizarre, metaphysical conspiracy thriller blending Illuminati literature with peyote buttons.”–Al Kratina, Montreal Gazette (contemporaneous)

FEATURING: Isabelle Huppert, Olivier Gourmet, Madeleine Budd, Kacey Mottet Klein, Adélaïde Leroux

PLOT:  The idyllic existence of an isolated family is shattered by the re-opening of an

abandoned highway that runs through their front yard.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Despite the absurd rot at its core, Home is structurally sound; but it’s too low-key and lacking in zing to be counted among the weirdest movies of all time.

COMMENTS:  There’s not much plot to Home—a highway opens in a family’s front yard, the fumes and endless noise bug them, and they eventually put cinder blocks and cement over their windows to keep the outside world out.  The idea could have packed a compact wallop in a short; but here, there’s ninety minutes to fill up.  Promising first time director Ursula Meier saturates the empty spaces with acting; thankfully, she has Isabelle Huppert and a pro cast on her side.  Home will work best for those who find the carefully observed intimate details of other people’s family lives fascinating, but the leisurely pacing will make this thin allegory something of a grind for others.  Early scenes establish the bucolic Eden that’s about to be paved over: the family plays hockey in the abandoned highway, watches TV on a couch outdoors, and bathes together.  (Meier makes a major point of the family’s unselfconscious, unsexual nudity; Huppert is the only one in the film who keeps her clothes on).  External pressure on the happy family arrives when the highway reopens (allowing Meier the opportunity for a nicely absurd parody of the “incredibly specific news broadcast” movie cliché: the only radio station the family receives focuses exclusively and obsessively on the new thoroughfare, tracking the progress of the first motorist as if he were a national celebrity). Amusingly, at first the brood attempts to go about its normal routines despite the intrusion of the motorway; college-age Judith continues her full-time bikini sunbathing career (to the delight of passing truckers), and the two younger kids dodge cars as they cross the highway on their way to school each morning. Eventually the pressure starts to get to the family unit; the incessant freeway noise causes sleepless nights, and fatalistic middle child Marion takes to wearing a homemade gas mask and filling her younger brother’s head with tales of how the gasoline fumes will stunt his growth. Father Michel (Gourmet) reasonably suggests relocation, but mother Marthe (Huppert) digs in to preserve the homestead. Under stress the family’s behavior takes a turn for the bizarre (especially Mom’s). When they decide to wall up the house, the heat inside becomes stifling and the air stale; they spend most of their time sleeping, lacking the strength to do more. The film’s symbolism is open ended, which can be a very good thing, but which works better when coupled with a stronger narrative. Critics seem to be focusing on the happy pastoral family vs. poisonous industrial society theme and the environmentalist subtext, but there’s also a metaphor about growing up at work here. At each stage of the story, the tone reflects one of the three children’s perceptions of family life. At first there is a childish innocence and fun to the home, with nothing of too much importance existing outside it. The outside world (represented by the highway) begins to encroach on the family sanctuary and penetrate its four walls, reflecting the anxiety and disillusionment of the early teen years. Finally, the home becomes a stifling prison run by madmen whose walls must be torn down in order to become an adult.

This Home is often confused with Home (2008), a mother-daughter cancer drama, and Home (2009), an environmental documentary narrated by Glenn Close. I have no theory to offer as to why the filmmakers gave their French language film shot in Bulgaria an English title.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…the engaging, darkly funny, surreal story of what happens when people who have thrived by keeping civilization at a safe distance suddenly find themselves pushed right back into its headlights… an absurdist pit stop on the order of ‘Bagdad Café,’ but with more edge and less charm.”–Janice Page, The Boston Globe (contemporaneous)

FEATURING: Lola Créton, Dominique Thomas

PLOT: A young girl from a poor family is married off to a local aristocrat with a blue beard and

a reputation for murdering his brides.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Blue Beard‘s weirdness, while detectable, is mild; and, despite its tragedy and enigmatic tone, as a film its impact is surprisingly slight.

COMMENTS:  Blue Beard is not merely a period piece in setting, with its authentic medieval gowns and tapestries and frescoes and gloomy stone castles, but it’s also a throwback to an older, subtler age of storytelling with its slow, clam, and detached style.  The primary actors—Lola Créton as the doomed child bride and Dominique Thomas as the unexpectedly sympathetic ogre—never raise their voices, and their expressions remain staid and repressed: obscure emotions flit across their faces, but their subtexts never fully emerge into the light of day.  Even the nobleman’s trademark chromatic bristles—the mark of his supernatural origin—look black and gray in the film, only showing a slight steely blue cast in just the right light, when viewed in private with the luxury to examine it.  Pacing is slow, camerawork languorous.  The flatness of the film serves two purposes: it gives us the freedom to project our own interpretations on the characters, and it causes a few key images to suddenly burst into three dimensions and startle us, like pages from a children’s pop-up book.  Director Breillat takes a weird approach in revealing the fate of Bluebeard’s previous wives, and the effect is successfully memorable and eerie.  The enigmatic final image, a psuedo-Biblical shot that strangely casts the young girl as Salome while effectively encapsulating the spectrum of her unresolved emotions, also fairly pops.  Breillat layers a framing story on top of the fairy tale wherein one little girl is reading the story to her more sensitive and easily frightened sister.  It’s an interesting directorial choice, but it would be hard to claim that this device is entirely successful.  In terms of pacing, it at least provides a little respite from the plodding medieval segments; thematically, the conceit highlights the difference between the carefully sculpted tragedies found in stories and the randomness of real life catastrophes.  With its child bride (diminutive Créton was 15 or 16 years old at the time of filming but looks 12 or 13, at her absolute oldest), the main narrative hints at institutionalized perversion and exploitation.  The story thwarts those expectations, however, in the way that the relationship develops: Marie-Catherine is grateful to Bluebeard for rescuing her from poverty and boredom, the older man is a perfect gentleman who reveals no overt predatory tendencies, and the two develop a chaste mutual fondness and in their own unique way make a happy couple.  Many will want to interpret this open-ended film as reflecting Breillat’s typical themes of female sexuality and gender politics, but it remains true to the mysterious core of the folktale as well.  Like Eve in Genesis (and Ofelia in Pan’s Labyrinth), the heroine here is threatened with death by a supernatural entity who holds her fate in his hands if she breaks a seemingly arbitrary rule.  The fairy tale is a wish-fulfillment that allows the protagonist to turn the tables on God, experiencing the forbidden while at the same time escaping death.  In real life, however, fatal dangers are not always so clearly and neatly marked out by dire prohibitions.  If you’re interested in pondering these sorts of weighty issues, you’ll find Blue Beard a useful meditation aid; if you’re looking for any sort of action, flash, or escapist fantasy, however, you’ll want to steer well clear of this often ponderous tale.

The legend of the murderous aristocrat Bluebeard is an old French folktale that possibly derives from, or incorporates, the biography of 15th century French nobleman Gilles de Rais, who was accused of murdering hundreds of children.  The legend was first reduced to print by Charles Perrault in 1697.  The story has been adapted for film dozens of times, never quite successfully, usually removing the supernatural elements and relocating the action to the present.  Edgar G. Ulmer‘s 1944 version starred John Carradine as an artist who strangles his models, and there was a sleazy 1973 Italian-produced version with ample nudity starring Richard Burton as the misogynist murderer and Raquel Welch, Sybil Danning and Joey Heatherton as some of his victims.  Cinematic pioneer Georges Méliès made a nine-minute silent version in 1901 with dream sequences that may count as the best and weirdest version of the tale ever filmed.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a surreal little film with an intriguing Freudian subtext and a haunting blend of magic and gritty realism.”–David Edwards, Daily Mirror (contemporaneous)