FEATURING: David Bowie, Candy Clark, Buck Henry, Rip Torn

PLOT: An extraterrestrial visits earth in search of water, but becomes distracted by

alcohol, television, corporate politics, and a tempestuous relationship with a human woman.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: Roeg’s usual penchants for nonlinear storytelling and rich, occasionally disturbing imagery are stretched to their breaking points here; the resulting film is not always coherent or consistent, but it is fascinating and intermittently very weird.

COMMENTS: Only Nicolas Roeg would have taken a story roughly in the vein of Starman or E.T. and turned it into this.  Instead of falling into a facile, friendly relationship with earth’s inhabitants, Roeg’s spaceman, Thomas Jerome Newton, is afflicted with a severe case of culture shock.  Struggling to simultaneously save his faraway family and understand human behavior, he ends up failing at both, and the film traces out his steep rise-and-fall arc with a plot so disorientingly scrambled that it sometimes threatens to become stream-of-consciousness.

Through this frenzied editing style, we’re witness to Newton’s past, present, and future, although it’s rarely clear which is which at any given moment.  This extreme nonlinearity conveys the sensation of being a stranger in a strange land, as flashbacks bleed readily into the film’s putative reality or its characters’ fantasies; however, this also tends to make plot developments foggy and render motivations obscure.  In this sense, it’s a very messy film, often more interested in delving into Newton’s frazzled interior logic than in aiding the viewer’s comprehension.  Stretched with epic sweep over 138 minutes, the film’s detours and repeated segments (like that of the spaceship crashing) can get frustrating, but The Man Who Fell to Earth is more about visceral sensory experiences and emotional intuition than narrative flow.

Under those terms, the film is a qualified success.  Newton’s skyrocketing financial fortunes, his dalliance with a sweet small-town girl named Mary Lou (Clark), his alcohol-driven decline, and his subsequent institutionalization are all tightly interwoven, delineating a tragic, decades-long trajectory.  The tragedy is further illustrated by the interspersed snippets of memory and fantasy, including a violent musical interlude set to the song “Hello Mary Lou” that recalls the “Memo to Turner” scene from Performance.  Also like Performance (and the rest of Roeg’s early films), The Man Who Fell to Earth abounds with graphic sexuality, which becomes one more avenue for Newton’s experimentation with life on earth.  Both formally and morally, this film is tailor-made to offend conservative sensibilities.

The film’s mounting transgressions are compounded by the way that Bowie’s cadaverous, androgynous body blurs the line between human and alien, especially during the lengthy sex scenes.  His star power and otherworldly aura make the film’s sci-fi conceits believable, since with his shock of unnaturally red hair, his eyes (which are different two colors), and even his British accent—which stands out against the voices of his American costars—Bowie is believably not of this world, and when he chooses to remove his human skin and eyes, the outcome is only marginally stranger than the his original appearance.  As he changes from freshly arrived naïf to contaminated wino, Bowie anchors the film, his intractable presence acting as a counterpoint to Roeg’s flighty direction.

Since Roeg speaks in such an indecipherable visual language, it’s hard to know what to make of The Man Who Fell to Earth.  It’s partly a spaced-out parable about capitalism and chemical dependence, and possibly a satire of the rags-to-riches American success story.  Although it drags on too long and is often unfulfilling, it’s still inexplicably captivating.  When it’s all over and the poor man is stuck here on earth, you’re left with a film that’s as enigmatic, tormented, and unexpectedly beautiful as the pale face of Bowie himself.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The story is complicated. It is set up as a near-total mystery that unfolds bit by bit, leaving—it must be said—a few small unexplained gaps. The price paid for this method is a certain confusion; the gain is the spectator’s tingling desire to have the puzzle work out.”–Richard Eder, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

–dialogue from Performance

DIRECTED BY:Donald Cammell, Nicolas Roeg

FEATURING: James Fox, Mick Jagger, Anita Pallenberg, Michèle Breton

PLOT: Chas, a sadistic associate gangster who terrorizes local businesses for London crime kingpin Harry Flowers, is forced to go into hiding when he kills one of his boss’ allies.  He rents a basement from Turner, a former rock icon caught in creative doldrums, now living as a hermit in a luxurious town house with two beautiful live-in girlfriends and a never-ending supply of dope.  Turner initially wants to get rid of Chas but gradually grows fascinated by him, sensing that the thug’s energy might help him break out of his artistic slump, and he begins to make over Chas in his own image.

BACKGROUND:

• Donald Cammell, a former painter turned screenwriter, wrote the script and directed the actors.  Nicolas Roeg, already a sought after cinematographer for his work on films such as The Masque of the Red Death and Fahrenheit 451, supervised the film’s visuals.  It was the first directing credit for either.
• Donald Cammell took his own life in 1996 with a bullet to the head.
• Warner Brothers agreed to distribute the movie solely because rock star Mick Jagger was attached to the project.
• The role of Chas was written with Marlon Brando in mind.  Depending on whom you ask, Brando either declined the role, or the producers decided he could not play a convincing lower-class Brit.  James Fox, a rising young actor known for his posh upper-class persona, studied actual London gangsters to get down the Cockney accent and criminal mannerisms.
• Fox, in his acting prime at the time of Performance, suffered a nervous breakdown after filming (reportedly brought about by a the combination of his father’s death and smoking the powerful hallucinogen DMT with Jagger) and did not act again for 8 years after completing the movie.
• Tuesday Weld and Marianne Faithfull were the original choices to play Pherber, but Pallenberg, a model and Rolling Stones groupie (then Keith Richards’ girlfriend), was brought in after Weld was injured and Faithfull became pregnant.
• Nicolas Roeg recalls seeing members of the film development lab destroying “intimate” scenes of the film “with a fire axe,” apparently believing they had mistakenly been sent illegal hardcore pornography to develop.
• Jack Nitzsche composed much of the score on the ninth Moog synthesizer ever built (the Moog probably belonged to Jagger: the Rolling Stones had been
  one of the first rock groups to include a synthesizer on their 1967 album “Their Satanic Majesties Request”).
• The movie was completed in 1968, but shelved for two years after a disastrous test screening at which audiences yelled at the screen and walked out of the theater.  A studio executive’s wife reportedly vomited from viewing the graphic violence, and audiences were offered their money back.  The movie’s eventual release was delayed for two years while the film was re-edited; much of the violence was trimmed, and Mick Jagger’s first appearance was moved forward in the film to appease Warner Brother executives.  Roeg has already left for Australia to make Walkabout and was not involved in the final cut.
• In order to compress the beginning of the film, partly so that Jagger would appear onscreen earlier, editor Frank Mazzola created the fast crosscutting montage that begins the film.  “I knew I’d have to slide things back and forth or extend something to make it hit on a note or a frame,” the editor recalls.  “I could do three or four or five of those cuts and bang!, it was perfect, like a beat… You could do anything to that film and it would work, because of the way it was happening.  It was
  poetry, it was organic…”
• Among the cuts later demanded by the British censors was a scene of Fox being flogged, intercut with a scene of him making love to a woman digging her fingernails into his back.
• Performance was savaged by critics on its initial release, but its reputation has improved over the years.  In 2009 Mick Jagger’s Turner ranked number one in Film Comment’s poll of top film performances by a musician.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Turner is dancing around with a large fluorescent tube before a stoned Chas when he suddenly howl and thrusts the glowing cylinder at the mobster’s ear; a tracking shot through his auditory canal reveals Chas’ mob boss imprinted on the tympanic membrane. The camera plunges past this barrier and suddenly Jagger replaces the crimelord in the scene; he launches into an taunting song aimed at Chas and assembled gang lieutenants.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Even before Anita Pallenberg feeds James Fox hallucinogenic

Original trailer for Performance (trailer contains brief nudity and sexuality)

amanita mushrooms on the sly near the climax, the crazed editing of the first half, which cuts back and forth across time and space without warning while setting up the tale of Chas’ fall from gangster grace, is so trippy that it’s almost completely disoriented us.  Performance is almost exactly what you would expect to see if you matched a couple of smart, artsy, experimental directors to an eccentric half-amateur cast of drug addicts in 1968 and the set’s caterers fed the crew a diet of nothing but hash brownies and magic mushrooms for the entire shoot.

COMMENTS: When you notice a bullet shattering a portrait of Jorge Luis Borges on the way through a victim’s skull (in the second of Nic Roeg’s fantastical tracking shots inside a character’s head) you realize exactly how fond writer/co-director Donald Cammell was of the Argentine writer (at another point in the film, a raving Jagger gives a shout-out to “Orbis Tertius” as well as other madnesses about “the tetrarchs of Sodom” and so on).  Despite his obvious reverence for the poet laureate of paradoxes and labyrinths, however, the wild-eyed Performance couldn’t be much farther from the lean discipline and esoteric clarity of a Borges story (if you want to see the equivalent of one of Borges’ playful philosophical parables on film, look to Charlie Kaufman instead).  Cammell’s script, with its hallucinogenic stream-of-consciousness style, is much more reminiscent of another, earthier hep writer, William S. Burroughs.  Cammell throws out references to not only Borges and Burroughs, but also to Aleister Crowley, Antonin Artaud, and Eastern philosophy, along with shards of Jung for good measure; it’s as if he’s intent on working his entire bookshelf into the script, at least the dangerous and decadent tomes.  None of these ideas are synthesized into a coherent argument; they zoom about and collide off one another and bounce off at strange tangents, just like the free-floating ideas circulating around intellectual circles in the late 1960s.  In that age, any thinker whose words could be used to support a philosophy of principled debauchery, who could offer a quote useful in bedding a buxom grad student or a seducing a zoned-out seeker, had instant credibility.

I don’t mean these observations as an attack on the script or the film: they are offered as a way of understanding how this wild, crazy, pretentious monument to hedonistic excess perfectly captured the zeitgeist of the smart-but-stoned set circa 1968.  The movie captures the intellectual confusion and intoxicating energy of the Swinging Sixties as well as any ever made.  It’s Performance‘s romantic impression of an era where it was reasonable to believe that any guy might one day accidentally stumble into a mad rockers mod pad and tumble into a threesome with a French runaway and a German model while dropping acid, discussing Egyptian occultism and listening to the Last Poets bongo-fueled calls for black revolution that gives the movie it’s strange coherence.

The movie begins with an astonishingly edited sequence that cuts back and forth between a limo driving down the road and Fox having rough sex with a floozy; weird, doom-laden electronic beats play, and as the lovemaking climaxes the cutting back and forth between machine and flesh becomes so rapid that the images merge into a strobe effect. After a short dramatic break the man whose love life we’ve been following, Chas, climbs into the limo with his cohorts and is off to work, but almost immediately we see another black car pull up to an almost identical row of brownstone buildings as the one he’s just left; we’re disoriented because a new character, a barrister, steps out of the car and heads off to a court of law.  We then alternate scenes between Chas shaking down a taxi-dispatch office for protection money and the lawyer defending a rich man accused of masterminding a case involving stock fraud in a merger attempt. Scenes jump back and forth in time as Chas visits Harry Flowers, the big boss, while the attorney drones on (accompanied by electronic squiggles from the score’s Moog). The jagged, jumbled narrative of the opening is not constructed merely to confuse and alienate the audience: if establishes the themes of duality and merger that will dominate the story once Chas meets Turner.

As the first act goes on, the confusing edits grow farther apart, and the story flattens out into a gangland tale that rates as many people’s favorite part of the film (despite it’s psychedelic credentials, Performance is also sometimes credited as the genesis of the British gangster film).  The violence on display was unprecedentedly brutal for the time, even after the massive cuts demanded by Warner Brothers and the British censors.  After kingpin Flowers makes an independent bookie (and personal enemy of Chas) an offer he can’t refuse, the hothead enforcer endangers the criminal merger by taking matters into his own hands.  The victims turn the tables, and the result is that Chas absorbs a massive beating and endures grimy underworld-style torture in a room that’s been vandalized with splattered red paint (to camouflage the flowing blood).  His tormentors underestimate Chas’ talent for violence, however, and the thug manages to escape them; but in doing so he signs his own death warrant with the organization, and is forced to go on the lam.

The middle sequence, where Chas makes his way into Turner’s basement hideout, marks the film’s weakest segment; the film is biding its time until the final fireworks. This sequence functions to set up the duality between Chas and Turner.  Fox works hard in the first half of the film to create a character with a powerful air of invulnerability, but Jagger, sneering in lipstick, has an instant presence from the moment he first appears (omitting the humorously incongruous scenes of the star spray-painting a wall that Warner Brothers insisted be inserted into the first half to assure audiences that the rock idol really was in the movie).  It quickly beomes obvious that Chas is out of his depth among the Bohemians, and his Cockney confidence looks increasingly unjustified as he tries to fool the hippie trio into believing he’s a juggler waiting for his equipment to arrive.  Sexy secretary Pherber immediately puts him off guard with her casual wordplay and the way she leans back and caresses the fur coat pooled around her crotch as she negotiates the rent.  Turner starts out uninterested in and unimpressed with the juggler; he tries to give him his rent back and convince him to leave the premises with a simpering display of disdain, blaring guitar licks from the speakers while Chas tries to explain himself and strutting about in his trademark Stones style, spouting fragments of poetry and wielding his microphone like a homophobe-slaying blade.  Turner, a semi-retired rock star undergoing a creative crisis, eventually relents and decides to let Chas stay on in the basement, intrigued by the gangster’s desperation to stay somewhere he’s unwanted.  An erotic lesbian sex scene and a three-way bath in Turner’s spacious tub establish the aura of decadence and liven up the connective tissue of the second act, but it’s all a setup for what’s to come.

Turner (who’s “lost his daemon,” according to Pherber) intuits the violent energy inside Chas and determines to metaphorically crack open his head and feed on the energy inside.  The predator becomes the prey, especially when it turns out that Chas needs something from the bohos: a Polaroid camera so that he can make a fake passport for himself to escape from the killers scouring England for him.  This gives Pherber and Turner the opportunity to play dress up with Chas, pretending to help him remake his image as a performer, while slipping him a nearly fatal dose of magic mushrooms.  Chas, a criminal expert but a psychedelic novice, falls under their influence almost immediately, particularly when voluptuous Pherber demonstrates her boudoir skills as a friendly gesture.  She probes his personality and more, dressing him up in a longhair wig so that he starts to look like the androgynous Turner and challenging his masculinity by holding up a mirror against his chest so that he sprouts her breasts.  The drug trip allows Roeg to deploy visual tricks with lighting and montage while Cammell writes lines like “the only performance that makes it all the way is the one that achieves madness!”

The highlight of the trip sequence, and of the film, is the song “Memo from Turner,” where Turner’s persona merges with that of Chas’ boss, Harry Flowers, inside the refugee’s head.  The lyrics are Dylanesque (“I remember you on Hemlock Row in 1956/You’re a faggy little leather boy with a smaller piece of stick.”)  The sudden musical number comes out of left field, and it’s pleasantly jarring; it helps that the tune is memorable, and that Jagger’s trademark aggressive ambisexuality blasts the clothes off square middle-aged gangsters in the course of the song.  “Memo from Turner” isn’t the movies’ first rock music video, as is sometimes claimed (don’t people remember the Beatles?), but it is one of the most impactful.  For many viewers, “Memo from Turner” was Performance‘s take-home moment, the sequence that sticks in the mind years later.  Quite possibly, Jagger’s performance here salvaged the film for a good number of viewers, particularly those who only came to see the singer in the first place.

Performance ends with a confusing and mysterious surrealistic bit where Chas and Turner’s identities completely merge.  I wouldn’t inquire too much into what that might mean, or what the entire movie might mean, if I were you.  Compared to Performance, Eraserhead is a textbook example of thematic clarity.  “What a dreadful question, what do I think of it, what’s it all about,” said David Cammell, the brother of co-director Donald and an associate producer if the film, in response to an interviewer’s question in 2007.  “I don’t know.  Do you know what it’s about?”  Nicolas Roeg himself stressed that “after all this time, [Performance]‘s mystery is part of it’s magic and attraction.”  The film’s trailer less than helpfully explains that it’s about “madness… and sanity… fantasy… and reality… and sensuality…”  That “sensuality” part, of course, may be the most important key to Performance‘s appeal.  The film serves us a lot of meaty but undercooked themes, and we might get intellectual salmonella from chewing it over too carefully. Primary among the movie’s mysteries is the title: what’s meant by “performance”? Chas’ work as a thug (Flower’s refers to his mob job at one point as a “performer”)?  Turner’s art?  The undercover bit where the gangster pretends to be a juggler?  All of life? There’s also a lot of focus on duality and merger, the confusing suggestion that Turner and Chas are two parts of the same person, throwaway considerations about the relationship between madness and art, and Jungian suggestions that the gangster is an out-of-balance hyper-man who needs to integrate his feminine side into his personality to complete himself.  (Of course, when Chas does finally accept his girlish bohemian side, it leads almost immediately to his death—maybe the message is that it’s a good idea to keep our personalities unintegrated for as long as possible).

Still, lets return to that sensuality the trailer mentions. Who can doubt that a major part of Performance‘s attraction is the wish-fulfillment fantasy of putting ourselves into that cozy little artificial paradise shared by Turner, Pherber and the French waif (and later Turner)?  It’s got everything anyone could ever wish for: luxury, sex, an awesome selection of vinyl, top end speakers, leisure, companionship, books, irresponsibility, a nightly light show directed by Nicolas Roeg, and a big enough variety of intoxicants to keep everyone in a permanent giggly euphoria.  It’s a hippie heaven even the straightest of us long to pay a visit to in our daydreams, and enduring film’s “awful decadence” looks like a tiny price to pay for fulfilling that fantasy.   How can we not love a movie where a flash of light suddenly reveals that the craggy silhouette of a mountain we think we’re seeing is actually Anita Pallenberg’s erect nipple?  This Performance may not be profound, but it’s certainly a lot of fun.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a bizarre, disconnected attempt to link the inhabitants of two kinds of London underworlds…  The surprise of the movie, and the reason to see it, is Mick Jagger’s performance… Other than that, the movie is neither very good nor very bad. Interesting.”–Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun Times (contemporaneous)

“…an arrogant, needless slap at our viewing sensibilities, an odious, amoral work, its oozing decadence as manifest behind the camera as it is on the screen.  That it is a personally successful rendering of a personal vision is probably true, but it certainly is no labor of love.”–Danny Peary, Cult Movies

“…this cultiest of movies is so much more than the sum of its parts, being an intricately detailed, kaleidoscopic signpost to the 1960s burn-out, with all its glorious hobbyhorses, pretensions and madnesses on show.”–Ali Catterall, Film 4 (video)

IMDB LINK: Performance (1970)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

BFI Screenonline: Performance – the information page for Performance at the British Film Institute

Cast Into Darkness – Michael Holden wrote this article on the myths surrounding the cult movie to commemorate the British re-release of Performance

Case Study: Performance – this “case study” from the British Board of Film Classification describes the classification and some of the content-related cuts to Performance demanded by the British censors over the years

Cinema Obscura:Ruminations on Donald Cammell & Nicolas Roeg and Performance – excellent background on the film, including information about enigmatic co-director Cammell from Ray Young

BIBLIOGRAPHY

“Performance” (BFI Film Classics Series) – University of Pittsburgh professor Colin MacCabe’s treatise on Performance

“Performance” (Bloomsbury Pocket Movie Guide 6) – a complete guide to the movie by British journalist Mick Brown

DVD INFO: By 2007 Warner Brothers had finally gotten over their embarrassment over Performance and released a remastered version of the cult classic on DVD (buy). (A few of the sound effects and one line from Jagger—”Here’s to jolly old England”—and some additional psychedelic sound effects are reportedly missing from the remastered version of the film on DVD due to issues with the original stereo recording.)  Extras-wise, the disc contains the original trailer; the thirty minute documentary Performance: Influence and Controversy, which contains interviews with the producers, crew members and Pallenberg; and Memo from Turner, a promotional piece that must have been written by Mick Jagger’s agent.

(This movie was nominated for review by Graham Reznick; “Memo from Turner” inspired the musical number in his Certified Weird movie I Can See You.  Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

FEATURING: Jenny Agutter, David Gulpilil, Luc Roeg

PLOT:  A father drives his two children out into the Australian outback for a “picnic.”  While

there, he commits suicide, leaving the children to struggle for survival in an unfamiliar and harsh natural world.  Eventually they cross paths with an adolescent aborigine who is partaking in his “walkabout”; a rite of passage that entails journeying into the wilderness alone to achieve manhood.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: With the exception of a few odd camera shots, it is not a weird film.  It is certainly a thought-provoking and undeniably beautiful film, but depictions of cultural differences and anthropocentricism are easily attainable on the Discovery channel or—to a much higher degree of weirdness—the National Geographic program “Taboo”.

COMMENTS: Most critiques of this film assert that it simply contrasts the natural world vs. the trappings of modern civilization and its unnecessary conveniences.  I think that’s too obvious.  To me, the underlying theme of budding sexuality and the transition to man/womanhood takes precedence.

The beautiful Jenny Agutter plays the girl (no names are given to the lead roles).  We assume she is around the age of sixteen and living a privileged life of private schooling and residing in a luxury home with all the modern amenities she could need.  An early shot of the girl swimming with her much younger brother in a crystal clear pool right next to an enormous, vast ocean is a personal favorite.  We don’t know anything about the family dynamics or how they interact with each other.  We can only guess the parent-child relationships are cold and impersonal.  The mother listens to cooking recipes on the kitchen radio, and any disturbance from his offspring only annoys the father.

Once we get to the outback things become even more unclear.  Why is the father trying to kill his kids?  Why is he such a bad shot?  Who knows?  He then offs himself, leaving the kids to fend for themselves.  Right away the viewer is treated to close-ups of reptiles, insects and other strange creatures to convey that the youngsters are definitely out of their element.  There is a really nice juxtaposition of the young 6-year-old boy (Luc Roeg—the director’s son) fading into the landscape: a melding of human and nature.

Nicolas Roeg is an amazing director.  Lovers of weird cinema know him through classics such as Bad Timing, The Man Who Fell To Earth, and the certified weird Don’t Look Now.  Alas, there is no dwarf in a red-hooded raincoat chasing the lads around the outback.  If there were, he would easily be picked off with a spear by David Gulpilil, the actor who portrays the aborigine with such authenticity that I originally thought he was the real deal.

The emergence of the aborigine is crucial to the two lost children’s existence.  Now they have hope for survival.  Here is an expert hunter and someone who can show them how to live off the land.  The trio become closer as their journey progresses, even though they never break through the communication barrier.  As a result, the dialogue is kept sparse throughout the film, with the exception of some ramblings of a 6-year-old.

My first viewing of this movie many years ago on VHS included an introductory preview describing this as a family film.  I guess it could be, for open-minded adults allowing their children to witness slaughtering of animals, suicides, and full frontal nudity.  I’m cool with it, but others may find it hard to watch.  The film exudes sexuality, but it is always done very tastefully.  Roeg is such a masterful director that his visuals become much more sensual than outright sexual (at least in this film).

As the young girl gets to be more familiar with the aborigine, sexuality becomes more prominent.  The innocence transitions to lust and longing.  Shots of white birch trees overtly begin resembling female genitalia.  When Agutter skinny dips fully nude, it does not seem exploitative at all.  It represents freedom in the natural world.

The one key scene that could be construed as weird is the mating ritual dance performed by the aborigine towards the end of the film. It is an exhausting day-long event to attract the young girl’s affections.  It is a beautiful and strange performance by a ritually-painted Gulpilil, but unfortunately it only freaks out his potential mate, and the rejection ends in tragedy.

As I stated previously, I could ramble on about how this film is an allegory about the evils of modern civilization.  There are some effective scenes of the aborigine hunting, intercut with a butcher chopping meat in his shop and big game hunters killing for sport.  But more importantly, it is a beautiful film about emerging adulthood and fearfulness of change.  This was made in 1971 and I don’t think it has dated badly at all.  In fact, I think there is a universal message that transcends time.  People of the modern world are constantly changing, but the natural world remains relatively the same, as does the natural human emotion of acceptance.

The new Criterion special edition disc includes a drab commentary by director Roeg and star Agutter and a relatively boring interview with Agutter and Luc Roeg (interesting only for seeing how they have aged).  More interesting is the hour long documentary on David Gulpilil, the person and the actor.  And I don’t need to stress the beauty of Criterion’s transfer; absolute perfection.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…the “civilized” characters and the aborigine exist in a wilderness that isn’t really a wilderness but more of an indefinite place for the story to be told. Roeg’s desert in ‘Walkabout’ is like Beckett’s stage for Waiting for Godot. That is, it’s nowhere in particular, and everywhere… [Roeg's] cinematography (and John Barry’s otherworldly music) make the desert seem a mystical place, a place for visions. So that the whole film becomes mystical, a dream, and the suicides which frame it set the boundaries of reality.”–Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun-Times (contemporaneous)

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

Franc Roddam’s ”Liebestod” from Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” is set in Las Vegas with Bridget Fonda and James Mathers excellently capturing the pathos of the doomed pair.

Ken Russell, an expert eccentric at this sort of thing, memorably tackles Puccini’s ”Turandot” with hallucinatory model Linzi Drew, inlaid rubies and diamonds, and an operating table in a typically heady Russellesque mix of bizarre, mystical excess and eros.

Godard, tongue delightfully in cheek, sets Jean Baptiste Lully in a work-out gym as two women contend with narcissistic male body builders.

Charles Sturridge’s interpretation of Verdi’s “La Forza Del Destino” subtly grows brighter upon repeated viewings. Sturridge’s “Destino” aptly paints troubled youth on a joy ride through an apathetic adult world in a lament to the Virgin.

Bruce Beresford’s film of Korngold’s “Die Tote Stadt,” starring a young Elizabeth Hurley, captures the music’s superficial sheen.

Nicholas Roeg, Robert Altman, Derek Jarman, Julian Temple, and Bill Bryden interpret Verdi, Rameau, Charpentier, and Leoncavallo to lesser effect, but even the slight failures here are far preferable to the bulk of Hollywood drek.

Ken Russell has had an ongoing obsession with composers: Tchaikovsky in The Music Lovers, the justifiably infamous Lisztomania, and Elgar, but his most hallucinatory and, oddly enough, most intimate work remains 1974′s Mahler, with Robert Powell (auditioning here for his role in Jesus of Nazareth) and Georgina Hale ideal in their roles as Gustav and Alma Mahler.  Russell, one of the most skilled directors when it comes to marrying music and imagery, gives refreshingly imaginative life to Mahler’s Third and Seventh Symphonies, as well as to Wagner.  The scherzo to the Mahler Seventh becomes a phantasmagorical, black joke on sex and death, the opening of the Third takes on new world imagery, and Wagner’s vehement anti-semitism gets blatantly cut down in Russell’s eager hands (it’s far preferable to 2001′s execrable Bride of the Wind).

Mahler has nearly become the new testament in most music circles, relegating Beethoven to old testament status; and the DVD market reflects this as much as the CD market.  One of the most definitive Mahler documentaries is the 2003 What the Universe Tells Me (buy), which is a penetrating, philosophical and probing analysis of his epic Third Symphony.

There have been numerous Mahler concert films, beginning with Leonard Bernstein’s legendary filmed 1970′s cycle with the Vienna Philharmonic (a high point in this is his understandably bitchy chastisement at the hopelessly conservative, stubborn, prima-donna like orchestra members).  Bernstein took on the mantle of educator once again with the insightful Mahler essay, The Little Drummer Boy, in 1985. Additional filmed performances have continued on up to the opposite end of the spectrum with 2008′s cubist Mahler Second Symphony (from Pierre Boulez) and the Berlin Staatskapelle.  Most surprising of all may be surrealist auteur Guy Maddin‘s Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (buy), which re-tells this very old story as a silent ballet juxtaposed to Mahler’s 1st and 2nd Symphonies.

Before Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts, Leopold Stokowski was considered the American musical educator. Uptight musicologists (is there any other kind?) may have foamed at the mouth every time Stoki walked up to the stage and played havoc with the scores, but audiences loved his flamboyant charisma and amorous flings (including an affair with Greta Garbo and a marriage to Gloria Vanderbilt ) along with his musical catholicism.  This wizard was a natural choice for Walt Disney’s Fantasia.

Of course, it’s well known that Walt was crucified for this, his most ambitious project and, initially, biggest  heartbreaking failure. Despite it’s almost legendary status, this one of a kind experiment (Fantasia 2000 [buy] only fleetingly came close) is so startlingly unique that mainstream audiences still don’t know quite what to make what of it, treating it almost as if it were an unapproachable, baffling avant-garde manifesto (contemporary corn fed on hyper-realism, mainstream audiences, amazingly, do nearly the same with any given Busby Berkeley film).  Mussorgsky, Stravinsky, Dukas and Bach come off best, although there are rewards throughout.

Some of the most hardcore 20th/21st century avant-garde performers and performances are finally, but surprisingly, being committed to film.

Mode Studios has released a Iannis Xenakis series (Amazon search results).  The late, post Webern, electronic composer’s string works, his infamous Krannerg, and La Legend d’ Eeer are among the works being performed by the Jack Quartet.  These filmed performances only go further in emphasizing the music’s difficulty.

The sublime A Trail on the Water (buy), one of the best films of it’s kind, intimately humanizes the person and music of Luigi Nono, who ranks with Boulez and Stockhausen as one of the towering voices of  post-World War II music.  Despite his avowed atheism, Nono’s late works became increasingly meditative, introverted and, yes, spirtual.  Trail aptly explores the composer’s relationship with his beloved Venice, his wife (the daughter of Arnold Schoenberg, who started it all), and two advocates in pianist Pollini and conductor Abbado.

The hopelessly overrated Philip Glass and John Cage have been well represented on DVD.  The best of these is perhaps Facet’s 1992 Listen (buy) which features both Cage and Luciano Berio.  However, both composers here are frequently accused of style over substance, and this film goes to no great length to disprove that.

The series Juxtapositions (Amazon search results) may be the most valuable avant-garde film collection, despite some weaker entries.  Philip Glass: Looking Glass and Arvo Part: 24 Preludes for a Fugue are predictably lesser entries but Gustav Mahler: Conducting Mahler/I Have Lost Touch With the World surprisingly offers little and falls flat. Still, the excellence of Elliott Carter: A Labyrinth of Time, Olivier Messiaen: The Crystal Liturgy, Nadia Boulanger: Mademoiselle, Pierre Boulez: Juxta Positions, Igor Stravinsky: The Final Chorale/Five Orchestral Pieces, The Matchstick Man / The Seventh Door – Two films on Gyorgy Kurtag and Peter Eotvos, cannot be over estimated and are all indispensable.

Also of noteworthy mention should be the DVD releases of Leonard Bernstein’s Candide and Mass (the former being his greatest work and the latter well ahead of it’s time) , Ives: The Unanswered Question, Harrison Birtwistle’s The Minotaur, Maria Ewing’s one of a kind, head turning performance as Salome, Strauss’ underrated Die Frau Ohne Schatten (a top notch production starring Cheryl Studer), Boulez In Rehearsal (Berg Three Pieces for Orchestra / Boulez Notations I-IV), Musik Trienniale Koln 2000 – Berg Lulu Suite / Debussy – Le Jet D’Eau / Stravinsky – Firebird, Debussy: La Mer/Le Martyre De Saint Sebastien/Lucerne Festival Orchestra/Claudio Abbado, Claude Debussy; The Fall of the House of Usher/Prélude à la l’après-midi d’un Faune/Jeux, Bregenzer Festspiele, After the Storm: The American Exile of Bela Bartok, Bartok: Bluebeard’s Castle, Stravinsky: Le Sacre du Printemps – Ballets by Uwe Scholz, Doris Dorrie and Barenboim’s 1960′s-type take on Cosi Fan Tutte, and too many alternative “Rings” to keep track of.

DIRECTED BY:  Nicolas Roeg

FEATURING:  Donald Sutherland, Julie Christie

PLOT: John and Laura Baxter (Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie) lose their daughter in a freak drowning accident. Life goes on, however, and they travel to Venice as planned, where John is directing the restoration of a Gothic cathedral. While there, they meet a blind psychic woman who tells them she can see their daughter, and John begins to catch glimpses out of the corner of his eye of a red-hooded figure that looks suspiciously like his drowned daughter.

BACKGROUND:

• This was director Nicolas Roeg’s third film, after Performance (1970) and Walkabout (1971). The movie was adapted from a short story by the British novelist Daphne du Maurier, whose works also inspired Rebecca and The Birds.
• The love scene between Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland was so graphic for the time that (unverified) rumors persisted that they had actually had intercourse on the set.  Roeg has since dismissed the rumors.
• Some of the style of the film may have been influenced by Italian giallos of the period, though this connection has been exaggerated simply because of the Venetian setting.
• Don’t Look Now is #8 on the British Film Institute’s list of the all-time great British films.

INDELIBLE IMAGE : The color red. (More would constitute a spoiler).

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  Don’t Look Now is subtly unnerving—perhaps too

Trailer for Don’t Look Now narrated by John Landis (courtesy of Trailers from Hell)

subtly—throughout. But the last 20 minutes are a truly unsettling, nightmarish experience, capped by a shocking, largely unexplained resolution that leaves it to the viewer to solve the film’s mystery. By the end, the city of Venice has turned into a strangely deserted, Gothic labyrinth that may haunt your nightmares.

COMMENTS: Near the opening of Don’t Look Now is a fast-moving montage in which key images are repeated, echoed, and transformed. Although the significance of all the symbols won’t be clear to the viewer at first, the sequence is a masterpiece of imagery, the effect subliminally hypnotic. Near the end of Don’t Look Now is a hyperkinetic montage of images from the film that come at the eye like shards of shattered glass. It’s as if the movie’s own life is flashing before its eyes.

In between these bravura sequences is a movie that is nearly a masterpiece.  Don’t Look Now is an intricately constructed puzzle that requires thought on the audience’s part to sort out.  The final resolution is nearly perfect for this sort of film: the literal narrative ties up loose ends in a tight, if unexpected, package.  As a symbolic expression of John Baxter’s failure to come to grips with the death of his child, it also satisfyingly closes the door and turns out the light on the main character’s psychological reality.  But the ending is also so—weird—that it suggests further interpretations that lie beneath the surface. Did it really happen that way, just as the narrative says? Or did the story actually end some time before: were the last twenty nightmarish minutes just an expressionist dream?

The reason that Don’t Look Now is nearly a masterpiece is that it has one terrible flaw.  For long stretches between those opening and closing montages, it commits the one sin that no movie should ever commit: it’s boring.  After the couple gets to Venice, Roeg spends a lot of time focusing on the ordinariness of John and Laura’s domestic life.  It’s true that underneath that surface of that ordinariness lurks the couple’s shared grief over the death of their daughter, and the separate ways in which they deal with that sorrow.  But their differences don’t explode into vicious disagreements arguments often enough to keep the viewer’s interest.  In fact, throughout most of the center part of the movie, they seem to be coping with the tragedy unexpectedly well: life goes on, they focus on their work, they have sex, they dress and go to dinner.  Their wounds seem long healed, and Roeg chooses not to pick at their scars.

In a way, the celebrated sex scene between Sutherland and Christie is a microcosm of what’s wrong with Don’t Look Back, rather than what’s right about it.  The coupling is not gratuitous; it serves an obvious plot function, coming as it does so soon after Laura has seemed to come to grips with her daughter’s death.  The viewer supplies the missing detail: the couple hasn’t made love like this since the tragedy.  The scene is intercut with a scene of the couple dressing for dinner, another indication of normality and ordinariness. But the scene, while it temporarily wakes the viewer up from his slumber, goes on far too long after it has served its purpose.  It’s symptomatic of the film’s overall disinterst in moving the plot along quickly.  There are entire scenes and characters in the movie that don’t advance the story at all, scenes of John discussing work with the bishop or eating arrangements with the proprietor of his pensione.  Much of the time, the viewer’s mind is drifting, observing at the Venetian scenery rather than at the subtle cues on the faces of the main characters.  And while this sort of backdrop of banality creates an excellent contrast to the dreamlike world John will soon find himself trapped in, it does not make for a compelling watching experience.

The film runs 110 minutes, which is twenty minutes longer than average.  Had Roeg found twenty minutes of domestic fat to trim, the film may truly have turned out as the masterpiece that many critics claim.  As it is, too many viewers actually give up on the film before they make it to the payoff, which is surely not what the filmmakers had hoped for.  In the end, Don’t Look Now is a film that plays better in the memory than onscreen, and also a film that is much better on a second viewing—with a finger always poised near the fast-forward button.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a fragile soap bubble of a horror film. It has a shiny surface that reflects all sorts of colors and moods, but after watching it for a while, you realize you’re looking not into it, but through it and out the other side. The bubble doesn’t burst, it slowly collapses, and you may feel, as I did, that you’ve been had.”–Vincent Camby, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

“Roeg’s film is a characteristically elliptical and genuinely unsettling affair, heightened by a palpable sense of atmosphere and ominous portent in which nothing is what it seems… an undeniably key work in British cinema.” –David Wood, BBC (video)

“After 25 years, ‘Don’t Look Now’ still has the power to frighten and disorient — to suggest a world that’s perilous, cruel and out of control.  Roeg… created an atmosphere thick with portents and subliminal clues and edited the film in a fractured manner that distorts time and perception.” –Edward Guthmann, San Francisco Chronicle (re-release)

IMDB ENTRY:  Don’t Look Now (1973)

DVD INFO:  The Paramount DVD release (Buy) contains no extras, except for the original trailer.