FEATURING: Robin Williams, Annabella Sciorra, Cuba Gooding Jr., Max von Sydow

PLOT: A pediatrician dies and goes to paradise, but he’s willing to throw away an eternity of

bliss to find his wife, who’s trapped in a far less pleasant afterlife.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Majestic visuals make Dreams worth a gander for most, but due to high levels of sugary sentiment it’s contraindicated for diabetic cinephiles.  While it has some unusual moments (and a cool eyeblink cameo from weird icon Werner Herzog as a tormented head), its weirdness isn’t much higher than any other Hollywood-approved fantasy.

COMMENTS:  The romantic afterlife fantasy What Dreams May Come flopped at the box office, but won a well-deserved Oscar for Best Visual Effects.  When pediatrician Chris (Robin Williams) dies and goes to heaven, the afterlife manifests as one of his wife’s oil paintings.  Williams (joined by spiritual guide Cuba Gooding Jr.) wanders around inside an incredibly detailed landscape that looks like it was literally created out of paint; when his shoe slips on the mud, it exposes an undercoat of iridescent green and orange. It’s a miraculous mise-en-scène that, by itself, makes the movie worth catching.  Other visuals pack quite a punch as well, especially when the action moves from a prismatic heaven to a gray hell: we watch a horde of swimming dead menacing Chris’s boat, and see him carefully transverse a field where the faces of the damned grow like heads of lettuce.  Unfortunately, the other aspects of the production can’t keep up to the standard set by the visuals, and a vein of sappiness undermines the whole endeavor.   What Dreams was made during the period when Robin Williams was still transitioning from a wacky motormouthed comedian to a “serious” dramatic actor, and he received some praise for this performance at the time; looking back, however, it seems too restrained, as if he’s trying to keep his massive personality in check.  Gooding Jr. tries to compensate for Williams’ surprising lack of energy, and goes over the top a couple of times (I half expected him to shout out, “show me the salvation!”). Annabella Sciorra comes off best, but she needed a better agent; she gets third billed, behind supporting player Gooding Jr., and doesn’t even get her name before the title! The story actually has an affecting emotional core which is cleverly explored—Chris’ descent into his wife’s personal hell mirrors a real life tragedy suffered back on earth—but the pathos doesn’t come through as powerfully as it should; you might come away from the picture with the feeling that the message is that the only things that survive death are love and therapy.  Distractions keep the story from getting into gear until the movie’s already half over.  Sure, the visuals are awesome in Paradise, but the story dawdles there, just taking in the scenery.  Chris’ relationship with his children is awkwardly handled as a pair of intrusive subplots to the main love story; it’s unsettling how, amidst so much longing for his wife back on Earth, he remembers to ask about his kids as an afterthought.  The dialogue frequently sounds like it should be printed on a motivational poster rather than coming out of the mouths of believable human beings: there’s about a dozen variations on the theme of “never give up,” plus such cringe-inducing lines as “you don’t have to break in half to love somebody” and “what some folks call impossible is just stuff they haven’t seen before.”  But even with all the kitsch and mawkishness spread throughout the film, it’s the ridiculous, nonsensical finish—with its teary hugs and wildflowers and sunlight glinting on the water and swelling strings—that leaves a sickly sweet aftertaste that almost ruins the whole experience.  (An unfinished but more sensible alternate ending, which follows the original novel, is included as an extra on the disc).  While What Dreams makes lots of references to fine art, from its “Hamlet”-inspired title to its mythological plot and the visual citations to 19th century paintings, it’s all a surface sheen of culture masking a limp, New Agey, nondenominational spirituality.  Even Richard Matheson’s original novel, while not high art on the level of the masterpieces the movie references, seems bowdlerized (the author is on record as finding the adaptation disappointing).  Though it clearly wants to be taken seriously as Art, the movie is simultaneously too concerned with being inoffensive and inspirational, so it ends up playing like Orpheus as adapted by someone whose only previous experience was writing greeting cards for Hallmark.

In an unusual move, What Dreams May Come listed about a dozen paintings which inspired the various looks of the film in the credits.  19th century German Romantic landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich was the most cited inspiration, with his The Wanderer Above the Mists and Two Men Contemplating the Moon singled out. You may notice just the tiniest hint of another influence, Hieronomous Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, in the Hell scenes.  The Paradise scenes, on the other hand, often have riotous color schemes that are more reminiscent to me of a modern impressionist like Leonid Afremov or even the Disney inspired work of Thomas Kinkade than the much subtler works of the Old Masters cited in the credits.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…probably not mainstream enough to enthrall audiences and assure a big return at the box office. It is arguably too offbeat… Director Vincent Ward’s view of heaven is surreal and spectacular, with special effects enhancing everything from the subtle greens of the mosses and grass to the crimsons, violets, oranges, and blues of the flower petals.”–James Berardinelli, Reel Views (contemporaneous)

DIRECTED BY: Peter Greenaway

FEATURING: Vivian Wu, Ewan McGregor, Yoshi Oida

PLOT:  Every birthday, Nagiko’s father draws calligraphic figures on her face while ritualistically reciting the story of creation.  Nagiko grows into a beautiful young fashion model obsessed with the intersection of calligraphy and sex, seeking lovers who will use her naked body as a canvas on which to write.  She meets and falls in love with a bisexual British translator who convinces her to write on others’ bodies, and together they conspire for revenge against the publisher who wronged her father.

BACKGROUND:

• The “Pillow Book” from which the movie takes its title is “The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon,” the diaristic collection of anecdotes, observations, poetry and lists by a lady-in-waiting to Empress Sadako of Japan in the Heian era (the book was composed around 1000 AD).  Shōnagon’s work, though probably never intended for others’ eyes, became one of the classics of Japanese literature and a tremendous source of historical data about the Japanese imperial court.  Greenaway was inspired by “The Pillow Book,” but the film is not an adaptation of Shōnagon.  In an interview he explains: “I took some of [the book's] sensitivities, primarily where Sei Shōnagon said, ‘Wouldn’t the world be desperately impoverished if we didn’t have literature and we didn’t acknowledge our own physicality?’ And the movie’s just about that.”
• Occasionally, the spoken Japanese dialogue is not translated into subtitles. This is deliberate.
• Venerable cinematographer Sacha Vierny had shot Greenaway’s previous six feature films and had previously worked with Resnais (Hiroshima Mon Amour, Last Year at Marienbad), Buñuel (Belle de Jour) and Raoul Ruiz (The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting, Three Crowns of the Sailor), among other notable (and weird) directors.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: There are a bewildering number of nominees to choose from, especially since Greenaway frequently places two or three images on the screen at once, picture-in-picture style.  The overwhelming repeated image is that of writing inked on nude bodies, however, and so the shot of glowing letters cast on Vivian Wu’s darkened, reclining body as she writes in her diary in bed best captures The Pillow Book‘s visual fetish.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: The Pillow Book is a movie about a fetishistic, eccentric, obsessed

Trailer for The Pillow Book

character, brought to us by an auteur with firsthand knowledge of those qualities.  Greenaway splashes the screen with visual extravagances, with pictures framed inside of other pictures, and images layered on top of one another, melding one into the next.  Full of obscure musings about the nature of art and sex, The Pillow Book tells a story of lust and revenge, but subjugates the text to the image, the narrative to the cinematic.  The result is visually hypnotic, frequently frustrating, and all Greenaway.

COMMENTS: A man and woman make love.  The entwining limbs are spectral, as their passion is plays out as a semi-transparent overlay flickering over an erotic Japanese lithograph like a movie projected on a screen.  In a box in the lower center portion of the encompassing picture, more sketched figures run through a kama sutra of sexual positions in a shifting slideshow of classical erotica, while the subtitles of the sultry French love song roll across the very bottom of the screen. 

It’s these dense, multilayered visual experiments—and not the dull storyline or esoteric symbolism—that provide the primary reason to peruse Peter Greenaway’s The Pillow Book.  Greenaway’s training as a painter pays off here, as he continues the revolutionary mise-en-scene he first developed in Prospero’s Books, one that stacks images on top of other images and while celebrating the nude human form.  Inspired by Eastern art, the compositions here are all carefully thought out, as intricately detailed as a classical Japanese woodblock print.

Greenaway uses some familiar cinema tricks, such as mixing color and black and white in the same shot—a scene in the beginning where Japanese characters painted on a young girls monochrome face start to glow blood red—and directly projecting images from a separate projector directly onto the actors and sets (in this case, usually unreadable text).  His primary innovation in The Pillow Book is his use of multiple scenes running in separate boxes on the main screen, an idea which seems to have been inspired equally by two new-in-1996 technologies: the picture-in-picture preview feature from television sets, and the multiple, movable frames of the Windows 95 operating system.  The technique is essentially an elaboration of the older split-screen format, but the freedom of being able to frame a second (or third, or fourth) image and position it anywhere on the screen is almost like adding another dimension to movies.  Sometimes Greenaway will use a second box to show the same action that’s occurring in the primary picture from another angle.  Sometimes he’ll show a completely different but thematically related scene (a historical flashback to Sei Shōnagon at the Imperial Heian Court in her layered silk robes and painted eyebrows, for example).  Sometimes he will simply have an abstract design playing in a postage-stamp sized square in the upper right hand corner of the frame.  One remarkable canvas is a moment when the “main” image with heroine Nagiko shows dimly through a reproduction of a page from the original “Pillow Book,” as if we’re peering at the action through a sheet of thin rice paper.  As Sei reads her list of “elegant things” we see each item (duck’s eggs, shaved ice in a silver bowl) appear in a crystal clear box the foreground.  Meanwhile, we observe the young Nagiko spying on her father as he humiliates himself before his publisher. There are three separate layers to this composite image, and the effect is stunning.  With so much going on all the time on screen, the eye never grows bored during The Pillow Book‘s two hour running time.

The experimental video presentation will confound conservative viewers, who may succumb to sensory overload causing them to label The Pillow Book “stupid,” “pretentious,” or even, in severe cases in susceptible populations, “gay.”  But avant-garde visuals aren’t the sole source of the movie’s weirdness.  The central premise—that a woman would become erotically obsessed with performing calligraphy on the human body—is obviously unreal and metaphorical, and square moviegoers will have a hard time connecting with it.  The story, while simple, is also confusingly told, with flashbacks and digressions to Sei Shōnagon’s famous lists of “things that make the heart beat faster.”  Greenaway is also fond of throwing in visual non-sequiturs: as Nagiko strolls through the Hong Kong airport, we get a sudden unexplained shot of a baby sleeping on a giant leaf.  Surrealistic pranks abound: a lovemaking/calligraphy session is interrupted by a gang of men dressed like ninjas, who seize the naked scribe and tie him to a chair, accusing him of being a graffiti vandal.  While Nagiko and Jerome make love in the bathtub, a maid stands in the background spinning plates on a long stick.  A middle-aged Asian man runs down Hong Kong streets in a diaper, with Japanese characters scrawled across his frame.  Human skin is flayed and literally made into a book.  Such things just don’t happen in a normal movie.

The Pillow Book is also thematically obscure.  It presents many dualities—male and female, the written word and the body, literature and the image—and molds them together.  By writing on flesh, inking books on human pages, Greenaway intends to reconcile the sensual and the literary.  But the film’s sympathies are strongly on the side of images, and its hard to discern any sort of actual argument about how this synthesis between the two different modes of aesthetic knowledge is supposed to occur.  Things are confused further by obscure symbolism.  Nagiko writes thirteen books on human bodies, with names such as “The Book of the Innocent,” “The Book of the Idiot,” “The Book of the Impotent,” and so forth, but we never get to actually read these books and understand how their titles are supposed relate to the movie’s theme (sometimes, they relate obviously to the plot, as is the case with “The Book of the Betrayed” or “The Book of the Dead.”)  The Pillow Book is definitely not an open book.

Vivian Wu plays the film’s only strongly defined character, but her performance does not bring Nagiko to life.  (Second banana Ewan McGregor does only a little better; he’s mostly notorious for The Pillow Book for his many full-frontal nude scenes, and his performance here reminds me of a vapid, Julian Sands-style pretty boy).  Asked to narrate much of the action, Wu seems to be aiming for a Merchant-Ivory level of literate gentility, but hitting something closer to the feigned elegance of an Emmanuelle softcore feature set in some exotic locale like the Greek islands.  In her defense, Greenaway has never been known as much of an actor’s director, and it’s hard to think of any outstanding performances in any of his films: they are remembered more for their visuals and outrageousness.  An intellectual filmmaker with a reputation (fair or unfair) for coldness, he’s not known for his abilities to tweak the audience’s emotions (except, perhaps, for eliciting occasional disgust).  I can’t help but imagine poor Wu, asked to pull up her blouse in an elevator so a stranger can ink some test characters on her belly and the underside of her breasts, asking the director “what’s my motivation in this scene?” and being met with an explanation like “in the 20th century… we’ve broken that magic connection [between body and writing] by this mechanical reproduction between the notion of physically making a mark that signifies.“

The story of The Pillow Book, while somewhat interesting due to its unconventionality, is not a strong point, either.  The premise of the woman obsessed with erotic calligraphy is blatantly metaphorical, and Greenaway doesn’t really sell it as a story: Nagiko simply develops a sexual fetish from the annual birthday ritual her father performed on her, with no explanation how the ceremony’s religious significance turns into an Electra complex.  In the middle of the film, there’s a sudden reversal; Nagiko stops pleading for others to write upon her and starts seeking fulfillment by writing on others.  The symbolic significance of the shift is itself uncertain (Nagiko’s change from canvas to artist seems to mark a maturation of some sort), but as a species of character development, it really falls flat; the audience finds no identification with this psychological transformation whatsoever.  There’s a tragedy at the end of the second act that is implausible, either poorly motivated or poorly explained.  Even worse, it doesn’t feel particularly tragic; it only serves as a plot point to get rid of a character once he’s no longer needed.   It precipitates an ending that plays out as a rapid cascade of human books that somehow, in a way that’s only loosely conveyed to the audience, convinces the antagonist to repent and remove himself from the picture.  The story’s strange, all right, but it’s also schematic and doesn’t engage us on an emotional level. ‘

In interviews, Greenaway is hostile to the idea of narrative film, dismissing modern movies as merely “illustrated text” and saying that he would like to “proselytize for an autonomous cinema, which is essentially image-based, not text-based.” Yet, the feature films he makes, while they do tend to elevate imagery over plot, usually don’t dispense with conventional narratives.  (Arguably his most successful movie, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, also features his strongest storyline).  The literary inspiration for The Pillow Book, Sei Shōnagon’s jumbled collection of courtly anecdotes and miscellaneous observations, is ironically far more non-linear and non-narrative than Greenaway’s adaptation, which chains itself to Nagiko’s calligraphic obsession and marches chronologically forward from youth to wisdom.  I don’t share Greenaway’s ambivalence about narrative. A theoretically perfect movie would contain a powerful, moving narrative together with fascinating imagery.  But I wish in The Pillow Book he had committed fully one way or the other, either to a completely surrealistic, impressionistic feature, or to a movie with a strong allegorical plot.  By regarding the film’s plot as something of little importance, without abandoning it entirely, he splits The Pillow Book‘s baby, or at least seriously wounds it.

While The Pillow Book‘s muddled symbolism and weak plot and acting hold it back from an unconditional recommendation, it’s hard to stress enough that it is an amazing visual experience.  To my knowledge, Greenaway never mentions Kwaidan as an influence on this movie, but knowing his preference for the language of images to words, The Pillow Book might easily be seen as an extended visual riff on Kwaidan‘s “Hoichi the Earless” segment, with its monk covered from head to toe in Taoist characters.  At any rate, The Pillow Book is a sumptuous, sensual celebration of calligraphy, the nude human form, and the possibilities of video.  While The Pillow Book is worthwhile (and “accessible,” for a Greenaway movie), if you are interested in the style displayed here, I would recommend this film’s predecessor in the auteur’s canon, Prospero’s Books, a postmodern, all-nude adaptation of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” instead.  It features the same level and type of visual experimentation, but coupled with stronger story (can’t go wrong with Shakespeare), more (but less erotic) nudity, the dulcet tones of Sir John Gielgud, and is altogether a more provocative and challenging work than The Pillow Book.  Better yet, try them together as a double feature.  No matter what you think of either one, you’ll have to admit that not much else like them exists in the cinematic universe.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…finds the filmmaker at his most atypically seductive, creating a spellbinding web of cruel elegance and intricate gamesmanship, exploring the exotic, haunting beauty of the bizarre.”–Janet Maslin, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

“A muddled riot of ideas as Greenaway stretches his blurring metaphors and convoluted content to extremes.”–Leah Jewett, Empire

“A list of splendid reasons to watch THE PILLOW BOOK: for its beautiful images; for its power to send eyes, ears and brain spinning; for its moments of emotional warmth (more frequent than some of Greenaway’s other films); because it is extravagantly pretentious and unashamedly arty; because it is awesome, rich and strange.”–Julian Lim, “The Flying Inkpot”

IMDB LINK: The Pillow Book (1996)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Tama Leaver – The Pillow Book – Fan page with images, bibliography, and links to other web sites discussing Greenaway and The Pillow Book

Salon | Peter Greenaway | Flesh and Ink – Erudite interview with the director covering nudity, list-making, cinematic influences, and other Greenaway projects

Bomb Magazine: Peter Greenaway by Lawrence Chua – Another post-Pillow Greenaway interview, this time focusing on the director’s “anxiety or disenchantment” with narrative filmmaking

The body as parchment: Peter Greenaway’s The Pillow Book puts projections and lighting effects to calligraphic purpose – Interesting, if somewhat technical, description of the dramatic lighting effects used in The Pillow Book, from Live Design magazine

Fleshing the Text: Greenaway’s Pillow Book and the Erasure of the Body – This dry academic essay from Paula Willoquet-Maricondi, originally published in the January 1999 issue of “Postmodern Culture,” is recommended for Jacques Derrida fanboys only, although you may want to scroll down to the end of the essay for the transcription/translation of the Thirteenth Book

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

The Pillow Book -Greenaway’s (out of print) annotated, illustrated script contains many notes helpful to understanding his intent, including the full translated texts of all thirteen books

DVD INFO: For whatever reason, Peter Greenaway’s films, while remaining arthouse favorites, receive little respect on Region 1 DVD.  Sony’s treatment of The Pillow Book (buy) is no exception, although at least the film is in print.  The movie comes with no extras except for a trailer.  Of somewhat greater concern is the ominous warning that comes up when you press “play” on the DVD: “This film has been modified from its original version.  It has been formatted to fit your television.”  The small print on the back of the DVD case also gives fair warning: “This movie, while filmed in multi-aspect ratios, has been formatted to fit your TV.”  (How do those arrogant bastards presume to know how my TV is shaped?) Mondo-Digital, however, contends that the reformatting in this case is not as significant a problem as it might first appear, pointing out that the multiple aspect ratios used made the film a challenge to project in theaters, as well: “In theaters [The Pillow Book] was usually exhibited around 1.85:1, which lopped significant information off the top and bottom of many shots and even wiped out some of the lower subtitles in a few scenes. Things seemed to fare a bit better at first glance with its DVD editions, which were essentially open matte at 1.33:1…” I suppose there was a concern that presenting the film in the widest aspect ratio used might unintentionally result in shrinking some of the picture-in-picture scenes to such tiny dimensions that the viewer would have to sit right up against the TV and squint to make them out. Additionally, many of the main narrative sequences utilize only the top portion of the TV screen, and actually appear to be in the correct widescreen format. Supposedly, Greenaway supervised and approved the same transfer used here for the British video release. So, while I would prefer a reissue with the proper formatting, I can accept that The Pillow Book‘s transfer is not the notorious pan-and-scan hack job that was perpetrated on Propsero’s Books VHS release.

(This movie was nominated for review by reader “Lili,” who called it a “very bizarre film.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

“People have wondered how to classify my film.  Absurdism or surrealism?  What the hell is it?… This film introduces a style that I’d like to call  ‘trivialism.’  Life is portrayed as a series of trivial components.  My intention is to touch on bigger, more philosophical issues at the same time.”–Roy Andersson, DVD commentary to Songs from the Second Floor

DIRECTED BY: Roy Andersson

FEATURING: Lars Nordh, Stefan Larsson

PLOT:  Set at the dawn of the millennium in a nameless city that seems to be undergoing an apocalyptic panic—traffic is at a standstill as people try to leave all at once, parades of flagellants march down the street, and the Church considers returning to human sacrifice—Songs unfolds as a series of brief, seemingly unrelated, vaguely surreal scenes.  Eventually a main thread emerges involving a family: the father’s furniture business has just burnt down, one son has gone insane from writing poetry, and the other son is a melancholy cab driver.  The father enters the retail crucifix business and begins seeing ghosts.

BACKGROUND:

• The film was inspired by the verse of the relatively obscure avant-garde Peruvian poet César Vallejo (1892-1938), whose poem “Stumble between to stars” is quoted in the film.  Anyone who thinks Andersson is obscure would do well to avoid Vallejo, whose work—with its invented words and grammar and difficult symbolism—recalls James Joyce at his most impenetrable.
• Songs  from the Second Floor was Andersson’s third feature film, and his first since 1975′s Giliap.  He spent most of the intervening time directing commercials, although he did complete two highly regarded short films.
• Andersson discovered Lars Nordh shopping for furniture at an IKEA.
• Many of the exterior shots were actually shot inside Andersson’s studio with trompe l’oeil paintings or three-dimensional models as backgrounds .
• All scenes are completed in one take.  The camera only moves once (a calm tracking shot in the railway station).
• At the time of the film’s release reviewers consistently marveled that none of the scenes had been scripted or storyboarded beforehand.  The method here shouldn’t suggest that Andersson simply made up the film as he went along, however, as unused footage shows that each scene was meticulously rehearsed and refined dozens of times, often on incomplete sets with stand-ins for the actors, over what must have been a period of weeks or months.  Andersson says they sometimes shot twenty to twenty five takes per scene to achieve the perfect performance.
• The film took four years to complete.
• Songs from the Second Floor tied for the jury prize at Cannes in 2000 (the jury prize is the third most prestigious award after the Palme D’Or and the Grand Prix).
• Andersson followed up Songs with You, the Living [Du Levande] (2007) (also Certified Weird).  The two movies are extremely similar both thematically (the comically apocalyptic mood) and stylistically (made up of intricately composed, brief vignettes).  Andersson has said he intends to create a trilogy; however, he has suggested that the third film may not follow the same style as the first two.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Fat Kalle standing at a deserted crossroads by the pile of discarded crucifixes, gazing at the figures approaching on the horizon, is an image worthy of European arthouse greats like Buñuel or Fellini.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  There are a few moments of magical realism in Songs from

Scene from Songs from the Second Floor

the Second Floor, involving subway commuters bursting into classical verse and the matter-of-fact appearance of ghosts, but even if these interludes hadn’t been included, the movie would feel strange because of the high artificiality of Andersson’s style: the static camera, the constant crowds of expressionless figurants gazing dispassionately at the action in the foreground, the carefully controlled compositions filled with background detail.  Adding deadpan absurd black humor, bleak existentialism, and a sense of looming catastrophe into the mix produces a singular concoction, one that captured Sweden’s—and the West’s—mood of anxious despair as the new millennium dawned.

COMMENTS: Songs from the Second Floor uses deep focus—the photographic technique that ensures that what’s happening in the background of a scene is as crisply rendered as what goes on in the foreground—as innovatively as any movie since Citizen Kane.  In Songs, what is happening way off in the distance is frequently more interesting than what’s transpiring right before our eyes (as when the parade of flagellants in three piece suits passes by outside a window while the main character is discussing relatively mundane insurance arrangements).  Andersson draws our attention to the “front” of a scene, but before we know it something from the “back” of the scene bursts forth and amaze us.  We realize we didn’t notice it, while it’s been sneaking up on us all along.  The film seems meandering, random, and frequently obsessed with trivialities, but by the end it adds up to a complete vision of human life in all its silliness and sadness.  It builds to an unforgettable existential climax that ties together the movie’s themes and imagery, leaving one lone man railing helplessly against the mysterious spirits of the universe.

Many of the scenes, even those set on city streets, were filmed in a studio, with perspectives forced to make them look like they extend to a vast horizon.  Even interiors are frequently shot in long hallways that appear to extend forever.  (One such hallway is an airport or railway terminal where lines of people struggling with huge racks of luggage struggle to cross the short space where the ticket takers calmly wait to pass them through the turnstiles—the exodus almost disappears to a point on the horizon).  Every shot, each of which is held for several minutes, is meticulously composed like a painting.  Songs‘ visual depth of field mirrors the depth of its ideas.  On the surface, it appears to be about ordinary people—businessmen, taxi drivers—in an extraordinary historical situation—some sort of national financial collapse and mass exodus.  But the themes roaming about like barely visible ghosts off in the distance are massive and universal.  The movie addresses the loss of tradition and the possibility that the past may mislead us, loss of faith in the modern world and the dangers of superstition, the fragility of social structures that may fray and snap when faced with economic challenges, the way individual and communal guilt becomes an almost metaphysical burden, the divinity hidden in the ordinariness of life and the humanity of Jesus, consumerism’s power to disembowel spirituality, and adds a sharp critique of the then-current Social Democratic Swedish government that will go over most viewer’s heads (Andersson tells us in the commentary that certain characters are based on members of the Swedish parliament).

With so many themes, so many possible meanings for the film, what impresses me most about Songs is its structure; in particular, the way it mixes randomness and order.  It begins with a man discussing downsizing with his boss (hidden inside a glowing tanning booth), followed by a man leaving for work while his naked wife tries to convince him to take a day off.  We next see the second man holding on to the first man’s leg as he drags him down the hallway, begging to keep his job, and then we follow an immigrant who tries to deliver a message to an unknown man in the corporate complex and winds up taking a beating for his trouble.  Then a magician tries and fails to saw a man in half, followed by a visit to a hospital where a nurse impatiently asks a doctor when he’s going to leave his wife…  and this all occurs before we meet Kalle, the furniture salesman-cum-arsonist who will turn out to be the film’s main character.  The movie appears to be wandering around in a set of barely connected incidents united mostly by a consistent deadpan style, but Andersson draws connections between images and themes and segues one scene into the next in such a way that we’re aware there’s an underlying order and purpose to it all—although it’s one we have difficulty putting into words.

Andersson has arranged the movie the way he sees life—as a series of bewildering anecdotes, and at the end comes the horror.  Themes, images and characters recur and interweave throughout the story, giving it a sense of coherence and a mysterious purpose.  (For one thing, you’ve never seen any movie before with so many scenes of crowds of people standing in the background, silently and dispassionately gazing at the action before them.  After a while, it turns into quite a creepy trope).  Andersson’s artistry is the hum of an unseen engine.  Using a common motif or playing off a closing line or theme, he guides us from each of the  individual segments, many of which would otherwise seem disconnected. The movie’s music, a calm, melancholy waltz, often strikes up at the very end of one scene and fades into the next, quietly assisting the transition from one scene to another.  Never is this technique more apparent than in the “singing on the subway” scene, where the scene cuts in mid-note from a woman on a train and is picked up by a woman on the telephone in a bar.  Then, there’s the moment where Kalle ends a scene by quoting a line of his son’s poetry—”beloved is the one who sits down”—and we are treated to a montage of many of the minor characters of the film, who take a seat at a bus stop, a park bench, a table in a restaurant.  Much later, a man gets his hand caught in the sliding doors of a train, recalling another of the son’s stanzas: “beloved be the one who catches a finger in the door.”  (These incantations remind us of Andersson’s essential humanism, the fact that he loves his characters even as he torments and laughs at them).

Although the artistry on display is masterful and the issues it raises deep, Songs from the Second Floor is far from a perfect film.  The pace is slow, the static camera takes some getting used to, and it takes the movie quite a while to build up a store of connections: the lack of initial correspondences will make many sympathize with the masses clogging the highways to flee this depressing Scandinavian burgh.  Though Songs is technically a comedy, the characters inside the film do not realize it; there are no punchlines, no mugging for the camera here.  When the stage magician’s trick fails and he accidentally saws into the volunteer, its funny intellectually, but its awkward onscreen, because no one in the audience reacts at all—they all sit and star blank faced at the scene.  The funniest parts are delivered slyly and without comment, as when a crucifix salesman turns the Golden Rule on its head to shame a customer who’s short of funds; you may laugh with your head, but not with your belly.  Not all scenes work equally, and there are many scenes—often in bedrooms—that are simply, and possibly deliberately, banal, lacking in the cinematic magic that Andersson seems able to conjure up so effortlessly at other times.  His dry, deadpan take on the human comedy, and his tendency to raise questions without suggesting answers, won’t sit well with all—well, with most—viewers.  But there are just enough great moments to pull you through to the ending, and if you can go the distance, it’s extremely rewarding.

It all comes together in a magnificent ending that ties up the film and for many will redeems it from being a dour, rambling arthouse bore—albeit one with some memorable imagery—into a complete, if mysterious, artistic statement.  Kalle, our paunchy putative hero, stands alone next to a pile of discarded crucifixes as tall as a man, attempting to liquidate his inventory after having misjudged the public’s millennial demand for religious icons.  Kalle’s been a figure of satire throughout the movie—he’s a cheat (he burned down his own business) and a boor (he can’t comprehend his comatose son’s love of poetry).  But, since he’s begun to be haunted by ghosts—spirits whom he can’t possibly help, and who acknowledge that there’s nothing he can do for the dead anymore—he’s gained a bit of our sympathy.  Kalle, too, has his cross to bear, and it may not be a simple matter to throw it into the dump like unsold merchandise.  As he tries to dispose of his burden, he notices something in the background of the scene, something that has been there all along.  He grows angry and lashes out, yelling into the blank horizon, “What can I do?  I can’t take it anymore! How much can you ask of a person?”  He lashes out, but only makes things worse.  Andersson has a chilling and mysterious surprise up his sleeve.  It echoes a memorable, but seemingly random, sequence from much earlier in the film, and it gives us further assurances that there is an order and symmetry behind it all, a meaning to the seemingly meaningless; but though we can glimpse an organization and arrangement at work here, we still can’t guess the ultimate purpose or plan—just like human life.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a collision at the intersection of farce and tragedy–the apocalypse as a joke on us.”–Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun Times (contemporaneous)

“…slapstick Ingmar Bergman—wacky yet depressing… there’s no real pleasure in the game—Songs From the Second Floor is more absurd than funny.”–J. Hobermann, The Village Voice (contemporaneous)

“…an ideologically ambitious and cleverly stylish film, with many scenes that linger in the mind – like those of David Lynch’s Eraserhead or Terry Gilliam’s Brazil – thanks to the economic precision of their ability to disturb. But as Kalle’s world breaks down and horror is added to horror, the film’s purpose – a lugubrious danse macabre stifling hope at every step – appears to drown in its own misery.”–Sight and Sound (contemporaneous)

IMDB LINK: Songs from the Second Floor (2000)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

The New Cult Canon: Songs from the Second Floor (2000) – Another in Scott Tobias’ excellent series for the Onion A.V. club of expanded reviews analyzing the most polarizing films of recent time

Songs from the Second Floor (2000) at Mubi – synopsis, director’s bio, and a few links to reviews and message board discussions

Roy Andersson Filmproduktion – Roy Andersson’s official site (in Swedish) contains an overview of his films

DVD INFO: The out-of-print but widely available New Yorker Video release (buy) comes packed with numerous extras. Besides the original trailer and production notes, there’s an informative subtitled commentary with director Roy Andersson (don’t expect all the film’s mysteries to be revealed, however). There’s also a behind the scenes glimpse at the making of the “rat” scene, three deleted scenes and an alternate take complete with director’s commentary, and three reels of unused footage showing the evolution of three key scenes—the bar scene, the railway scene, and the airport scene.

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

FEATURING: Ewelina Guzik, Sven Pippig, Sabine Timoteo, Elisabeth Orth

PLOT: A whimsical young woman brimming with optimism moves breezily through her hometown in Switzerland, picking up new friends Werwen (Sven Pippig)—a sickly momma’s boy—and Edna (Sabine Timoteo)—a cross-dressing gardener—along the way.  The trio’s mission is to teach others to live without fear through experimental color hypnosis.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: Pepperminta is a creative, experimental, singular film that defies standard classification.  It is at once funny, thought-provoking, insightful, fanciful, sexual, and wistful; it contains memorable visuals, bizarre characters, impromptu musical numbers, and flashes of complete fantasy.  It’s wonderfully weird, to be sure, but its sentimentality and naive perspective can be cloying and alienating for some audiences.

COMMENTS: Swiss video artist Pipilotti Rist is known for saturated colors and themes of harmony and sensuality in her short works.  Pepperminta marks her first foray into feature-length narrative film, allowing her to expand upon these concepts in a more accessible manner.  Inspired by Pippi Longstocking, the story is a fantastical urban adventure set in a magical realist universe that’s open to Utopian ideas, and the central character is unflappable in her quest to bring joy, beauty, and strength to everyone she meets.  Pepperminta transforms the souls of those she chooses to be a part of her mission, healing them with flowers, touch, music, and contagious confidence.  She believes that through certain combinations of color a person’s outlook can be altered, and demonstrates this in several wacky encounters.

Pepperminta is primarily driven by its mysterious but likable characters.  The title character is quick-to-smile, red-haired, freckled, and feels completely at ease in her own body.  She wins others over to her side with unshakable kindness, even if her weirdness confuses most people at first.  Werwen is shy,  middle-aged, and allergic to everything; he easily falls in love with Pepperminta, most likely because she’s the first girl with whom he’s interacted.  With her help he conquers his fear of the outside world bred by his overprotective mother.  Edna is taciturn and serious-minded, slowly released from her hard outer shell as she opens herself up to her new friends, even tapping into the magical aspects of Pepperminta’s personality. There’s also a surprisingly spry, dancy senior lady who foresees her own death, a chef who prepares delightfully sweet cuisine, a police officer intent on giving our heroes a speeding ticket, a group of professors inextricably strung together with their own neckties, a dead grandmother who gives advice through a seashell, and the spirit of Pepperminta’s inner child.

Aside from its quixotic script, zany characters, peppy musical score, and color science, the film offers a refreshingly blunt and open view of female sexuality and body image, depicting menstrual blood as a sacred, life-giving fluid and the nude female body as a beautiful form at any age.  Some of this imagery is too overt and visceral, but this supportive, positive portrayal of feminist themes outweighs any ick factor.  The whole proceedings are populated with a wealth of sensual, elemental feelings and scenes, allowing the viewer to lose him or herself in imagined moments of touch, pleasure, and comfort.  Rist has an impressive ability to communicate texture through her visuals.

Rist employs a range of imaginative and experimental visual techniques, often reminiscent of her short art films.  Colors swirl and blend like squirts of ink in water, shifting between neon and negative displays and impossibly fusing with the real-life environments.  Pepperminta’s color theory is discussed and explored at length, and by the end of the film it’s hard not to believe that she’s onto something—mainly due to how effectively Rist grabs her audience with welcoming, captivating use of color.  There is also a good amount of stop-motion (both animated and live-action) takes, underwater shots, and gleeful musical numbers, resulting in a multifaceted, lighthearted journey through the artist’s imagination.

Pepperminta’s infectious optimism and idealistic themes are sure to alienate many skeptical viewers— and indeed at times the film is too saccharine for its own good—but Rist’s conviction in her ideas shines through, and personally I found it charming.  Once in a while it’s nice to see a rose (and purple, blue, green, red, yellow, and orange) tinted view of the world.  It’s as an exuberant escape from the real-life doldrums of convention and routine.  And if that view can be presented with a high dosage of weirdness, all the better!

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Anyone wondering what an overdose of quirk and colors might look like without having to resort to drugs would do well to check out ‘Pepperminta.’”–Boyd van Hoeij, Variety (contemporaneous)

“A hundred thoughts suggested by the book might be written down, but most of them would begin and end with this fact of strangeness… many of the stories are about women and children,–the lovely materials from which the best fairy tales of the world have been woven. They too are strange, these Japanese maidens and wives and keen-eyed, dark-haired girls and boys; they are like us and yet not like us; and the sky and the hills and the flowers are all different from ours… in these delicate, transparent, ghostly sketches of a world unreal to us, there is a haunting sense of spiritual reality.”–from the original introduction to the folk tale collection “Kwaidan”

DIRECTED BY: Masaki Kobayashi

FEATURING: Rentarô Mikuni, Michiyo Aratama, Keiko Kishi, Tatsuya Nakadai, Tetsurô Tanba, Kan’emon Nakamura

PLOT: An anthology film telling four Japanese folk tales centered around ghosts or nature spirits.  An ambitious samurai leaves his faithful but poor wife for a rich new one, and finds himself haunted by regret over his desertion.  A winter spirit spares the life of a young woodcutter, on one condition.  A clan of ghosts demand a blind minstrel play the tale of their tragedy for them night after night.  The final story tells of a guard who sees an apparition in a bowl of water.

BACKGROUND:

• The four episodes were adapted from Lafciado Hearn’s collections of Japanese folk tales (the two middle pieces are from his 1903 volume entitled “Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things”).  Hearn was born Greek, educated in Ireland, and spent time as a journalist in the United States (causing a scandal by marrying a black woman in Cincinnati, which was a crime at the time).  He later became a foreign correspondent in Japan and was naturalized as a Japanese citizen, taking the name Koizumi Yakumo.
• Hearn offered “Weird Tales” as one possible translation of the Japanese word Kwaidan.
• Kwaidan won the Special Jury Prize at Cannes (at that time, the second most prestigious prize after the Palme D’Or).  It was nominated for a Best Foreign Film Oscar, but lost to the Czech war drama The Shop on Main Street [Obchod na korze].
• The episode “The Woman of the Snow” was (unwisely) trimmed from the original American theatrical release in order to cut the runtime from three hours to just over two hours.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Although it’s hard to top the image of the minstrel Hoichi covered (almost) from head to toe in holy Buddhist characters or the ghostly court of samurai, it’s the expressionistic set of “The Woman in the Snow”—with it’s constellations of warped watching eyeballs set in a deep blue sky—that makes the eeriest impression.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Kwaidan illustrates the rule that, the better the movie, the less

Original Trailer for Kwaidan

weird it has to be to make the List. Although on the surface it’s just a collection of bare-bones ghost stories, in telling these tales director Kobayashi wisely jettisons reality in favor of a stylized, expressionistic, visually poetic aesthetic that gently detaches the viewer from everyday life and floats him into an ancient spirit world that seems simultaneously to have never and always existed.

COMMENTS: In Kwaidan‘s opening credits black, blue, red and purple inks swirl around in water like dyed jellyfish caught in a lava lamp, forming weird organic shapes.  A single, metallic chord chimes in as the colors switch.  The sequence sets a mesmerizing mood, suggesting that this “horror” film is going to be something different: slow, abstract, and deeply beautiful, more of an uncanny art installation than a narrative cascade towards a spine-tingling “gotcha!” moment.  Although Kwaidan‘s canvas is suffused with the supernatural and ghosts appear in every episode, it’s almost false advertising to label it a “horror movie;” the film is more like watching a 14th century Zen scroll come to life, with the animated figures slowly acting out their story.  The simple plots of these four folktales are almost irrelevant; you should be able to tell early on approximately where each story will end up.  But Masaki Kobayashi honors these persistent eldritch legends not by jazzing them up for modern audiences, but by going deep inside them and patiently teasing out every last bit of poetry.  The stories may be primitive, but the themes are eternal: love, regret, the inscrutability and capriciousness of nature, obsession, the inability to forget past wrongs, karma, and the fear of the unknown.  The director approaches each tale with reverential awe, as if he feels a calling to preserve and restore these ancient stories as cultural, and human, treasures.  The end result is subtly but transcendently strange, a mix of terror and beauty that had not been seen onscreen since the German Expressionists were completely assimilated into Hollywood.

The first story, “The Black Hair,” is the most emotionally involving and moralistic of the tales.  An upwardly mobile samurai living in poverty deserts his devoted seamstress wife for a marriage of convenience with a wealthy but frivolous woman with painted eyebrows.  He leaves his hovel in Kyoto for a new position in a far away land, but he is haunted by visions of the love he abandoned patiently working at her loom.  When his assignment ends he ditches the second wife and travels back to Kyoto. He arrives in the eerily deserted city at midnight, finding that the street in front of his old home has been overgrown with bushes and brambles until it resembles a forest clearing more than an avenue.  The layout of his old home seems to have changed, and he has to journey through “black rooms” and overgrown courtyards until he finds his faithful wife still sitting by her spinning wheel, unchanged since he left.  The couple reconcile quickly and joyously and retire to the conjugal chamber.  The final reveal is not surprising, but the aftermath is handled in an odd, literally quiet way that highlights the horror and will stick with you for quite a while.

We immediately transition into a snowy forest, built entirely on a sound stage, for the poetic “The Snow Woman.”  Caught in a blizzard, a woodcutter and his apprentice wander through a bleak snowscape; mysterious, deformed eyeballs watch them from the painted night sky.  With the surreal set, and the synthesized wailing of the wind and howling of distant predators, the episode is so dreamily beautiful that you almost wish it could go on forever; but eventually the pair find their way to a hut where they take shelter for the night.  The apprentice wakes up in the middle of the night to find a beautiful, blue skinned woman in a glowing white gown standing over the frozen body of his master; she finds him young and handsome and decides to spare his life, on the condition that he never tell a soul what has happened that night.  The boy recovers, and years later he meets woman wandering in the forest and takes her as his wife. They raise several children together, until one night he mentions the incident years ago.  Once again, the conclusion will not startle the alert viewer, but the ending does give a satisfying, melancholy feeling of a circle being closed.

The third story, “Hoichi the Earless,” is the most spectacular.  It begins with a re-enactment of an ancient naval battle between two warring clans, acted out on a sound stage sea.  The melee is meticulously detailed and choreographed, and the fact that it plays out on a stage, in front of an irrationally orange sky and accompanied by droning musical narration, enhances the legendary, balletic feeling.  The Heike clan is defeated, and, followed by her loyal retainers, their princess suicidally plunges into the waters while holding the infant emperor, ending the line forever.  Centuries later, Hoichi, a blind biwa player living at a Buddhist monastery, has mastered singing and playing the tragic story of the defeat of the Heikes so well that one night a samurai comes to him and asks him to play it for his master.  It will come as no surprise to find out that the samurai is a messenger from the dead, and the undead retinue demand that the prodigy appear nightly before them to sing them the tragic tale.  When the priest at the monastery discovers this arrangement, he fears for his charge’s life and concocts a plan to save him by painting scared texts all over Hoichi’s body.  “Earless” is the first of the stories whose ending might come as a small shock, and it is also the only segment with much in the way of effective comic relief, courtesy of a pair of bumbling, easily-spooked servants who are given the job of tracking Hoichi to see where he goes at night.  These advantages, along with the spectacle of the battle scenes and the pageantry of the ghostly court, make “Earless” the most popular and memorable of Kwaidan‘s episodes.

The capper, “In a Cup of Tea,” is the most problematic story, although it has its charms as well.  In a wraparound segment, a narrator explains that the story is unfinished; we then launch into the story of a night watchman who one day picks up a cup of water and finds a face staring back at him from the rippling liquid.  He throws the drink away and scoops up a new one, but the apparition is still looking at him with a mischievous grin.  Frustrated and unsure what to do, he drinks the second cup down, only to finds himself visited in the night by the spirit he drank.  He survives his first encounter, but later three more ghosts appear to him.  With the protagonist constantly jousting with insubstantial ghosts, he tone here is almost, but not quite (or at least, not effectively) comic; our hero is bullheaded, a little stupid, and hard to identify with.  As we were warned in the beginning, the tale ends in the middle of the action, with no resolution.  We must return to the framing sequence for an ironic conclusion, but its one that fails to chill the blood.  Nearly everyone considers “In a Cup of Tea” the weakest episode in the anthology, but it’s not so substandard that it squanders the goodwill that the film has already built up.

The four tales are simple, but Kobayashi’s method of telling them is anything but.  There are few exteriors; almost everything was shot on a soundstage where the director could meticulously control the atmosphere. He fills each frame of the film with visual poetry.  Kwaidan often recalls the Cinemascope epics of Hollywood’s golden age, when certain movies were intended to be events rather than just containers for stories.  The look of the film is luxurious, elegant, classical, sumptuous and lush; sets, costumes, and camerawork are all tasteful, colorful treats for the eyes.  Although there are no huge crowd scenes swelling with extras, the film still conjures up an epic feel.  The sets, especially in “Woman in the Snow” and “Hoichi the Earless,” are spectacular.  I already mentioned the fascinating constellation of eyeballs in “Woman,” but even after the deadly winter storm has passed and a happier summer has arrived, the sky is tinted impossibly bright yellows, pinks and oranges; and there’s an impression of smiling lips, rather than eyes, hanging in the stratosphere.  Kobayashi is also an expert at using light and shadow; carefully positioned, filtered pale blue lights give the Snow Woman her unearthly complexion.  As the priests paint the blind minstrel with holy symbols in “Hoichi,” we are treated to a shot of a golden Buddha statue; suddenly and inexplicably, the angle of the light shifts, highlighting new surfaces and throwing old ones into shadow.  The metamorphosis visually illustrates the magical transformation going on in the room next door.  Kwaidan is filled with such visual metaphors that reward the attentive viewer and engage the mind and eye as the stories slowly and inexorably unfold.

The other sensuous element that catapults Kwaidan into the cinematic stratosphere is the sound design, by avant-garde composer Tōru Takemitsu.  There are only a very few conventional musical themes in the movie’s three hours; mostly, Takemitsu punctuates the action with brief, exotic bursts of sound.  We hear unexplained clicks, scratches and knocks; sudden percussion; short bursts of electric guitar; microdrones; chords so subdued they’re almost subliminal; electronically altered environmental sounds; and rudely plucked strings.  The sounds are frequently just slightly out of sync with the action; they highlight the eeriness of the scenes because they’re uncanny, off the rhythm and disorienting.  This technique is nowhere put to better use than in the climax of “The Black Hair”: to convey the passage to another level of reality, the “diagetic” (or real world) sound drops out totally and is replaced by Tōru Takemitsu’s sound sculptures.  Soft drones and chords fill up the background, but in the foreground, slightly off beat with the action, is a series of clattering noises as if someone is falling or struggling with a door.  (Matthew Desson points out that there is total silence at the moment the samurai falls through the floorboards, but the snapping noises surrounding that event could be the sound effects of him crashing through the rotted wood; it’s as if the sound has been shifted off the beat to unnerve us.  It occurs to me that some of the clattering sounds may have even been recycled from earlier scenes where the samurai falls to the ground as he first enters the altered house).

Although the tales form a strong foundation, Kwaidan isn’t essentially a narrative movie; it’s an experience movie that lifts you out of the everyday world and spirits you away to another reality, an otherworld where resplendent ghosts hold eternal court.  Though these are technically nightmares, their slow, quiet, hypnotic rhythms absorb rather than alarm you.  When you’re wandering with the woodsman through the snowy woods, you can almost hear death in the distance calling you seductively; you almost wish you could lie down in that magical forest underneath its canopy of eyes, until the drifts blow over you and the Winter Woman comes to take your soul away to the other world.  That’s the strange alchemy of Kwaidan: it reonciles fear and beauty, and makes a horrible fate seem almost enviable.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…the eye [is] quietly fascinated by a succession of tableau scenes that are exquisite color compositions, and the ear has been haunted by sounds—and by silences, which are as effective—into a mystical, other-worldly mood.”–Bosley Crowther, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

“…Kobayashi explores common ground between traditional Japanese visual arts and drama and cinematic expressionism, in the process finding the universal language of myth and dreams in a one-of-a-kind masterpiece.”–Keith Phipps, The Onion A.V. Club (DVD)

“Kwaidan fits squarely into the tradition of Japanese horror: its emphasis on the weird more than the disgusting, the importance of the unseen, and, of course, the idea that the dead rarely rest easy.”–Matthew Dessem, The Criterion Contraption (DVD)

OFFICIAL SITES:

Kwaidan (1965) – The Criterion Collection – the Criterion Collection page for Kwaidan includes the original theatrical trailer and an essay on the film by David Ehrenstein

Kwaidan @ Masters of Cinema – the webpage of the British distributor contains basic information about the film, an alternate trailer, and a copy of Hearn’s story “In a Cup of Tea,” which was made into the fourth segment of the movie

IMDB LINK: Ghost Stories (1964)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Kwaidan – Criterion Collection [Blu-ray] at Amazon – although Criterion had not yet announced a release date for a Blu-ray of Kwaidan at the time of this writing, they have created an Amazon product page and, curiously, have put the trailer and excerpts of an interview with Japanese cinema expert Donald Richie there

Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things – Project Guttenberg – read or download the complete text of the 1903 folk tale collection from which the stories “The Woman in the Snow” and “Hoichi the Earless” were drawn

DVD INFO: Unusually, the Criterion Collection edition (buy) contains no extras beyond the theatrical trailer; a two-disc edition would have done this masterpiece of world cinema justice. On the plus side, the restoration of the film is astounding; the picture is crisp with minimal artifacts, and the colors are as vivid as anyone could hope for.  The three hour movie has been fit onto a dual layered DVD, which may offend digital purists.  Sixth months before this article was published, Kwaidan was a finalist for a Criterion catalog Blu-ray release, and although winners hadn’t been announced at the time of this writing, given the fact that some special features already have been produced, it seems that it’s just a matter of time before the movie gets the deluxe treatment (check to see if Blu-ray is available).

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

DIRECTED BY:  Guillermo del Toro

FEATURING: Ivana Baquero, Sergi López, Maribel Verdú, Doug Jones, Álex Angulo

PLOT:  While blood trickles backwards from the ground into a prone girl’s nostril, a voiceover tells of a princess of the Underworld who escaped to the mortal realm and forgot her divinity.  We then meet Ofelia, an eleven-year old girl who is traveling with her pregnant mother to stay with her new stepfather, a brutal Captain in the employ of the dictator Franco, who is hunting the Communist/Republican resistance hiding in the forest around a Spanish mill.  With her mother’s difficult pregnancy and the cruel Captain’s indifference to her needs, Ofelia’s life becomes intolerable, until she is visited by a faun who promises to restore her to her rightful place as an immortal fairy princess if she can complete three tasks.

BACKGROUND:

• Despite the English language title, the faun in the movie is not the Greek nature god Pan.
• Pan’s Labyrinth is intended as a “companion piece” to del Toro’s 2001 ghost story The Devil’s Backbone, which also features the experiences of an imaginative child during the Spanish Civil War.
• Del Toro has tended to alternate making artistic, genre-tinged, Spanish language movies with smarter-than-usual big budget Hollywood fantasy projects.  He followed the innovative Mexican vampire movie Cronos (1993) with Mimic (1997), and the psychological ghost story The Devil’s Backbone [El Espinazo del Diablo] (2001) with Blade II (2002) and Hellboy (2004), before returning to his Latin roots in 2006 with El Laberinto del Fauno.  Since then he has made Hellboy II: The Golden Army and is slated to direct the upcoming live-action version of The Hobbit.  If he holds true to form, we can expect another daring Spanish language film to follow his Tolkien adaptation.
• Pan’s Labyrinth was in competition for the Golden Palm at Cannes, but the fantasy lost to Ken Loach’s Irish troubles drama The Wind That Shakes the Barley.  It was also nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards, but lost to the German Communist-era drama The Lives of Others.
• Despite not winning any major awards, eight top critics—including Roger Ebert, Richard Corliss and Mark Kermode—selected El Laberinto del Fauno as the best film of 2006.  With a 98% positive ranking, Metacrtitic considers it the second best reviewed film of 2006 (trailing only Army of Shadows, a lost 1969 Italian classic re-released in the United States in 2006).
• Perhaps the most gratifying praise the movie received was a reported 22 minutes of applause from the Cannes audience.

INDELIBLE IMAGE:  The Pale Man, murderer of children, who sits eternally in front of an uneaten banquet with his eyeballs lying on a golden plate in front of him.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  Pan’s Labyrinth is the textbook example of the rule that

Original (and somewhat misleading) trailer for Pan’s Labyrinth

the better a movie is, the less weird it has to be to make the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies of all time.  On one level, by blending a realistic wartime drama with a fairy tale that could almost be viewed as a conventional fantasy, the movie could be seen as merely novel, rather than weird.  The way that Ofelia’s “fantasy” terrors bleed into and ominously echo the real world horrors of Franco’s Spain creates a sort of a weird resonance even when we are lodged in the “real” plot.  The film is also suffused with weirdness’ close cousin, ambiguity, in that it never proves the realm of fairies and fauns to be a phantasmagoria; the evidence is deliberately conflicting on whether these wonders are all in Ofelia’s  head or not.  The film is filled with masterful, memorable, visionary images, such as the moving mandrake root that resembles a woody baby and the giant toad that coughs out its own innards, though such marvels might be glimpsed briefly in a regulation fantasy films.  Those elements are enough to nudge Pan’s Labyrinth from a mainstream fantasy in the direction of the surreal, but it’s the nightmare centerpiece with the Pale Man that tips Pan‘s scales into the weird.

COMMENTS:  You can have brilliant cinematography, masterful acting, awe-inspiring spectacle, and evocative music—and Pan’s Labyrinth has all of these—but you can’t create a classic without a great, emotionally engaging story to tell.  Although del Toro insists that he tells his stories primarily through images, it’s Pan’s Labyrinth‘s tight, simple, elegant script that delivers a tale that immediately feels timeless.  When we think back on the movie, the visions of the praying mantis turning into a fairy before our eyes, the Toad imploding and turning itself inside out, or the Pale Man glaring through the eyeballs in his palms as he chases Ofelia through the darkened vaulted corridors may come to mind first; but we also remember Captain Vidal’s brutal execution of an innocent man with a bottle, the Doctor’s calm defiance as he turns his back on Vidal’s drawn pistol and walks slowly away to his fate, and Ofelia’s heartbreakingly naive pleas to her unborn brother not to hurt their mother.  Pan’s Labyrinth appeals equally to our love of escapism and to our need to be grounded in this flawed world, to our sense of childlike wonder and to the bittersweet wisdom of adulthood, and holds those opposing impulses together in a delightful tension.  Good stories require conflict, and although there are mesmerizing conflicts here between Ofelia and the Captain, and between the Fascists and the rebels, the most involving conflict in this story is the one between fantasy and reality.

Structurally, there are two stories here, the tale of the quests the faun requires Ofelia to undertake to prove her fey pedigree, and a wartime drama in post-Civil War Spain.  Taken out of context, the “real” story—the tale of fascist Captain Vidal’s tyrannical rule over his own household, as well as the populace he lords himself over—could seem lightweight and cliched.  Though brilliantly realized by Sergi López, the captain is a stock sadist with no redeeming characteristics whatsoever.  He exists solely for the audience to hate.  Mercedes, the house manager secretly working with the rebels, the doctor, and the other resistance figures are unconditionally good; they exist solely for the audience to root for.  The rebels haunting the woods are ciphers, sometimes almost mythological creatures; del Toro points out on his commentary track that he even has them materialize out of the forest like ghosts or spirits when they appear.  The storyline moves on a standard emotional track: the Captain is cruel and arrogant, killing innocents and taking an almost sexual delight in torture, the resistance is noble and self-sacrificing. In the end the audience is appeased when evil is cleansed through a viscerally satisfying act of redemptive violence.

But even though the story is a stock one and its characters merely types, it never rings false for a moment, and in fact moves us intensely.  The war story itself is a sort of modern, cinematic fairy tale about good triumphing over evil.  That plotline is informed by, and feeds off, the simultaneous telling of Ofelia’s fairy tale, one which follows all the conventions of a story by Grimm.  One of the ironies of the narrative is that, in many ways, Ofelia’s “fantasy” world is more complex and emotionally real than the world that seems to exist outside her head.   The faun, for example, is not a simple cardboard character; he is neither good nor evil.  He is alternately obsequious towards Ofelia (addressing her as “your Highness”) and subtly menacing.  His appearance is simultaneous attractive, almost cute, and uncanny.  He offers Ofelia what seems to be her only hope for happiness and temporarily cures her sick mother, yet in the end he is not to be trusted.  Whereas the ethical choices in the “real” world are cut and dried—it is only a question of whether one has the courage to do what is right—Ofelia is forced to make tougher, more complex decisions in the fairy world.

Fairy tales, especially in their pre-Disneyfied original forms as oral folk legends, appeal to children because their weird magical incidents and clearly defined monsters are easier to understand and accept than the incomprehensible rituals of adulthood.  Children can’t understand the mysteries of sex, the complicated relationships of their parents, and the necessity to compromise principles sometimes just to survive.  Ofelia struggles to understand why her mother submits herself to the horrible Captain, who shows his wife no tenderness and cares only about his unborn son.  The girl senses instinctively that the Captain is evil, but as a protected child she can’t know the extent of his depravity.  On the other hand, she has no difficulty accepting and understanding the pure evil embodied by the Pale Man, the Captain’s fantastic doppelgänger and the weirdest character in Pan’s Labyrinth.

It’s significant that the descent into the Pale Man’s mysterious lair occurs at the exact midpoint of the story; Ofelia’s mixed success in completing her quest inside these nightmare chambers is the pivot on which the rest of her tale will swing.  In terms of tone, this irrational, mythological sequence puts weirdness the center of the tale; it echoes the particular horrors of the war raging outside as a universal, existential horror.  The Pale Man is mysterious beyond just his monstrous appearance, with his bags of loose skin hanging off his skeletal frame, his noseless nostrils, and the detachable eyeballs he wears in the palms of his hands.  The realm he rules over is equally perverse; he sits unseeing before an uneaten banquet, with friezes celebrating his historic child-killings lining the walls, and his eyeballs lying on a gold plate in front of him.  Chillingly, a pile of shoes sits in a corner.  And while Ofelia is in his kingdom, she is in a kind of trance.  The irrational and contradictory rules in this realm.  Ofelia’s fairy companions deliberately mislead her for inscrutable reasons, but her intuition proves true; soon after, her instinct betrays her while she ignores the fairies’ accurate warnings.  The fairy world—which may be all inside Ofelia’s head—is more confused, psychologically deep, and meaningful than the black-and-white conflict between Fascism and principled resistance in the real world.

The Pale Man is a deliberate, distorted mirror image of the Captain.  Not only does his role as devourer of innocents reflect the Captain’s inherent sadism, but the wasteful banquet he presides over reminds us of the extravagant feast Vidal throws for the provincial notables, featuring rabbits he has taken from his victims.  Even more so than the seamless visual wipes Del Toro uses to transition from the real world to the fantasy world, it’s the repetition of fairy tale motifs that recur in the real world that link the two realms in our minds.  Particularly obvious are the connections between Ofelia and Mercedes, her surrogate mother, role model, and Vidal’s chief antagonist.  The faun requires Ofelia to find a key in her first quest; Mercedes steals a key to help the rebels.  Completing her second task wins Ofelia a magical dagger; a desperate Mercedes palms a kitchen knife that will prove crucial later.  In the separate climaxes that conclude the two halves of the movie, both Mercedes and Ofelia will hold the life of another in their hands.  There are a multitude of other parallels sprinkled throughout the film, and although they work only subliminally on a first viewing, it can be a treat to pick them out on a second.  The doctor prescribes two drops of medicine to palliate Ofelia’s mother; the faun prescribes two drops of blood to cure her.  The principled disobedience and sacrifice of the doctor, the emotional highlight of the war story, finds its double during the faun’s final test of Ofelia.  The doubling of images from fairyland into fascist Spain lends a mythic resonance to the simplistic war story.  Del Toro calls these correspondences echoes, but I think of them as stitches; they sew the two stories together into a unified two-headed monster, with the sinister heads of the Captain and the Pale Man springing from a single trunk.

It’s the world of the Captain and Mercedes that involves us emotionally—because we can relate to these real life characters—but it’s Ofelia’s fairyland that astounds and attracts us.  The streamlined world of fairy, with three clear tasks that have to be completed to win the prize and clearly defined moments where a single choice will determine our fate, is far more alluring than the wartime world where battles are fought incrementally and noble gestures can be in vain.  In Pan’s Labyrinth, the real world is simplified so we, the audience, can achieve an easy proxy victory over evil; but because the movie is set during a precise historical tragedy, we should realize that things don’t always work out that way.  The vision of resistance here is itself a wish-fulfillment fairy tale.  If we know our history, we realize that the Allies are never coming to liberate Spain, and the rebels have already lost. Winning the symbolic battle fought in Pan’s Labyrinth can’t change the fact that the Republicans lost the war.  We also know that the Utopian vision of equality espoused by the rebels, and mocked by the Captain, is a pure illusion.  In the best deconstructionist tradition, del Toro raises the question of whether both of the stories aren’t really fairy tales—and the question of whether it might be preferable to view them that way.  Might there be a greater truth in the stories we deliberately mold to guide ourselves than in the accidental realities of history?

In the end, Pan’s Labyrinth never tells us whether the faun is real, and whether Ofelia is really the incarnation of Moanna, immortal princess of the underworld.  Del Toro deliberately provides us with evidence for either position.  Did Ofelia escape from the locked room by drawing a door on the wall with her magical chalk?  Or did someone hear her screams and let her out, off-camera?  Did the mandrake root heal the mother, or is it just coincidence that she got better when it was placed under her bed, and had a miscarriage when it was removed?  Can the Captain not see the faun because it is only in Ofelia’s imagination, or because it is invisible to everyone but fellow immortals?  Does the fairy world exist eternally alongside our world, or does it die with Ofelia?  Some will feel compelled to take a strong position on one side or the other, and debate the contradictory evidence endlessly on message boards.   Others will see the beauty inherent in the ambiguous construction.  Del Toro is forcing us to choose, to take a position on whether the Other World is real or imaginary.  One choice leads to great beauty and hope of something beyond.  On the other side is death, and acceptance that we are all doomed.  The director’s commentary reveals that Del Toro believes the magic was real.  But he’s not didactic, and he doesn’t demand anyone come to the same conclusion.  The choice is up to us.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“If you recall the chills that ran down your spine and the surreal humor that tickled your brain in the presence of ‘Alice in Wonderland,’ ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ or ‘The Wizard of Oz’ when you were a child (or, later, in the nightmarish dream-films of Luis Bunuel, Jean Cocteau, F.W. Murnau or David Cronenberg), you’ll discover those sensations once again, buried deep in the heart of ‘Pan’s Labyrinth.’”–Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun Times (contemporaneous)

“Guillermo del Toro’s films do not starve for creatures of baroque ingenuity, and Pan’s Labyrinth, the vividly aestheticized tale of a young girl’s journey through the gothic rabbit hole of her imagination, is cluttered with insects that morph into faeries, a faun who gatekeeps an unknown dimension, a large toad with a secret in its volatile tummy, and a merciless monster with eyes in the palms of its hands… Del Toro is smart but he’s no theoretician, and though he takes aim at fascism, his vision is scarcely surreal; though prone to sensualist shocks, his comic-con aesthetic is so tidy and discreetly alluring Buñuel might have called it bourgeois.”–Ed Gonzalez, Slant Magazine(contemporaneous)

“A fairy tale not even remotely intended for children, this entrancing magical-realist drama concocts a sinister spin on ‘Alice in Wonderland’ against the war-torn backdrop of 1940s Spain, shifting between two worlds with striking craft and discipline…  Del Toro’s taste for matter-of-fact surrealism inevitably means that some of the story’s metaphorical and mythological underpinnings remain elusive, though for the most part the story’s flow is so relentless that explanations feel almost unnecessary.”–Justin Chang, Variety (contemporaneous)

OFFICIAL SITES:

Pan’s Labyrinth – The official site won a “Webby” award for Best Movie Site of 2007.  Contains numerous stills, trailers, downloadable icons and wallpapers, and a Web version of del Toro’s sketchbooks for the film.

MySpace – Pan’s Labyrinth – the movie’s official MySapce page

IMDB LINK: El laberinto del fauno (2006)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Girl Interrupted – Mark Kermode’s reverent piece from Sight & Sound about Pan’s Labyrinth, containing enough quotes from del Toro that the director should have been credited as the co-writer

Escaping Into the Real – excellent, insightful criticism from Timothy Miller on Pan’s Labyrinth‘s ambiguous attitude towards escapism

Pan’s Labyrinth at the Guillermo del Toro Fansite – Pan’s Labyrinth quotes and links from the director’s fansite

Pan’s Labyrinth – this monograph on the film by Paul Julian Smith, professor of Spanish at Cambridge University, appears to be unpublished and may be unfinished, but contains some noteworthy observations

American Cinematographer: Fear and Fantasy – extensive discussion of the visual strategy of the film, incorporating quotes from Director of Photography Guillermo Navarro

Doug Jones – the Making of a Fantasy – archive of behind the scenes images and videos of the makeup and special effects work by DDT Efectos Especiales for the film, courtesy of Doug Jones’ website

Interview: Sergi Lopez on Pan’s Labyrinth – quotes from Lopez, who played the Captain, on his character and on working with del Toro

DVD INFO:  With no featurette included (only trailers), New Line’s 1 disc edition (buy) could be considered a little light on extras.  The interactive DVD-ROM features can be cool, but you have to have a PC (no Mac’s allowed) and install extra included software to access them.  If your system qualifies, you’ll find that you can access the official website and see the same sketchbook information in a custom browser (yippee).  More interesting is the “Interactive Viewing Experience,” which in theory allows you to access the full script, storyboards, stills and concept art at appropriate points as you watch the movie in a small box.  I couldn’t get the video portion to run on two different Windows machines, however, although I could access the script and storyboards separately.

More important than the superficial features, however, is the commentary track from del Toro, which, from the perspective of understanding the creative process, is one of the best ever made.  The director breaks down each scene and justifies nearly every artistic choice he makes in the film; he makes observations that even the most dedicated student would miss without the insights he provides (such as the fact that the two halves of the split tree trunk in Ofelia’s first quest resemble not only the horns of the faun, but also a diagram of the female reproductive system—well I’ll be damned).

The two-disc “Platinum” edition (buy) adds a disc of featurettes: The Power of Myth (on the fairy tale legends that influenced del Toro in constructing the scenario), The Faun and the Fairies (on the creation of the creatures that populate the film), The Color and The Shape (on the film’s use of color), and The Lullaby/Mercedes Lullaby Progression (on the musical theme). There’s also a Director’s Notebook (with sketchbook pages and storyboards that at least partially duplicate those found on the interactive portion of the single DVD); four semi-animated “DVD comics” providing mythical back-stories for the faun, toad, and Pale Man; and Charlie Rose’s 49 minute interview with del Toro and fellow Mexican filmmakers Alfonso Cuarón (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) and González Iñárritu (Babel).

The Blu-ray disc (buy) collects all the features on the two-disc DVD, adding minor behind-the-scenes footage. It also contains “Enhanced Visual Commentary” which allows the viewer to jump to picture-in-picture video commentary at appropriate points in the film.

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

DIRECTED BY: Andrei Tarkovsky

FEATURING: Aleksandr Kaidanovsky, Anatoli Solonitsyn, Nikolai Grinko, Alisa Freindlich

PLOT:  A mysterious phenomenon known as the Zone arises in a small, unnamed country.  The military sent soldiers in and the troops never returned; they cordon off the Zone with barbed wire and armed guards, but rumors persist within the populace that inside the Zone is a room that will grant the innermost wish of anyone who enters it.  A Stalker, a man capable of evading both the police and the traps formed by the Zone itself, leads a writer and a scientist into the Zone in search of the mystical room.

BACKGROUND:

• For information on director Tarkovsky, see the background section of the entry for Nostalghia.
• Stalker is very loosely based on a science fiction novel with a title translating to “Roadside Picnic” written by two brothers, Boris and Arkady Strugatsky.
• After shooting the outdoor scenes for over a year on an experimental film stock, the entire footage was lost when the film laboratory improperly developed the negatives.  All the scenes had to be re-shot using a different Director of Photography.  Tarkovsky and Georgy Rerberg, the first cinematographer, had feuded on the set, and Rerberg deserted the project after the disaster with the negatives.
• Tarkovsky, his wife and assistant director Larisa, and another crew member all died of lung cancer.  Vladimir Sharun, who worked in the sound department, believed that the deaths were related to toxic waste the crew breathed in while filming downstream from a chemical plant.  He reported that the river was filled with a floating white foam that also floated through the air and gave several crew members allergic reactions.  A shot of the floating foam, which looks like snow falling in spring or summer, can be seen in the film.
• The Chernobyl nuclear disaster happened seven years after the film was released.  The quarantined area around the disaster site is sometimes referred to by locals as “The Zone,” and guides who illegally and unwisely take tourists there as “Stalkers.”
• A popular Russian video game named “S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl” involves the player penetrating a “Zone” and evokes a similar visual sense as the movie.

INDELIBLE IMAGE:  Like most of Tarkovsky’s works, Stalker is a movie full of awe-inspiring visual poetry and splendor, making it hard to pick a single sequence.  One key scene that stands out is Stalker’s dream.  The film stock changes from color to sepia—but a very warm brown, almost golden—as the camera pans over a crystal clear stream.  A female voice whispers an apocalyptic verse and the mystical electronic flute theme plays as the camera roams over various objects lying under the water: abstract rock formations, tiles, springs, gears, a mirror clearly reflecting upside down trees, a gun, an Orthodox icon, a fishbowl with goldfish swimming in it.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Stalker is an ambiguous, but despairing, existential parable

Scene from Stalker

containing narrative non-sequiturs wrapped inside of strange and gorgeous visuals.

COMMENTS: It’s not fair to the potential viewer unfamiliar with Tarkovsky to start a review of one of his films without the following caveat: this movie isn’t for everyone.  Most people find this director’s extreme, deliberate slowness hard to digest.  There a relatively static, dialogue-free shots in Stalker that run for four minutes or more—a lot of shots like that, in fact, in a movie that runs for almost three hours.  Add to this obstacle the additional hurdle that Tarkovsky movies are obscure and difficult to comprehend: there are lots of shots that are obvious symbols (dogs, flowing water) but which appear to add up to nothing, and snatches of poetry and philosophical ramblings that seem like they must be profound but are impossible to decipher within the context of the story.  If the foregoing isn’t enough to turn you off, Tarkovsky movies are also oppressively doom-laden, full of dour Russian men with craggy faces who are slowly devoured from inside their guts by malaise.  A smile in a Tarkovsky film is almost as rare as a four syllable word in a Michael Bay production.

If you haven’t been scared off yet—if the style sounds tolerable, or even intriguing—then step into Tarkovsky’s strange world and be prepared to glimpse miracles.  If you are at the proper wavelength, Tarkovsky will cast a hypnotic spell on you like no other director.  The Russian is every bit the equal of Stanley Kubrick as a visual stylist.  Stalker contains awe-inspiring images: the sepia-lensed scenes that begin the film, set in the drab urban world, are like vintage photographs that transform poverty and squalor into beauty.  The lighting in these sequences is set to blaring, increasing contrast and bringing out light tones so that the characters glow with an unearthly light.  Tarkovsky provides unexpected textures to fill in the backgrounds: the wooden walls of the houses and barrooms are abstract and unnatural, the gray rock walls of the Zone are geometric and fractured, and at one point a rolling prairie turns liquid and wavy like a gently undulating lake.  Stalker contains many of the director’s trademark pans, slow reveals, and tracking shots, including the one in Stalker’s dream where the camera travels over a path of submerged symbols.  In some scenes, the lighting will shift slowly and almost subliminally, from grey to lava orange and back, in ways that could never happen in nature.  The constant photographic invention and trickery makes Tarkovsky a filmmaker’s filmmaker, one whom those with great visual ambition study carefully.

In Stalker, Tarkovsky adds sonic artfulness to his visual mastery.  The recurring theme from Stalker is an ahead-of-its-time mix of what we would today call “world music” and electronically altered instruments.  Tarkovsky wanted a composition that sounded like a blend of Eastern and Western music, and the melody that flows from this desire is played on a Western flute accompanied by an Armenian string instrument called the tar, with the sound of both instruments modulated by a synthesizer.  The resulting piece is strange, complex, and mystical, and creates an otherworldly atmosphere.  Although the mix of wandering Oriental melodies and synthesizers is a relatively common way to achieve a “spiritual” ambiance today, it’s worth reflecting that, in 1979, there was nothing in the world that sounded quite like this.  The musical experimentation did not end with the theme.  As the three men ride into the Zone, the clickity-clack of the train wheels on the track is slowed down and electronically altered so that each revolution of the wheel sounds like an alien drumbeat, a truly weird effect that creates a sense of foreboding an proclaims that the  journey is not to an exotic land, but rather deep inside the soul.  Add to this a quiet sound design that makes careful use of ambient echoes and splashes of water in the abandoned, quarry-like rooms of the Zone, as well as long periods of carefully orchestrated silence, and you have a sonic environment that is the auditory equivalent of the unique visual world Tarkovsky creates.  Together, the curious aural and visual worlds of Stalker combine with its unexpected narrative to create a singular, and unnerving, movie universe.

As for the story, the journey into and through the Zone provides a structure for the film, but Tarkovsky’s method constantly frustrates our expectations.  In the end the film is much more about the characters than about the events that occur to them.  Although we are told by Stalker that the Zone protects itself by constantly shifting its layout and creating traps, in the end each of the three men spends more time struggling with his companions (and even more effort wrestling with himself) than they do fighting their way through the perils of the Zone.  At the outset of the journey, there is almost the sense that this will be Tarkovsky’s action movie, as the three men sneak past armed guards and even encounter gunfire.  But the action shifts to a lower gear quickly.  We are told that the Zone is dangerous and full of traps, and Stalker insists that the men never forge ahead unless he has first thrown a nut with a bandage tied to it onto the path to assure himself there are no traps, but we never see any real evidence of mortal danger from the sentient Zone.  Instead, all the conflict comes from the men themselves.  The man known only as Writer and the man known only as Scientist squabble incessantly, with Writer usually getting the upper hand.  The two men come to distrust Stalker, and disobey his orders, without consequences.  They sweat and tremble as they consider the possibility that a diabolical snare may lie behind the next door, but when the Zone finally springs its trap on them, it is purely psychological in nature: the existential trap causes Writer to deliver the sort of despairing monologue that he had been freely offering up throughout the journey anyway, without prodding from mystical forces.  When, after some logic-defying occurrences such as the appearance of a ringing telephone (a wrong number, as it turns out), the men finally reach the antechamber of the room of wishes, the goal they have risked their lives for eludes them.  For different reasons, each man is afraid or unwilling to enter the room.  So, they sit there, on the cusp of having their ultimate dreams fulfilled, then turn back.  The film ends with an entirely unexpected, ambiguous denouement, where an unexplained miracle of uncertain significance may, or may not, occur.

Writer obviously represents right-brain intuition, and Scientist left-brain logic.  Writer is consumed by self-doubt, half-convinced that his talent is an illusion, that he is not a great genius and that his words will not live on past him.  Scientist is more inscrutable, but it turns out in the end that his character has an important twist to provide the story.  It’s Stalker himself who most engages our interest.  Although he serves as the other men’s guide, as the journey progresses it is revealed that he is just as flawed, afraid and tormented as the others.  There are intriguing suggestions that he is a Christ-like figure, one that the other two men defy and refuse to put their faith in, and that he suffers psychically from his failure to lead his charges to happiness—or to whatever exactly it is that the room will bring them.

Stalker is a movie which is built out of loose ends.  Each of the three men sets out to complete a quest, but chicken out when the time comes for action, and end the story exactly where they began.  Conspicuously highlighted symbols cascade through the movie, but never reveal their significance: water, trains, the dog that follows Stalker throughout the Zone, not to mention the long, random parade of submerged images Stalker envisions while he dreams of Biblical apocalypse.  No rational explanation is ever offered for the origin of the Zone itself, and the existence of the possibly mythical room of wishes.  The men philosophize and poetize about the meaning of life throughout the film, but never come to any firm conclusions.  Their various speculations, considered together, demonstrate no consistency or intellectual rigor or add up to a thesis.  Some might consider this overweening pretentiousness—filling the frame with half-explored ideas in order to suggest a profound meaning that the director is incapable of delivering.  Others may find it humble, an accurate and honest realization by the artist that he is smart enough to recognize the big questions of life and the human soul, but not omnipotent so as to answer them.  Stalker remains a fascinating, and frustrating, mystery, if we are capable of seeing it; but it bores us if we are firmly lodged in an age where our homes no longer have house-spirits, or our churches Gods.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“It’s certainly not necessary to construct an Oz or an E.T. in the service of every film fantasy. On the other hand, the fact that film is a visual medium cannot entirely be ignored.  ‘Stalker’ offers the eye so little that it might well have made a better novel, or short story, than a nearly three-hour-long film.”–Janet Maslin, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

“Weird, imagist allegory of the perils of intellectualism in Russia.”–The Guardian (DVD)

“… something akin to the essence of what man is made of: a tangled knot of memories, fears, fantasies, nightmares, paradoxical impulses, and a yearning for something that’s simultaneously beyond our reach and yet intrinsic to every one of us.”–Nick Schager, Slant Magazine (DVD)

IMDB LINK: Stalker (1979)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Stalker at nostalghia.com: The Stalker page at the ultimate Tarkovsky site (more of an academic resource than a fan site) features several interviews with the crew of Stalker and with Tarkovsky himself

Is Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker about the gulags? Chernobyl? EU immigration?: Reflections on the possible meanings of the film by novelist Geoff Dyer

DVD INFO: The 2-disc release by Kino (buy) contains the movie, not remastered and presented in full screen. There is an option to hear the dialogue overdubbed by a single actor in either English or French; this is an odd choice, and one that I can’t imagine many people would be interested in taking advantage of. Disc 2 contains interviews with the composer, cameraman, and production designer about their roles in the film’s production and memories of Tarkovsky. It also contains excerpts from Tarkovsky’s film school graduation project and some footage of Tarkovsky’s ruined childhood home.

The Kino release, although almost identical in content, supersedes the the Ruscico DVD, which was poorly received by many Tarkovsky fans because of the decision to replace Tarkovsky’s mono soundtrack with newly created Dolby 5.1 surround sound audio. In creating the new soundtrack, some of the music was altered and some ambient sound effects were added where the director had chosen to place only silence.  The Kino release offers the option of listening to either soundtrack.

DIRECTED BY: Andrei Tarkovsky

FEATURING: Oleg Yankovskiy, Domiziana Giordano, Erland Josephson

PLOT: Andrei is a Russian poet is traveling around Italy in the company of a fetching translator, researching a biography of a Russian composer who studied in Italy before returning to Russia only to drink and kill himself.  Andrei becomes homesick and bored with the project, and with life in general, until he becomes fascinated by a insane man living in a small town famous for its natural mineral baths.  The madman gives him a simple symbolic task to perform—which Andrei procrastinates in completing— then leaves for Rome on a mission of his own.

BACKGROUND:

• Tarkovsky was considered one of the finest filmmakers in the Soviet Union; he frequently ran into difficulty with the Soviet censors, however, particularly for his Christian viewpoints.  Although his films won acclaim at international film festivals, they were often shown to limited audiences in edited versions in his own country.  Work on the historical epic Tarkovsky was helming prior to Nostalghia had been halted by the Soviet censorship board because of scenes seen as critical of the state’s policy of official atheism.
• Nostalghia was the first film Tarkovsky made outside the Soviet Union.  Originally intended to be a Soviet/Italian co-production, the state-owned USSR film production Mosfilm withdrew financial support for the project without comment after filming had already begun.
• The film competed for the Palme d’Or at Cannes, but was awarded a special jury prize instead.  Tarkovsky claimed that the Soviet contingent applied pressure to assure that the film would not be awarded the grand prize.
• Tarkovsky defected to the West soon after Nostalghia was completed, leaving his wife and son behind.  They were eventually allowed to leave the country when he was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1986.  Rumors persist that Tarkovsky did not die of natural causes, but was actually poisoned by the KGB in retaliation for his defection.

INDELIBLE IMAGE:  There are many fine candidates.  The scene of Andrei attempting to carry a lit candle cupped in his hand across a drained spa may stick with the viewer, if not for its symbolism, then because it audaciously continues for over eight minutes.  But the final, static, picture postcard-like composition of a Russian homestead nestled inside an Italian cathedral perhaps captures Tarkovsky’s theme the best, and is shockingly beautiful, as well.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  The fluidity between the conscious and subconscious worlds. 

Video trailer for Nostalghia

Although it’s almost always clear whether the events depicted actually occur or are imagined, Tarkovsky is much more interested in what is going on inside the heads of his alienated Russian poet and the Italian madman than in what is happening in the “real” world.  He uses strong, sometimes obscure visual symbolism and dreams to convey an affecting mood of existential loneliness.

COMMENTS:  Nostalghia can’t be approached without a word of warning: this movie is slow.  Any film whose climax consists of a man struggling to carry a lit candle from one end of a drained pool to another, carefully cupping it against the wind, seeing it blown out and relighting it and restarting his journey, for almost nine minutes of screen time, can hardly be described by another word.  Very little happens in the story; the meaning is almost entirely conveyed through visual symbols rather than action or dialogue.  Watching Nostalghia is like staring a beautiful painted canvas that very slowly morphs into a different, but equally masterful, landscape.

Anyone who is interested in movies primarily as a visual medium will want to study Nostalghia closely.  The camera pans and zooms constantly, but slowly and deliberately, absorbing every detail.  The characters themselves move through these worlds languidly, as if they’re weary and half asleep, and even their emotions seem mired in molasses: an almost expressionless Andrei slowly opens a creaking door to reveal an almost expressionless Eugenia, whose face very gradually moves out of the shadows and slowly breaks into a Mona Lisa-like smile.  Many Americans, especially younger Americans used to Hollywood movies that sustain interest through a steady stream of events and violent confrontations, will find it to be excruciating going that confirms their worst stereotypes about plotless and obscure European art movies; but, at the risk of indulging in a cliche, Nostalghia rewards the patient viewer.  The prizes are a scrapbook of poignantly beautiful images, a mysteriously satisfying sense of spiritual longing and melancholy, and mystical excursions into a subconscious realm where the weird and the irrational hold sway.

Most of the joy of the movie comes from appreciating the painstakingly assembled and lit shots, which come in three varieties: Andrei’s nostalgic black and white reminiscences of his Russian homeland, a sun-baked Italy that occasionally blazes into brilliant yellows or glows the color of blue-green algae, and a blend of the two worlds, a dim, bleached landscape drenched in shadows so overwhelming that it appears to be monochrome.  Tarkovsky moves between these three visual schemes in an extraordinarily fluid way—there are no hard cuts, no unnatural, stylized transitions.  The ease with which he moves between the color and monochrome worlds echoes the ease with which he moves between the protagonist’s interior and exterior worlds.

As an example of this fluid method, consider the way Tarkovsky handles Andrei’s dream in the Bagno Vignoni hotel.  We have already seen his fading memories of his Russian homestead, where he imagines wife and his old German shepherd romping through a gray countryside.  When he enters the hotel room it’s darkened and shadowy, almost greyscale; when he turns on one light switch, the bulb casts an unnatural pale blue light, while switching on another light reveals that the bathroom wall that looked periwinkle in the shadows is actually bright white.  By flicking various switches and opening his window Andrei changes the color scheme from color to black and white and back.  As he prepares for sleep, accompanied by the sound of rain, he switches off all the lights, invoking the monochromatic color scheme.  As the moon glow changes, causing more and more of the room to fall into inky shadows, we notice that the old dog of his memory has wandered in from the bathroom and settled at the foot of his bed.  In a few minutes we have almost imperceptibly moved from the waking world to the dreaming world, without realizing it, just as if we were falling asleep in our chairs watching the screen.  The black and white dream that follows, while beautiful, is less impressive than the way the transition was achieved.

The key scene for lovers of the weird will likely be Andrei’s trip inside divine lunatic Domenico’s lair, a ramshackle, irrational space that’s a jumbled reflection of his own mad mind.   The home, where the madman once kept his family imprisoned for years, is full of both brick-a-brack and magical secrets, though the paradoxes within are largely created by Tarkovsky’s camera.  The crumbling masonry is white and the house is full of shadows and oddly lit, with sunlight appearing on the walls in random patches, recreating the mock monochrome color scheme the director has used before.  In contrast, there is a window that Andrei and Domenico occasionally wander by that looks out on a forest of verdant green plants.  Another window forms the basis of one of the house’s visual mysteries: as Andrei enters, he views a window that looks out on a Tuscan countryside full of rolling hills.  The camera reveals, however, that there is less to the scene than meets the eye; Domenico has created a marvelous model of the landscape complete with crystalline streams, and positioned his creation directly in front of the window sill so that it seamlessly blends into the view.  In another trick, the camera, tracking Andrei’s eye, pans from the model up to the window, and as it climbs the color leeches away until the zenith of the pan is in black and white, like the gray postcard views of the Russian’s memory.  Tarkovsky deploys other illusions to disorient the viewer and create an interior dreamscape.  The camera will pan around three corners of a room, and Andrei will appear in each corner, seemingly without having moved.  A poster of a frightening baby with a large head and blank eye sockets suddenly appears on a way and fades away.  After having shot the scene so that it appears Andrei and Domenico are conversing in tight quarters, the camera pulls back to reveal that the room is actually cavernous, like a warehouse, and has a leaky thatched roof.  As a final note, notice how “1 + 1 = 1″ appears carved on a wall: it’s a sensible metaphor that Domenico fully explains in dialogue, but a sight which nonetheless appears screamingly irrational when engraved into a madman’s home, and one which is amplified because Domenico has just begun talking to his dog about his guilty conscience as the equation comes into view.  The scenes inside this sanctuary produce a subtly jarring impression of benign madness.

Three other standout scenes deserve mentioning. The first striking image in the film occurs in a cathedral where women pray to an effigy of Madonna for fertility and rip open her torso to free a flock of small birds.  In the second, a homesick Andrei drinks vodka and wanders into an extraordinary, half-flooded ruins covered in green algae, where you can almost smell the stagnant water. There he delivers his finest monologue of the film: a drunken speech to a little Italian girl. (In fact, this is virtually the only scene where stoic Andrei shows any visible emotion).  Finally, the immolation scene, after Domenico has delivered his mad speech to the people of Rome, from atop the famous equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, set to the distorted strains of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”—coupled with the bizarre reactions of the assembled spectators—is also likely to burn itself into the viewer’s memory.

If there is one complaint, besides the often overly deliberate pace, it’s that it’s difficult to know what to make of Eugenia.  Her character is constantly unsatisfied.  She cannot understand the devout women who pray to the Madonna of Childbirth, or even bring herself to kneel respectfully at the church.  She haughtily rejects the sacristan’s reactionary idea that women are fulfilled through motherhood, but offers no view of her own to counter that notion.  She is frustrated in her unrequited love for Andrei, and ends up with a powerful man who ignores her.  While the other two main characters are granted a climax to their story arcs, her final act is to go out for a pack of cigarettes (the movie has previously impressed upon us that smoking is a non-act, a waste of time).  Perhaps she exists to only show the alienation of the modern European from her own culture.  Still, she emerges as an unfulfilling character as well as an unfulfilled one; given the amount of screen time Eugenia is given and the heart Domiziana Giordano puts into the role, it seems a shame to leave her character so unexplored.

Like Eugenia, Andrei is also unsatisfied throughout most of the movie.  He begins by saying “I’m tired of seeing these sickeningly beautiful sights,” and progresses to “I’m bored.”  He is in the grips of nostalghia throughout, but he is also simply world-weary, suggesting that his homesickness is not merely for Mother Russia, but for his spiritual home.  He seems to be surprised, and a bit sad, when a little girl tells him she is happy to be alive.  He does not seek to return home, at least not until the very end of the movie.  It’s unclear why he procrastinates in completing the ritual as he promised Domenico, or what he does after he parts from Eugenia, other than drink and dream.  It’s also unclear how, and even whether, carrying the lit candle across the bath brings him redemption.  The symbolism is unforced and open-ended, but carrying the candle to the other side, struggling to keep it lit, suffering false starts and having to begin all over with a new strategy suggests the journey of a life from birth to death.

The final shot, of Andre and his dog reclining in front of their homestead, now nestled inside the outdoor nave of San Galgano Abbey, is beautiful, but I find it ambiguous.  It suggests that those two worlds—the Italian and the Russian, the material and the spiritual—that Andrei has been unable to synthesize, or to translate, have finally been merged.  But the film’s overall tone, up until its final seconds, fills us with such visions of melancholy beauty—a sense of longing that never quite slips and falls into despair or rises to hope–that it’s hard to experience this final, quiet image as a triumphant transformation, or to imagine that Andrei’s nostalghia has been cured by simple (or even by difficult) symbolism.  Although you can’t see Andrei’s expression in the picture, I can’t imagine him wearing anything other than the slightly pained mask he wears throughout the entire film.  The tension inherent in that final shot, which suggests a sudden burst of heavenly grace that is inconsonant with most of what has come before, gives that parting shot a great deal of power.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Mr. Tarkovsky… may well be a film poet, but he’s a film poet with a tiny vocabulary. The same eventually boring images keep recurring in film after film – shots of damp landscapes, marshes, hills in fog, and abandoned buildings with roofs that leak.”–Vicnent Canby, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

“Highly cerebral, beautifully realized, and symbolically obscure, Nostalghia is a cinematic abstract of spiritual hunger.”–Acquarello, Strictly Film School (DVD)

“…Nostalghia represents an important contribution to the Tarkovsky canon, containing some of the director’s most indelible images. Domenico’s self-immolation is surreal and upsetting, played out in an atmosphere that recalls the madhouse in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (the gathered crowd looks dangerously mad), and the final image, of Andrei sitting by a small model of his boyhood home contained within the arches of a ruined Italian cathedral, sums up the film’s dialectic of reality and fantasy as only a powerful image can.”–Nick Burton, Pif Magazine (DVD)

IMDB LINK:  Nostalghia (1983)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Nostalghia.com – An Andrei Tarkovsky Information Site – remarkably complete site dedicated to Tarkovsky with plenty of Nostalghia-specific content; fans of the director will become pleasantly lost here

Nostalghia @ Turner Classic Movies – no real analysis, but plenty of background information on the production

DVD INFO: I reviewed Nostalghia from a VHS copy, so the DVD information here is secondhand.

The most easily obtained version currently in circulation is an all-regions disc from South Korea (buy).  No extras are listed.  Some consumers have stated this version is identical to the discontinued Fox Lorber Region 1 edition (buy), which is still available new (at premium prices) and used.

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

FEATURING: Alice Krige, Shelley Duvall, Frank Gorshin

PLOT: A prisoner returns to his childhood home on an ostrich farm in a

mythical northern land during the constant daylight of the summer season, where he becomes involved with two mysterious women.

WHY IT  WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Twilight of the Ice Nymphs is plenty weird enough to make the List, although it can be such slow going that many folks will tune out before discovering it’s weirder points.  Twilight just isn’t good enough.  With several of director Guy Maddin’s more effective films already slated for inclusion, it makes little sense to allow a lesser effort, weird though it may well be, to take space away from a more deserving contender.

COMMENTS:  Twilight of the Ice Nymphs is set in a suitably colorful and mythic locale, an imaginary land with Nordic overtones and ostriches, but it’s dragged down by an uninspiring hero in an uninvolving storyline, ponderous dialogue, and uneven acting.  The protagonist, Peter (Nigel Whitmey), is subject to bouts of sleep-hunting, and also, it seems, to episodes of sleep-acting.  For most of the movie his emotional range is so low-key that it barely registers: he covers a scale from glum to mildly perturbed.  It doesn’t help that Whitmey’s dialogue was dubbed in by a different actor in post-production after what Maddin hints was a very nasty incident between the director and actor.  Peter strikes up no real chemistry with either of his potential lovers, Juliana (whose personal history is obscure) and Zephyr (a wandering woman three months pregnant with her lost husband’s child), so there is little for the audience to root for in this three-way romance.  Besides Peter, Pascale Bussières as Juliana is cute but forgettable, Alice Krige’s performance as Zephyr seems on loan from a BBC teleplay, and R.H. Thompson’s evil Dr. Solti is little more than a distracting, hammy faux-Russian accent.  Veteran movie actors Shelley Duvall and former Riddler Frank Gorshin put the others to shame, but unfortunately they are pushed into a background subplot.

That said, the film’s visual sensibilities are truly wondrous.  Maddin built his magical fairy-forest inside a Winnipeg warehouse, maintaining meticulous control over every aspect of his mise-en-scene.  Particularly noteworthy are his brash color schemes: he uses “jewel tones” throughout, and seems particularly fond of placing surrounding emerald hues with bright pinks, magentas, and tangerines, as in a sunset setting over a forest canopy.  This makes the movie effective as a slide-show of gorgeous stills; Twilight would probably work well on a big screen TV with the sound turned off as visual wallpaper for a hoity-toity wine-and-cheese party.

Twilight of the Ice Nymphs is available on the DVD, “The Guy Maddin Collection” (buy), along with the feature film Archangel and the award-winning short The Heart of the World.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Maddin’s fictional world is… so infused with such a delightful weirdness, such a disorienting, overwrought absurdity, that its artificiality and peculiarity give it a marvelous flavor that is a real pleasure to savor.” -Keith Allen, movierapture.com