An office worker suffers increasingly gruesome visions of his own death.
Tag Archives: Surrealism
IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: FEAR X (2003)
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DIRECTED BY: Nicolas Winding Refn
FEATURING: John Turturro, James Remar, Deborah Kay Unger
PLOT: A mall security guard travels cross-country in an effort to find the man who killed his pregnant wife.
COMMENTS: Mall cops get no respect. And if you’re judging them by the standards of heroic crimefighters, well, they don’t deserve any. As officers without portfolio, the most they can hope to do is serve as glorified hall monitors. But that actually highlights their most essential skill. They are watchers, ever on the lookout for wrongdoing. It’s a talent that is both passive and invasive.
From what we can see, Harry Caine (Turturro) is good at his job. He readily spots small-time crooks on the prowl, he’s got a billfold crammed full of mugshots to help him pick out known miscreants, and a bottomless well of patience. So it’s his peculiar curse that his wife’s murder took place at the very place he works, giving him access to grainy video footage of the crime to obsess over. And it’s an equally striking coincidence that an inspection of the house across the street produces a critical clue that might just lead Harry to the killer. For someone with the ability to look closely, finding the answer is surely just a matter of time.
The first half of Fear X (a meaningless title that might as well be gibberish) is a portrait of obsession at a low-but-steady simmer, and it’s intriguing to watch Turturro play quiet and insular. The milieu is familiar; in a sparse apartment, he pores over a wall of photographs that is only missing red yarn to connect them. But there’s a gutting hollowness to his pain. He’s not interested in revenge, he insists. He just wants to know why.
Act II shifts the action from suburban Wisconsin to rural Montana (the film was shot in and around Winnipeg), but in truth, the location is an entirely different movie. Once he arrives in the small town in the Big Country (with its five-story motel), he enters a world filled with intricate mysteries out of a John Le Carré novel, long red hallways that would be at home in “Twin Peaks”, and images of roiling seas of blood crashing outside an elevator that are positively Kubrickian. It’s as stark a transition as Dorothy’s arrival in Oz, and while Turturro tries to maintain his internal devastation, he’s ultimately forced to confront the progression of strange occurrences, culminating in a circular argument with the likely assailant. That proves to be Fear X’s undoing, because while there’s nothing wrong with a film that leaves its mysteries unexplained, there’s something very unsatisfying about a story that suggests it’s foolish to look for answers in the first place. Turturro gets the exact opposite of what he wants—revenge without understanding—and as he tosses his meticulously accumulated pile of clues into the wind, there’s more than a whiff of condescension about his belief that he could ever hope to figure it all out.
In some respects, Fear X is an embarrassment of riches. In his first film on North American soil, Refn not only benefits from Turturro in the starring role, but he also enlists the services of Brian Eno to contribute to the score, Larry Smith (Stanley Kubrick’s cinematographer for The Shining) behind the camera, and a co-scriptwriter in the form of novelist Hubert Selby, Jr. (of Last Exit to Brooklyn and Requiem for a Dream notoriety) turning in some of his last work. It’s a lot of talent thrown at a story that doesn’t really add up to much. It begins as a showcase for Turturro, then becomes a platform for Refn to show off his appreciation for the avant-garde masters. And if all you want to do is passively watch, it’s interesting. But we are not all mall cops. Sometimes, audience members are looking for a little more respect.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
(This movie was nominated for review by burner. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)
- Factory sealed DVD
APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: DAAAAAALI! (2023)
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Daaaaalí! is currently available for VOD rental or purchase.
DIRECTED BY: Quentin Dupieux
FEATURING: Anaïs Demoustier, Edouard Baer, Jonathan Cohen, Gilles Lellouche, Pio Marmaï, Didier Flamand, Éric Naggar
PLOT: A journalist attempts to interview Salvador Dalí, but the painter’s erratic behavior and demands constantly cut her attempts short.
WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: If you asked who would be the most intriguing modern director to concoct a Salvador Dalí biopic, Quentin Dupieux’s name would be at the very top of the list. While other directors resort to bemused realism to tackle the Surrealist icon’s notoriously slippery persona, Dupieux is a kindred spirit who fearlessly jumps right in to what makes Dalí tick: the irrational, the nonsensical, the dreamlike. Confident in its refusal to explain its enigmatic subject, Daaaalí! is the only cinematic portrait one could imagine the real Dalí endorsing.
COMMENTS: More weirdly witty than funny and anything but insightful, Daaaalí! tackles its unknowable subject in the only way possible: as a dream. Aspiring journalist Judith somehow gets the famous artist to agree to sit down for a magazine interview, but when he finally arrives—after imperiously striding down a seemingly endless hotel corridor for long enough for Judith to hit the bathroom and order room service—he immediately shuts down the interview because there’s no camera. Then, when Judith reschedules and secures a camera for a second attempt, Dalí accidentally destroys it. And so on. Dalí serves as a negative force in the film, denying and sabotaging every plan that does not accord with his transient, selfish whims. It soon becomes apparent that, like Judith, we are never going to learn anything about the artist beyond his surface facade of arrogance.
But insight into the man is not what this movie is, or should be, about. Instead, Daaaaali! is thoroughly Surrealist in spirit, evoking Dalí’s aesthetics (and, equally, those of Dalí’s great frenemy, Luis Buñuel). These men’s sensibilities are a perfect fit for Dupieux, who barely has to fine-tune his own eccentric predilections at all to tell this story. After the premise is established, we quickly spin off into a labyrinth of dreams and anachronisms (we see completed paintings, then later in the film we see Dalí in the process of painting them). Nothing encapsulates the playful narrative spirit better than the long digression (over a bowl of muddy stew with live worms) in which a priest tells the painter about a dream he had where he was shot by a cowboy while riding a donkey. That incident doesn’t end the dream, however; it keeps recurring throughout the film. We are quickly lost inside an arbitrary narrative structure that almost gets as confusing as Dupieux’s bewildering Reality. But we’re anchored in Dalí’s frustratingly quirky, self-involved personality, and in Judith’s repeated failure to capture anything of substance about her quarry.
There are basically four actors who play Dalí, plus one actor who plays old Dalí (a sub-Dalí standing to one side of the main story), plus at least one bonus Dalí who only appears for a few seconds. There could be more Dalís running about, but 4-5 Dalís seems like the most accurate number, without counting fractional Dalís. This use of multiple actors in a central role is, naturally, a reference to Buñuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire, just as the continuous failure to consummate the interview recalls the failed dinner party of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. The gentle anticlericalism shown by the repeatedly-shot priest character is also a decidedly Buñuelian touch. Dupieux adapts these Surrealist motifs so naturally that, as much as anything, Daaaaali! serves as a reminder that the Rubber auteur, while often trafficking in modern pop culture references like slashers and superheroes, is himself firmly anchored in the Buñuel/Dalí tradition. Dupieux even creates a living Dalíesque tableau to bookend the film: a piano with a tree sprouting from its cabin and a fountain spouting from its keyboard, draining into a piano-shaped pool. Although critics sometimes view Dupieux as a lightweight due to his prolific output and disinterest in tackling political or otherwise “weighty” themes, in actuality he stands nearly alone in carrying on this strain of classical European Surrealism. We may not learn much about Dalí in Daaaaali!, but hopefully people will learn more about Quentin Dupieux’s underappreciated talents.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: RUMOURS (2024)
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DIRECTED BY: Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, Galen Johnson
FEATURING: Roy Dupuis, Cate Blanchett, Denis Ménochet, Charles Dance, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Rolando Ravello, Takehiro Hira, Alicia Vikander
PLOT: G7 leaders gather at a conference to write a statement on an unspecified crisis; everyone else suddenly disappears, leaving the leaders stranded in the woods with masturbating zombie bog-men and a giant brain.
WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Ever since seeing the pre-release still of the giant brain in the forest with ivy growing on it, we knew Rumours was going to be weird. While the cast and budget may be bigger than usual, Guy Maddin proves he is no sellout, and the rumo(u)rs are all true: the movie does not disappoint in the oddness department.
COMMENTS: Seeing a Guy Maddin (well, a Maddin and the Johnsons) movie with known actors in an actual AMC theater is, in itself, a surreal experience. The fact that I was not the only one there was even stranger. Although it would be nice for other local Maddin fans to get a chance to come out and catch Rumours on a big screen—there must be at least one or two others in a metro area of one million souls—I was halfway hoping that the five other patrons had wandered in unsuspecting, lured by Cate Blanchett’s name on the marquee, and, like hapless G7 leaders, were about to be blindsided by a strangeness they could never have foreseen.
To be fair, it takes a while for it to sink in that this is a Maddin movie. There’s no homage to a particular cinematic era—the movie instead is a stylistic melange of soft focus, lavender lighting, and melodramatic musical cues, shot in academy ratio—and the broad political satire is far away from Maddin’s typical Freudian introspection. Perhaps this shows the influence of screenwriter and co-director Evan Johnson and third co-director Galen Johnson steering Maddin away from his usual fallbacks. But soon enough the absurd sense of humor reminds us that we are, indeed, watching a Maddin film. (My favorite joke may be when the French Prime Minister explains that the giant brain in the forest must be a woman’s, because it is “slightly smaller than a man’s giant brain.”)
Satirically, the movie is obvious rather than incisive, earning its laughs from its absurdities, not its relevancies. The G7 leaders have assembled to address a crisis they never get around to defining, instead meeting in small groups to draft statements that are made up of half boilerplate, half non-sequitur (items like the display of non-sexual physical affection within marriage make it into the statement, along with nonsense the American president mutters while talking in his sleep). The characterizations of the ineffectual statesmen and women are, to say the least, unflattering: the Italian Prime Minister does little but offer his companions lunch meat. In a ironic nation-deprecating joke, the most dynamic of the seven is the Canadian: he’s a horndog in a man-bun with a weakness for strong women, who has, or will, sleep with the entire female cast. But don’t do as the French Prime Minister explicitly suggests and look for symbolism in the leaders’ characters. Instead, embrace the UK’s atypical astute response when P.M. Broulez asks, “what does it mean that Canada is faster than Germany?” “Nothing!” It’s not specific shots at the political order, but the dreamlike elements of the masturbating bog-men, the giant forest cerebrum, and the treacherous A.I. chatbot that hit hardest in Rumours. We don’t know what has caused the apocalypse, or even if it is an apocalypse; all we know is that the world’s leaders are spectacularly unequipped to save us all from whatever weirdness is slouching towards the summit.
The relatively big exposure of Rumours made me slightly afraid that Maddin might have gone (slightly) mainstream. My fears were assuaged when the credits rolled and the five other people in the theater all started loudly complaining to each other: “That made no sense at all!” “That was terrible!” “I wanted to leave but I just thought it had to get better!” “Who did Cate Blanchett owe money to?” They may have hated it, but odds are they would think about what they had seen later, and would never entirely forget the bizarre experience. It’s a response that I like to think would have had Maddin and the Johnsons chuckling. It certainly had me chuckling.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: MOTHER, COUCH (2023)
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Mother, Couch is currently available for VOD rental or purchase.
DIRECTED BY: Niclas Larsson
FEATURING: Ewan McGregor, Ellen Burstyn, Taylor Russell, Rhys Ifans, Lara Flynn Boyle, F. Murray Abraham
PLOT: A mother refuses to get up from a furniture showroom couch despite the best efforts of her three children—each, incidentally, from a different father.
WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: The spanner ratchets up the pressure on poor David and his siblings, making for a whimsical-into-menacing story flow with waves of absurdity. In other words, the Beau is Afraid archetype, but with a happy ending.
Kind of.
COMMENTS: What does it take to break one mild-mannered Scotsman? Niclas Larsson’s film, Mother, Couch, explores this question, among several others. From the starting gun, however, it was clear that this was the question that would be on my mind, until it was either answered or the credits rolled. The opening scene pulls us into the awkward and uncomfortable world of David, as he uneasily navigates a run-down parking lot and then enters “Oakbeds Furniture,” a similarly run-down home furnishings department store where his mother has permanently ensconced herself, on the second floor, in the seat of a (rather expensive) Italian sofa. From there, events turn with an increasingly jittery surrealism.
The humor found in Mother, Couch is, not to mince words, a bit “Swedish.”1 Those of you who know, know, but to explain briefly: sitcom by long-suffering ordeal. (Not to stereotype this flavor of Scandinavian, but my admittedly limited experience suggests Swedes possess a heavy streak of wry fatality.) David—a magnificently middle-aged Ewan McGregor, neither the gung-ho heroin kid nor the sage Jedi—politely, and a touch pathetically, lets everyone roll over him: his laid-back-but-glib Welsh brother, his snarky American sister with permanently-affixed cigarette, and his dotty mother whose tongue is as sharp as the penknife she, inexplicably, brought with her. In true Buñuel–Dupieuxiène style, the links in this chain of events grow to such a weight as to bring David to bursting point (apologies for the semi-spoiler that answers my opening query).
Mother, Couch is soft-spoken in its eccentricity, allowing its quiet oddities space to breathe. F. Murray Abraham’s turn as both Marcus and Marco, Oakbeds’ twin owners, is a delightful two-fer of talent, with Marcus something of a David-double (calm, deferential, doormat), and Marco eventually threatening our hapless protagonist with a chainsaw when price negotiations for the titular couch hit the rocks. At times, Rhys Ifans and Lara Flynn Boyle each appear to be performing in a different film—for reasons which become clear as events progress. As for Ellen Burstyn, well, I alternately loved and loathed her, as her “Mother” character occupies perhaps three different narrative planes.
The movie kicks off with a glib bit of foreshadowing: the on-screen quotation, “It was all very simple, they were looking for a dresser. Blood wouldn’t spill until later.” Larsson positions the furniture motif throughout, with an unlikely key (given by mother to son) failing to open the half-dozen or more dressers littered around the store and the mother’s apartment. The simplicity of the premise gets things rolling. There’s hope in Mother, Couch, though it’s nearly crushed by a long history of lies and creeping irrationality. As Mother says, “You don’t stab someone in the back, that’s for sure. Not even family!” Ultimately (another semi-spoiler) she fails to follow her own advice, but I believe she tries. When she veers from this maxim, though, it doesn’t stop the first finale’s last supper, as family, old and new, gather together just before David suffers a (literal) sinking feeling.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
- As it well might be: Swedish director Larsson here adapts a novel by Swedish novelist Jerker Virdborg. ↩︎