Director’s description: “Anita the duck buys a psychic device at a novelty store in an alternate universe and creates mayhem at a crazy party.”
POD 366, EP. 84: Festival Season Sneaks up on 366
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Quick links/Discussed in this episode:
PHYSICAL MEDIA:
Adela Has Not Had Supper Yet (1978): Detective Nick Carter’s investigation of a missing dog leads him to suspect a carnivorous plant. From Deaf Crocodile, this is the middle movie in an official satirical trilogy from Czech Oldrich Lipský that begins with Lemonade Joe (1964) and ends with The Mysterious Castle in the Carpathians (1981). Buy Adela Has Not Had Supper Yet directly from Deaf Crocodile.
Linoleum (2022): Read Gregory J. Smalley’s review. The Jim Gaffigan-led psychological thriller about a kid’s show science host and the spacecraft that crash lands in his back yard comes to Blu-ray this week. Buy Linoleum.
Marat/Sade [The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade] (1967): Read Shane Wilson’s review. The film adaptation of the avant-garde 1960s play about, well, a play directed by de Sade starring asylum inmates, in a new DVD (no Blu-ray) release from Sandpiper Pictures. Buy Marat/Sade.
Repo Man (1984): Read the Canonically Weird entry. Alex Cox‘s punk sci-fi classic gets a 4K UHD upgrade from the Criterion collection. Buy Repo Man.
FILM FESTIVALS:
Sydney Underground Film Festival (Sydney, Australia, Sept. 12-15)
A minor festival (though of course, not for Australians) that has a rather amazing lineup this year, beginning with the promising festival opener, Female Trouble. Also on tap are a couple of low-budget movies we’ve reviewed from other festivals—the sentient kombucha starter fantasy Darla in Space and Joel Potrykus‘ middle-aged update to Buzzard, Vulcanizadora. Aussies can also check out The Hyperboreans, the latest wildness from the team behind The Wolf House, and the Australian debut of Quentin Dupieux‘s Salvador Dali biopic Daaaaaali! The one new-to-us title was Bruce la Bruce’s explicit and typically transgressive take on Teorema, The Visitor. Enjoy, mate!
Sydney Underground Film Festival homepage
Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) (Toronto, Canada, Sept. 5-Sept. 15)
TIFF is always one of the year’s major festivals and is sometimes seen as the kickoff for awards season. Although their programmers have no particular love for films with weirder predilections, with over a hundred movies on offer, it’s inevitable that some strangeness sneaks in. This year, Francis Ford Coppola‘s divisive America-as-ancient-Rome fantasy Megalopolis, which buzzed at Cannes, remains a major talking point as it makes its North American debut ahead of a late September release. Other Cannes debuts premiering in North America include David Cronenberg‘s mortuary The Shrouds and Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson’s satire Rumours. Here are some of the other potentially weird films we noticed on the undercard:
- Daniela Forever – A depressed man recreates his lost lover through lucid dreaming
- Do I Know You from Somewhere? – A couple’s life together starts subtly changing, until they’re (literally) not the same people they started as
- Lázaro at Night – Three actors in a love triangle find reality breaking apart when they compete for roles in the same film
- Mr. K – Crispin Glover finds himself checked into a hotel he can never leave in this Kafkaesque tale
- On Becoming a Guinea Fowl – Zambian story of a funeral programmers describe as a “surrealist drama”
- Pedro Páramo – Adaptation of a classical magical realist novel about a dusty Mexican town where the living may be the dead, this is the directing debut of award-winning cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto
- Perfumed with Mint – Mint plants begin growing out of human bodies, attracting shadowy ghosts, and the growth can only be suppressed by smoking hashish
- So Surreal: Behind the Masks – a documentary about how Surrealist artists—Max Ernst in particular—were inspired by Native American masks sold on the colonialist artifact market
- Universal Language – Here’s a major one we missed on the podcast discussion: the return of Matthew Rankin, who brings us a Canadian-set comedy where the cast inexplicably speaks Persian, inspired by the style of Roy Andersson
- You Are Not Alone – A lonely man may have found love, except that he’s already spoken for—by an alien
Toronto International Film Festival homepage
Venice International Film Festival (Venice, Italy, Aug. 28-Sept. 7)
We’ve gotten out of the habit of checking out the lineup at Venice after years sans weirdness, but this year they surprised us with a brace of worthily weird offerings (thanks to reader Devon for the tip on the Quays!)
- Baby Invasion – Harmony Korine‘s experiment about killers using baby face avatars who may or may not be characters in a video game disgusted many but still earned a surprising 8.5 minute standing ovation
- Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass – Another project that snuck up on us: the Quay Brothers have completed their own stop-motion adaptation of Bruno Schultz’s short story collection (previously made into a canonically weird film by Wojciech Has). Early stills look like they still have that dusty magic, and this will obviously be anxiously anticipated when it obtains a wider release.
Venice International Film Festival homepage
WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE:
We have no guests currently scheduled for next week’s Pod 366, although that could change, but at any rate Greg and Giles will be back to talk about the week’s weird news and releases.
Also, it seems likely we’ll have further updates on our big book, “The 366 Weird Movies Guide.” Stay tuned! Onward and weirdward!
CAPSULE: WAITING FOR DALI (2023)
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Waiting for Dali is currently available for rental or purchase on-demand.
DIRECTED BY: David Pujol
FEATURING: Ivan Massagué, José Garcia, Clara Ponsot
PLOT: A restaurateur in Salvador Dalí ‘s hometown of Cadaqués in the 70s dreams of luring the artist to visit his Dalí -themed “El Surreal” bistro, and catches a break when a master chef on the lam shows up in need of work (and a cover story).
COMMENTS: Movie about Dalí (at least the ones we’ve covered) all seem to be rooted in realism: Little Ashes focused on Federico García Lorca’s crush on the young Dalí, while Mary Harron‘s Daliland largely contended itself with depicting the extravagance of the painter’s lavish celebrity lifestyle. Perhaps Dalí himself would appreciate the irony; no director dares attempt to even approximate his hallucinatory genius. (We suspect surrealist Quentin Dupieux will end this trend soon when he releases his “real fake biopic” starring multiple actors as Dalí later this year.) When Jules decorates his El Surreal bistro with plastic clocks melting in the trees, a lobster glued to the telephone, and mannequins seated at the tables, it seems like a cheesy Vegas-style tribute to the surrealist icon rather than anything legitimately surreal.
The surrealist cuisine crafted by master chef Fernando, however, does show originality: an airy mountain of carrot mouse modeled off a local landmark, “hot-and-cold pea soup,” various oddly shaped mini-loafs painstakingly decorated with tiny springs of herbs, and an array savory lollipops served on a bed of mud. The artistic journey in the film belongs to Fernando, who learns to incorporate controlled chaos into his craft, which had previously been ruled by strict order and proper French culinary procedures. Fernando’s gastronomical reinventions suggest the way Dalí mastered the basic techniques of painting before warping them to his own imaginary landscapes. Restaurateur Jules (who looks uncannily like a young Spanish Robert Downey Jr.), on the other hand, essentially serves as dapper comic relief: he is a Dalí fanboy who invents with multiple unsuccessful schemes to lure the object of his obsession to his dining establishment. In the end, it is only Fernando’s audacious menu that offers any chance of attracting the master.
Dalí himself is only an aspirational figure in the tale; if you are waiting for him to appear, you may be disappointed. You will also not learn a lot about the artist; the film, made for a Spanish audience, assumes you have a baseline of knowledge about the time, place, and players. A single introductory sentence explains that the story takes place at the end of the Franco dictatorship, and from there you’re on your own. The film expects you to know who Gala is when she appears, and to recognize the various Dalían tributes Jules has set up in El Surreal. Franco’s police play a role in motivating the plot, but they are hardly a serious threat; they are almost comic foils, and not even important enough to bother tying up the loose threads they leave at the end. The film is instead surprisingly light and frothy, like carrot mousse, and sunny like the Catalonian shore, a celebration of creativity that shines even in the darkest days.
Director David Pujol’s had directed two previous documentaries about Dalí, and also a television miniseries documentary about avant-garde chef Ferran Adrià, so he obviously knows his subjects well.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: A QUIET PLACE IN THE COUNTRY (1968)
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DIRECTED BY: Elio Petri
FEATURING: Franco Nero, Vanessa Redgrave, Georges Géret, Rita Calderoni, Gabriella Boccardo
PLOT: After relocating to a run-down mansion in an attempt to recharge his imagination, a famous painter begins to suspects that the ghost of the previous owner, a beautiful young woman with nymphomaniac tendencies, may be endangering his sanity.
COMMENTS: A filmmaker has to know what he’s doing when he opens a film called A Quiet Place in the Country with a cacophonous opening credit sequence, flashing snippets of famed pieces of art (which will be visually referenced throughout the film) to the sounds of percussive crashes from Ennio Morricone and the improvisational ensemble Nuova Consonanza. Sure enough, the only thing noisier than those titles is the mind of our protagonist, whom we first meet tied to a chair, nearly naked and surrounded by unnecessary electric appliances bought by his hot girlfriend. This ought to be a moment of supreme satisfaction, an introduction to someone at the top who is about to be brought low for our entertainment and edification. But Leonardo, the handsome and successful painter with money and public adulation and said hot girlfriend, is already in free fall. The point of the movie is to show how much further he’s going to go.
Nero plays a man in the grip of maddening dissatisfaction. He’s stricken with a drought of creativity; the works he produces are dissonant blotches of color, and he seeks inspiration in images of war, famine, and smut. His libido is barely under control: he molests women on the street (or imagines he does) and he greedily collects skin mags at the local newsstand despite knowing that Redgrave (arguably looking as beautiful and certainly as overtly sexual as she had ever been on film) is waiting at home for him. He’s desperately seeking something, and it isn’t until he comes across a decrepit mansion on the outskirts of the city that he gets anywhere close to figuring out what it is.
Did I mention that A Quiet Place in the Country is a giallo? The house contains a supernatural murder mystery, with the previous tenant allegedly gunned down during the war, but the townsfolk may be keeping some secrets about her, especially the old groundskeeper. Leonardo’s obsession with the woman leads him to have bloody, violent thoughts that he doesn’t do a great job of keeping in check. The threats only grow, while Leonardo’s grip on his sanity slips. He attacks a photographer, he terrifies his live-in housekeeper (although he seems to accept her absurd assertion that the young man sharing her bed is her little brother come to keep her company), and he grows ever more paranoid about his girlfriend Flavia. He dreams of her killing him, and sees visions of her everywhere he goes, often pushing him around immobilized in a wheelchair. By the time insanity erupts into violence, it seems inevitable.
Perhaps that’s what leaves me cold about A Quiet Place in the Country. Director Petri (whose work I have reviewed previously) has unquestionably put together an efficient piece of shock cinema with a highbrow veneer. But because Leonardo seems pretty unstable from the outset, there’s not really any suspense or surprise in his story. He’s like a jack-in-the-box: you know he’ll pop, and it’s only a question of when. And because we are rooted in his point of view, the twist ending loses a lot of its punch. Rather than recontextualizing all that has come before, it just reinforces the fact that we’ve been watching everything through the lens of a crazy person. That makes A Quiet Place in the Country an interesting piece of art, even unique. But it doesn’t linger. Once it’s through, we’re on to the next piece in the gallery.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
“…one of the weirder, more vaguely satirical contemporaries of Argento’s definitive Italian post-BLOW-UP giallo; it’s the brother, not the son, the cool uncle the Argento generation never sees anymore except on rare holidays when they can get away to visit him at the ‘funny’ farm… It defies expectations for a giallo while riffing on them in a deadpan absurdist abstraction that puts it more aligned with Spasmo and nothing else.” – Erich Kuersten, Acidemic Journal of Film and Media
(This movie was nominated for review by joe gideon. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)
![A Quiet Place in the Country [Blu-ray]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51Ih8xrfMzL._SL500_.jpg)
SATURDAY SHORT: THE MEANING OF LIFE (2005)
A survey of misplaced priorities throughout the universe.