CAPSULE: CAVERNA (2023)

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Caverna can be rented on-demand.

DIRECTED BY: Daniel Contaldo, Hannah Swayze

FEATURING: Giorgia Tomasi, Lorenzo Passaniti, Caterina Fornaciai

PLOT: A group of Italian 20-somethings explore their childhoods and psychological ailments via avant-garde theater exercises.

Still from Caverna (2023)

COMMENTS:

The most meandering film I’ve ever seen:
Caverna, Caverna, Caverna, Caverna!
The most grousing and wibble-cam there’s ever been—
Caverna, Caverna, Caverna, Caverna, Caverna, Caverna, Caverna.

I’ve just watched a film named Caverna

By now I have largely made my point, but in an effort to give this whatsit a fairer shake, let me lay down some less flippant remarks. With dream flashbacks and otherwise linear progression, Contaldo and Swayze (which would make a great pair of names on a P.I.s’ office door) tell a story about a group of young, aspiring actors—with a focus on country-bred Lorenzo and Catholic Giorgia—honing their performance-art chops while battling inner demons. Giorgia was a disappointment to her folks, more interested in playing in the dirt than in bending to a rigid religious hierarchy; Lorenzo was a disappointment to his father, wanting to wander the nearby hills and fields as opposed to… well, it wasn’t quite clear just what exactly the possibly-carpenter patriarch wanted from the boy. Guiding Giorgia, Lorenzo, et al. is Alba, an instructor who isn’t above playing favorites; and who, to me, seemed to be making things up as she went along. (Mind you, this may have been the point—or I may have missed the point.)

Caverna is, at least, only an hour long, and during my viewing exhibited the good sense to slip in a twist of tone right around the time I had resigned myself to staring vacantly at the screen. The neophyte performers acquitted themselves adequately, but forget any story (something I don’t actually demand of a film anymore)—there isn’t even a committed pursuit of any particular concept, or even mood. Sure, sure, we get it: childhood traumas, particularly emotional ones, are serious business and can seriously fracture the victims. But the two featured youths seemed more disaffected and occasionally annoyed than particularly addled. They pursue their career goals (“the true performer paints with the eyes of his mind!”), party vaguely, chat idly, and smoke prodigiously in front of charming, down-at-the-heel Old World backdrops. The dreams they relate to one another in class drip with heavy symbolism (of course, it may just be that my own dreams are never nearly so psychologo-poetical), and Lorenzo’s burst of anger—that twist of tone I mentioned—stems neither from anything much apparent, nor from much that might reasonably be guessed at.

As the directors  swap between the hazy saturation of dream-reminiscences and the cinema verité of the real lives and theater-ness of the troupe, there’s just enough filmic flair and character charm to keep your attention. But you will be relieved when the timer goes off, and you can move on with your life.

(At the time of this writing, Caverna was available free on Tubi and other free-streaming services).

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Things take a weird turn, and this ‘theater workshop’ becomes the stage for a surrealistic fantasy that’s hard to explain. To be fair, if “weird for the sake of being weird” is your thing, then you may well love this experience. I could appreciate what they were attempting; unfortunately, it didn’t land for me.”–Chris Jones, Overly Honest Movie Reviews (contemporaneous)

42.* VINYAN (2008)

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DIRECTED BY: Fabrice du Welz

FEATURING: Emmanuelle Béart, , Petch Osathanugrah, Julie Dreyfus

PLOT: Months after their son was lost in the tsunami that devastated Phuket, Jeanne and Paul see a video that suggests the boy might be alive deep in the Burmese jungle. They undertake a perilous voyage into Myanmar to find him, but encounter increasing danger and incomprehensible conditions. As their guides continue to make demands and lead them deeper into unfamiliar territory, Paul becomes more and more skeptical, but Jeanne remains resolved to find her child.

Still from Vinyan (2008)

BACKGROUND

  • The title is a term defined within the film as a spirit that has died a horrible death, becoming confused and angry and haunting the living world. The word may have been invented for this movie.
  • Du Welz’s second feature film, following Calvaire.
  • Filmed on location in Thailand, where in 2004 the Boxing Day tsunami killed nearly 5,400 people, including 2,000 foreign tourists.
  • Petch Osathanugrah passed away in August 2023 after living a remarkably varied life. Vinyan is his only credited acting role, but he was also a pop singer, art collector, president of Bangkok University, and CEO of the Osotspa beverage company, which manufactures the M-150 energy drink.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: The final shot of the movie features despairing mother Jeanne giving herself over to the angry spirits of the region’s lost children, smiling deliriously while the white-painted boys caress and smear mud on her naked body. Immediately following a shocking burst of violence, the scene is a potent vision of both her psychological state and the primal landscape that has subsumed her.

TWO WEIRD THINGS: Hungry old white people are funny; an ancient temple appears

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: An unexpected blend of Don’t Look Now and Apocalypse Now, Vinyan builds horror out of unrelenting grief in a violently hostile world. The deeper we go into both the wilds of the Burmese coast and into the heroine’s desperation, the more disturbing the setting becomes, and the more inevitably tragic the characters’ fate.

Original trailer for Vinyan

COMMENTS: Vinyan begins as a horror story that has already concluded: a child has been lost in a terrible cataclysm. This would be Continue reading 42.* VINYAN (2008)

POD 366, EPISODE 38: THE TRIAL OF THE LAST DRAGON AT TIFF

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Audio only link (Soundcloud download)

Quick links/Discussed in this episode:

The Last Dragon (1985): Discussion begins. Karate kid Leroy fights the Shogun of Harlem for the hand of Vanity. This exceedingly silly, oh-so-80s cult film in out 4K, so you can see “the Glow” in hi-def. Buy Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon.

Toronto International Film Festival: Discussion begins. The festival is over, but many of these films will be getting distribution in the coming weeks and months. Here are six titles we think show promise:

  • La Chimera – A film from Alice Rohrwatcher (Happy as Lazzaro) following a group of Etruscan tomb raiders; could be arty-weird
  • Dicks – The Musical – This vulgar, absurd queer musical won the audience award in the “Midnight” section and will be in theaters next week from A24.
  • Dream Scenario stars as a nondescript professor who shows up in strangers’ dreams; also from A24 and on screens in November.
  • Mademoiselle Kenopsia – Experimental movie from Denis Côté (Vic + Flo Saw a Bear) that appears to have only one character onscreen for 80 minutes—maybe.
  • Mother, Couch – Grandma sits down on a couch and refuses to move in what we’re suspecting is a Buñuelian scenario.
  • Riddle of Fire – We’ll let the programmers hype this one: “a neo-fairytale that evokes the sensation of tuning into a late-night broadcast of an obscure and wackadoo children’s film from another dimension.”

Toronto International Film Festival 2023 complete film list.

The Trial (1962): Discussion begins. Read the Canonically Weird entry! A new restoration of ‘ surreal adaptation of ‘s novel is now available from Criterion, in either standalone Blu-ray or 4K UHD + Blu-ray. Buy The Trial.

WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE:

Next week’s Pod 366 should have as our first returning guest (although at the time of this writing we have not confirmed a recording time yet—if it’s not next week, it will be in an episode soon after). In written reviews next week, Shane Wilson searches the reader-suggested queue and comes up with a gem in Vinyan (2008); Giles Edwards braves the avant-garde Caverna (2023); and Gregory J. Smalley explores one Jagged Mind (2023). Onward and weirdward!

CAPSULE: DALÌLAND (2022)

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DIRECTED BY: Mary Harron

FEATURING: , , Christopher Briney, Rupert Graves,

PLOT: A young art gallery intern has a brush with the strange world of during the master’s twilight years.

Still from Daliland (2022)

COMMENTS: Tucked into this quiet biopic is as apt a description of what attracts us, here at 366 Weird Movies, to the films we hunt for, enjoy, and cling to. On a cash errand for the maestro, James interrupts a gallery owner pitching a signed art print. The woman is intrigued, but hesitant, not sure what to make of the image which stands before her. “You… like it?” she asks. “I find it upsetting… I don’t think I want to live with someone else’s weird dream on my wall.” James replies, “But that weirdness, that’s what makes it original. It got to you, that’s why you’ll never get tired of it; you’ll never forget it.” He nails it, inadvertently securing the sale. Simultaneously, his description of that piece explains, as best one can, what Salvador Dalì, and all weird visionaries, are about.

Mary Harron’s film is more of an ensemble piece than the name (and grandiose subject matter) might suggest. In fact, much of the film involves Salvador Dalì (Ben Kingsley), now old, at times bordering on caricature, observing those around him: the trendy hangers-on, his friend Alice Cooper, his inspiring—but harsh—wife Gala (Barbara Sukowa), his new assistant James, and, most of all, Dalì. He speaks in third person. He performs without surcease in the presence of others. And he ages, as it is “very tiring being Dalì.” Put aside his trove of drawings, paintings, and sculptures; his life was a work of art, a performance piece for the ages.

Dalìland is polished and straightforward, but that does not make it resonate any less. While there are many searing, satirical jabs at posers and poseurs, show-offs and charlatans, Harron neither glorifies nor denigrates these oddballs and outcasts dancing along society’s periphery; those who, through their mien and flair mitigate the day-to-day blandness of those around them; the eye-catchers who make others wonder, “Just what the heck are they doing?” and who devote their life force to lending us a touch of the unreal—the sur-real, if you will. Dalì was many different people over the course of his long life, and the performer behind these acts is impossible to know. Indeed, it is clear even to a layman such as myself, that the “real” Dalì probably never existed, and Dalì could not have been happier for having achieved that.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The latest of the director’s splendidly offbeat biopics captures the madness, the comedy and the tragedy of the surrealist legend who turned his very identity into a work of art.”–Owen Gleiberman, Variety (contemporaneous)

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