Tag Archives: 1999

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: POLA X (1999)

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DIRECTED BY: Leos Carax

FEATURING: Guillaume Depardieu, Katerina Golubeva, , Delphine Chuillot

PLOT: Pierre’s happy-go-lucky existence is shattered when he meets a young woman claiming to be his lost sister; suddenly disenchanted with his life, he abandons his mother, his fiancée, and his successful literary formula in search of a higher truth.

Still from pola X (1999)

COMMENTS: Herman Melville needed a hit. He’d received a critical drubbing for his last book, a light tome about the whaling industry, so to improve his fortunes, he poured his effort into a potboiler with Gothic overtones. Did it work? Not only did Pierre, or The Ambiguities not reverse his fortunes, but the negative response went beyond the work and spilled over to the author himself, with the New York Day Book headlining its review, “HERMAN MELVILLE CRAZY”.

Are there parallels with Leos Carax, who waited eight years following the critical and box office failure of The Lovers on the Bridge to bring forth this adaptation of Pierre? One hates to espouse such a simplistic theory of armchair psychoanalysis, but the shoe sure does fit. Just as Melville poured his wounded heart into his tale, Carax goes all in on every bit of melodrama. He faithfully adapts all aspects of the book, including its  transgressive and destructive relationships. For what it’s worth, the critics all called Carax crazy, as well.

Although he’d be the last to admit it, Pierre is already pretty messed up at the start of Pola X. He speaks in romantic platitudes to Lucie, his fiancée whom he’s cheats upon regularly. (Carax nicely frames one such conversation atop a hillside with a dramatic vista, his camera swooping like the beginning of The Sound of Music.) He has an unusually close relationship with his mother Marie, in whose house he still lives, and who has no qualms about bathing in front of her son. Their unity seems to be a reaction to something in his late father’s past; we don’t know exactly what it is, but it’s bad enough that newsstands are selling books about the old man’s precipitous fall. His cousin Thibault has given himself over completely to the pursuit of money. And there’s his budding career as an anonymous novelist, a vocation that permits him to act as the voice of his generation without any pressure to represent it. Clearly, Pierre is a man of the utmost privilege, the kind you fully expect to see brought low by circumstance.

So part of what makes his fall from grace so surprising is that it is almost entirely self-generated, inspired by his discovery of Isabella, a homeless immigrant who professes to be Pierre’s sister by virtue of one of his father’s dalliances. This dovetails with dreams Pierre has been having about a woman who matches Isabella to a tee, and the discovery completely unmoors him and everyone around him. He cuts off all connection to his past life, he takes up with Isabella and a pair of fellow struggling immigrants (and is shocked when hotels turn them away, cab drivers insult them, and Thibault denies any connection to him), and he declares that everything he has ever written has been fraudulent and now he will write the book that truly blows it all wide open.

Carax has a lot of fun pushing his characters to their limits. Pierre undergoes a full transformation, as the twentysomething socialite takes to wielding a cane and wearing a blanket like a Russian greatcoat, as though he had suddenly become a tubercular artist from a 19th century opera. He adopts a fully disgusted assessment of the human race, telling a young girl that all people stink (a viewpoint that recoils upon her in a spectacularly bad way). Pierre and his troupe don’t merely find themselves on the streets; they wind up at the warehouse headquarters of a spectacular industrial music collective (playing the brilliantly realized score by avant-garde rock legend Scott Walker) that turns out to be a terrorist cell. Lucie doesn’t merely waste away in misery at having been ditched by Pierre, but actually shows up at his door, clinging to him and maintaining a blissful ignorance about his connection with Isabella. And Marie doesn’t merely pine for her wayward son, but roams the countryside on his motorcycle until it becomes the agent of her destruction (in a morbidly funny manner).

And then there’s what he does to Isabella, as they make manifest their bond, explicitly. (Golubeva used a body double for the most graphic moments; Depardieu did not.) It’s almost as though Carax wanted to eliminate any doubt as to whether they consummate their incestuous relationship by presenting it in pornographic detail. But he gets to have his cake and eat it too (not a euphemism), because the scene isn’t romantic in any context. The sex is hungry rather than loving, desperate rather than passionate. Whatever Pierre is trying to find in his life, he pays no heed to any obstacles, physical or moral, that stand in his way. Of course, in doing so, he brings the girl down with him. There’s a reason that he later dreams of the two of them consumed by a river of blood.

Pola X ends up being a peculiar sort of ironic contradiction. A protagonist who has it all but finds a lie at the heart of his happiness, and the ensuing search for truth that brings only pain to himself and those around him. Intriguingly, both of Pierre’s creators found a different way out of their dark places. Melville eventually turned away from prose, devoting himself to poetry. Carax, meanwhile, only got weirder.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Not all of Pola X is fully comprehensible… But the images—oh, they capture the mood of this piece and the things that are really important.”–Marjorie Baumgarten, Austin Chronicle (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by Motyka. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: CRIMINAL LOVERS (1999)

Les amants criminels

DIRECTED BY: François Ozon

FEATURING: Natacha Régnier, Jérémie Renier, Miki Manojlovic, Salim Kechiouche

PLOT: High schooler Alice seduces shy Luc into a plot to kill her ex-boyfriend; they get lost in the woods while burying the body and stumble upon a cabin, whose lone occupant captures them for his own ends.

Still from Criminal Lovers (1999)

COMMENTS: Let’s begin at the end, with two men in custody and a young woman gunned down by the police. Criminal Lovers dabbles in the language of fairy tales, so it would be natural to expect some kind of a moral here at the end of the journey. But writer-director François Ozon is much more interested in the morally compromised, and arguably all three of these people have done something to earn their fate. So the closest thing to a life lesson might be: those who do bad things will ultimately pay the price.

The most commonly referenced fairy tale in reviews of Criminal Lovers is “Hansel and Gretel” (a tale we have encountered here a few times before). At face value, the comparison is apt: a boy and girl get lost in the woods, and encounter a malevolent force who plans to eat them. But fairy tales are dependent upon a clear division of good and evil, and Criminal Lovers has not a good soul in sight. This is most evident in the personage of Alice, the amoral teen who leads on her erstwhile paramour Saïd, and then persuades the feckless Luc to join in her murder plot. The film believes it is revealing the depth of Alice’s monstrousness as we go, as it flashes back to her repeated machinations with Luc, as well as to a literature class where she reads the poetry of Rimbaud with a clearly sinister interpretation. But Ozon establishes her unscrupulous nature in the very first scene, as she lies to Saïd while teasing him. Even more than the world of fairy tales, we seem to be deep in the realm of the murderous femme fatale, a genre populated by such films as The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Honeymoon Killers, and most especially Double Indemnity.

That’s where the movie’s biggest twist comes into play, in which a nameless Woodsman captures the couple and proceeds to lavish his attentions not on Alice, but on the guileless Luc. Ozon seems intent on subverting the traditional male gaze, as Luc becomes the subject of the Woodsman’s carnal urges. This, even as the tensions are kept high by the suggestions that both teens are likely to end up on the grizzled man’s dinner plate. Ozon doesn’t focus on the anticipated violence; it’s your expectations for the romantic partnerships that he wants to disrupt. This was shocking 25 years ago, and it’s still a decent surprise today.

The way that Alice is kept around to act as an ugly counterpart to the ongoing gay seduction hints at the film’s sensibilities. Despite being trapped in the crawlspace beneath the Woodsman’s cabin, she still seizes upon every opportunity to rattle Luc’s cage, patronizingly complimenting him on finally achieving arousal during one of the hermit’s assaults, or laughing bitterly as she clues him in to the source of the meat he has just consumed. The film suggests that Luc is a more innocent soul, having done Alice’s bidding despite not really being into her (or, possibly, to women at all). Alice, even when she is in the most peril, is still a bad, bad lady.

Criminal Lovers makes a final strange turn in the final scenes, when Luc and Alice make their escape and the film turns into a full-on parody, as the pair frolic in a pool beneath a waterfall and finally consummate their union in the forest while woodland creatures cavort around their intertwined bodies and lush music plays. It’s played for laughs and eye rolls, and seems to be mocking the audience’s expectations as much as the conventions of fairy tale romance. It’s a solid joke, but coming on the heels of the tense thriller, the forbidden romance, and the dark character study, it becomes just one-too-many shifts in tone for a film that never settles on any one. So that final scene, with the violent end to one character and the probable lifelong incarceration of the other two, doesn’t pack a punch on its own. It’s been too inconsistent to make an impression at the end. Criminal Lovers always keeps you guessing, but never seems to have a final answer.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“At times, the film’s mordant absurdity plays with poetry, but of the most self-conscious brand… It’s one of those cases where the director trips over his own brains; he’s too smart for his own good.” – Elvis Mitchell, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by Motyka, whose assesses the film as “definitely weird, if a little pretentious [well, it’s French.]” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

WEIRD VIEW CREW: THE ITEM (1999)

In The Item, the chick, the fat guy, the mustache guy, and Dan Clark pick up a mysterious briefcase in a scenario that was intended to evoke Pulp Fiction as made by . The result, instead, is a 2.7 IMDb rating. Pete soldiers on gamely, with some herbal assistance.

(This movie was nominated for review by Val Santos. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

WEIRD VIEW CREW: ROCK N’ ROLL FRANKENSTEIN (1999)

Beware

This review isn’t too NSFW (we’d rate it PG-13 for penile synonyms), but the movie sure is. Kids shouldn’t watch Rock n’ Roll Frankenstein. Other people who shouldn’t watch Rock n’ Roll Frankenstein: people who care about movies or about being entertained.

(This movie was nominated for review by Brian O’Hara, director of Rock n’ Roll Frankenstein. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: ONE SOLDIER (1999)

DIRECTED BY: Steven Wright

FEATURING: Steven Wright, Sandi Carroll

PLOT: A Civil War soldier looks back upon his life and contemplates the nature of human existence in the days leading up to his execution for murder.

Still from One Soldier (1999)

COMMENTS: For years, Steven Wright built his comedy empire on peerless one-liners that required 5 seconds to fully sink in and another 30 to stop laughing. Long before successors like Mitch Hedberg and Demetri Martin picked up the torch, Wright was unspooling hour-long sets built out of dozens upon dozens of jokes that lay like unexploded mines waiting to go off. It’s frankly all I can do to resist the temptation to just spend the whole review quoting him. (I’ll allow myself this one famous joke for the unacquainted: “I spilled spot remover on my dog… and now he’s gone.”) This earned him many opportunities to apply his hangdog stare and drier-than-the-Sahara monotone to a variety of projects as a supporting actor and voice artist, but there have been fewer opportunities to try to translate his voice as a writer to the screen. In 1988, he wrote, produced, and starred in “The Appointments of Dennis Jennings,” the tale of a hapless psychiatric patient that earned Wright that year’s Academy Award for live-action short. That success under his belt, he then waited 11 years to make another short, this time assuming the director’s mantle as well.

The initial joke is that, even though his milieu is now the American Civil War, Steven Wright in a Union uniform is still Steven Wright. The elements are in place for a “Drunk History”-style collision of history and comedy, as mournful violins accompany Wright’s walks through an empty New England landscape. But when he launches into his narration in his classic disaffected drone, the subject matter is immediately more philosophical, touching on the inscrutability of life and the inevitability of death. Soon enough, his wife Becky joins in with her own reflection, and each hints that his fate may already be sealed. Essentially, “One Soldier” is like if “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” were a comedy sketch.

Of course, Steven Wright can’t not be funny, or at least not indulge his quirkier side. Particularly as regards his fate, which he anticipates by plucking petals off a flower. Even his deepest musings are tinged with silliness, like his recollections of his job in the war, playing the concertina to soothe the nerves of the top brass. A heartwarming reunion with his wife is tempered somewhat by his insistence on wearing a harmonica, even during intimate moments. And there’s a comedian’s love of the absurd, best typified by this line of dialogue which is no less bizarre when heard in context: “When she said the number 25 in German, it drove me wild.”

Wright’s soldier is a philosopher who hasn’t done the work and doesn’t have the language to describe the uncertainties he feels. That makes “One Soldier” a most unusual vanity project: it can’t carry the burden of the weighty issues it confronts, so it leans into that weakness. But there’s still something haunting that comes through, perhaps best exemplified by the film’s final thoughts: “First you don’t exist, then you exist, then you don’t exist. So this whole thing is just an interruption from not existing.” Steven Wright finds the comedy in the tragic notion that a person’s last thought on this earth is that he’s been thinking too much about the meaning of life.

“One Soldier” is available as a bonus feature on “When the Leaves Blow Away,” a recording of a one-hour Wright stand-up set from 2007.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“It is a fine blend of deep theological ponderings, modern Zen koans, and comic schtick. Like Wright’s live stand-up, the film’s slow pace and ponderous subject matter have a rather hypnotic effect, drawing one into the skewed reality of Wright’s brilliant mind.” – J. C. Shakespeare, Austin Chronicle (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by RobinHoodsun, who mused “it was very very weird and it left me with a starnge feeling lol.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)