Tag Archives: 2002

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: VAKVAGANY (2002)

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DIRECTED BY: Benjamin Meade, Andras Suranyi

FEATURING: Erno Locsei, Stan Brakhage, James Ellroy, Roy Menninger, Etuska Locsei

PLOT: Filmmakers discover a batch of home movies shot by a Hungarian family in the years following World War II; they set out to find surviving members of the family, while calling upon a group of expert viewers to help them interpret the footage.

Still from Vakvagany (2002)

COMMENTS: For as long as there have been movies, there have been professionals who seek to deliver a story to a wider audience, and there have been amateurs who only wish to record personal moments for later reminiscence. When it comes to the latter, the idea that anyone beyond a very small circle might see the footage borders on absurd. To reach a mass audience, the film would have to present something of enormous significance, like the scene captured by Abraham Zapruder in Dallas in November 1963. Or perhaps it could be used to comment on current events, such as to understand the accused subjects of Capturing the Friedmans. But beyond that, a home movie seems of little public value outside of the home, and to watch one uninvited feels nosy at best and invasive at worst.

The directors of Vakvagany seem to feel they’ve backed into a Rear Window scenario. Someone has found some old home movies, they’ve watched them, and they’ve seen some surprising things: a couple sorting through a treasure trove of jewelry and other valuables. Unusually lengthy shots of a nude infant. Footage of a mother holding her toddler son’s penis as he attempts to urinate. “What’s going on here?” they must have asked themselves. “Is this immoral? Criminal, even?” Their snooping has led them to a possibly unsavory place, and now they feel compelled to know more.

In these discovered films, we meet the Locsei family, and the first facts we receive are unsettling. Mr. Locsei was evidently a functionary in the postwar Hungarian government. A neighbor suggests he may have overseen the collection of valuables from Jews who were deported to concentration camps during the war, which may explain that delighted sorting of valuables we witnessed. (On the other hand, it will be suggested later in the film that Mr. Locsei was actually saving these possessions to be returned to their owners.) We also see his wife cavorting with grapes, which matches with suggestions of alcoholism. Most importantly, we see the two Locsei children, who don’t relish being on camera, hardly surprising given some of the awkward moments to which they’ve been subjected. 

To help us out, the filmmakers have enlisted onscreen interpreters, who are shockingly confident in their impromptu reactions. Legendary experimentalist Brakhage, upon seeing a father embracing his squirming daughter, opines, “I don’t quite believe his hugs,” and later compares the son’s efforts to free his arm from his father’s grasp to a Nazi salute. (“Perhaps I’m reading too much into it,” he then admits.) Psychiatrist Menninger wryly notes the professional Continue reading IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: VAKVAGANY (2002) →

Capsules

CAPSULE: GERRY (2002)

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DIRECTED BY: Gus Van Sant

FEATURING: ,

PLOT: Two young men become lost in a desert, and wander aimlessly in search of a way out.

Still from Gerry (2002)

COMMENTS: The plot synopsis above may seem unhelpfully brief, but there’s the very real possibility that I’ve actually said too much. Describing Gerry is an almost futile task, because very little actually happens, and that’s very much the point. Even before they get lost, the two men motoring down the highway aren’t really doing anything. Their sojourn into the desert is a vague trek to see “the thing,” a goal they dispense with pretty early on. They don’t even speak for the first eight minutes of the film until Damon reminds Affleck to stick to the path, as blunt a piece of foreshadowing as one can imagine.

Gerry is largely a sensory experience. Van Sant and cinematographer Harris Savides capture a some truly spectacular, desolate vistas (a mélange of Death Valley and Argentina), against which Affleck and Damon seem puny and immaterial. Meanwhile, the soundscape of designer Leslie Shatz is cranked up to the maximum, with every trudge and scrape slamming into the red. It’s not just that these two men are lost and doomed. It’s that we’re right there with them.

For a story about people walking blithely into harm’s way, Gerry is unexpectedly entertaining. Affleck and Damon improvised much of their dialogue and they have a casual repartee, best exemplified by a scene where Affleck manages to get stuck atop an enormous boulder and the pair has to figure out a way to get him down. (Affleck also nails the film’s most brutal slice of gallows humor: “How do you think the hike’s going so far?”) They exude a surprising amount of personality for as little as they say, and as little as we know about them. Even their names are a mystery; they might both be called Gerry, but they also use the word as shorthand for making a dumb mistake, so the very title of the film could just be a way of busting their chops.

Van Sant marries this non-story with potent visuals that would be comically overwrought if they didn’t serve the film so well. A perfectly framed closeup of the men slogging through the desert almost resembles a horse race, until you realize each ear-splitting crunch in the dirt is leading them ever closer to nowhere at all. A long, slow dolly around Affleck, capturing his utter dejection is paired with a similar dolly looking outward, taking in the stunning scenery that is doing him in.

Gerry kicks off a sort of unofficial Gus Van Sant trilogy about young death. This film’s death-by-misfortune is followed by Last Days (suicide) and Elephant (murder). Uniting the three films is a sense that that last day of life is not momentous or weighted with significance. The days are just days. And there is beauty and terror in them, just the same.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“If you can imagine Dude, Where’s My Car? rewritten by Samuel Beckett, you have some idea of what this intriguing, ferociously austere, but subtly and unlocatably humorous picture feels like… Gerry requires a leap of faith and an investment of attention: but with its fascination and weird exhilaration it handsomely repays both.” Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by Motkya, who called it “ a masterpiece of minimalism” and argued “[t]his movie deserves to be in the List, if only for its uncompromising refusal to be a traditional cinematic experience.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)   

Apocryphally Weird

22*. A SNAKE OF JUNE (2002)

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 Rokugatsu no hebi

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , Yûji Kôtari, Shinya Tsukamoto

PLOT: Rinko is a shy and inhibited woman working as a counselor at a suicide hotline. One day, a photographer she previously helped sends her compromising photos of herself. The stalking turns into blackmail when he forces her to live out her erotic fantasies, which take on an increasingly hallucinatory character.

Still from A Snake of June (2002)

BACKGROUND:

  • Shinya Tsukamoto’s seventh film, after Gemini (1999).
  • A Snake of June debuted at the 59th Venice International Film Festival (2002), where it won a special award (the Kinematrix Film Award, which does not appear to have been awarded before or since).
  • Tsukamoto and main actress Asuka Kurosawa were respectively awarded the Special Jury Award and Best Actress Award at 2003’s edition of Fantasporto (Porto International Film Festival).

INDELIBLE IMAGE: The unusual garb of the erotic cabaret’s patrons, who sport funnel masks as they watch an equally offbeat performance.

TWO WEIRD THINGS: Erotic drowning performance; corrugated pipe assault

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Although modest by the director’s standards, A Snake of June stands out by all other measures of weirdness through its gradual abandonment of conventional narrative logic to indulge in surreal displays of interlacing horror, desire and sadism.


Restoration trailer for A Snake of June (2002)

COMMENTS: A Snake of June starts off surprisingly restrained for a Continue reading 22*. A SNAKE OF JUNE (2002) →