DIRECTED BY: Arielle Dombasle
FEATURING: Arielle Dombasle, Nicolas Ker, Michel Fau, Asia Argento, Theo Hakola
PLOT: Hambourg is a demigod who has spent the past millennia attempting to combine a man and a woman to reforge the “Androgyne”; his latest experiment involving an elegant directress [efn_note]I don’t generally use the term “directress”, but I feel it important to emphasize the character’s heightened (and chic) femininity.[/efn_note] and an unstable musician begins unraveling as his project comes under the investigation of “the inspector.”
WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: Alien Crystal Palace is the Godard-ian science fiction sex film we’ve all been waiting for. Enough said.
COMMENTS: When Asia Argento plays the blandest character in a movie, you know you’ve found something special. I did not know this, nor much else for that matter, when I talked myself into staying up for the midnight screening of Alien Crystal Palace. Sitting in the crowd (and it was indeed a crowd), it occurred to me that I was almost certainly one of the only people not chemically altered for that screening. I needed no such aids, though, as Alien Crystal Palace took me by the hand into its world of drunken artists, coked-up conspirators, and stylistic anarchy.
I’ll dive straight into the heart of the matter: this is, by any technical standard, a truly terrible movie. The editing is choppy and seemingly arbitrary, with scenes clattering forward as eccentrically as the characters. The acting, almost across the board, feels like everyone downed a bottle of meth-infused Château Lafite before going on camera. Arielle Dombasle, starring as the urbane directress Dolorès Rivers, even tilts toward the wacky, despite her 130+ role pedigree dating back the to 1970s. Dombasle also wrote and directed this madness, and has set herself up as unflappably femme-française. Her counterpart—the yang to Dolorès’ yin—manages to be the most bizarre and frantic character in this already off-the-walls sci-fi thriller.
This is a paragraph exclusively concerning Nicolas Ker. As the actor who plays the movie-within-movie score composer, Nicolas Atlante, he out-Wiseaus Wiseau. He out-Belmondo’s Belmondo. When he’s not suffering brief moments of recuperation every morning (hearty swigs of Johnny Walker Red Label wake him up after another sleepless night), he’s always shouting at someone, something, nobody, or nothing. He rocks his dead-man heroin-chic look with a cranky aplomb, cigarette always in hand, two cravates always secured tightly around his bare neck. Ker is one of the co-writers of the screenplay, which I did not find surprising; I was surprised, however, when I learned that the heartfelt, wrenching soundtrack—which reminded me very much of the (British) New Wave band New Order—was done by this same Frenchman.
And now I must fall into a mad ramble. Nouvelle vague poster boy Jean-Pierre Léaud (Of Les quatres cent coups fame) plays the god Horus, father of Hambourg. There are a troupe of goth-gay “policemen” under the command of the snippiest Bowie/Warhol facsimile of a detective on this side of the galaxy. Lovers run towards, or sometimes from, each other in live-action slow motion to telegraph… something. When not enjoying his lush Egypto-pleasure hall in the heavens, Hambourg travels around exotic points via CGI submarine. We learn from one of the three producer characters, “I’m not a killer, I’m an intellectual.” ‘Struth, never have I seen so much Frenchiness Frenching forth from a French movie.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY: