Tag Archives: Art

It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: UN PERRO LLAMADO DOLOR [A DOG CALLED PAIN] (2001)

Leave a comment

AKA El artista y su modelo [The Artist and His Model]

DIRECTED BY: Luis Eduardo Aute

PLOT: A series of vignettes about seven legendary Spanish-speaking painters and their relationships with their models, united by a dog which shares a name with Frida Kahlo’s beloved pet.

Imaged from "A Dog Called Pain" (2001)

COMMENTS: No doubt you’re all familiar with the Barbershop Harmony Society and the annual international barbershop quartet competition it hosts. Well, have I got news for you: just this past week, video of the 2023 finalists’ performances in Louisville earlier this year was posted online, so you now have the chance to see what the coolest kids in a capella close harmony are up to. In particular, you might want to check out the work of this year’s champion Midtown, who clinched the crown with a 12-minute mashup of “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” and the old “Spider-Man” cartoon theme, a performance which turns out to consist entirely of inside jokes. It’s so deep down the barbershop rabbit hole that the explanation merits its own playlist. And if the crowd’s response is any indication, the aficionados are eating it up with a spoon.

Now, why am I subjecting you to this bizarre-even-by-our-standards digression about an arcane and nearly forgotten musical subgenre? Because for weeks, I have been reckoning with what I think of Un perro llamado dolor, Luis Eduardo Aute’s hand-crafted fantasia on the lives and artistic stylings of some of the most famous painters who ever lived, and hearing this professional and utterly impenetrable barbershop performance proved to be a fitting analogue: it’s exceedingly skilled, breathtakingly beautiful in moments, and so far up its own ass that it threatens to cross dimensions.

Aute possessed a variety of talents, from composing chart-topping songs to headlining art shows across Europe to not only writing successful poetry but inventing new forms to increase the challenge. After a while, he began to combine his talents, uniting his artwork, songs, and poems around joint themes and even expanding into film, a medium he encountered early through a job he landed as a second A.D. on ’s Cleopatra. So here is a chance for all of his skills to come together.

It’s a mammoth undertaking. Aute created over 4,000 drawings in pencil and charcoal, often aping the styles of the greats he intends to honor. His assembly is barely animation (save for a couple computer-assisted shots late in the film, Un perro unfolds at a rate of about 3 seconds per drawing), but it flows smoothly through seven different portraits united only by the subjects’ profession and the titular dog. The dog is a curious companion. Named Pain (supposedly like one of Frida Kahlo’s actual dogs, although hers were Xoloitzcuintli and not the generic hound seen here), his presence hints at the constant agony all artists seemingly feel, but he is a loyal friend, protecting his masters and their models against all sorts of villains who would do them harm.

The dangers of both the making of art and the judgment of others seem to be foremost in Aute’s mind. We watch as crowds of celebrities (especially comic filmmakers) look on at Picasso’s Guernica like a Hollywood legend, but the artist himself needs reassurance from Man Ray that he’s done something worthwhile. is portrayed as unusually vulnerable, and his model even chops off one of his hands. Francisco Goya is attacked first by flying demons, then firing squads. Aute suggests that to be an artist is to endure trauma.

But maybe not. Divining Aute’s point is purely a guessing game. If you’re not an art historian, Un perro is a baffling collection of surreal images that convey the hauntings of a troubled soul but offer little interpretation. Even if you recognize Goya and his Maja desnuda, or intuit that it’s Leon Trotsky whom Diego Rivera stabs in the head with a Soviet sickle, there’s nothing to tell you why Aute brings them together. And those are just the artists I recognized. I found myself stopping the film frequently to peruse quick biographies of the subjects of Aute’s portraits in hopes of gleaning more insight into what was going on. (I have to confess that I was not familiar with Joaquín Sorolla at all, and his story in the film remains lost on me.) It’s the purest artist’s trope: let the work speak for itself. But what the work seems to be saying here is that it’s too smart for you.

My best hope for understanding comes from the title cards, which describe Un perro llamado dolor as a “libertarian fantasy based on the work and events of the lives of the artists portrayed.” It’s a curious label, given that the main characters in the film are in no way free. They are trapped by their obsessions, helpless in the face of fantastical fears, and able to defend themselves only with pencil or paintbrush. Aute may intend his film as a celebration of their persistence and fortitude, or he may seek to make them seem smaller, more human and fragile. It’s hard to know.

The obtuse nature of the film makes it a strange viewing experience, because it feels like it’s trying hard to push you away. Aute crafts something beautiful, but the experience locks you out, rather than inviting you in. Watching it in a room full of Spanish art historians would make for a very unusual experience. Much like being in an audience of barbershop quartet enthusiasts who laugh uproariously to drive home the point that they get all the jokes… and you don’t.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The seven ‘portraits’ of assorted artists and their (usually nude) muses, starting with Goya and ending with Velasquez in no apparent chronological order, bear enigmatic titles like ‘There are no witches, but they do exist’ and proceed with a loopy, angst-filled dream logic that defies exposition.  A difficult, arcane film… will prove a hard sell outside the fest circuit, particularly since some of its profiled Spanish artists are virtually unknown here.” – Ronnie Scheib, Variety (contemporaneous)

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

List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: THE DRAUGHTSMAN’S CONTRACT (1982)

1 Comment

366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

Recommended

DIRECTED BY: Peter Greenaway

FEATURING: Anthony Higgins, Janet Suzman, Anne-Louise Lambert, Hugh Fraser

PLOT: At the finale of the 17th-century, the wife of a boorish aristocrat contracts with a draughtsman to contrive a series of drawings; unexpected pictographic clues appearing in the artist’s renderings suggest a deadly conspiracy.

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Greenaway tackles his first feature-length narrative with such structure, symmetry, and formalism that it might conceivably collapse into its own pretentious confinement. However, regular spikes of ornate bawdiness and cryptic banter, alongside Nyman’s jaunty film score, render the whole affair so baroquely flippant that the inclusion of a living garden statue is merely the ultimate, strange garnish on this eccentric appetizer to Greenaway’s impending career.

COMMENTS: “It has been fancifully imputed that Mr. Neville saw you as a deceived husband.” If that withering—and scandalous—insult vexes you, I strongly recommend against attempting to endure Peter Greenaway’s high-falutin’ whodunnit. On the other hand, if you wish to pry, peep, poke, and peek at the behind-closed-doors (and at times, on-the-lawn-somewhat-obscured-by-a-parasol) doings of the sickeningly wealthy and witty, the droll and devastating—veritably, the very cream of late-17th-century excess—Greenaway’s soufflé of mannerisms, ostentation, lines, lists, longitudes, and lasciviousness baked into this country-house mystery will not only fit the bill, but fit it perfectly with a stretch of laced linen that will leave you petrified to touch it with your coarse peasant hands.

Mr. Neville (Anthony Higgins), whose observations Mr. Noyes infers from prior insinuations and sketch-work, is a draughtsman by trade, and a haughty rake by inclination. On the eve of Mr. Herbert’s departure, Neville attends a soirée hosted by Mrs. Herbert, who wishes, she claims, to furnish her husband with a set of exterior drawings of their estate as a gift upon his return, in hopes of salvaging, at least, some civility in their marriage. Initially disinclined, Neville agrees only after much pursuit by Mrs. Herbert (and her daughter, Mrs. Talmann), and the inking of a curious contract which delineates recompense both financial and sexual. Mr. Herbert leaves for business, and Mr. Neville ensconces himself as he begins his work—and play.

I beg your indulgence for what is, even for me, an excess in flowery language; but such is the overwhelming effect of this strange matrix of conflicting impulses and shifting conspiracies. Greenaway kicks the door down for this one (doubtless because its vertical line displeased him) and comes swinging in full force with his painterly mise-en-scène and artful dialogue thronging the screen and speakers. Frames within frames, within frames; candlesticks joining and isolating conversers, sometimes positioned as an extension of a phallus-above-the-table (Neville’s, naturally); ordered chaos—there is nothing, it appears, left to ill-rendered whim nor faith in dreamscapes.

The “conflicting impulses” mentioned play out primarily between the pristine structure of the film (pacing, staging, scoring, framing, &c.) and the often-hilarious, invariably biting dialogue, which itself is masked with powder-splotched cosmetics and finery that could pass for a migraine. And Greenaway looooves sex on shameless display. As if imitating the outward prudish mien of its characters, The Draughtsman’s Contract conveys all manner of carnality, some of it extreme, while only ever exposing a single breast on screen. Anthony Higgins—witness to this breast, among other parts and places—is perfectly cast as the cocksure draughtsman, believing he is outwitting the conspiratorial axis of Mrs. Herbert and her daughter. Though doomed from the start, he careens toward his fate on a cloud of magniloquent artistry, wit, and lasciviousness.

As far as I could determine, the extras on Kino Lorber’s 40th anniversary, 4K release of The Draughtsman’s Contract were lifted straight from the preceding UK-only disc. Though they are scant, the included introduction from Peter Greenaway is a delightful and informative ten-minute essential, outlining the director’s intentions and providing a brief history of the film. The even briefer interview with Michael Nyman succinctly and charmingly relates how these two lovers of lists began their collaboration. Last, and by no means least, the video and sound are perfection in itself—and as Greenaway would observe, it is the deft combination of those elements that filmmaking is all about.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Agatha Christie this ain’t, but it is weirdly wonderful… the film shows a unique talent getting to grips with narrative cinema to create something which is as engaging and alluring as it is baffling and perplexing.”–Mark Kermode, BFI

Capsules

CAPSULE: DALÌLAND (2022)

Leave a comment

366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

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)

Capsules

CAPSULE: THE ADVENTURES OF PICASSO [PICASSOS ÄVENTYR] (1978)

Leave a comment

366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

DIRECTED BY: Tage Danielsson

FEATURING: Gösta Ekman, Hans Alfredson, Margaretha Krook, Lena Olin, Bernard Cribbins, Wilfrid Brambell

PLOT: The life of the legendary Spanish painter, told with a  questionable level of veracity.

Still from The Adventures of Picasso (1978)

COMMENTS: In a few weeks, a motion picture will make its streaming debut purporting to tell the remarkable story of pop music’s crown prince of parody, . Weird promises to cover every step of the master accordionist’s life and, whenever possible, to subvert the proceedings with lies and misdirections. It’s a fitting approach for someone who has built a career out of taking familiar sounds and destroying them from within.

What it won’t be is unprecedented. The grand womb-to-tomb biopic has been assailed before. Its conventions have been savagely parodied. We’ve seen lives thoroughly misappropriated with falsehoods and flights of invention. (And that’s to say nothing of legitimate productions that shred the truth to achieve better storytelling.) It turns out that a leading exemplar of the ridiculous film biography hit screens years earlier, the product of a Swedish comedy duo who wondered what it would be like to make an authoritative biography when you have virtually no knowledge of the subject.

Like a book report by a student who did absolutely none of the reading, this take on the life of Picasso is drenched in flopsweat. Within the first 15 minutes of the movie, the pieces of the Picasso legend are already falling into place: young Pablo has established his bonafides at art school (successfully painting a nude after seeing the model for a split second), relocated to Madrid, adopted his trademark striped shirt and white trousers, and invented cubism. Having burned what few facts they have available, the filmmakers pivot to wildly making stuff up. Did you know that Picasso was gifted with a vial of magical ink by a woman he saved from a pair of foul brigands? Maybe you recall his illustrious contemporaries, who evidently include Ernest Hemingway, Erik Satie, two Toulouse-Lautrecs, Puccini (and his real life Mimi), Vincent van Gogh, and even Rembrandt. And who can forget the real story of how a petty artistic quibble between Churchill and Hitler presaged World War II. (No wonder Picasso would seek refuge in America, despite the notorious Art Prohibition of the Roaring Twenties.) The Adventures of Picasso is the movie equivalent of converting text into Japanese in Google Translate and then back.

One of the film’s most inventive techniques is the choice to dispense with dialogue altogether. Actors speak in grunts and gibberish or spout cursory and irrelevant phrases in pidgin versions of various languages. (A persistent chanteuse sings lyrics that are actually a recipe for a Finnish fish pastry.) Even the headline of the traditional newspaper carrying the word of the outbreak of World War I reads simply “BOOM KRASCH BANG!” Only the narration is necessary to carry the story forward, and you get a different version depending upon your native tongue. (English-speakers like myself are treated to comic actor Bernard Cribbins, in his role as Gertrude Stein.) The filmmakers have thus given themselves an out: don’t understand what’s going on? No worries; you’re not supposed to.

While writers Danielsson and Alfredson will do anything for a joke, they show surprising empathy for the Picasso they’ve created. There’s an extended skit where the onscreen Picasso is forced to do whatever the narrator dictates, and that typifies the notion that Picasso ultimately had no agency, a victim of his own success. His father is a relentless huckster; when his dicey hair tonic instantly produces Picasso’s famous baldness, the old man immediately sells the locks to capitalize on his son’s fame. Throughout the rest of his “career,” dear old dad will be there, making friends with history’s greatest monsters and looking for the quickest way to make a buck. At the end, the great artist is nothing more than an exhibit himself; his home is a theme park and his doves of peace are trinkets to be sold. In this telling, Picasso doesn’t so much die as drop out, leaving our materialistic world behind.

The Adventures of Picasso certainly takes an unusual approach to biography; if you come hoping to learn anything about the creative mind behind “Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon” or “Guernica,” you will surely be disappointed. And even the deeper truth that may be lurking within seems suspect; the real Picasso was far from an innocent and was in full control of his brand. But there’s something almost noble about the notion that if you can’t get it right, then by all means get it completely and utterly wrong. Or, as another great biographical subject once observed, “It doesn’t matter if it’s boiled or fried. Just eat it.”

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The Adventures of Picasso‘ is billed as ‘a lunatic comedy,’ and while it does achieve that feeling on a couple of rare occasions, for the most part it’s like a bad dream… The film’s strategy is to make everything as feverishly absurd as it can be…. But too much of it has the ring of desperation. It’s all too frantic for words.” Janet Maslin, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by Ettin, who called it a “[S]wedish surreal comedy” that ” [I]’m sure you will like.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)        

Capsules

CAPSULE: GELATERIA (2019)

1 Comment

DIRECTED BY: Arthur Patching, Christian Serritiello

FEATURING: Arthur Patching, Christian Serritiello, Carrie Getman, Tomas Spencer, Daniel Brunet, Simone Spinazze, Joulia Strauss

PLOT: A picaresque tour of a town on a remote island where a man leaves his girlfriend on a train and is scorned by an old childhood companion; an Italian speaker leaves his job addressing party guests in the unfamiliar language to attend an art show where a singer sings of anarchy; a getaway driver meets a UFO watcher at a remote hotel; and an artist travels to a remote island to find out what happened to the paintings she submitted to an art show.

Still from Gelateria (2019)

COMMENTS: We begin with a man standing on a rocky shore as he stares resolutely into the wild, swirling forces of nature. Finally, he screams, unleashing all his inner turmoil into the void. But we can’t hear anything at all. Whether he is unable to give it voice or it cannot be heard above the din, we cannot be sure. But the scream is silent, doomed.

Gelateria says as much in that first minute as it does in the 60 that follow. Playing out like an extended Monty Python episode that isn’t especially interested in being funny, the film bounces from one set piece to another, with one character or another delivering us to the next sketch like an off-kilter La Ronde. Like that opening vignette, much will be said but very little will be heard.

In some respects, a movie like this is review-proof. If the premise is interesting enough, it can hold your interest for several minutes until it has to bounce to the next one. Consider a scene on a yacht where a wealthy man has paid top dollar for someone to come and speak words that no one can understand. It’s a quirky situation, and the confusion of the speaker is an entertaining contrast with the blissful ignorance of the party guests. When that starts to lag, we can spend a few moments observing how no one even seems to be able to party properly, and we even get one final burst of absurdity when the host sneaks off to scarf down a hot dog. Once the speaker makes his exit, we’ve just about wrung all we can out of this scenario; it’s the perfect time to move on.

And Gelateria, like its namesake, has a variety of flavors for us to sample. Haunted: an early scene where a man contemplates his failing relationship, represented by the camera’s inability to keep his girlfriend in focus. Shocking: a singer exhorts her audience to revolt against the system, then begins shooting members of the uncooperative crowd. Giddily silly: a policeman offers to help a desperate visitor, but only in exchange for her attendance at a play he’s in. The subsequent play is wonderfully unhinged, as it appears to be falling apart right before our very eyes. (“Of course you will eat it,” an actress says of the pasta that is accumulating on the table. “It’s a play. They expect reality.”)

There’s not much reality here, of course, so what are we actually getting from it? It doesn’t have to be about anything, of course, but there’s a preponderance of evidence to suggest that the whole movie is a meditation on artists and their relationships with their patrons and audiences. Nearly everyone is either performing in some way or putting their heart on display for all to see, and the responses – from feigned appreciation to apathy to outright hostility – are not soul-enriching. If the metaphor-for-art explanation appeals to you, I encourage you to peruse David Finkelstein’s more detailed exegesis of the theme, but if that is the right interpretation, then it’s hard not to view the whole enterprise as an exercise in navel-gazing.

You see, possibly the most delightful interlude is a fun little cartoon (animated by Tiago Araújo) which introduces the character we will follow for the remainder of the film: an aspiring painter whose work has vanished as the result of what seems to be a scam. She seems a pitiable sort, but when we meet her in the flesh, she is played alternately by both writers/directors/editors/producers/cinematographers Patching and Seritiello in an inoffensive drag turn that seems to have more to do with giving credence to the closing title card “This film was inspired by true events” than anything. They are the artist, you see. But that means this whole amusing, well-shot motion picture is just a way of telling us how put upon they are as artists. And that kind of ouroboros is clever, but it’s not very fulfilling to watch. It ends up being a hollow pursuit.

All of which is to say: Gelateria is an enjoyable little piece of alt-comedy. It has a strong farcical tone, the premises hit their marks and get out promptly, and everyone really commits to the bit. But the underlying thread of self-pity subtly undercuts the modest successes, making a sweet taste turn sour. Tell it to the wind.

Gelateria is available on Vimeo for the reasonable price of $2 to rent or $5 to own.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Gelateria is a beautifully shot, weird, and truly hell-ride of a film… With personal camerawork seeming to slide in and between the realms of reality and a dreamlike world, you’ll quickly find yourself trapped.” Jordaine Givens, Film Threat