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Apocryphally Weird

68*. DREAMS THAT MONEY CAN BUY (1947)

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“Ernst was obviously an astute observer of what qualities go into making an experience oneiric.”—Deirdre Barrett, IASD president

RecommendedWeirdest!

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Jack Bittner

PLOT: Fresh from the bank and owing cash, Joe needs to get some money—fast. A solution hits him for quick green, and soon he’s selling people dreams. Most come to buy (one comes to sell), but the ephemeral business ain’t all swell.

Still from "dreams that money can buy" (1949)

BACKGROUND:

  • One loft apartment, $25,000 (partly supplied by Peggy Guggenheim), three years of filming, and the involvement of some of the contemporary art-world’s heaviest hitters is all it took to create Dreams That Money Can Buy.
  • The film won of the Venice Film Festival’s special award for “Best Original Contribution to the Progress of Cinematography”.
  • At its New York City premiere, Dreams was projected on wall and ceiling of the venue, instead of the screen.
  • , aged 19 at the time, shows up as an extra, securing his place amongst the cool kids of cinema five years before his directorial debut.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: In a feature-length showcase from the avant-garde’s best, choosing just one is an odd request. G. Smalley suggests the scene from Max Ernst’s “Desire” where an elderly butler (Ernst himself) pulls first a shirtless man, then a pallid, corpselike woman in a nightgown out from under the sleeper’s red-velvet curtained canopy bed. It helps that the room is filled with smoke (possibly from an incinerated telephone) and that the sound accompaniment is a trancelike looped recording of men and women chanting backwards.

TWO WEIRD THINGS: Bouncy beatnik narrator; escaping out the window with Zeus-bust luggage into death color-drop explosion

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: This dream anthology has pep, humor, surrealism, and cool to spare, all presented in the confines of a brownstone apartment.

Promo trailer for a London screening of Dreams that Money Can Buy (1947)

COMMENTS: It is the intersection of Capitalism and Surrealism. It is Continue reading 68*. DREAMS THAT MONEY CAN BUY (1947) →

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: MARUTIRTHA HINGLAJ (1959)

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AKA Hinglaj, The Desert Shrine

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DIRECTED BY: Bikash Roy

FEATURING: Uttam Kumar, Sabitri Chatterjee, Anil Chatterjee, Pahari Sanyal, Bikash Roy

PLOT: A young man and woman are rescued in the desert by a group of pilgrims of various castes and faiths. 

Still from MARUTIRTHA HINGLAJ (1959)

COMMENTS: Movies about religion run similar dangers to those from any long-running franchise. Built as they are around a deep canon embraced by a particularly ardent regiment of hardcore fans, the producers must satisfy the expectations of devotees while extending an outreach to any potential converts. It’s hard to be all things to all people, especially when you’re relying on the moral rectitude of the universe.

Marutirtha Hinglaj, however, is not concerned with appealing to the unenlightened, and that’s honestly to the film’s benefit, because we heathens can appreciate the pilgrims’ passion and determination at face value. An understanding of the apparent tolerance between the Hindus and Muslims on the dangerous trek, familiarity with the unique powers of redemption granted by the goddess Durga, and even the finer points of why highborn girls aren’t supposed to run away with street-rat boys are all concerns you can set aside with this movie. Hinglaj is perfectly legible as a study of the human quest for forgiveness and emotional peace, no matter how much turmoil is required to achieve it. Christian travelers to Lourdes or even rock fans making the trip to Jim Morrison’s grave can relate.

The film was based on a popular travelogue of the time, and if we were just following this group as they made their way through the desert, it would be a fairly straightforward accounting of the journey. Director Roy’s major contribution to the narrative is the introduction of the forlorn couple whom the marchers rescue from the wastelands. Thirumal is a poor fortune teller tasked with predicting the future for well-off bride-to-be Kunti. They fall madly in love (the initial transgression) and then elope (compounding the problem), which is when tragedy finds them. Roving bandits attack the couple, robbing them and assaulting Kunti, a crime that they view as punishment for their earlier wrongdoing (a frustrating instance of culturally approved victim-blaming that is probably the most inexplicable belief for a 21st-century audience). It’s a lamentable fate, not least because Roy crafts a charming montage of the illicit pair’s moneymaking ventures on the road, demonstrating their overwhelming charm as he plays music while she dances. Thirumal beams with rapturous love for his wife, but we also start to see his palpable jealousy at onlookers’ attention, which foreshadows the madness that will soon overtake him as he pivots between passion and faith.

It is difficult but essential to understand the moral code on display here. The conditions for the march across the Indian wasteland are maddeningly difficult, but of course the challenge is what ennobles the effort. They have been promised complete forgiveness for their mistakes—some of which are revealed to be quite severe—but the future looks to be as bright as the present is dark. Even Kunti, who believes herself to be unpure as a result of both her actions and the cruelties forced upon her, comes to hope for the deliverance that reaching Hinglaj will bring. By contrast, Thirumal’s mania isn’t because he doesn’t believe in the possibility of healing, but because he’s certain that he doesn’t deserve it. His struggle is balanced by the kindness and sympathy of the traveling company. The weight of this conflict lifts Marutirtha Hinglaj out of the real world and into an elevated plane of moral debate. It’s a little strange to watch these intensely earnest travelers, and when shot against Roy’s dramatic backdrops, which deftly combine imperiously vast locations in the Makran desert with unusually authentic soundstage filming, the whole proceeding takes on a surreal quality.

Marutirtha Hinglaj isn’t out to convert anyone. It’s perfectly acceptable to look at the whole enterprise as proof of the madness of religious belief. Yet there is a beauty in the purity of these travelers’ moral code, and a dramatic correctness in the way that the story metes out an appropriate justice. The film makes a weird gamble on the drama of the mystery of faith, and seems to have earned a nod of approval from the gods.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…I was moved by this film. It may be a bit dated, but there’s so much to think about here, that I will probably be dwelling on this story for some time… it hangs on urgent questions of life and death. The parallel moral journey is thus impossible to dismiss. When belief and devotion play out in extreme survival scenarios, it seems important to take them seriously.” – Miranda, Filmi~Contrast

(This movie was nominated for review by Debasish, who called it “a very existential movie with spiritual and surreal undertones.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.) 

Marutirtha Hinglaj (Brand New Single Disc Dvd,

Marutirtha Hinglaj (Brand New Single Disc Dvd, Bengali Dvd, With English Subtitles, Released By Angel Digital)

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    Capsules

    CAPSULE: MOTHER MARY (2026)

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    DIRECTED BY:

    FEATURING: , Michaela Coel

    PLOT: A pop star seeks out her estranged seamstress to make a new dress for an upcoming performance.

    Still from Mother Mary (2026)

    COMMENTS: Mother Mary is a pop singer known for her elaborate costumes featuring halo-styled headdresses (a motif she may have recently abandoned). Now, I don’t know modern pop music from Tuvan throat singing (not quite true—I own a Hun Huur Tu album—but you get the point).  But I gather Anne Hathaway’s Mother Mary is supposed to be huge, the type of singer whose trysts with NFL stars get featured on TMZ. The Catholic nomenclature obviously recalls megastar Madonna, while her costuming suggests Taylor Swift by way of Bjork. Critics more familiar with this genre than I am often trot out Lady Gaga as an analogue, along with a number of other names that sound vaguely familiar (vague familiarity being the essential currency of popular music). Jack Antonoff, Charli XCX, and FKA Twigs (who also appears in the film and, coincidentally, also has a Mother Mary role under her belt) supply the generic pop soundtrack.

    At any rate, Mother Mary is secretly a wreck. Her last big public performance ended in an embarrassing and concerning platform malfunction, and she’s apparently been in a bit of a slump since. OK, creative crisis, got it. After an unsatisfactory wardrobe session sends her into a crisis of insecurity, she flies off to see her old estranged seamstress, Sam (Coel). What follows is a long sequence of the two women warily circling each other; Sam is not at all happy to see her old friend, but nevertheless passive-aggressively agrees to make her the new dress MM hopes will reignite her creative spark. The film turns into an extended conversation as Sam takes measurements, selects fabrics, and asks her client to do an interpretive dance (without musical accompaniment, because she has sworn a vow to not listen to Mother Mary’s new work). The designer pokes at old resentments, while the idol she helped create desperately (and pathetically) attempts to mend fences. The supernatural twist is divulged about halfway through, but it’s less hauntingly mysterious and more a disappointingly literal metaphor for the women’s shredded relationship. What began as a talky two-hander suddenly turns into In Fabric, but with no humor whatsoever.

    It’s no knock on the two principals, who turn in excellent work, but Mother Mary never really finds anything interesting to say about its subject. The best produced parts are the concert clips—which convey a degree of spectacle that suggests why people might actually flock to see the otherwise vapid Mother Mary—and a few ethereal sequences with a flowing red spirit. But the story itself never approaches the profundity of a good Lana Del Rey single. Pop stars are bland, so maybe, by definition, movies about pop stars should be bland—-even when they try to spice things up with bloody symbolism.

    WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

    “‘Weird’ is a dismissive adjective for things that people don’t readily understand, or for complex work that wears its idiosyncrasies on its bell sleeve. But the writer-director behind The Green Knight and A Ghost Story has taken the most accessible subject imaginable — stratospheric pop stardom — and made something wonderfully, gloriously weird out of it.”–David Fear, Rolling Stone (contemporaneous)

     

    List Candidates

    APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: RESURRECTION (2025)

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    Resurrection is available to purchase on-demand.

    DIRECTED BY: 

    FEATURING: Jackson Yee, Shu Qi

    PLOT: We follow five dreams of a “Deliriant,” a man who chooses to dream despite a futuristic ban on the practice.

    Still from Resurrection (2025)

    WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Bi Gan dreams better than you do.

    COMMENTS: According to Resurrection, the secret to immortality is to stop dreaming. Dreamers, the prologue explains, “bring pain to reality and chaos to history.” Yet despite the obvious benefits of ceasing to dream, some rebels—“Deliriants”—continue to do so, secretly. They are tracked by “the Big Others,” agents who can see through illusions, enter dreams, and gently bring the Deliriants back to reality (i.e., death). Resurrection tracks the dreams of one such Deliriant, who somehow hides inside film, and the Big Other who gently guides him towards fatal reality.

    Our Deliriant’s dreams glide through movie history. After intertitles explaining the premise, Resurrection opens with the viewer traveling through a hole burning through a celluloid membrane, that opens onto a cinema whose occupants stare in wonder at us intruders until policemen roughly usher them out the exits. The line between us and the dreamer thus blurred, we travel through five dream stories. Each is organized around a different sense, and each is set in a different cinematic era, floating from silent movies to film noir and ending in 1999’s millennial panic. Some (especially the first) are exceedingly strange. As we travel we will encounter opium addicts, hard-bitten theremin-playing detectives, former monks, con men, gangsters, and vampires, with opening and closing doses of the mysterious Big Other and her esoteric rituals. It’s like a universalized version of Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams, and less uneven than most anthology films. Bi Gan’s style benefits from shorter formats. His previous slowcore stories sometimes drifted too far from their narrative anchors, but with the longest entry here being only about 30 minutes, it’s easy to focus on each tale in its entirety before resetting our attention on the next.

    But we do not watch Bi Gan movies for the stories anyway. We watch them for the masterful visuals and the “how’d he do that?” camerawork. Although each installment has its own charm, the director puts the fireworks right up front, with a mysterious cinematic prologue which, like the opening of Holy Motors, nods at the movieness of it all. It segues seamlessly into the first dream: having spied an opium poppy hiding in the Deliriant’s eye when examining at his photograph through a microscope, the Big Other wanders silently down Caligari stairwells and past Metropolis machinery and through a storeroom with a Méliès moon until she uncovers the Deleriant, looking like Max Schreck suffering from the plague, offering up a plate of poppies that bloom in stop-motion. Stylistically, this sequence is more avant-garde than anything Gan has tried before: by way of . The other fantastic sequence comes in the last dream, which is another of the director’s celebrated, complicated single takes, following two lovers from a harbor through busy rain-slicked city streets into a karaoke bar and then back to the harbor, where they board a boat and sail off to sea. The shot takes up 30 minutes of screen time, but there’s a time lapse inside the sequence that means the camera actually filmed for much longer.

    When is a dream not a dream? When it is a metaphor. Bi Gan’s dreams in Resurrection are metaphors, most obviously, for cinema; the Deliriant’s reveries progress chronologically through different cinematic eras. But falling deeper into them, they are also a complex symbol of the human spirit, that spirit of individualism, imagination, and chaos that opposes religion, politics, and often good sense, yet remains essential to our being. Resurrection is a quiet act of rebellion. Nothing in it directly challenges the status quo, so it is not only acceptable to the ruling party, but even useful as a global prestige item. But the Deliriant’s tragic soul is forged in defiance. And though he must die for it, even the Big Other must honor that spirit.

    WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

    “…a cavalcade of strange images that take the language of cinema into [Bi Gan’s] sleeping fantasies and bring it back more vibrant than ever.”–Richard Whittaker, The Austin Chronicle (contemporaneous)

    Resurrection (Criterion Premieres) [Blu-ray]

    Resurrection (Criterion Premieres) [Blu-ray]

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      CAPSULE: BY DESIGN (2025)

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      By Design is available to rent or purchase on-demand.

      Recommended

      DIRECTED BY:

      FEATURING: , , Samantha Matis

      PLOT: A woman swaps bodies with… a chair.

      Still from By Design (2025)

      COMMENTS: Body-swapping has a long tradition in cinema. From mainstream comedies (Penny Marshal’s Big) to horror/sci-fi flicks (Invasion of the Body Snatchers), it has established itself as a subgenre in our collective consciousness. More personal approaches can be found, too, using the premise to build an eccentric mood piece or a multilayered allegory with underlying social commentary (e.g.  Under the Skin). The last category is where By Design belongs.

      The plot follows Camille, a single woman with a life that seems unfulfilling to her, even if she tries to hide it. She is lonely; she has female friends, but jealousy often emerges between them. Her philosophical musings, expressed in a distinctly hypnotic voice, give a sense of her unique worldview and portray a character longing for something beyond her mundane life, something that will gain her attention and maybe even love.

      She finds what she’s looking for in the most unexpected place, a shop selling designer chairs. From that moment on, everything plays out like a magical realist parable. She falls in love with a specific chair she cannot have, and through the power of her desire—there isn’t explicit lore here explaining the process—she swaps bodies with it so that they never have to part. And thus her odyssey begins.

      After this transformation, the narrative splits, sometimes following chair-Camille and her encounters with a charming man named Olivier, at other times focusing on her now-vacant human body. The latter scenes recall the Theater of the Absurd, since most people don’t seem to realize something is off—not even her own mother. This suggests an underlying commentary on the way people prefer her as an object and an empty vessel rather than a person.

      Kramer further develops her commentary on the objectification of bodies—both female and male—through Camille’s adventures as a chair. She is literally an object now, at the disposal of her new owner Olivier, a man who has himself been a victim of objectification and can understand her. Their weirdly erotic relationship suggests a deep understanding between them. All is not as it seems, however.

      Kramer tells her story with theatricality from start till finish, culminating in short pieces of choreography. Most scenes take place in interior spaces. The furniture is of minimalist and modernist design. The acting could be described as melodramatic or over-expressive. This is clearly an expressionist artistic movie, not interested in submitting to naturalism. There are even POV shots from the perspective of a chair.

      By Design will appeal to a variety of audiences: those seeking art-house curiosities with unique concepts will find it enjoyable, and its themes and the way it portrays human bodies —objectified, sensual, yet soulful—will intrigue those interested in the female gaze in cinema and feminist narratives.