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List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: BORGMAN (2013)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Jan Bijvoet, Hadewych Minis, Sara H. Ditlevsen

PLOT:  A dangerous group of criminals are lead by a strangely charismatic man named Camiel Borgman, who terrorizes a family after being let into their home.

Still from Borgman (2013)
WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST:  Dumping dead bodies in a lake and taking a dip right after is weird, but what about strange underground criminals who perform dark ballets on other people’s property just for their own amusement?

COMMENTS: With a keen focus on power and class, Borgman unravels the culture behind malignant societal ills by dissecting its basic unit (the family), citing examples such as sexism, classism, and a general need to be better off than one’s neighbor.  Although he is compared to in numerous reviews, Borgman director Alex Van Warmerdam seems to be less patient, more starkly manical. This makes Borgman full of surprises from start to finish. It’s cohesive and bursting with ideas. It’s fair to say the film’s cerebral aspect alone is completely riveting and preposterously strange, and its characters have a drastic range in their behavior. They can be repulsive, but then they are cool and funny. The maliciousness of Camiel Borgman (Jan Bijvoet) is casual, but it’s not surprising that both he and his companions Ludwig and Pascal (Alex van Warmerdam and Tom Dewispelaere respectively) are given the narrative leverage to pull some laughs while scaring us.

Stine, played by Sara H. Ditlevsen is absolutely beautiful, and Hadewych Minis’ Marina is truly mesmerizing. The way the two female leads cater to the men in the story is erotic but dangerous; we watch as it leads to cruelty. There is a strong and intentionally obvious message concerning the guilt of having too much, of looking out upon society and realizing that you are simply better off than most people, but it’s just an aside. Borgman deals mostly with the eradication of the family unit, a demonstration of how abuse leads to distance and betrayal. Richard (Jeroen Perceval) heads the family and he is a racist misogynist if there ever was one. We watch as his own demons consume him in various forms. There is a plentitude of weird creepiness concerning this family and their interaction with Camiel Borgman and his unusually loyal posse, and it makes for a compelling and mystical viewing experience.

Borgman is incredibly dreamy, and a feeling of almost whimsical, drifting terror is delivered in master strokes. It is relentless. Strangely enough, it does not give the impression that it would make a great midnight movie, or even a good cult film, but that doesn’t stop its strangeness from being potent and penetrating. While seeming to borrow heavily from major independent thrillers like Timecrimes, Funny Games and perhaps even No Country for Old Men (the meticulous and calm way Borgman is shown scraping poisonous resin across a serving bowl), Borgman maintains a freshness that is disturbing, dark, cerebral and exhilarating. It has a chilly and dark atmosphere. The heaviness of small details psychically nestle in your brain just enough to hint at the true malice being shown. The result is magnificent anxiety. Bijvoet’s Borgman is entrancing both because of his extraordinary power over people and his relentless brutality for the sake of an unidentified gain. Only hints are given at the intention behind his and malice, so generalized that it’s ultimately up to the viewer to determine what the true meaning is, if any at all. Bijvoet’s performance has range. He portrays coldness, creepiness, tenderness, and brutality all with equalized vigor. He is calm quiet, powerful, and definitely represents larger concepts.

As for the most important aspect of Borgman to us—its weirdness—the actions of the characters are so ridiculous (and sometimes insidious) that the whole thing ends up being slightly surreal. It is also very comical. The label given by critics for this movie as a straight dark comedy is acceptable here, but there is much more to it than that. The end will have most people scratching their heads, in a good way; it gives the movie great replay value, and it’s almost terrifying in its creepiness. I didn’t much enjoy Dogtooth, the domestic satire most associated with this movie; I found Borgman to be much more exciting in its ability to borrow from so many other movies but still be original. In the end, it was the small details, the humor, the subtlety in performance and image that combined to make Borgman lasting, dark, and really, really weird.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Filled with surreal touches and shocking scenes of black humor, Borgman steams ahead with the power and inevitability of a nightmare.”–Tirdad Derakhshani, The Philadelphia Inquirer (contemporaneous)

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: TRANS-EUROP-EXPRESS (1967)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , , Alain Robbe-Grillet

PLOT: A director (played by Robbe-Grillet himself) pitches a complicated story about a cocaine smuggling caper to a producer during a train ride, and the audience watches the results play out, revisions and all.

Still from Trans-Europ-Express (1967)
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: The second film from novelist-turned-director Alain Robbe-Grillet is a pioneering work of cinematic meta-fiction that prefigures the work of (among others) by putting a fictional author inside of the movie, one who supposedly writes the script in real time as we watch. Sometimes the story backtracks on itself, erasing old plot points or creating alternative scenarios. To make things even stranger, the protagonist of the movie-inside-the-movie is obsessed with bondage, and begins a relationship with an elegant prostitute who may help him fulfill his most excessive fantasies.

COMMENTS: Sitting on the Trans-Europ-Express from Paris to Antwerp, a director tells his producer that they should set a movie on this train; they decide it should be about drug smuggling. A man, who we’ve previously seen buying a suitcase to smuggle cocaine, walks into their compartment. The producer and director are invisible to him; he only sees the script girl. When he leaves almost immediately, the director comments “is he crazy?” “Didn’t you recognize him?,” asks the producer. “It’s Trintignant. What about using him in your film?” They then do proceed to use Trintigant in their film treatment. The story they concoct on the fly sends him to an Antwerp where everyone is either an operative working for the local cartel or a detective, and where he is sent on an increasingly Byzantine series of rendezvous to prove his worth and to obscure his tracks. Along the way he begins a relationship with the prostitute Eva, with whom he indulges his strangling fetish. After a series of double crosses and betrayals which are nearly impossible to sort out, because the director keeps rewriting the script, it all ends in tragedy at “Eve’s Witchcraft Cabaret,” a bondage-themed club with a naked girl chained to a rotating stage.

Despite the dark themes, Trans-Europ-Express is actually a comedy, though in a high-minded, very French way—more “witty” than “funny.” The movie’s abstract, Cubist twists on gangster scenarios recall ‘s crazy yakuza film Branded to Kill, also from 1967. Although it deconstructs the conventions of a genre picture in similar fashion to ‘s 1960 Breathless, the light touch and playfulness keeps Express from feeling as ponderous and self-important as the works of some of Robbe-Grillet’s New Wave contemporaries. At the same time, the movie’s perverse sexuality, related to the subconscious desires of Surrealism, ventures further into the forbidden than his contemporaries dared. Express‘ scenes of sexual strangulation, implied rape and even nudity were considered pretty hot stuff at the time, although they will look tame through jaded modern eyes.

Robbe-Grillet began his career as an experimental novelist, helping to found the avant-garde “nouvelle roman” genre. He turned to cinema after co-writing the script for Last Year at Marienbad with . Trans-Europ-Express was his second film as director. The Kino sub-label Redemption began releasing Robbe-Grillet’s neglected films, some of which have never been on DVD before, in 2014.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The result is both a pure example of narrative deconstruction – with some genuinely absurd moments – and a pretty weird experience for the viewer…”–Johnathan Dawson, Senses of Cinema

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: A FIELD IN ENGLAND (2013)

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A Field in England has been promoted onto the List of the 366 Weirdest Movies of All Time. Please visit the official Certified Weird entry.

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Peter Ferdinando, Richard Glover, Ryan Pope, Reece Shearsmith, Michael Smiley

PLOT: During the English Civil War, a small band of deserters wanders into a large, empty field while searching for an ale-house. In that field, they unearth (oddly literally) a fifth companion, who turns out to be a domineering alchemist. He manipulates the four deserters into hunting for a buried treasure, leading them on a journey of dubious magic, self-discovery, and psychedelia.

Still from A Field in England (2013)
WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: The last Ben Wheatley film I saw–Kill List–ended on a weird, brutally discordant note and it had its dark inexplicable moments, but I didn’t recommend it for the List because it felt too calculated and purposeful. A Field in England, on the other hand, is fully spontaneous, right up to the vaguely cyclical ending, and weirdness is its baseline. Those palatable touches of order and familiarity, like the vaguely heroic character arc and melodramatic villain, seem to spring wholesale out of the film’s twisted substrate; they serve, if anything, to orient and emphasize the weirdness, rather than undermining it. Because it is both random, and confident in its randomness, I submit A Field in England for consideration.

COMMENTS: A Field in England is a grimy, trippy gonzo costume adventure, one of the least heroic and most eccentric swashbuckler narratives I’ve been privy to. The story is so constrained, it’s almost cute: during the English Civil War, a small band of deserters wanders into a large, empty field where they are manipulated into hunting for a buried treasure. Matters of friendship, power, fear, life, and death ensue, and a loose, quirky hero’s story takes shape, though it’s driven more by suggestive leaps of happenstance than by fate or necessity.

Like Wheatley’s previous Kill List, A Field in England benefits from being a pastiche. It wears the heritage of historical adventure films on its sleeve, but it also has buddy-comedy and art-film elements, and it brings it disparate tones together admirably. One of its special accomplishments is to operate as an art-film while exhibiting a British comedy’s sense of humor. The dialogue and situational gags are dry and crass, and they serve to establish the five characters in a way that makes them genuinely endearing, even as we puzzle over what the hell is actually happening to them.

The five main characters have names, Wikipedia informs me, but I didn’t really pick up on them during the film. To me, they represented archetypes: the coward (Whitehead), the soldier (Jacob), the fool (Friend), the lackey (Cutler), and the evil mastermind (O’Neill). Of these five, Whitehead got all the most pivotal roles, and Field ends up being his story. His character arc provided a framework for all the other relationships and interactions, and though he didn’t have the funniest or most endearing moments, he drove all the key developments in the non sequiturish plot. Without Whitehead and his four boorish cohorts, the movie might have been almost unwatchable, but it actually went down pretty smooth.

As I said before, the reason this is an accomplishment is that the narrative logic of the film is genuinely random, driven by a sort of weird intuition with no respect for cause and effect. This can be attributed, at least in part, to the film’s hallucinogenic drug subtext, which led to some trippy, seizure-inducing sequences accompanying the major plot points. It only worked because the whole film had a foggy, disorienting quality, disconnected from its own reality, with an unstable relationship between dreamy detachment and visceral sensory amplification. The swing from one extreme to the other is epitomized in Whitehead’s psychedelic character climax, where he shifts from a sort of bleary, stupefied slow-motion degenerate into a potent force of nature, a raging hurricane-god rising up from the swaying of the wheat fields.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…unapologetically psychedelic in both tone and tempo… a film both Ingmar Bergman and Ken Russell could drool over.”–Marc Savlov, The Austin Chronicle (contemporaneous)

Capsules

CAPSULE: VANISHING WAVES (2012)

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DIRECTED BY: Kristina Buozyte

FEATURING: Marius Jampolskis, Jurga Jutaite

PLOT: A scientist experimenting with a technology to allow people to enter the minds of others finds himself in ethical dilemma when he falls in love with his test subject: a young woman trapped in a coma.

Still from Vanishing Waves (2012)
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Kristina Buozyte (and her co-writer and “Creative Director” Bruno Samper) are names to keep an eye on. However, Vanishing Waves, a slightly trippier (but much sexier) variation on Inception, comes up short of making the List of the Best Weird Movies: it’s weirdness is just an accent for its science fiction conceit.

COMMENTS: Made for about 1.5 million dollars, but looking much more expensive, Vanishing Waves is a literal head-trip that explores what it might be like to travel into someone else’s mind. With fractal effects morphing out of diffused white light and neural maps that twinkle like celestial bodies in the void, overlaid with a cellular geometry, the visuals portraying the boundary between one consciousness and another reminded me of a grayscale version of Enter the Void.

Once inside the mind of the other, however, scientist Lukas finds coma victim Aurora’s interior life to be a series of tableaux based on the real world, including a paradisaical beach, an empty opera house, and a wooden home that takes on an M.C. Escher by way of Cabinet of Dr. Caligari architecture. What Lukas sees inside Aurora’s head is clearly made of dreams, as when they observe a strange blue insect eating a pile of tiny globes, which it then excretes from its hindquarters, encased in a gelatinous casing. This is a strange image of primitive sexual biology, and Aurora—who doesn’t speak, as the verbal portions of her mind clamped down in the grips of her coma—has little more than the primal urge of sex left on her mind. Her first act on encountering Lukas swimming in the infinite ocean of her consciousness is to passionately soul kiss the stranger, an act which, predictably, gets Lukas hooked and wanting more.

The sleeping Aurora has no idea who Lukas is, and in her brain-damaged fugue state cannot imagine—at least at first—the existence of any other consciousness besides hers and his. Inside her mind is a perfect guilt-free, consequence-free world of erotic abandon, and we can understand why Lukas doesn’t explain the full depth of his discoveries to his fellow scientists, even if we don’t endorse his acts. The early couplings are playful, childlike and primal, an attitude reinforced by their infantile reactions to the dishes at an elaborate imaginary feast: they splash each other with soup and wine and spit the half-chewed blackberries onto their faces, savoring texture of the food against their skin as much as its flavor. As Aurora starts to slowly and instinctively rebuild her memories, their sexual Eden unravels. A dark, mysterious third party is glimpsed lurking in the shadows of Aurora’s mind, and, in the movie’s centerpiece sequence, an orgy of writhing, faceless bodies turns from a wet dream to a nightmare. When you get down to it, Lukas is a 21st century cyber-rapist, penetrating his victim’s mind, with the coma serving the same function as a roofie snuck into a drink. However much Lukas is obsessed with Aurora, this is not a what society normally views as a solid basis for a mature relationship. Can the pair form a meaningful mind-to-mind connection under these bizarre circumstances? And, given Aurora’s low-brain-activity condition, does she have any other practical suitors? These questions are left to the viewer to decide.

Specialty releaser Artsploitation Films views Vanishing Waves as the brightest jewel in their catalog, and presents it in an elaborate 2-disc set. There is no commentary track but there are both written and filmed interviews, a hidden (that is, unlabeled) slide show, and a “making of” video. The two extra-special extras are the film’s complete soundtrack and the entirety of Kristina Buozyte’s début film, The Collectress, a drama about a woman who has to film herself engaging in increasingly risky behavior because she can only feel emotions when watching them on video.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…derivative to a fault—but a deserved midnight-movie cult following is all but assured.”–David Fear, Time Out New York (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by Tally Isham, who said it had “very good moments of dream-like weirdness.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Miscellanea

366 UNDERGROUND: FAITH OF OUR FATHERS (1997)

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DIRECTED BY: Hamilton Sterling

FEATURING: Jeff Hawk, George Gerlernter, James Geralden, Cassandra Joy, Noel Webb, Clement Blake

PLOT: A satiric parable wherein naive innocent chimney-sweeper Charles is schooled in the ways of the world and business by a cynical benefactor, Nick, who encourages him to bring back the tradition of ‘climbing boys’ when a rich client expresses a wish for ‘the old days’. Charles complies with the exploitation of a child, but at a cost to himself and those around him.

IS IT WEIRD?:  Not really. Pretentious, certainly; but there’s nothing new brought to the table in terms of weirdness.

COMMENTS:  At first glance, Faith of Our Fathers appears to be very timely and prescient, considering that the film was completed in 1996, went out on the festival circuit where it did get some very good critical notice but no release until 2013, when it could be seen as an “I-told-you-so” roadmap to the current economic/political/cultural climate (much like how Richard Brooks’ reviled Wrong is Right from 1982 turned out to be a not-that-exaggerated look at what the Millennium-Ought decade held in store for everyone). It’s really hard to fault the filmmakers’ intentions, as there is a concerted effort on everyone’s part to make this a meaningful project.

Faith of Our FathersUnfortunately, for me those intentions fall short in the experience of watching this play out. I suspect those who would enjoy watching this film would also be rabid fans of hardcore symbolic European art-house films, which are usually very slowly paced, populated with metaphors instead of characters and with degrees of inscrutability. My failure to connect here is probably a failing of this viewer. It’s a film that I really wanted to like, especially since items like composition, nuanced acting and craftsmanship are usually in short supply in the majority of work that gets the “Underground” label. But honestly, I just couldn’t enjoy it, despite the impressive craft on display (the cinematography, score, and a performance by Gerlernter as fallen priest/satanic provocateur Nicholas Nickelby).

It also doesn’t help when you have this as your logline:

” …this surreal and politically prescient film deconstructs the language of religious and economic America, finding artistic alternatives within the ethos of art.”

If this sentence gets you pumped to see what might follow, instead of rolling your eyes from the stench of pretension, then you’ll enjoy the journey. Much as I wanted to, I couldn’t get past it—so fair warning.

Faith of Our Fathers was self-released by writer/director Hamilton Sterling on DVD and Blu-ray, and the presentation is of very high-quality. One thing missing is a director’s commentary, which I think really would’ve helped—not that Sterling would’ve needed to spoonfeed us every single symbol in the film, but some context certainly would’ve been appreciated, especially explanations for the jumping back and forth between color and black and white, and sequences such as the one where one of the main characters has a dialogue with Napoleon Bonaparte in the park.

Helikon Sound – Hamilton Sterling’s site. Sterling has worked as a sound tech on films like Magnolia, The Tree of Life, Gangs of New York, and The Dark Knight, amongst others.

Faith of Our Fathers Facebook page