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Capsules, Shorts

CAPSULE: OSCAR NOMINATED SHORT FILMS (LIVE ACTION) (2012)

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DIRECTED BY: Bryan Buckley (“Asad”), Shawn Christensen (“Curfew”), Yan England (“Henry”), Sam French (“Buzkashi Boys”), Tom Van Avermaet (“Death of a Shadow”)

FEATURING:Gérard Poirier, Shawn Christensen, Fatima Ptacek, Matthias Schoenaerts, Harun Mohammed, Fawad Mohammadi, Jawanmard Paiz

PLOT: Five short stories (each approximately 20 minutes long): a dead soldier works for a shadow collector in the afterlife, an elderly composer struggles with his memories, a suicidal drug addict is pressed into watching the daughter of his estranged sister, two Afghani lads hope to grow up to play Buzkashi, and a Somali boy must decide between becoming a pirate or a fisherman.

Still from "Death of a Shadow" (2012)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: While the presence of the fantastical, steampunkish “Death of a Shadow” provides an excuse for us to review 2012’s crop of Oscar nominated live action shorts, none of the nominees are of sufficient strangeness to challenge for a spot on the List of the 366 Weirdest Movies of All Time. It’s still well worth your time to check out this slate of shorts if you get the chance.

COMMENTS: You might hope the Academy Awards would rename their “Best Short Film” category to “Best Realist Narrative Short Film” to reflect the fact that experimental, abstract, and surrealist films are not eligible to compete in the category (for boundary-pushing styles, you’ll have to rely on 366 Weird Movies Weirdest Short Film awards). The truth is that Academy probably considers the concepts of “narrative” and “realist” to be inherent in the definition of “Best.” When we think back over the most memorable and influential (post-silent era) short films of all time, titles like “Meshes of the Afternoon,” (1943), “La Jetee” (1962), and “Scorpio Rising” (1964) spring to mind. Naturally, none of these classics were acknowledged by the Academy, who instead consistently nominate competent but boring shorts that disappear into the mists of time. (Even 1956’s “The Red Balloon,” the sentimental story of the friendship between a boy and his helium-inflated buddy, was too “out there” for the squares at the Academy).

That’s why this year’s inclusion of “Death of a Shadow” is an encouraging departure: “Death” is still narrative and realist, but at least it’s magically realist. None of this year’s bundle of shorts innovate much or deviate from standard filmmaking techniques in any meaningful way. And, with the possible exception of “Henry,” none of them are really tuned in to the unique possibilities of the short format—they all look like stunted feature films, or standalone television episodes with artistic ambitions. This is not to say the assembly is bad—far from it, all of the films are of exceptionally high technical quality—but merely to point out that the Academy considers the short film category the minor leagues of feature filmmaking, a place where directors can demonstrate that they have the talent to someday helm a Hollywood movie.

We’ll tackle each of this year’s nominees in the order they appear in the program; by coincidence, the movie of most interest to our readers, “Death of a Shadow,” just happens to be first in the lineup. The premise verges on weird: after his death in WWI, a soldier goes to work for a mysterious shadow collector. He is given a camera he uses to snap photographs of people at the moment of their death, capturing a negative image of their spirit at the moment it leaves the body. Once he supplies the hobbyist with 10,000 postmortem shadows, the ghostly photographer will be allowed to return to the world of the living. He select his subjects from a giant database, half microfiche reader and half primitive punchcard computer. The film’s look is described as steampunk (although it’s not, technically); the in-story explanation for the retro-technology might be that the dead Continue reading CAPSULE: OSCAR NOMINATED SHORT FILMS (LIVE ACTION) (2012) →

Capsules

CAPSULE: THE DEMONIACS (1974)

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Les démoniaques; AKA Curse of the Living Dead

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: John Rico, Joëlle Coeur, Lieva Lone, Patricia Hermenier

PLOT: A crew of “wreckers” rape and apparently kill two female shipwreck survivors, but the two girls seek revenge with the help of the evil spirits who live in nearby ruins.

Still from The Demoniacs (1974)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Jean Rollin expands his narrow directorial palette slightly with The Demoniacs, moving away from his usual vampires and stepping out of his musty old castles for the fresh air of the seashore. The film doesn’t do enough to distinguish itself from the usual Rollin romp, however, and despite the pirate spice the result in a fairly typical film that exhibits all the artsploitation auteur’s usual virtues (visuals and atmosphere) and vices (pacing and continuity).

COMMENTS: The Demoniacs explores a new aesthetic for Jean Rollin, one that I’d dub “beach Gothic”: there are scenes set in a ship cemetery, a battered girl in a nightgown crawling along the shoreline past a congregation of carefully arranged crabs, and a pirate’s tavern decorated with bat wings and death’s heads. The villains of the piece are a quartet of sinister salts called “wreckers” who scheme to lure ships onto the shallow reefs of their island home at night, then salvage the loot that washes up onshore. On the night this tale begins, the crew is rooting through their latest catch when two beautiful young blonde girls in pristine white nightgowns stride out of the sea, looking as if they’re walking on water. True to their corrupt natures, the pirates’ response to this eerie and angelic vision is to rape the two innocent survivors, brutally beat them, and leave them for dead. (The rape scene is overlong, and somehow seems even more unpleasant and perverted because the abuse is so badly choreographed). Whether the girls were killed or not remains ambiguous; later, the Captain sees visions of them in a drunken stupor and is convinced they’ve come back to haunt him, but a villager also spots the girls walking about. That sighting leads the wreckers to track the fugitives to a graveyard of shipwrecks—an amazing location, although the most suspenseful question arising in the chase is whether the busty female brigand’s impractical bodice will be able to contain her heaving bosoms during the ensuing three-way gal slap fight. The girls flee into the “cursed ruins” where even the wreckers fear to follow; there, they are met by an orange-haired female clown (!) who introduces the suddenly mute cuties to a sleeping evil who promises to give them a chance at revenge. This sets up a third act with a resolution that’s bewildering even by Rollin’s nonlinear standards. Along the way we get a psychic brothel proprietress, bloodless pigeon heads, and macabre background details like the cheerful noose that hangs over the Captain’s bed as a decoration. One of the film’s biggest assets is Joëlle Coeur as the wanton female wrecker; she’s one in a long line of remarkably beautiful and uninhibited leading ladies Rollin managed to dig up. She’s tempting, she’s perverse, and she’s hard to take your eyes off of whenever she’s onscreen.

After you’ve seen several of them, Rollin’s 1970s movies start to blur together; they become almost interchangeable, like hazy fragments from an uneasy night of nightmares, so that one’s preference for one over another is based on subtle and almost arbitrary criteria. I consider this one of his better efforts, but newcomers will take a while to adjust to the slow pace (it seems like the Captain even gropes his mistress in slow motion). Rollin’s vampire movies may be a better place to start, since the familiar bloodsucker lore provides the viewer with something of a safety net when logic leaves them hanging.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“For all its dreamlike Rollinesque tendencies ‘Les Demoniaques’ is actually a solid and entertaining (if somewhat lackluster) viewing experience. The premise is handled well and the narrative is welcomingly coherent; Rollin’s direction is pretty much faultless throughout and the cast cackle their way through the script in fine fashion (with as ever much topless shenanigans on show to keep art house fans discreetly aroused)…”–Alan Simpson, SexGoreMutants.com (DVD)

The Demoniacs (US Limited Edition) [4K UHD]

The Demoniacs (US Limited Edition) [4K UHD]
  • The Demoniacs (US Limited Edition)
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Capsules

CAPSULE: JEANNE DIELMAN, 23 QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES (1975)

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DIRECTED BY: Chantal Akerman

FEATURING:

PLOT: A widow performs chores around her apartment and prostitutes herself in the afternoons.

Still from Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: With its belabored 3+ hours (!) of a woman doing dull daily chores in long static real time takes, Jeanne Dielman is an example of how a movie can essentially swallow its own tail, achieving a level of surreality by emphasizing ordinariness and normality to an absurd degree. Like Andy Warhol’s “Sleep,” this deliberate experiment in extended boredom serves a purpose in the film universe; it’s just that that purpose isn’t to be watched by a normal human audience.

COMMENTS: When I read critics rave about Jeanne Dielman, I sometimes feel like I’m scanning reviews from the Bizarro World Times, dispatches from an alternate universe where up is down and audiences are enthralled by watching women shop for buttons and cook meatloaf for hours on end. (Vincent Canby’s claim that the frumped-up Delphine Seyrig “has never looked more beautiful” than in this film doesn’t help counter that impression that every review of the film was written on Opposite Day). It’s not that Akerman’s movie is a fraud or a failure. According to its experimental goal of exploring mundanity to its absolute limit, it’s a success, one that, for obvious reasons, other directors have rarely sought to repeat. But Jeanne Dielman is a formal exercise that no one other than a theoretician could love: we can’t bond with its affectless characters, its punishing three hour running time is a blunt weapon used to hammer home its hopeless message, and frankly, it’s just no fun. Watching this movie isn’t just taking your cultural vegetables, it’s gagging down a spoonful of cultural castor oil. Jeane Dielman‘s high artistic intent and ridiculous integrity of vision are too powerful to give the film a “beware” rating, but this is a movie that’s better read about than watched; heck, even Mlle. Dielman’s son would rather read than act in the movie. On its release the movie was adopted by feminists as a landmark statement on the crushing boredom of “women’s work,” but it’s not (and Akerman herself never claimed it was). That interpretation would require that the men and the working women in the movie—the son, the postal clerk, the waitress—were depicted as living lives of glamor compared to housefrau Jeanne. Rather, the film paints the entire adult world (or at least the “bourgeois” world) as morbidly dull: the only human beings shown enjoying any aspect of life in the film are children briefly seen running and playing in the street. The universal and almost unqualified praise for Akerman’s avant-garde oddity—which bludgeons the concept of “entertainment” with the same subtlety and affection as John Waters did for the concept of “taste” in Pink Flamingos—seems like it might make a great case study for a 20th century edition of “Extraordinary Aesthetic Delusions and the Madness of Critics.” For those who crave such things, a similar modern ennuiscape was sketched earlier, but with greater economy and magic, by in Dillinger is Dead.

After the marketing success of a line of toys based on Star Wars characters, figurines based on popular movies became huge sellers in the late 1970s and 1980s. Obviously not every toy company could afford to license a top-of-the-line property like Raiders of the Lost Ark, but the Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles posable action figure was almost certainly the most ill-advised attempt to cash in on the fad. I can still hear the radio spots created to coincide with the movie’s 1983 U.S. release: “Your Jeanne Dielman action figure makes coffee, entertains ‘gentleman callers,’ eats in stony silence, or just sits and stares at the wall, just like international screen icon Delphine Seyrig! For extra authenticity, the molded plastic face is incapable of expression. WARNING: to avoid risk of catatonia, toy should not be played with for more than three hours at a setting. Potato peeler and scissors sold separately.”

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Miss Seyrig has participated in a number of supposedly experimental films over the years, but in none as original and ambitious as this. ‘Jeanne Dielman’ is not quite like any other film you’ve ever seen…”–Vincent Canby, The New York Times (1983 U.S. theatrical release)

Canonically Weird (The List)

84. TOTO THE HERO [TOTO LE HÉROS] (1991)

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“I often have that strange and penetrating dream, of an unknown woman whom I love and who loves me. And every time, she’s neither quite the same nor completely different…”–Toto the Hero

Recommended

DIRECTED BY: Jaco Van Dormael

FEATURING: Michel Bouquet, Jo De Backer, Thomas Godet, Sandrine Blancke, Mireille Perrier, Peter Böhlke, Didier Ferney, Hugo Harold-Harrison

PLOT: Thomas firmly believes that he was switched at birth with his next door neighbor, Alfred: that Alfred’s parents are really his parents, that Alfred’s toys should be his, that his destiny was appropriated by Alfred. He’s also romantically attracted to his sister, and jealous of the attention she shows the neighbor boy; this obsession pursues him to adulthood, when he finds a woman who reminds him of his sister so much that he fears it may actually be her. Now an old man in a nursing home, Thomas plots to kill Alfred and take back the life that was stolen from him.

Still from Toto the Hero (1991)

BACKGROUND:

  • Writer/director Jaco Van Dormael was a circus clown before turning to filmmaking.
  • Despite critical praise for each of his movies, Van Dormael has only made three features in 20 years: Toto the Hero, The Eighth Day [Le huitième jour] (1996), and Mr. Nobody (2009).
  • It took Van Dormael five years to write the dense script (working with three credited collaborators).
  • Toto won the Camera D’or (a prize recognizing the best debut feature film) at Cannes in 1991.
  • Paramount Pictures apparently owns the distribution rights in the U.S., but has not shown any interest in releasing the film on Region 1 DVD (it was released on VHS). Toto is available on DVD in Region 2.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Toto the Hero relies on its elaborate narrative structure rather than visuals for its effect, but the movie’s iconic image is young Thomas clutching his toy airplane; appropriately, it’s only memorable due to the point in the story where it occurs. (If you must have a weird scene instead of the most memorable one, pick the image of Thomas’ dead father and sister appearing to him on the back of a moving truck, playing a piano and trumpet duet).

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: The story structure, which dives in and out of narrative wormholes, emerging at different points in Thomas’ life. There are flashbacks inside of flashbacks, with a liberal sprinkling of fantasy sequences mixed in—some obvious, some more ambiguous.  And all the incest stuff—with a beloved sister who seems not to stay dead—doesn’t hurt the movie’s weirdness one bit, either.

Clip from Toto les Heros (in French)

COMMENTS:  At some point in all of our lives, we will inevitably fail to land that job or Continue reading 84. TOTO THE HERO [TOTO LE HÉROS] (1991) →