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It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

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

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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.)

Capsules

CAPSULE: CONTAINER (2006)

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DIRECTED BY: Lukas Moodysson

FEATURING: The body of Peter Lorentzon and the voice of Jena Malone

PLOT: A male figure wanders around an apartment and derelict areas; a female figure inhabits an hotel room, occasionally interacting with him.

Still from Container (2006)

COMMENTS: This reviewer deleted his original opening to these comments, as it was profane and filled with curses. Perhaps this suggests the power of Lukas Moodysson’s contemplation on modern life, despair, and transgender perception; but, as the director’s namesake painfully suggests, this is a moody, moody piece. It is a litany of nouns and complaints. Some are grand, but most comprise a barrage of irksome sadness, a steady flow of quiet misery delivered in a squeaking near-monotone that forever flirts with outright un-stand-ability.

Occasionally interesting things float to the surface of this collage of tragic mundanity. Moodysson’s metaphor is apt. The film’s subject is not a gay man, she tells us, but a straight woman trapped in a disgusting body (her words, mind you) with a willy. They are alternately tired of lugging this horrible form around—illustrated when the woman figure acts as caretaker to the bloated frame, brushes its teeth, puts it to bed—and tired of carrying this insistent, petulant creature inside—shown through recurring images of the large man carrying the elfin form of the woman on his back. There is no satisfaction here, no relief—not through gossip magazines, drunken soirées, random hook-ups, gallons of lotion, or untold amounts of medication.

Container overstays its welcome for nearly as long as its run time. I felt the pain and confusion, but I felt it within minutes of beginning the ordeal. Moodysson’s dabbling with meta-narration is intriguing: at various points the thoughts of the voice actress, wondering why she was cast, comes through the noise, as do the occasional remarks presumably from the actor Peter Lorentzon. (I’m not actually this depressed, he comments through Jena Malone’s reading, I’m just performing a role here.) And there are even moments of absurd humor—making the line “How the Hell did all of Romania fit inside Britney Spears?” perfectly reasonable in context is quite the coup. However, the director has a lot of the exact same thing to say, and takes the liberty of doing so. I am certain that this is the point: gender dysphoria is a serious beast, sometimes deadly so. I am also certain that the ever-accumulating tedium blunts the impact, making something tragically inspirational into something merely wearying and dispiriting.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Moodysson says he expects his film to find an appreciative audience of seven. He’s probably right. But those seven will doubtlessly think it’s one of the weirdest, most disturbing things they’ve seen in ages.”–Jamie Russell, BBC (contemporaneous)

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: FIEND WITHOUT A FACE (1958)

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DIRECTED BY: Arthur Crabtree

FEATURING: Marshall Thompson, Kim Parker, Kynaston Reeves, Terry Kilburn, Stanley Maxted

PLOT: An officer at a an American air base in rural Manitoba teams up with a comely young researcher to investigate mysterious deaths, which locals blame on a top secret nuclear project.

Still from fiend without a face (1958)

COMMENTS: This time a year ago, I was absorbing the marvels of a wondrous motion picture entitled The Giant Claw. That film built its mystery by hiding its central antagonist for a significant portion of the running time, permitting the imaginations of audiences to run wild searching for an explanation. This was followed by an enormous shift in tone due to the eventual revelation of the monster, a silly, gangly mess that drastically undercut the gravity of the story.

In some respects, history repeats itself with Fiend Without a Face, a movie in which we actually witness the murder of several townspeople by a force we cannot see, thereby building a mystery around what precisely is going on. As for what happens when we do finally lay eyes upon the title character… well, let’s just come back to that in a bit, shall we?

During the very long time that Fiend Without a Face itself waits for that big revelation, it has to fill the time with distractions. There are repercussions over the activities at the air base, which NIMBY-leaning locals blame for the mysterious deaths as well as for a decrease in dairy production. There’s the slow-burning investigation by Major Cummings, which at one point takes a lengthy side trip to a cemetery crypt. Cummings also gets the film’s romance plot, making eyes at the sister of the first victim, helped in part by an especially egregious shower scene. While none of this is boring, exactly, it’s not particularly interesting, especially since the audience is primed for a monster. It’s up to a cast of impressively obscure nobodies to sell the escalating tension through horrified stares and dramatic physical lurches. (The only cast member whose name rang any bells for me was E. Kerrigan Prescott, better known in these parts for his mad-scientist turn from Godmonster of Indian Flats.) They succeed only modestly, adding to the pressure to deliver something extraordinary at the climax.

It is a heck of a thing we ultimately get, so let’s talk about these monsters who have been sucking out their victims’ brains and spinal cords. Turns out they themselves are brains. Literally brains, with spinal cords for tails, eyestalks, and two little kickstand proboscises that deprive humans of their, well, brains and spinal cords. In the story, they’ve been wished into existence by a retired professor who Major Cummings deduces has been performing poorly vetted experiments with mental powers. In filmic terms, they’re brought to life through a combination of stop-motion animation, ill-concealed wire work, and broad acting. Oh, and they’re are goofy as all get-out. Look, I understand that special effects from yesteryear can’t be judged by the technology of today. That’s fine. But they’re still just brains, either animated to move like snakes or flown about like marionettes. The logic of brain-eating creatures that are themselves brains is impossible to parse. So you’re left with something that’s quite ridiculous, but also not quite ridiculous enough.

The climactic showdown between a group of humans trapped inside a house while a horde of flying brains tries to bust in was notable in its day for its new levels of violence and gore. (The film was called out as offensive in the British Parliament.) The setting also seems to presage settings to come, such as those seen in Night of the Living Dead or Evil Dead II. But this film’s solution is the equivalent of sending the cavalry. After all, what saves the day? How does one defeat a foe that has been created by an unholy blend of nuclear power and the untapped recesses of the human mind? Why, with guns, of course. The trio of Air Force officers starts taking out the little airborne cerebella by peppering them with bullets (and the occasional blunt instrument), resulting in a gleefully gross stew of blood and effluvia. It’s a classically 1950s mindset, using brute force to overcome the odds. This carries over to the most absurd plot element, in which Cummings saves the day by blowing up the nuclear power plant with dynamite. (Certainly no potential downside to that plan.) 

Fiend Without a Face is light fun, a solid representative of 1950s cinematic horror boasting three salient characteristics: an intriguing premise, very low-budget production, and a monster that doesn’t quite live up to the hype. File it next to similar efforts from the period like Beginning of the End, The Amazing Colossal Man, or The Crawling Eye. You know, the kind of film that works best if you just shut off your brain.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“There can be no purer surrealism in cinema than the sight of these twitching brain-things besieging a house full of people, leaping and plopping like possessed frogs. The entire climax has the bizarreness of some mad medieval allegory, like a triptych by Hieronymus Bosch” – Nigel Honeybone, Horror News

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

Apocryphally Weird

41*. THE SERVANT (1963)

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“The truth of the independent consciousness is accordingly the consciousness of the servant… being a consciousness repressed within itself, it will enter into itself, and change around into the real and true independence.”–G.W.F. Hegel, “The Master-Slave Dialectic”

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , , Wendy Craig,

PLOT: Hard-drinking playboy and would-be colonialist Tony hires the solicitous Barret as a manservant, despite the fact that his fiancée takes a dislike to the new employee. Barret convinces Tony to hire his sister as a maid, which sets off a chain of events that eventually leads to the master dismissing both servants. Tony’s drinking intensifies, however, and he invites his servant to return to the house; gradually, the roles of master and servant are reversed.

Still from The Servant (1963)

BACKGROUND:

  • Director Joseph Losey moved to the UK after receiving a summons to appear before Joseph McCarthy’s House  Un-American Activities committee.
  • The screenplay was written by Nobel Prize-winning playwright Harold Pinter, who adapted  Robin Maugham’s 1948 novella. It was the first of three collaborations between Losey and Pinter.
  • In 1999, a panel of movie professionals voted The Servant the 22nd best British film of all time.
  • Dirk Bogarde, a closeted gay man, had played a closeted gay man in 1961’s The Victim, one of the first films to deal openly and sympathetically with homosexuality. His agent (with whom the actor was secretly involved) was nervous about Bogarde taking this role, fearing he might acquire a “homosexual image.”
  • When Losey came down with pneumonia during the shoot, Bogarde stepped in to direct for ten days, with Losey providing instructions via telephone from the hospital.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Mirrors, devices which reverse and sometimes warp images, but which also serve to reveal the selves we cannot see. Tony’s townhouse is littered with mirrors on seemingly every wall, and Losey takes advantage of them throughout the film, using mirrors to reflect the underlying truth of a situation. In one shot, Tony and Susan face Barret accusingly. In the convex mirror image, Barret can be seen clearly, standing calmly with a robe and a cigarette, while only the back of Tony’s head is visible, and Susan isn’t there at all. The mirror shows us the relative power and importance of the three characters in the scene more profoundly than the head-on camera shot does.

TWO WEIRD THINGS: Upside-down orgy; kissing the servant

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: The Servant emits the subtlest whiff of dignified strangeness, all emanating from the mysterious Bogarde: an unassuming Trojan horse of malice and perversion without a clear motive or objective other than raw power.

2021 Restoration trailer for The Servant

COMMENTS: Led by a dominating career performance from Dirk Continue reading 41*. THE SERVANT (1963) →