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Capsules

CAPSULE: THE GOLDEN FERN (1963)

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Zlaté kapradí

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DIRECTED BY: Jiří Weiss

FEATURING: Vít Olmer, Karla Chadimová, Daniela Smutná

PLOT: When a lazy and amorous shepherd steals a golden fern bough from deep in a malevolent forest, a mysterious young woman appears begging him to return it lest dire consequences befall him.

COMMENTS: If fairy tales have taught us anything, it’s that going into the woods at night can be dangerous. The Golden Fern ominously begins in medias res in a dark and moonlit forest. A handsome young man races through the trees; it seems like he’s running from someone, but then he stumbles upon a grove of ferns and triumphantly picks the largest frond. He’s immediately attacked by a flock of angry birds whose screeching fills the air. He fights them off and manages to escape back to his humble peasant’s hut, where he gloats over his trophy. Was this an admirable act of bravery or simply foolish bravado?

There are no easy answers in Weiss’ film, but when a sudden knock sounds at the door, the latter seems more likely. He opens the door and at first only a shadowy figure appears, barely visible in the distance. “Give it back,” a voice urges him. “Give back the fern.”

Our protagonist, Jura (Olmer), hesitates to comply. He wants to know who would command him. Eventually the speaker reveals themselves, and to his surprised delight, the forbidding figure turns out to be a very pretty blonde (Chadimová). This being a fairy tale, he’s not going to give back the fern unless she kisses him first. She continues to insist he must give it back, but he ignores her warnings, and she relents to his clumsy overtures.

What seems like a poor start to a relationship briefly becomes a romantic idyll. The girl, whom Jura calls “Lysanka” because she has no other name, falls in love with him. In her devotion, she steadfastly protects him from the ambiguous influence of the golden fern, which he, of course, fails to return.

Fern was made at the beginning of the , although Weiss represents an older generation than the young film makers who would make names for themselves as part of the innovative and rebellious movement that yielded the Canonically Weird gems The Cremator,  Daisies, and A Report on the Party and Guests. While not quite as anarchic and freewheeling, Weiss displays the absurdist and irreverent black humor that’s a common denominator among Czech directors. This is a pretty dark fairy tale; however, the only truly weird element is the fern itself (unfortunately glimpsed in action in only one scene). Half plant, half beast, and blossoming with mysterious flowers before sprouting a tentacular vine replete with talon-like thorns, this fern looks like a worthy adversary to a monster from one of ‘s cheapo creature features (and I mean that as a complement). In a suspenseful and creepy scene, Lysanka fights the fern in what becomes a battle of wills. She emerges victorious, the possessor of one of its golden seeds.

The clever mix of basic low-budget effects utilized throughout the film enhance the otherworldly atmosphere, and the black and white cinematography fits the ominous tone. Lysanka never explains where she came from or who exactly she is; her pleas on behalf of the fern make her initially appear as its ally, until it reveals itself to be an opposing force. Jura remains oblivious of the magical powers surrounding him, simply losing himself in Lysanka’s love and beauty.

After defeating the golden fern, Lysanka sews the golden seed into a seam in Jura’s shirt. When he gets drunk at a tavern and ends up shanghaied into the army, it spells the end of their affair. She begs him to never exchange the shirt for another. He promises he won’t, but it’s Jura’s inability to follow good advice that landed him in this dire situation in the first place.

The setting then shifts to the frontier of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, where the Empress’ forces are at war with the Turkish military. This second half of the film has prompted comparisons to  The Saragossa Manuscript , but Golden Fern never reaches levels of surrealism. After a somewhat minor act of courage (literally capturing a flag from the enemy), the general promotes Jura to officer.

While the upper ranks continue to ridicule him for his slow-witted peasant ways, Jura unwisely begins a flirtation with the general’s gorgeous and aloof daughter (Smutná). First inspired by the possibility that she’ll convince her father to release him from his military service so he can return to Lysanka, she predictably beguiles Jura into attempting a series of increasingly dangerous tasks.

Learning from a fortune teller how to capture the general’s daughter’s heart, Jura risks his life to infiltrate the enemy camp. When he’s caught half-dead and disguised as a Turk after completing his mission, his commanders immediately assume Jura has turned traitor. The general’s daughter coldly abandons to him his fate as the gears of military justice grind into action; laws which seem as cruel and arbitrary as the mysterious rules of the forest. Even in a world of magic ferns and fae spirits, people still kill each other, mock each other, and fall in love—human nature is both triumph and tragedy.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

Czech writer-director Jiří Weiss’s The Golden Fern is a dark and haunting fairy tale, albeit one that’s grounded in an earthy naturalism. Rather than lean heavily into the surreal, as these films often do, Weiss subtly weaves elements of the magical or miraculous into an otherwise straightforward narrative, thereby cannily introducing aspects of the uncanny.”–Budd Wilkins, Slant Magazine (Blu-ray)

The Golden Fern [Blu-ray]

The Golden Fern [Blu-ray]
  • Czech director Jiří Weiss's breathtaking B&W fantasy about a stunning young forest fairy who falls in love with a handsome but selfish shepherd
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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: GANDU (2010)

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AKA The Loser

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DIRECTED BY: Quashiq Mukherjee

FEATURING: , , Kamalika Banerjee, Silajit Majumder,

PLOT: A young man in the slums of Kolkata ekes out a mindless existence, dreaming of getting out and becoming a famous rapper.

Still from gandu (2010)

COMMENTS: “Gandu” doesn’t translate literally as “loser.” That’s a polite interpretation for the benefit of weak-hearted English speakers. The most common reading is “asshole.” (The subtitles default to that term, although some onscreen interviewees say even worse.) So the fact that our hero is not only called Gandu but willingly responds to the slur tells us a lot about him. He’s not just bad; he’s happy to make you think he is.

Gandu’s world is one of dreary hopelessness. His mother spends the day in thrall to her boyfriend, the owner of the local internet café where sad people try to reach their loved ones over terrible connections. The young man whiles away the day by stealing from his mother’s beau while the couple is having sex (he literally crawls into the bedroom to lift the cash) and heads out into the streets to find no prospects for employment or romance, placing bets in a numbers racket that is never going to come through and dreaming of becoming a rap star. We get peeks at Gandu’s rap game, and while he throws down some decent verses, the biggest thing he brings to the table is anger.

The story gets some necessary development when Gandu is nearly run down by a rickshaw. While his instinct is to get mad, he changes his tune when he meets the driver, a friendly fellow curiously named Ricksha who idolizes Bruce Lee, to the point of adopting the legendary star’s hairstyle and building a shrine to him. Ricksha isn’t going any further in life than Gandu is, but he’s more satisfied with his lot, and the two make an appealing pair: Gandu sullenly bemoans his fate, and Ricksha encourages his new pal to at least try for his own level of achievement.

Gandu goes on like this for a while, with the two men living life in a loop, while documentary interviews pop in to express the wider world’s general contempt for their sort. However, in the third act, the film takes a big swing, demolishing the fourth wall to make a point about exactly these kinds of stories. Gandu, having been caught stealing and booted out of his home, contemplates ending it all. Ricksha has an alternate plan: get high on the best stuff there is, the drugs of the gods. Clearly, these do the job, because shortly after dosing, Gandu learns that there is a filmmaker named Quashiq Mukherjee (“Q”) who is making a movie about him. Q in fact shows up, camera already filming, and then the dominoes come a-tumbling. Gandu’s lottery tickets finally win, and win big. A record deal quickly falls into place. The hand-scrawled credits that opened the film are replaced with new, slick, professionally designed titles. Most notably, this loser who has been reduced to self-pleasuring while watching porn finds himself in the company of a pink-haired prostitute who takes his virginity, an occasion so momentous that the film switches to color to capture the event in all its unsimulated splendor.

All the while, Q takes shots at the Indian film industry. At the outset, he jettisons the raucous colors, fantastical storylines, and elaborate musical numbers in favor of stark monochrome, brutal realism, and hardcore rap. Then, twisting the knife further, he produces a deus ex machina to give Gandu the obligatory happy ending, but he does so in the most anti-Bollywood way possible: the rap numbers are professionally produced. The romance is pornographic sex. The hero who saves the day is… the director himself. An audience member has the choice of indulging in this absurd grotesque fantasia or accepting the likely possibility that we’re watching Gandu’s last magnificent dream before succumbing to the drugs in his system. Either way, Q refuses to play by the Indian film world’s rules.

Even if you err on the side of the “rap conquers all” interpretation, Gandu is a grim watch. For all of Q’s inventive storytelling, no one in the movie has any real agency or plays an active role in their own lives (as may be true for many of the residents of Kolkata’s slums). For all the rejection of the illusions of the silver screen, the alternative is aimless and hopeless. Gandu is insightful and daring, but in the end, it doesn’t really go anywhere. You can throw magic at him, but the hero never changes. He’s just an asshole.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…hte film begins in an almost realist style… until they eventually descend into hard drug abuse, at which point the film takes an extremely surreal, post modern tangent.  A mess from start to finish, [Gandu] nevertheless guarantees a unique ride.” – Daniel Green, Cinevue

(This movie was nominated for review by… um… by Gandu. Hmm. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)      

Gandu

Gandu
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Apocryphally Weird

54*. FANDO AND LIS (1968)

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Fando y Lis

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“…tragedy and Grand-Guignol, poetry and vulgarity, comedy and melodrama, love and eroticism, happenings and set theory, bad taste and aesthetic refinement, the sacrilegious and the sacred, ritual death and the exaltation of life, the sordid and the sublime…”–‘s recipe for Panic drama

Weirdest!

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Sergio Kleiner, Diana Mariscal

PLOT: Sometime after an apocalypse, Fando and the paraplegic Lis leave a ruins to search for the legendary city of Tar, wheeling Lis on a cart along with their only possessions, a phonograph and a drum. They meet many strange characters on the road, including an androgynous Pope and a doctor who drinks Lis’ blood. Finally, Fando gets fed up with carting Lis about and kills her.

Still from Fando y Lis (1968)

BACKGROUND:

  • Alejandro Jodorowsky directed the movie without a script, just a one page outline, working from his memory of fellow Panic society member Fernando Arrabal‘s play of the same title (which Jodorowsky had previously directed many times).
  • The movie’s premier at the 1968 Acapulco Film Festival caused a scandal: viewers rioted, and Mexican director Emilio Fernandez swore he would kill Jodorowsky. After one more screening in Mexico City, the film was banned in Mexico, and had only a few unsuccessful international screenings thereafter.
  • Never released on VHS, Fando y Lis remained virtually unknown until ABKCO restored and re-released it in 2009 as part of their major Jodorowsky revival.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Fando and Lis painting their names on each others’ half-naked bodies, and then on the bare white walls of their dwelling, before dousing everything in sight (including each other) in buckets of black ink. It’s hippies having a blast, a groovy south-of-the-border happening, Panic-style.

TWO WEIRD THINGS: Flaming piano; syringe-using vampire

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: If you’ve ever seen a Jodorowsky movie before, you know what to expect. Fando y Lis is a parade of fantastical, shocking imagery, including snakes that penetrate a baby doll and a man who begs for blood (he extracts a donation with a syringe and drinks it from a brandy snifter). It’s not as polished and conceptually grand as later Jodorowosky masterpieces, but the basis of his style and major preoccupations can be seen along the dusty road to Tar.


Restoration trailer for Fando y Lis (1968)

COMMENTS: Fando y Lis is Alejandro Jodorowsky’s most Surrealist movie (the black and white cinematography reinforces the connection)—although not necessarily his most surreal movie Continue reading 54*. FANDO AND LIS (1968) →

It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE POSSESSED (1965)

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La Donna del Lago

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DIRECTED BY: , Franco Rossellini

FEATURING: , Salvo Randone, , Pier Giovanni Anchisi, Virna Lisi

PLOT: A writer visits a childhood vacation spot at a lake and investigates the mystery of a missing acquaintance.

Still from The Possessed (1965)

COMMENTS: “It’s difficult to look inside oneself honestly, eh?”

Is this why award-winning author Bernard (Baldwin) claims to have never written anything autobiographical? His friends seem skeptical. He returns to a lakeside village to begin work on his next book, one inspired by memories of his childhood summers. But instead of writing, Bernard begins a routine of gossiping with the locals and spying on the staff of his hotel, “a hotel. . . filled with memories,” where “everything seem[s] normal on the surface.”

Moody black and white photography heightens the suggestion that everything isn’t quite normal in this unnamed locale. The cinematography emphasizes shadows; picturesque tree-lined lanes become sinister and otherworldly. The light dappling the lake’s surface could be the sun or the moon. The immersive sound design features a menacing whisper of wind which begins at Bernard’s first sight of the lake.

It’s the off-season, and characters furtively scurry about, either to escape from the cold or from prying eyes. The camera slides around corners, rendering the layout of both the town and the hotel endlessly labyrinthine. It sidles up to the cracks in doors, providing his point of view whenever Bernard’s voyeurism in the present day is intercut with his memories of Tilde, a beautiful blonde chamber maid (Lisi). As we search through the hotel and the village along with him, we quickly come to realize that, though he never fully admits it, Bernard is completely infatuated with the memory of Tilde.

After mistakenly following another woman, he discovers that Tilde died under mysterious circumstances since his last visit the year before. Determined to find out what happened to her—was it suicide or murder?—Bernard enlists the help of Francesco (Anchisi), a cynical local photographer. He willingly shares photographic evidence along with his own theories, but becomes increasingly reluctant to dig too deeply into the mystery. As Bernard becomes ever more obsessed with Tilde, he begins having nightmares about her case. Gradually he comes to suspect the hotel owner’s family must be somehow implicated.

When it was first released in 1965, La Donna del Lago (“The Lady of the Lake”) was poorly received. Italian critics lambasted its art-house style, including the use of washed out high-contrast in dreams and flashbacks, and creative editing that consistently blurs the lines between past and present. Cultural and historical baggage may also have sunk it. The screenplay is loosely based on a novel of the same name, which was in turn was inspired by a true crime1.

News of the actual case was still fresh in the popular consciousness while the film was being made, but if the filmmakers had hoped to cash in, they misread their audience. By the mid ’60s, color was in, and The Possessed seemed hopelessly pretentious and out of date. Instead of a typical crime thriller, it’s an Expressionist and hallucinatory fever-dream tour through the corridors of memory and imagination. Like Last Year at Marienbad, only with faster pacing and moments of ian suspense, The Possessed is both beautiful and occasionally confusing to watch, but it’s never boring.

Later re–branded as a giallo, The Possessed features some tropes of the genre, but even though pretty girls are dying mysterious deaths, there is no black-gloved killer (and the young women may not have been murdered at all). The writer protagonist is a familiar figure, the outsider trying to carry out his own investigation while becoming further mired in mystery. Renzo Rossellini’s orchestral score swells to ironic crescendos whenever Bernard fails to uncover any meaningful clues. There are plentiful red herrings: ambiguous photographic images, scraps of paper scrawled with obscure sentence fragments, women who wear each other’s coats so they become unrecognizable when bundled up in scarves against the wind. Ultimately The Possessed resists easy genre categorization, and for this reason its hybrid qualities make it weird-adjacent. It conjures a pervasive unsettling atmosphere, even though nothing overtly surreal appears on screen.

The fact that the screenplay was originally drafted by (Death Laid an Egg, If You Live, Shoot) may account for some of the film’s more unusual qualities, and makes The Possessed of interest to Questi completists. The original novel by Giovanni Comisso describes a writer’s journey to the scene of the crimes where he receives psychic impressions of the suspects, and Questi focuses heavily on this aspect. Cues such as the high contrast lighting and a repeated mournful bird cry provide hints for interpreting Bernard’s thoughts, imaginings, memories, and dreams, but in the end these images from inside his head all become tangled up together. Anyone familiar with the story’s background would of course already know who the killers will turn out to be, but Questi’s script isn’t a whodunit. He isn’t afraid to leave questions unanswered. As Bernard is subtly implicated as an unreliable narrator, a true crime story becomes a study of subjectivity and desire.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The story’s a feverish dream-narrative in which Bernard is often literally fevered and dreaming… For its amplified layers of bafflement within its hallucinations, I prefer [the title] The Lady of the Lake to The Possessed, but this highly polished mirror of uncertainty and obsession is a lovely discovery under any identity.”–Michael Barrett, Pop Matters [Blu-ray]

1 The Alleghe killings were a series of murders that began in the 1930s in a small village in Northern Italy, and after being interrupted by WWII, they continued, still unsolved, into the 1950s. The case had been closed, then reopened, and the killers were only convicted in 1964.

The Possessed

The Possessed
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