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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: THE MAN WHO LIES (1968)

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L’homme qui ment

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , Sylvie Bréal, Zuzana Kocúriková, Sylvia Turbová, Ivan Mistrík,

PLOT: A mysterious stranger gradually infiltrates the home and family of a missing man.

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: The Man Who Lies suffers from doppelgänger syndrome, both the title character and the film as a whole. A second shadow protagonist haunts the main character, who defends his own existence and reality by repeatedly telling the same story over and over again. But with each telling the details change, until the final version becomes the exact opposite of the first. Where reality ends and the lies begin is impossible to untangle. Every scene of the film negates its own double and even the dual protagonists swap identities by the end.

COMMENTS: In the opening narration, Trintignant introduces himself as “Jean Robin” but then backpeddles and admits he’s actually called “Boris Varissa.” And people sometimes call him “The Ukrainian,” though he doesn’t know why. As the film progresses, it becomes obvious none of these names actually belong to him, and we never find out who he really is. In one meta-moment, he even describes himself as an actor rehearsing a role. Robbe-Grillet covers much the same territory as Last Year at Marienbad but in a more comedic tone, closer to the literal winking at the camera of Trans-Europ Express.

“Boris” enters a small rural town after escaping from a brigade of soldiers. He describes how he anonymously disappears into the crowd, though we see him walking alone down deserted streets. He enters a pub, which he describes as empty, though it’s so full of patrons he has difficulty finding a seat. Here the townspeople discuss the unknown fate of local hero Jean Robin, whose portrait adorns every building in town.

The details of Robin’s disappearance are sketchy and inconsistent. No one is quite sure where he is, how long he’s been away, or when he will return. Some believe he will definitely come back, others declare him dead. His poor lovely wife and sister remain in their crumbling ancestral chateau awaiting his return, though no one has actually seen them in years.

Boris immediately begins telling everyone he was great friends with Jean Robin during the war. In fact, he personally helped Jean escape their enemies. No one is particularly inclined to hear this tale, and many, like the pub’s proprietor, treat the interloper with outright contempt. Others act like he isn’t even there.

After this inauspicious debut, Boris heads to the Robin chateau. There, Jean’s wife, Laura, his sister, Sylvia, and their maid, Maria, amuse themselves playing Blind Man’s Bluff and other obscure games involving blindfolds and medieval weapons. Boris first insinuates himself into the affections of Maria. He regales her with long tales of Jean’s heroism in the Resistance. But cracks quickly develop in his facade. He doesn’t recognize his dear friend’s elderly father? And who is this Dr Mueller he speaks of? There is no doctor of that name in town.

In one scene, where he meets with Jean’s sister, Trintignant poses before a grave in a cemetery marked with the name “Boris Varissa,” which he quickly moves to hide from her. In another scene, he re-enacts his own near-death experience for Maria, telling her dramatically of how he suffered a near-fatal head wound. As he collapses, he pours a bottle of fake blood onto his chest. “But wasn’t it a head wound?” she asks him.

Even with the humor, the repetition of Jean/Boris story gets a little tiresome. The viewer may find themselves thinking, like the film’s characters, there he goes again—the war, the war—whenever Boris launches into yet another version of the narrative. Though he initially lauds Jean as a valiant hero, Boris eventually claims he was actually a treacherous traitor. But since Boris is a liar, the identities of both men remain questionable and unstable.

After a while, it’s the women who fascinate, though they hardly say a word. They play their strange games in an abandoned attic full of forgotten heirlooms and family portraits. Here Robbe-Grillet displays all his classic fetishes: the nape of the neck, the suspended gesture, bound wrists. Though Maria and Sylvia succumb to Boris’ advances, Laura remains spectral and aloof. She drifts through the house in a long white nightgown, appearing to give no credence whatsoever to anything Boris says. Indeed, she barely acknowledges his existence.

Unable to crack her, Boris starts to lose it. When Jean’s father dies in a sudden accident and a “Dr Mueller” shows up to write the death certificate, Boris looks genuinely spooked. Though he makes headway in removing his detractors, his success in taking Jean’s place at the chateau is far from secure, as the subject of his lies keeps coming back to haunt him.

In his quasi-autobiographical “romanesque,” Ghosts in the Mirror, Robbe-Grillet credits the mysterious figure of Count Henri de Corinthe with providing the inspiration for the screenplay. In Robbe-Grillet’s telling, Corinthe comes across as a Ripley-esque character, who may have disappeared one of his own friends in order to “borrow” his military exploits. Of course, we must take this explanation with a grain of salt for, as Robbe-Grillet admits, in writing the book he deliberately took on the role of the man who lies for himself. Any viewer looking to discern the “truth” here will inevitably be frustrated—by design.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Shades of the filmmaker’s script for Last Year At Marienbad can be picked up on throughout the movie but here he blends that with the pseudo-surrealism he’d started toying with in Trans-Europ Express, a film that, like this one, is more concerned with the viewer’s interpretation of reality than reality itself.… The Man Who Lies isn’t the best starting point for those new to Alain Robbe-Grillet’s work but it’s an interesting, stylish and at times intriguingly sexy mix of mystery and artsy surrealism, the kind that fans of his work will no doubt appreciate. – Ian Jane, DVD Talk

Capsules

A DIFFERENT MAN (2024)

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A Different Man is currently available for VOD rental or purchase.

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Sebastian Stan, Renate Reinsve,

PLOT: Edward, an aspiring actor who suffers from disfiguring facial tumors, is cured by an experimental treatment and starts a new life; he then seeks to be cast in a play about his previous life, but becomes jealous when the charismatic, disfigured Oswald—a better actor and a better fit for the part—enters the scene.

Still from A Different Man (2024)

COMMENTS: In one of the wickedly funny moments of A Different Man, Edward is passed over by an agent specializing in casting actors with “unusual physiognomies” in favor of a crazed, but relatively normal looking, subway provocateur. Edward’s neurofibromitosis has disfigured his character even more than his face: he prefers to slink into the background, he’s understandably paranoid, and he’s jumpy from constantly being on alert to incoming social threats. And yet, he harbors a vanity: to be an actor, despite the fact that he can barely remember his lines and has no sense of the appropriate register for the one job he does land, playing a disabled employee in a corporate inclusivity training video. The only bright spot in his life is his crush on Ingrid, a cute aspiring playwright living in the next apartment, but even she instinctively recoils from his touch (while remaining unfailingly friendly). So miserable Edward can hardly be blamed for volunteering for an experimental therapy that might reduce his tumors: “the risk may be worth the reward.” And when the treatment works miraculously well, not merely reducing his blemishes but completely healing them and turning him into a handsome man, he can hardly be blamed for indulging in unselfconscious socializing and casual sex—although some of his post-cure decisions will prove questionable.

But when dashing Oswald, another man with neurofibromitosis who has all the talent and social capital Edwards craves, but without having cheated through surgery, bursts onto the scene, Edward (now called Guy) is chastened and again filled with self-doubt. A Different Man is not a literal doppelgänger film—-Oswald not quite a literal double, but an independent individual who simply happens to share a rare characteristic with Edward—-but he serves the same symbolic story function as William Wilson or James Simon. It is a fittingly twisted take on the trope of the double. The weirdest thing about the film is Oswald’s sudden omnipresence—he pops up at rehearsals, at the bar, in Ingrid’s apartment—as if he’s being summoned by Edward’s guilty conscience. And Oswald’s appearance ignites the film’s central irony: Ingrid writes an off-Broadway play with the role Edward was born to play, but because of his successful surgery, he’s no longer right for the part.

A Different Man posits what appears to be a simple moral: changing your surface appearance will not change your essential nature. And yet this simple fable plays out in anything but a simple fashion, because the characters of Edward/Guy and Ingrid are so complex. (Oswald is not complex: although Pearson’s performance is unimpeachable, he’s a one-note symbol here.) Edward does some bad things, but we are predisposed to forgive him because we know where he came from and how he suffered in the first act. Our empathy for him shifts with the plot twists. Ingrid, too, is not the angel she first seems, but just another flawed specimen of humanity. The screenplay pulls the viewer in so many different directions that, as you watch the film, the seemingly simple message plays as psychologically complex. While mostly a comedy, it begins by generating a deep empathy for Edward’s condition. When he goes through the painful experimental treatment and literally rips ribbons flesh off of his face, it briefly becomes a horror film. When Oswald mysteriously pops in, it toys with becoming a psychological thriller. As Edward’s jealousy grows, it angles towards satire. And all the while the film doesn’t shy away from self-reflection: discussing the play within the film, Ingrid wonders out loud whether it is wrong to cast someone because of their disfigurement, rather than in spite of it. Schimberg  keeps the viewer off balance, disguising the simplicity of the scenario in a way that seems to fully explore the story’s implications and yet leave something mysterious unsaid.

Writer/director Aaron Schimberg clearly created the movie as a showcase for Adam Pearson, who impressed him on the set of Chained for Life, and whom he described as “one of the biggest extroverts I’ve ever met: very much the life of the party, everybody loves him. He could be a cult leader if he wanted to.” Pearson obviously doesn’t get many feature film roles written for him, so the existence of two Schimberg/Pearson movies is a great bit of cinematic history trvia. If Schimberg comes up with a third unique role for Pearson, their collaboration may become legendary, in the Sergio Leone/ vein.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…far more surreal and weirder than you might be expecting, which should suggest just how strange this one gets. There’s a David Lynch vibe to things (alongside Woody Allen and especially Charlie Kaufman) that may affect audiences in different ways, but while at times it kept me at arm’s length, I never lost interest. Even when the plot goes a bit off the rails in the third act, I stayed engaged.”–Joey Magidson, Awards Radar (contemporaneous)

Capsules

CAPSULE: LINOLEUM (2022)

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Linoleum is currently available for VOD rental.

DIRECTED BY: Colin West

FEATURING: Jim Gaffigan, , Gabriel Rush, Rhea Seehorn, Roger Hendricks Simon

PLOT: When a rocket crashes in his backyard, failed children’s TV-show host Cameron decides to rebuild it; meanwhile, a lot of strange, inexplicable things are happening in his suburban town.

Still from Linoleum (2022)

COMMENTS: Linoleum has a lot going on in it, and for a while you may get the sense that it has bitten off more than it will be able to chew. The core story follows Cameron, who once wanted to be an astronaut but has settled for a career as an astronomer-cum-children’s show host, and whose long-running Bill Nye-esque science program has just been shifted to the midnight time slot. It also spends a lot of time following his daughter Nora, who’s a fashionably lesbian outcast until the new boy in town makes her question her sexual identity. There’s also Cameron’s wife Erin, who’s debating her own career choices and her choice of mate, and Cameron’s father, who’s in memory care with dementia. And there’s the new arrival in town, Cameron’s doppelgänger, who crashes onto the scene in a red convertible in miraculous fashion. A lot of weird, reality-defying events happen in this suburban town in an unspecified VHS-era time period, much of it precipitated by the rocket capsule that crashes in Cameron’s back yard. I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out Linoleum‘s numerous, deliberate Donnie Darko nods, from the FAA-baffling aeronautic MacGuffin to the mysterious old woman hanging around on the periphery to a climax occurring at a Halloween party. So, yeah, there’s a lot going on; to the script’s credit, it’s all eventually explained by the (guessable, but not obvious) ending twist.

Colin West’s third feature film sports capable direction, helped along by a solid cast of indie movie vets. But most of the film’s publicity and buzz rightly centers around stand-up Gaffigan’s unexpected thesping. Although he doesn’t quite sink his wholesome reputation—Cameron is likable, if a bit of a wimp—he does stretch in his secondary role as Kent Armstrong, who brings a different and darker energy. Kent is cocky, and he treats his son with a military dad’s disciplinary philosophy. He’s both a better (younger, more competent) and a worse (less empathetic) version of Cameron. Gaffigan differentiates the two parts nicely, making a strong case he should be considered for more dramatic roles.

There’s a lot to praise in Linoleum, and yet, for me, it doesn’t entirely launch—and I’m not really sure why. The plot mechanics work; the twist satisfyingly ties things together (presuming you prefer things tied up in tidy packages). But the scattered critical reception it received, ranging from raves to confusion, suggest it failed to land universally. Cameron looks at the tangled mess of wires and unknown components he’s gathered from the capsule wreckage and wonders how he’s going to assemble them into a functional rocket. An early trial of the boosters starts with nothing, followed by a gradual growing power-up, followed by disappointment. So even though the assemblage works, it doesn’t work exactly as intended. This is not quite the proper metaphor for my experience of watching Linoleum, but it comes close. On the plus side, Linoleum has a gentle, Gaffiganesque charm and a resolution that tugs on susceptible heartstrings. So although it falls short of a general recommendation, if you are looking for the unusual combination of a puzzle movie with a tearjerking element, I’ll understand if you value this film highly.

No idea why it’s called Linoleum.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…The overload of strange occurrences and oddball coincidences gets unwieldy pretty quickly… Linoleum teases these weird glitches for most of its running time before clumsily explaining them away in a rush of exposition in the final act.”–Josh Bell, CBR

A Quiet Place in the Country [Blu-ray]

A Quiet Place in the Country [Blu-ray]
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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: INFINITY POOL (2023)

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Infinity Pool is currently available for VOD rental or purchase.

Recommended

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , , Jalil Lespert, Cleopatra Coleman,

PLOT: A foreign couple on vacation accidentally run down a local while driving drunk and learn of that country’s strange legal arrangement: in death penalty cases, for a generous monetary donation, they can substitute a clone for execution.

Still from infinity Pool (2023)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Cronenberg fils continues his plunge into the deep end of human darkness with Infinity Pool, a feverish nightmare of sin and excess spiked with hallucinogens.

COMMENTS: Infinity Pool takes place in an uncertain locale—an island paradise that might be in some Adriatic outpost of Eastern Europe (where it was actually filmed), or the Muslim world, or Oceania. Detective Thresh, tourists’ point of contact with the otherwise unseen government, has a vaguely Nazi-ish aura about him. Street signs and license plates are written in an alien language unknown on this planet. The time is also uncertain: for all intents and purposes the story is set in the modern day, except that this unknown backwater inexplicably possesses cloning technology, including complete personality and memory duplicating, that must be centuries away from realization. In short, Infinity Pool contains within it exactly what it needs to enact its parable, nothing more or less. The insular reality of the setting is as isolated as an all-inclusive resort protected from contact with the populace by huge fences and armed guards, where only a filtered simulacrum of authentic culture exists.

Cinematographer Karim Hussain, who has shot every B. Cronenberg film so far, uses disorienting techniques—vertical 360 pans, extreme closeups of lips and eyelashes, a strange shot where Thomas Kretschmann‘s silhouette turns into a pinheaded alien—to remind us that we’re in an exotic land defying norms and expectations. These stylistic excesses are capped by two epilepsy-warning, -styled psychedelic montages—one deployed to the depict the psychological effect of the doubling process, one the result of an orgy sparked by an indigenous hallucinogen—featuring swirling lights, disco balls, nude women, and, most disturbingly, a nipple oozing… something. These heavy techniques magnify Infinity Pool‘s weighty mood of moral doom.

Skarsgård is good as James, a writer who reveals less and less character as the film progresses. His decline is inevitable and believable: who among us would have the courage to defy the devil’s bargain Thresh offers to escape permanent oblivion? Still, Mia Goth dominates the film, cementing her position as horror’s nonpareil femme fatale of the moment. The ginger domme grows larger as Skarsgård shrinks. She has a wine-guzzling blast as a depraved seductress peeling away masks to reveal what seem to be infinite layers of evil.

The events of Infinity Pool work as pure moral horror, but also operate on a two-tiered satirical layer. As a social critique, the film illustrates first-world exploitation of poorer countries, while on an individual level it plumbs the perverse depths of self-destructive behavior. The rich selfishly appropriate local culture by stealing grotesque ceremonial masks for a disguise to perpetrate additional crimes. Meanwhile, sinking into hideous hedonistic excess, James finds himself engaging in shockingly literal self-abuse. The rich treat the poor as expendable, and James objectifies himself to escape responsibility for his own crimes. The premise naturally invites speculation about the nature of identity: an exact clone of myself with all my memories isn’t exactly me, but what is it? A mystery and a horror.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“If you’re willing to surf on the wonderfully weird and wild wavelength of ‘Infinity Pool’ it is indeed a singular, and unforgettable, ride.”–Katie Walsh, Los Angeles Times (contemporaneous)