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Canonically Weird (The List)

175. L’IMMORTELLE (1963)

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“-Do you know the poems of Sultan Selim?

‘They are full of flowers and perfumes,

greenery, cool fountains, and slim jets of water.’

-Which Sultan Selim?

-I don’t know. Whichever. They were all named Selim and they all wrote the same poems with the same cliched imagery that recurs like fetishes. Or passwords you utter to pass through the garden gate and enter the palace of your sleepless nights.”- L’Immortelle

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , Jacques Doniol-Valcroze,

PLOT: A professor vacationing in Istanbul comes across a mysterious, vivacious woman who weaves in and out of his life during a fateful summer. The impenetrability of the woman ignites an obsession in the professor, one that leads him into the shadowy, knotted heart of the city and the underbelly of his own desire.

Stil from L'Immortelle (1963)

BACKGROUND:

  • Already a staple in French New Wave as a successful screenwriter (Last Year in Marienbad), Alain Robbe-Grillet was trying to break into motion pictures as a director, but was unable to find the funding. A Belgian producer agreed to fund his first feature on the condition that he use funds legally tied up in Turkey (due to an inability to convert the Turkish pound, which had left a wool-trading friend of the producer’s unable to use his profit anywhere else in the world). Robbe-Grillet shot the film there and used the location as a central narrative device, in the vein of a cinematic arabesque.
  • Robbe-Grillet’s own wife Catherine plays the oft-mentioned Catherine Sarayon (or Carayon). Robbe-Grillet met her in Turkey, which is similar to the way the protagonist meets the woman he falls for in L’Immortelle. Catherine wrote several novels of sadomasochistic erotica, sometimes under the pseudonym “Jean de Berg.”
  • During filming, Turkey erupted into a violent revolution in which the heads of government were all hanged. Robbe-Grillet, whose production company had made deals with the ousted government, had to get out hastily and wait in France for the volatile situation to die down before returning to complete the film.
  • Although it was reasonably well-regarded at the time of its release, screening at the Berlin Film Festival, L’Immortelle since fell between the cracks and was not released on home video in any form until 2014.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: This film is rife with iconic, spellbinding imagery, but chief among them is the mystical and sacred moment in the mosque as the professor, already deeply entranced by the woman of his waking dreams, searches for her in the darkness. He shambles around a corner with desperation in his gait (slowly, though, as if no wait was long enough), and spies the woman kneeling on the ground kneeling in prayer, perfect and impregnable. She rises to meet him like a goddess of torturous pleasure; her grace and beauty combined with his love-struck agony in the shadows is a moment of understated, haunting beauty.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: L’Immortelle operates less like a film and more like a state of mind, using baffling, at times purposely repetitive shots to create something that transcends the world of the nominal. It is a movie based in philosophy, emotion, and spirituality, not plot and structure. It does not want to entertain or make sense, it wants to touch below the surface, and it does through the tried-and-true tactic of not explaining a single thing, compounding each image placed on screen into an enigma that never diminishes as time rolls on.


Original French language trailer for L’Immortelle

COMMENTS: The narrative tradition is a lie. From our earliest fables to the towering epics of our own time, we tell stories in the way that is the most Continue reading 175. L’IMMORTELLE (1963) →

Reader Recommendations

READER RECOMMENDATION: SUNSET BOULEVARD (1950)

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Reader recommendation by “Brad”

DIRECTED BY: Billy Wilder

FEATURING: William Holden, Gloria Swanson, Erich von Stroheim

PLOT: An unlucky screenwriter, Joe (Holden), begins a chance relationship with once popular actress Norma Desmond (Swanson), getting caught up in a world of mystery and eventual murder.

Still from Sunset Boulevard (1950)
WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: This noir-ish 50’sdrama is not only an early inside look on Hollywood actors dealing with being washed up and forgotten about, but it has an atmospheric weirdness that builds and builds until its ending, which is actually the beginning.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Norma Desmonds’ pet monkeys funeral.

COMMENTS: A non-linear, shadowy, and dark examination of those working within the Hollywood business. Mixing Hollywood and murder-mystery before it was a formula. Directed by great Austrian filmmaker Billy Wilder with as much tension as a  film. This film is one of the most bizarre to come out of Hollywood pre-1960, outside of Blonde Venus. The film is definitely an American classic that can also be classified as a strange classic. Cecil B. DeMille and Buster Keaton have cameos.  named Sunset Boulevard as one of his personal favorites.

Capsules

CAPSULE: CRAVE (2012)

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DIRECTED BY: Charles de Lauzirika

FEATURING: Josh Lawson, Emma Lung, ,

PLOT: A freelance crime-scene photographer romances a younger woman in his apartment building, while suffering delusions and fantasizing about becoming a vigilante.

Still from Crave (2012)
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: This movie is trying so hard to be like its big brother Taxi Driver that it’s embarrassing to watch at times; it has a certain grotty charm and good performances, but needs a huge wallop of subtlety. Its hallucinations are so clearly marked off as fantasies that they never threaten to swallow up the viewer, leaving its weird effect highly attenuated.

COMMENTS: An internal monologue of a disaffected white guy who’s convinced that humanity is rotten. The antihero drives aimlessly through the city at night, searching for scenes of depravity to reinforce his misanthropic vision. He awkwardly romances a beautiful woman who’s out of his league. He plans a crime, practices the exact words he will say to his victim. The delusional self-appointed vigilante eventually wreaks a gruesome vengeance on an absuer of women. Stop me if you’ve heard this before.

Taxi Driver was the deconstructed, arthouse revision of puerile crime-anxiety thrillers like Death Wish; Crave is an unneeded, on-the-nose reconstruction of Taxi Driver for the modern age. Crave‘s chief problem, for a movie whose promotional material promises that its photographer protagonist Aiden will be a hero whose “dark imagination starts to leak into reality,” is that the line between fantasy and reality isn’t blurry for the viewer—when redheads tear off their blouses and fall to their knees and Bill Gates shows up offering Aiden bags of cash, it’s fantasy. The clarity of that line and the lack of a radical subjective perspective removes a lot of potential tension that might result if we are wondering if what is happening is really inside Aiden’s head. Nor is Aiden delusional enough to create suspense via the gap between the dangers the audience recognizes and what our protagonist comprehends; he not only realizes his grip on his emotional throttle is slipping, he agonizes about it endlessly in voiceovers and heart-to-hearts with his tough-but-wise stereotype cop buddy. And some of the stuff that clearly is intended to happen in reality doesn’t make a lot of sense, like his hot neighbor’s spur-of-the-moment decision to screw Aiden senseless one afternoon just because he’s not terrible-looking and not obviously a psychopath. That’s bad writing, though, not dark imagination.

The script’s lack of originality and subtlety is a shame, because there is a lot of talent here. Josh Lawson is not bad as Aiden, although he lacks the scruffy anti-charisma necessary to take the role over the top. The supporting players fare better. Adorable Emma Lung somehow comes across as a real person, despite the fact that the only character trait the script gives her to work with is a baffling bad taste in men. Edward Furlong, who we last saw in the miserable This Is Not a Movie, redeems himself here as a hipster cad who nonetheless doesn’t deserve his torturous fate. Ron Perlman’s square mug is, as always, a welcome sight; inhabiting his character with ease, he lends instant credibility to any project. The movie’s technical qualities are pro throughout. The neon-noir vistas of Chicago streets at night are memorable, as is the shot of spinning pinwheels reflected in Aiden’s eye. De Lauzirika, who has previously specialized in directing special features for major DVD releases (including Alien, Blade Runner, and three of the extras on the “Twin Peaks” Gold Box set), is a talented director who shoots a good-looking film and elicits fine performances from his actors. But, he may better serve his career in the future by directing scripts written by someone else.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“[The performances are] undermined by not just the clichéd story but director/co-writer Charles de Lauzirika’s misguided tone, which veers from straight-up impotent fury to a clunky humor that’s just not funny in the story’s overall context.”–Maitland McDonagh, Film Journal International (contemporaneous)

Canonically Weird (The List)

170. GLEN OR GLENDA (1953)

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“Some argue that this kind of thing puts Ed Wood into the company of Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí.

Should we buy this argument? Pull the string!”–IMDB Glen or Glenda FAQ

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , Ed Wood, Jr. (as Daniel Davis), Dolores Fuller, Timothy Farrell,

PLOT: A transvestite is found dead, a suicide. Seeking to understand more about this phenomenon, a police inspector visits a psychiatrist who explains transvestism to him using the example of Glen, a heterosexual man who is tormented by the question of whether he should reveal his passion for cross-dressing to his fiancée. Meanwhile, a sinister, omniscient “scientist” (played by Bela Lugosi) occasionally appears to cryptically comment on the action (“pull the string!”)

Still from Glen or Glenda? (1953)
BACKGROUND:

  • Producer George Weiss wanted to make a film to exploit the then-current case of Christine Jorgensen (born George William Jorgensen), one of the first men to have successful sex-reassignment surgery. According to legend, Ed Wood convinced Weiss that he was the right man to direct the picture because he was a transvestite in his private life and understood gender confusion. The resulting film, shot in just four days, ended up being more about transvestism than sex-change surgery.
  • Against Wood’s wishes, Weiss inserted bondage-themed imagery into the dream sequence to give the film a dash more sex.
  • Wood himself plays the transvestite Glen (and Glenda) under the pseudonym Daniel Davis.
  • In his own life, Wood did not take the advice he gave his character in Glen or Glenda to honestly discuss his desire to wear women’s clothes with his betrothed. Wood’s first wife had their marriage annulled in 1955, after Ed surprised her by wearing ladies’ undergarments to their honeymoon.
  • This is the first of three collaborations between Wood and then down-on-his-luck and opiate-addicted Bela Lugosi. Three of Lugosi’s final four credits were Wood films.
  • Some reviews of Glen or Glenda refer to Lugosi’s character as “the Spirit” rather than “the Scientist”; were there two separate sets of credits, each with a different name for the character?
  • Wood’s 1963 novel “Killer in Drag” features a transvestite character named Glen whose alter-ego is named Glenda.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Such a wealth of possibilities! What about the hairy Satan who inexplicably shows up at Glen and Barbara’s dream wedding? And who can forget Bela Lugosi, yelling nonsense at the viewer while his angry face is superimposed over a herd of stampeding buffalo? The iconic image, however, is Wood’s intended emotional climax: in a ridiculously touching gesture of unconditional acceptance, Glen’s girlfriend Barbara strips off her angora sweater and hands it to the wide-eyed transvestite.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: A narratively-knotted 1950s pro-transvestite pseudo-documentary, told in naively earnest rhetoric via a wandering structure that includes flashbacks inside of flashbacks, would have made for a worthwhile oddity in itself. But throw in Bela Lugosi as a one-man Greek chorus reciting fractured fairy tales, and include a fourteen-minute dream sequence mixing Freudian symbolism, bargain-basement Expressionism, bondage, and a guest appearance by the Devil and you achieve incomparable weirdness, the way only Ed Wood could serve it up—on a bed of angora.


Clip from Glen or Glenda

COMMENTS: Ed Wood had a secret, and it’s not just that he liked the feel of silk panties under his rough trousers. Transvestism, in a way, was the Continue reading 170. GLEN OR GLENDA (1953) →