Tag Archives: Dreamlike

Reader Recommendations

READER RECOMMENDATION: VALERIE AND HER WEEK OF WONDERS [Valerie a týden divů] (1970)

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The sixth submission in the June review writing contest: by “Kat.”

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Jaroslava Schallerova, Helena Anyzova, Petr Kopriva, Jiri Prymek

PLOT:  13-year old Valerie lives with her grandmother in a small rural village in

Still from Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970)

Czechoslovakia; on the week of her menarche she drifts into a sensual, and at times threatening, dreamworld.

WHY IT DESERVES TO MAKE THE LIST:  This is a gently weird film, as close to representing a dream on film as I have yet seen.  Every shot is a thing of beauty.  The plot is loose but generally true to its own dream logic.  As she approaches adulthood Valerie finds herself the object of desire for men, women and weasel-men alike.  Responding to all the strange occurrences around her with unflappable calmness, Valerie is a passive heroine, but Schallerova oozes charm and is a complete eye magnet whenever she is onscreen.

COMMENTS: A tight, coherent plot is not the strength of this piece, it has to be said.  It’s very much like the moments when you first wake from a puzzling dream, before your conscious mind has started to add little bridging details to try and make sense of it.

Valerie lives with her grandmother, and at the age of 13 has her first period.  Her grandmother tells her that this is the same age as her mother was.  It seems to be an occasion for neither celebration nor shame.  Valerie tells her grandmother that she is excited at the prospect of a troupe of actors arriving in the village and is informed that she’d do better to be excited about the arrival of the bishop and his priests.  You’d be forgiven for thinking that her grandmother is a bit of a party pooper, but like everyone in this film she’s not just what she appears to be at first glance.  Throughout the film religion and sexuality arm wrestle for dominance, but it’s rather like both arms are on the same body.

The performers arrive, as do the clergy.  The bishop has come to deliver a sermon to the virgins of the village, and it’s a pretty inappropriate one.  The bishop himself is a tad inappropriate at times, and has a face not designed to inspire confidence, looking like the hideous love child of Graf Orlak and Bergman’s Death, but with some of the most terrible teeth ever committed to film.  Again though, by the end of the film you’ll see him in different light.

During the course of the film Valerie will see transforming weasels, a hairy priest striptease and the nubile young women of the village will invite her to join them in a game of “hide the fish down your bodice” in the sun dappled river.  She will cure a young women of a strange vampiric ailment by sleeping with her, spy on her grandmother in a odd sexual situation while the toothy bishop lurks at her shoulder and will laugh in the face of being burned at the stake.  Throughout it all Valerie is protected by her mother’s magic earrings and is watched over, in a slightly creepy way by her brother (or would be lover?) Eagle.

Films about girls “coming of age” are few and far between and this is a gorgeous example.  Valerie is surrounded by sexuality both threatening and inviting.  She is on the receiving end of aggressive approaches from the hairy priest and her domineering female cousin, but also sees a guiltless, inviting sensuality in the form of the women in the river, the young woman she spends the night with and the gentle Eagle.

In the end Valerie seems to have explored both the dark and the light of impending womanhood and emerged into the sunlight, where even the toothy bishop seems a bit of a sweetie.

This would make a perfect double bill with Neil Jordan and Angela Carter’s Company Of Wolves, if you fancy an evening of oestrogen-heavy weirdness.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a collection of dream adventures, spurred by guiltless and poly-sexual eroticism. Virtually every shot is a knockout…”–Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader (rerelease/screening)

Canonically Weird (The List)

54. YOU, THE LIVING [DU LEVANDE] (2007)

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Recommended

“Be pleased then, you living one, in your delightfully warmed bed, before Lethe’s ice-cold wave will lick your escaping foot.”–Goethe, Roman Elegies, the quote that begins You, the Living

DIRECTED BY: Roy Andersson

FEATURING: A large cast of unknowns, who are given approximately equal weight in the story

PLOT: A man napping on a couch awakes, looks into the camera, and tells us that he had a nightmare that bombers were coming. The movie then shows us fifty or so dryly absurd scenes involving many unhappy characters in a nameless Swedish city, some of whom relate their dreams to us. Memorable sketches include a musician who tells us of his mutual fund performance while making love and a young girl spurned by a rock musician who dreams that they get married.

Still from You, the Living (Du Levande) (2007)

BACKGROUND:

  • Director Roy Andersson made short films beginning in 1967.  After his first two features, En kärlekshistoria (1970) and Giliap (1975), he began directing commercials and did not return to movies until the critically acclaimed (and Canonically Weird) Songs from the Second Floor (2000). This, only his fourth feature film, was completed when he was 64 years old.
  • You, the Living was refused funding by the Swedish Film Institute; Andersson reportedly accused the body of nepotism after the requested funding was instead granted to a relative of a member of the Institute. The movie was eventually completed with funding from five different countries, and is officially listed as a Swedish-French-German-Danish-Norwegian co-production.
  • The actors in the film are mostly amateurs with no previous feature film credits. The musician is played by Eric Bäckman, a member of the Swedish gothic metal band “Deathstars.”
  • All of the scenes (except one exterior) were shot on sound stages created in Andersson’s own studio.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Everyone talks about the bittersweet wedding fantasy, although the nude heavyset woman riding a skinny man while wearing his spiked military band helmet is also fairly indelible, perhaps for the wrong reasons.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Disorientingly constructed as a series of sketches with common characters, some completely naturalistic and some totally absurd, united by uneasy, melancholy comedy, You, the Living feels like a series of dreams trapped inside a larger dream.


English language DVD release trailer for You, the Living

COMMENTS: An enigmatic movie deserves an enigmatic title, and You, the Living gives Continue reading 54. YOU, THE LIVING [DU LEVANDE] (2007) →

Canonically Weird (The List)

48. INLAND EMPIRE (2006)

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Weirdest!

“My response to viewers who are puzzled by the plots is, I don’t think you’re so puzzled as you may think.  We all have a certain amount of intuition, and that is something that can be trusted and should be trusted… And so when you see something that’s abstract in a film, and you seem to be getting lost, the thing to do is to start talking to your friends, and they’ll say something and you’ll find yourself disagreeing with that, and realize that you really had formed opinions, and you had a scenario that made sense in your mind, and that’s valid.  We know more than we think.”—direct advice from David Lynch on understanding his films

DIRECTED BY: David Lynch

FEATURING: Laura Dern

PLOT: INLAND EMPIRE shifts around on a dozen tectonic plates of varying levels of surreality, but the unstable base layer involves Laura Dern as actress Nikki Grace cast in a melodrama based on an unproduced Polish screenplay which was abandoned as cursed after its two leads were murdered.  As she acts out the adulterous scenario, Grace becomes confused, coming to believe at times that she is the character in the screenplay.  After consummating a relationship with her handsome co-star, that reality slips away and Dern is seen playing several different characters, wandering around in a series of loosely interconnected sketches that involve (among other stories) an abused woman confessing her hatred of men to a psychiatrist, the lives of a gaggle of lip-syncing prostitutes, infidelity dramas, and a sobbing woman watching a room full of bunnies in an absurdist television sitcom.

Still from Inland Empire (2006)

BACKGROUND:

  • The film began as a series of individual short films shot on digital video, as Lynch was exploring the new format.  After Laura Dern suggested working on a project with the director, Lynch later noticed recurring themes in the shorts he was shooting, and decided to put them together into a feature film.
  • In his announcement for the movie and in interviews afterward, Lynch has said that he is done shooting on film and will work exclusively with digital video from now on, citing the greater freedom afforded by the format and going so far as to say that the idea of going back to film makes him feel “sick and weak.”
  • Lynch reported that he wrote the film scene by scene, working without a finished script and trusting that connections would appear.
  • The footage of the rabbits is recycled from a series of short films called “Rabbits” that was exclusively screened on davidlynch.com.
  • Lynch has said he decided to title the movie INLAND EMPIRE after hearing Dern say that her husband hailed from that Southern California enclave, simply because he liked the sound of the words.
  • Lynch invested his own money to get the film made.  He also distributed the film himself, thus facing no pressure to make cuts to the finished product.
  • David Lynch himself sings on the soundtrack.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: The nattily-dressed, stiff and deliberately posed bunny-people from the series of short “Rabbit” films, who were so evocative that Lynch decided to give them a new home in INLAND EMPIRE.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  INLAND EMPIRE is David Lynch at his most deliberately unhinged, experimenting with how far he can stray from linear narrative while still producing a work that feels thematically whole, searching for the minimum number of recurring images and themes needed to stitch a piece together so that it tantalizingly approaches coherence without ever actually resolving.

Trailer for INLAND EMPIRE

COMMENTS:  INLAND EMPIRE is a frustrating movie, or, more charitably put, a Continue reading 48. INLAND EMPIRE (2006) →

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: DEAD MAN (1995)

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NOTE: Dead Man has been promoted to the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies ever made. Commenting is closed on this review, which is left here for archival purposes. Please visit Dead Man‘s Certified Weird entry to comment on this film.

DIRECTED BY: Jim Jarmusch

FEATURING: Johnny Depp, Gary Farmer, Lance Henriksen, Michael Wincott, Robert Mitchum, Crispin Glover, Iggy Pop, Billy Bob Thornton, Mili Avatal, Gabriel Byrne

PLOT:  Mild-mannered accountant Bill Blake heads west, becomes a wanted man after he

Still from Dead Man (1995)

shoots a man in self defense, and, wounded, flees to the wilderness where he’s befriended by an Indian named Nobody who believes he is the poet William Blake.

WHY IT’S ON THE BORDERLINE:  Dead Man is a lyrical and hypnotic film, and one that comes about as achingly close to making the List on the first pass as is possible.  The quality of the movie is no obstacle to its making the List, but the weirdness, while there, is subtle and must be teased out by the viewer.  There is a mystical and dreamlike tinge to Blake’s journey into death, but the strangeness is almost entirely tonal; Jarmusch’s artiness aside, it’s possible to view the movie as a rather straightforward, if quirky, indie Western.

COMMENTS:  Dead Man begins on a locomotive as a naif accountant is traveling from Cleveland to a the western town of Machine to begin a new life.  We see him on the train playing solitaire or reading a booklet on beekeeping.  He looks up to survey at his fellow passengers, who meet his glance with indifference.  The train’s whistle blows as the scene fades to black, accompanied by twanging chords from Neil Young’s guitar (sounding like abstract, electrified snippets stolen from a Morricone score).  The scene repeats and fades back in again and again, each time with the traveler glancing around the compartment to find his companions slowly changing: their dress becomes more rustic, their hair longer and more unkempt; female passengers become less frequent, firearms more common; the indifference in their eyes turns into quiet hostility.

Dead Man tells the story of an innocent who becomes a refugee after being caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.  It’s a standard story, but the way Jarmusch tells can be strange indeed.  This opening scene sets the rhythm for the movie: it proceeds in a series of slow pulses punctuated by fadeouts and anguished bursts from Young’s guitar, and it slowly shifts locale from the civilized to the wild.  The continual fading out and Continue reading LIST CANDIDATE: DEAD MAN (1995) →

Canonically Weird (The List)

45. WAKING LIFE (2001)

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“Sanity is a madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled.”–George Santayana, Interpretations of Poetry and Religion

DIRECTED BY: Richard Linklater

FEATURING: Wiley Wiggins, ,

PLOT:  An unnamed young man appears to be drifting from dream to dream, each animated in a different style. His dreams involve him talking to various college professors who explain their theories on existentialism, artificial intelligence and free will, as well as more typical dreamlike experiences such as floating away and taking a ride in a boat-car. About halfway through the film it slowly dawns on the dreamer that he is dreaming, and he begins to ask the characters he meets for help waking up.

Still from Waking Life (2001)

BACKGROUND:

  • The film was shot on mini-DV video over a period of six weeks. Each frame was then painstakingly hand-drawn by a team of animators using computer software specifically adapted for this film (a 21st century update of the process known as Rotoscoping).
  • Each minute of film took an average of 250 hours to create.
  • Featured actor Wiley Wiggins also worked as one of the animators.
  • The monologues on existentialism and free will were delivered by Robert C. Solomon and David Sosa, respectively, two philosophy professors from the University of Texas.
  • Ethan Hawke and Julie Delphy play the same characters in their short scene as they did in Linklater’s earlier film, Before Sunrise.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: In a film where thirty different animators each put their own distinctive stamp on the characters, it wouldn’t be at all surprising if thirty different people came up with thirty different answers to the question, “what was your favorite image in Waking Life?” We’ll suggest that final shot of the dreamer floating into the heavens is the obvious take-home image to bring to mind when you remember the movie, however.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Though Waking Life is a string of vignettes of varying levels of oddness, it’s the animation—which shifts from style to style, with the only constant being the fact that the backgrounds continually shift and waver in a state of eternal flux—that keeps it weird. The concept—that the entire film is a dream from which the unnamed protagonist can’t seem to awake—promises an exemplary level of surreality. In fact, many of the segments are, on their face, completely ordinary: cogent explanations of sometimes difficult, sometimes speculative philosophical concepts. The fact that these heady but decidedly rational ideas are explored in the context of the supposedly irrational world of dreams, might, in itself, be considered just a little bit weird.

Original trailer for Waking Life

COMMENTS: There are at least two ways to conclude Waking Life is an unconditional Continue reading 45. WAKING LIFE (2001) →