Inspired by a brief obituary in the newspaper, this animation tells the tale of severely flawed family that grows ever more dysfunctional with the passing of time.
CONTENT WARNING: Stain contains disturbing content including animated violence.
Tag Archives: Dysfunctional family
113. CAREFUL (1992)
“The pandemonium of everyone, everywhere suddenly declaring all at once ‘and I too was molested by my father, or my mother; I too have recovered memories which have basically obliterated my chances of any kind of comfortable adult sexuality’—it seemed at that moment almost unthinkable to slant a movie—even going back into the German romantic past when incest was almost a common theme—to slant it comically and yet still somehow catch the feverish horror of incest in the net… It was only when the idea of the Alpine world, where extreme caution was required for all behavior, where there was a kind of silencer on everyone’s libido and behavior, when that was factored in, then I could see the green light in Guy’s eyes. Once he had the world ‘careful’ it was there all at once.”–George Toles describing genesis of Careful in the documentary Guy Maddin: Waiting for Twilight
DIRECTED BY: Guy Maddin
FEATURING: Kyle McCulloch, Gosia Dobrowolska, Sarah Neville, Brent Neale
PLOT: Villagers of the Alpine town of Tolzbad believe that avalanches will bury them if they are not meticulously careful to keep their voices low and their movements measured. The film follows the adventures of a family of a widowed mother and her three sons: Johann, who is engaged to be married; Grigorss, who is training to be a butler; and Franz, a mute who never leaves his chair in the attic. Presaged by the appearance of the blind ghost of the father, the family’s repressed emotions eventually erupt into suicide, duels, and even the dreaded avalanche.
BACKGROUND:
- This was Guy Maddin’s third film, and his first fully in color (Archangel featured a few tinted scenes). The chromatic process used in the film mimics the so-called “two-strip” Technicolor which was used before 1932.
- The setting of Careful was inspired by “mountain movies,” a 1920s subgenre popular in the German national cinema, although Maddin admits in the DVD commentary that he had not actually seen any mountain movies when he made the film.
- Long-time Maddin screenwriting collaborator George Toles appears in Careful as a corpse in drag.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: I am tempted by the vision of the mountain mineworkers—women stripped down to their underwear, wielding pickaxes while wearing candle-bearing diapers on their heads—but the film’s most significant image is Johann gazing manically at his mother sleeping under her goat’s-head headboard while spreading the limbs of his massive garden shears.
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: If movies themselves could dream, their dreams would look like Guy Maddin movies: sludgy jumbles of styles, moods, and melodramatic preoccupations, composed of fragmented images made up from bits of misplaced, distressed celluloid. Like Maddin’s other movies, Careful keeps us at two removes from reality: it displaces us once by its narrative dislogic, and then a second time by its archaic stylization. In Careful the technique is particularly appropriate, since the subject matter—repressed incestuous desire—demands to be buried under layers of mystery.
Original trailer for Careful
COMMENTS: Careful begins with what amounts to a pre-Code Public Service Announcement, Continue reading 113. CAREFUL (1992)
CAPSULE: CATERPILLAR (2010)
AKA Kyatapirâ
DIRECTED BY: Kôji Wakamatsu
FEATURING: Shinobu Terajima, Keigo Kasuya
PLOT: Lieutenant Kurokawa loses all four limbs and is rendered deaf, dumb and disfigured during the Japanese invasion of China on the eve of World War II; when the Emperor declares him a “Living War God,” his wife Shigeko is ordered to care for the living torso, including fulfilling all her usual wifely duties.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Despite its perverse premise and its superficial similarities to the Certified Weird Johnny Got His Gun, Caterpillar isn’t that weird; instead, it’s an intense domestic drama about duty.
COMMENTS: Lieutenant Kurokawa is a monster. Scarred by the war, unable to hear or to speak (with great difficulty, he can sometimes painfully squeeze out a single syllable), he’s essentially a torso, an esophagus and a fully-functional phallus. Flashbacks reveal that the caterpillar, now revered as a god, was actually a moral monster long before his physique was carved up to match. The duty to care for the god-monster falls upon long-suffering partner Shigeko, who must feed him, wipe him, and cater to his suddenly insatiable sexual needs. For the wife, the mangled Lieutenant combines the worst aspects of an infant and a spouse—completely dependent, demanding, and incoherent, but with no compensatory cuteness or tenderness. She lives alone with him in a one-room house of horrors. Yet, perversely, this disaster delivers an unexpected upside for the poor farm wife. She gains social standing in the village as the caretaker for a god. She is sure to wheel him out in his cart daily to shore up the morale of the rapidly depopulating village as all available able-bodied men are shipped to the front to help failing war effort (even as the daily radio broadcasts detail Japan’s magnificent martial victories). On the home front, Shigeko also eventually learns to enjoy the petty power she has to deny the god a little bit of rice or sex, becoming herself a mini-dictator of an empire consisting of one subject on a straw mat. Caterpillar starts slowly but draws you in to the compellingly claustrophobic dynamic between these two unlikely mates yoked together by fate and obligation. Shinobu Terajima’s performance as the wife is brave and sympathetic (she won many awards, including the Silver Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival), but Keigo Kasuya’s turn as the caterpillar is even more crucial to the film’s success. His ability to convey mute fury and desperation with just his eyes, stutters and howls humanizes his role as a symbol of national and domestic fascism. The film never becomes truly exploitative, but there is plenty of caterpillar/human sex, in multiple positions, to titillate the curious. The cinematography is mostly cast in a drab browns that are effective at evoking a backwater rural lifestyle but aren’t particularly pleasing to look at. The budget is obviously tiny: for events outside of the hut and the village, the movie mainly relies on archival footage, along with one war crime recreation with distracting CG flames superimposed over the scene. But the inherent horrific drama and Wakamatsu’s insistent indictment of unthinking duty overcome the cheapness, and Caterillar metamorphoses into an anti-authority parable worth paying attention to.
Like many Japanese directors, Kôji Wakamatsu began his career in the trenches making “pink” films before graduating to more serious features. His filmography contains some titles he’d probably prefer we forgot: movies with names like The Embryo Hunts in Secret, Diary Story of a Japanese Rapist, and Violated Angels. In the 1970s Wakamatsu began slipping more politics into his exploitation films, culminating in United Red Army (2008), an entirely serious drama about the collapse of the Japanese radical movement in the 1970s, and in this film. Caterpillar was adapted from a 1929 short story by Edogawa Rampo that was originally banned as perverse and unpatriotic.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
CAPSULE: THE BABY (1973)
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DIRECTED BY: Ted Post
FEATURING: Ruth Roman, Anjanette Comer, Marianna Hill, Suzanne Zenor, David Mooney [as David Manzy]
PLOT: A social worker becomes obsessed with a case involving a family with an adult son with the intellect of a one-year old, who sleeps in a crib and wears a diaper.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: The Baby‘s infantilism premise, which is handled with an almost disconcerting matter-of-factness, is outlandish, but the film is fairly conventional in its execution.
COMMENTS: Although it has a minor cult following, for the most part The Baby is a fairly ordinary thriller with low production values. Director Post had previously worked extensively in television, and his direction here shows it: it’s efficient, competent, but unexciting. But the colorful material overcomes the pedestrian direction, and you can see why this one stuck in people’s memory: the film “stars” an actor in his twenties who sucks his thumb and sleeps in a crib, and no one in the movie seems to think this is the slightest bit odd. His teenage babysitter even changes his adult-sized diapers without a second thought. That The Baby is also filled with hints (and often more) of psychosexual perversity—infantilism, sadism, pathological possessiveness—doesn’t hurt its memorability quotient a bit. And despite the movie’s made for TV feel, there are a couple of things that it does very well. The acting is uneven, but Ruth Roman brings verve to her role as the bitter old matron who’s willing to do anything to keep her Baby. She channels Joan Crawford’s looks, Suzanne Pleshette’s voice, and Shelly Winters’ orneriness; by the end, she’s become a Ma Barker-style family queenpin, masterminding plots and directing her two oversexed girls on kidnapping and rescue missions. (Perhaps coincidentally, and perhaps not, the family’s “two sexually predatory sisters and a nonverbal idiot brother” sibling structure replicates the even weirder clan from Jack Hill’s Spider Baby [1968]). Roman provides so much bitchy fun that you wish she’d thrown all restraint out the window and gone into full bore Mommie Dearest histrionics (if she had, the film really would be the undisputed camp classic it claims to be). The downside of Roman’s charisma is that she sets off the soap opera-level talents of the pretty but vapid actresses hired to play against her. Speaking of bad acting, though, nothing beats David Manzy’s head-lolling, mouth-breathing performance as Baby. His attempts at infantile mewling and babbling are embarrassing. Maybe that’s why (some viewers report) in earlier television screenings of the film, Manzy’s voice was overdubbed with the cries of a real baby! It’s hard to say Manzy’s performance is bad—we don’t really have any other adult infant characters like Baby to compare it against, and maybe this is exactly how a twenty-year old with the brain of a one-year old would act—but it is ridiculous-looking. Besides Roman’s performance, the other thing that stands out about The Baby is the twist ending. For most of its running time, the movie does the minimum necessary to keep you interested. There will be long sequences of the social worker visiting Baby, lightly fencing with Roman and her daughters over the best interests of the child, and just when you start checking your watch and wondering whether this is all the movie’s got, bam—Baby will do something wrong and need to be punished, providing another kinky plot development that gives the film life again for a few more minutes. The twist ending operates in the same way, coming after the movie has taken an unexpected but unsuspenseful detour into slasher movie territory for the climax, with characters being picked off one by one in a too-dark house. Then, just as you’re about to yawn and put The Baby to bed, there’s a pleasantly perverse little jolt at the end that wakes you up and makes you look at the film with new eyes.
Severin Films re-released The Baby in 2011 in a widescreen version remastered from the original negative. The movie had previously been available on DVD in a couple of inferior incarnations, one from Image Entertainment and in a no-frills full screen version from the now-defunct Geneon, a company specializing in anime. Severin’s release adds only a few extras—the original trailer and telephone interviews with director Post and “star” Mooney—but it’s the best presentation the film’s fans are likely to see for an almost 40-year old camp thriller.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
(This movie was nominated for review by our own Eric Gabbard,who called it “weird but well constructed.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)
CAPSULE: THE QUIET (2005)
DIRECTED BY: Jamie Babbit
FEATURING: Elisha Cuthbert, Camilla Belle, Edie Falco, Martin Donovan, Katy Mixon
PLOT: A deaf girl becomes ensnared in her adoptive family’s amoral dysfunctions.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: The Quiet is an artfully produced, comparatively non-formulaic independent film, but it’s not a dramatic enough departure from the thriller genre to constitute a truly weird viewing experience.
COMMENTS: Strong sexual themes ground this strange tale of a family slowly going insane. After her father’s untimely death, deaf-mute teenager Dot (Belle) is taken in by her godparents (Donovan, Falco) who from outward appearances have a conventional, affluently idyllic suburban life along with their cheerleader daughter Nina (Cuthbert). Dot’s transition is derailed by increasingly disturbing conflicts and revelations. Her new family has dark secrets.
A sick, twisted dysfunctionality plagues the household. Trapped between an opiate addict mother, licentious father, homicidal sister, and perverted new beau, Dot struggles to keep her perspective. Unable to readily communicate, and with no outside party to turn to, Dot is at a disadvantage when her demented new family draws her into a sordid web of immorality and charade. The line between spider and fly becomes blurred, however, when it turns out that Dot harbors her own eerie enigma.
The Quiet rips the facade from blissful, suburban tranquility in the tradition of movies such as American Beauty and The Safety Of Objects. Less satirical than the former and not as convoluted as the later, The Quiet is a suspenseful drama with an hypnotic narrative tone reminiscent of One Day Like Rain and Make-Out with Violence.
The Quiet is a well produced film with a perverse story. It does not set out to be a black comedy, or a sophisticated social indictment of suburbia, although it contains some elements of both. Neither is it a movie with a message or mere exploitation. The Quiet is a simple, racy, psychological thriller. With some hauntingly memorable dialogue, it is arty yet lucid, brooding and visually dark. While more twists and turns would have provided greater depth, it is structurally complete enough to be worthwhile for patrons seeking a departure from blockbusters, crowd-pleasers, and annoying Lifetime Network potboilers.
Feminist director Jamie Babbit’s other films include But I’m A Cheerleader and Itty Bitty Titty Comittee. Viewers will recognize Cuthbert from the sensational The Girl Next Door.
The Quiet trailer