Translucent organ bags undulate as a brass band plays backwards.
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Tag Archives: Experimental
SATURDAY SHORT: EAGER (2015)
Shapeshifting alien clay figures perform a dance and/or ritual, later joined by forest flowers.
APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: HAPPY END (1967)
Šťastný konec
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DIRECTED BY: Oldrich Lipský
FEATURING: Vladimír Menšík, Jaroslava Obermaierová, Josef Abrhám
PLOT: Chronicling the life of one Bedřich Frydrych (Menšík), a butcher and wife-murderer, from birth to death; in this cas, everything is reversed: his “birth” starts at his execution and his “happy end” comes at infancy.
WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: While it’s all light and very funny, deeper and darker meanings lurk under the surface; the hero found guilty and sentenced to life—literally, in this case.
COMMENTS: “You lie down in the bed you make.” This famous epigram opens the film after the credits, all superimposed over the opening image, a close-up of our lead character, seemingly sleeping. Then a pair of hands grasps the head and what we thought was a sleeping man turns out to be a decapitated head, fresh from the guillotine. But far from being the end of the story, this turns out to be the beginning. Frydrych narrates, in the fashion of David Copperfield, his “birth,” as his head is joined to his body, now intact as the guillotine blade moves up, and he is welcomed into the world.
The central gimmick of Happy End—a narrative where the action is reversed—is more commonplace to audiences now than at the time of its production. We’ve seen works such as Christopher Nolan‘s Memento and Tenet, Harold Pinter’s “Betrayal,” Gaspar Noé‘s Irréversible, and Martin Amis’ novel “Time’s Arrow,” to name a few. But just because a gimmick is familiar doesn’t guarantee that it’s executed skillfully.
Happy End benefits from several assets: a short running time (barely over 70 minutes); a clever script by Lipsky and his collaborator Miloš Macourek, and a talented pool of actors, especially Vladimír Menšík in a rare leading role 1, and he’s perfect as a murderer who is also a sort of low-rent Candide navigating his way through life.
Considered conventionally, the story is a melodrama set in the early 1900s telling the sordid tale of Bedřich Frydrych meeting young Julia (Obermaierová), whom he’ll eventually marry and eventually murder, along with her adulterous lover, Jenick (Abrhám), leading to his execution. But in this iteration, with things reversed, Frydrych is birthed and “schooled,” whereupon he enters society and is provided with a wife whom he assembles from parts stashed in a suitcase. Marital life starts out rocky when an ambulance deposits Jenick on the street, whereupon he flies up to the apartment through the window (leading to Frydrych’s nickname for him, “Mr. Birdy”). From that point on, it’s a hard life as Frydrych attempts to rid himself of Julia and Jenick to get to his own happy end.
It’s a neat trick, but even more impressive when considering that the narrative works in either direction; as told here, Happy End subverts what would be a tale of tragedy into a tale of triumph. Frydrych is still a murderer, of sorts. His “final” meeting with Jenick is taking him into the water and leaving him there, thereby getting him out of his and Julia’s lives. In conventional time, this is their first meeting; Frydrych saves him from drowning, and thereafter Jenick develops an interest in Julia. Similarly, Frydrych and Julia’s ‘first’ meeting turns into an act of creation, rather than the grisly destructive dismemberment it would normally be. Even the wordplay is subverted, as exchanges take on different meanings: “Only those who repent can enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” “That would take a very long time…”; “You’ll meet your Lord soon.” “That’s disgusting!”
The UK label Second Run premiered Happy End as an all-region Blu-ray in 2024, after its 4K restoration from the Czech National Film Archive. Along with a booklet essay by film researcher Jonathan Owen, the release includes a 30 minute video essay by film critic Cerise Howard and an episode of The Projection Booth Podcast with Mike White, Kat Ellinger and Ben Buckingham serves as commentary.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
- Menšík is a recurring face in Czech cinema of the 1960s, a Czech “that guy” character actor glimpsed in The Cassandra Cat, The Cremator, and Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up And Scald Myself With Tea, among others. ↩︎
APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: NITWIT (2002)
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Nitwit is currently available to watch for free on YouTube.
DIRECTED BY: Xan Price
FEATURING: Agnes Ausborn, Daniel Brantley, Wilder Selzer, Philly Abe
PLOT: A couple licks pictures of horses; the woman grows an unusually large blue proboscis. A wig screams and moans, while a baby cries out for a mommy; a man digs up a furry monster named Tongue and agrees to be its mommy and buy it a red dress. Microscopic creatures scheme to implant a baby in the woman so that the ensuing explosive birth will produce an anus; rollicking games of “Hot Damn” and “Damn Slow” are played.
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: Nitwit checks all the boxes. There are monsters and manipulative babies. The characters are cartoonish and never make any choice you expect. The acting is wildly over-the-top. The filming is amateurish but confident. And the authorial voice is all there on the screen, neither judgmental nor protective. Nitwit is bracingly odd and unashamed. It plays by no rules, and doesn’t even pretend to make sense.
COMMENTS: Having spent a couple years working my way through the 366 Weird Movies Reader Queue, I’ve been impressed with the perceptiveness of our contributors; even when I didn’t find a movie to be all that weird, I’ve always understood where the suggestion came from, the glimmer of surprise and wonderment that undergirded the suggestion. But when it comes to Nitwit, my immediate reaction was an unwavering, “Oh, yeah, this is the stuff.” The opening vignette, in which a boy and a girl (they are adults chronologically, but emotionally they are definitely children) become so enraptured by a visual encyclopedia of horses that they attempt to taste the pictures, followed by chomping on a piece of steel wool, is but a mere amuse bouche for the full menu of eye-widening surprise this film inspires. There’s something refreshing about a movie that is unmistakably, indisputably weird, and Nitwit is cool, invigorating plunge.
Nitwit plays like a sketch film. There are only a handful of characters, who shift from high to low status as needed, and their stories interweave without ever really connecting. Sometimes these sketches take the form of little dramas, like the way the fresh-faced Minoltuh and her bewigged mama Womma trade off taking care of each other, the sickly one becoming childish and helpless while the healthier of the pair criticizes the patient for being difficult. (When it’s Minoltuh’s turn to be the patient, she grows an enormous azure nose that resembles nothing less than a coiled duct pipe. They do finally manage to cut the appendage off, but when Womma demands to know why the enormous blue schnozz is still in the house, Minoltuh lamely replies, “I was just keeping it, you know… for the memories.”) Other times, the characters engage in random silliness, such as the game Minoltuh and Hootus play in which they climb over each other while lasciviously-but-asexually chanting “hot damn!” to each other. In one of my favorite absurd moments, Hootus meets up with a dog, whom the man says he would love to see dig a hole. Smash cut to both of them, the man and the dog, gleefully pawing at the dirt like the mindless animals they are.
There are a couple threads that flirt with plot, including Hootus’ encounter with a Davy Crockett cap with dangling tentacles. He brings the strange spider-like creature to his bomb-shelter hovel and nails it to the wall, at which point the beast makes a simple request: it will be the man’s mommy if the man will be its mommy. In the most reasonable statement anyone in this film makes, the man admits that he doesn’t know very much about being a mommy, but the furry thing is undeterred. “Just mash your lips together and spit.” The bargain is made, with the caveat that he can’t call the monster “mommy,” but must instead use its given name, “Tongue.” This is one of the most fully articulated relationships in the entire movie, and it serves as a stark counterpoint to the glowing parasites who are conspiring to put a baby in Minoltuh’s belly in order to force an explosion that will create the anus she currently lacks. Their intent seesaws between charity and cruelty, and it’s only on that emotional spectrum that a character desperately gasping “I’m farting” could be a poignant moment.
Nitwit is an amateurish production, shot on harsh video with novice actors gamely doing every crazy thing Price asks of them in locations like abandoned alleys, empty fields, and somebody’s apartment. But there’s nothing that a gaudier, more professional approach would bring to the material that’s not already here. The film is collected insanity, stuck together like pinned butterflies on display, and the raw presentation only intensifies the surprise of the thing. Nitwit isn’t smart, but it’s content to be exactly what it is, and that’s not dumb.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
(This movie was nominated for review by K Lovelady. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)
SATURDAY SHORT: ODD (2024)
The many imaginary forms of cacti.