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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: GANDU (2010)

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AKA The Loser

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DIRECTED BY: Qaushiq Mukherjee

FEATURING: Anubrata Basu, Joyraj Bhattacharjee, Kamalika Banerjee, Silajit Majumder, Rii Sen

PLOT: A young man in the slums of Kolkata ekes out a mindless existence, dreaming of getting out and becoming a famous rapper.

Still from gandu (2010)

COMMENTS: “Gandu” doesn’t translate literally as “loser.” That’s a polite interpretation for the benefit of weak-hearted English speakers. The most common reading is “asshole.” (The subtitles default to that term, although some onscreen interviewees say even worse.) So the fact that our hero is not only called Gandu but willingly responds to the slur tells us a lot about him. He’s not just bad; he’s happy to make you think he is.

Gandu’s world is one of dreary hopelessness. His mother spends the day in thrall to her boyfriend, the owner of the local internet café where sad people try to reach their loved ones over terrible connections. The young man whiles away the day by stealing from his mother’s beau while the couple is having sex (he literally crawls into the bedroom to lift the cash) and heads out into the streets to find no prospects for employment or romance, placing bets in a numbers racket that is never going to come through and dreaming of becoming a rap star. We get peeks at Gandu’s rap game, and while he throws down some decent verses, the biggest thing he brings to the table is anger.

The story gets some necessary development when Gandu is nearly run down by a rickshaw. While his instinct is to get mad, he changes his tune when he meets the driver, a friendly fellow curiously named Ricksha who idolizes Bruce Lee, to the point of adopting the legendary star’s hairstyle and building a shrine to him. Ricksha isn’t going any further in life than Gandu is, but he’s more satisfied with his lot, and the two make an appealing pair: Gandu sullenly bemoans his fate, and Ricksha encourages his new pal to at least try for his own level of achievement.

Gandu goes on like this for a while, with the two men living life in a loop, while documentary interviews pop in to express the wider world’s general contempt for their sort. However, in the third act, the film takes a big swing, demolishing the fourth wall to make a point about exactly these kinds of stories. Gandu, having been caught stealing and booted out of his home, contemplates ending it all. Ricksha has an alternate plan: get high on the best stuff there is, the drugs of the gods. Clearly, these do the job, because shortly after dosing, Gandu learns that there is a filmmaker named Quashiq Mukherjee (“Q”) who is making a movie about him. Q in fact shows up, camera already filming, and then the dominoes come a-tumbling. Gandu’s lottery tickets finally win, and win big. A record deal quickly falls into place. The hand-scrawled credits that opened the film are replaced with new, slick, professionally designed titles. Most notably, this loser who has been reduced to self-pleasuring while watching porn finds himself in the company of a pink-haired prostitute who takes his virginity, an occasion so momentous that the film switches to color to capture the event in all its unsimulated splendor.

All the while, Q takes shots at the Indian film industry. At the outset, he jettisons the raucous colors, fantastical storylines, and elaborate musical numbers in favor of stark monochrome, brutal realism, and hardcore rap. Then, twisting the knife further, he produces a deus ex machina to give Gandu the obligatory happy ending, but he does so in the most anti-Bollywood way possible: the rap numbers are professionally produced. The romance is pornographic sex. The hero who saves the day is… the director himself. An audience member has the choice of indulging in this absurd grotesque fantasia or accepting the likely possibility that we’re watching Gandu’s last magnificent dream before succumbing to the drugs in his system. Either way, Q refuses to play by the Indian film world’s rules.

Even if you err on the side of the “rap conquers all” interpretation, Gandu is a grim watch. For all of Q’s inventive storytelling, no one in the movie has any real agency or plays an active role in their own lives (as may be true for many of the residents of Kolkata’s slums). For all the rejection of the illusions of the silver screen, the alternative is aimless and hopeless. Gandu is insightful and daring, but in the end, it doesn’t really go anywhere. You can throw magic at him, but the hero never changes. He’s just an asshole.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…hte film begins in an almost realist style… until they eventually descend into hard drug abuse, at which point the film takes an extremely surreal, post modern tangent.  A mess from start to finish, [Gandu] nevertheless guarantees a unique ride.” – Daniel Green, Cinevue

(This movie was nominated for review by… um… by Gandu. Hmm. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)      

Gandu

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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: POLA X (1999)

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DIRECTED BY: Leos Carax

FEATURING: Guillaume Depardieu, Katerina Golubeva, , Delphine Chuillot

PLOT: Pierre’s happy-go-lucky existence is shattered when he meets a young woman claiming to be his lost sister; suddenly disenchanted with his life, he abandons his mother, his fiancée, and his successful literary formula in search of a higher truth.

Still from pola X (1999)

COMMENTS: Herman Melville needed a hit. He’d received a critical drubbing for his last book, a light tome about the whaling industry, so to improve his fortunes, he poured his effort into a potboiler with Gothic overtones. Did it work? Not only did Pierre, or The Ambiguities not reverse his fortunes, but the negative response went beyond the work and spilled over to the author himself, with the New York Day Book headlining its review, “HERMAN MELVILLE CRAZY”.

Are there parallels with Leos Carax, who waited eight years following the critical and box office failure of The Lovers on the Bridge to bring forth this adaptation of Pierre? One hates to espouse such a simplistic theory of armchair psychoanalysis, but the shoe sure does fit. Just as Melville poured his wounded heart into his tale, Carax goes all in on every bit of melodrama. He faithfully adapts all aspects of the book, including its  transgressive and destructive relationships. For what it’s worth, the critics all called Carax crazy, as well.

Although he’d be the last to admit it, Pierre is already pretty messed up at the start of Pola X. He speaks in romantic platitudes to Lucie, his fiancée whom he’s cheats upon regularly. (Carax nicely frames one such conversation atop a hillside with a dramatic vista, his camera swooping like the beginning of The Sound of Music.) He has an unusually close relationship with his mother Marie, in whose house he still lives, and who has no qualms about bathing in front of her son. Their unity seems to be a reaction to something in his late father’s past; we don’t know exactly what it is, but it’s bad enough that newsstands are selling books about the old man’s precipitous fall. His cousin Thibault has given himself over completely to the pursuit of money. And there’s his budding career as an anonymous novelist, a vocation that permits him to act as the voice of his generation without any pressure to represent it. Clearly, Pierre is a man of the utmost privilege, the kind you fully expect to see brought low by circumstance.

So part of what makes his fall from grace so surprising is that it is almost entirely self-generated, inspired by his discovery of Isabella, a homeless immigrant who professes to be Pierre’s sister by virtue of one of his father’s dalliances. This dovetails with dreams Pierre has been having about a woman who matches Isabella to a tee, and the discovery completely unmoors him and everyone around him. He cuts off all connection to his past life, he takes up with Isabella and a pair of fellow struggling immigrants (and is shocked when hotels turn them away, cab drivers insult them, and Thibault denies any connection to him), and he declares that everything he has ever written has been fraudulent and now he will write the book that truly blows it all wide open.

Carax has a lot of fun pushing his characters to their limits. Pierre undergoes a full transformation, as the twentysomething socialite takes to wielding a cane and wearing a blanket like a Russian greatcoat, as though he had suddenly become a tubercular artist from a 19th century opera. He adopts a fully disgusted assessment of the human race, telling a young girl that all people stink (a viewpoint that recoils upon her in a spectacularly bad way). Pierre and his troupe don’t merely find themselves on the streets; they wind up at the warehouse headquarters of a spectacular industrial music collective (playing the brilliantly realized score by avant-garde rock legend Scott Walker) that turns out to be a terrorist cell. Lucie doesn’t merely waste away in misery at having been ditched by Pierre, but actually shows up at his door, clinging to him and maintaining a blissful ignorance about his connection with Isabella. And Marie doesn’t merely pine for her wayward son, but roams the countryside on his motorcycle until it becomes the agent of her destruction (in a morbidly funny manner).

And then there’s what he does to Isabella, as they make manifest their bond, explicitly. (Golubeva used a body double for the most graphic moments; Depardieu did not.) It’s almost as though Carax wanted to eliminate any doubt as to whether they consummate their incestuous relationship by presenting it in pornographic detail. But he gets to have his cake and eat it too (not a euphemism), because the scene isn’t romantic in any context. The sex is hungry rather than loving, desperate rather than passionate. Whatever Pierre is trying to find in his life, he pays no heed to any obstacles, physical or moral, that stand in his way. Of course, in doing so, he brings the girl down with him. There’s a reason that he later dreams of the two of them consumed by a river of blood.

Pola X ends up being a peculiar sort of ironic contradiction. A protagonist who has it all but finds a lie at the heart of his happiness, and the ensuing search for truth that brings only pain to himself and those around him. Intriguingly, both of Pierre’s creators found a different way out of their dark places. Melville eventually turned away from prose, devoting himself to poetry. Carax, meanwhile, only got weirder.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Not all of Pola X is fully comprehensible… But the images—oh, they capture the mood of this piece and the things that are really important.”–Marjorie Baumgarten, Austin Chronicle (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by Motyka. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Pola X [DVD]

Pola X [DVD]
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Capsules

CAPSULE: ANATOMY OF HELL (2004)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Amira Casar, Rocco Siffredi, voice of Catherine Breillat

PLOT: A woman pays a gay man to observe her intimate moments for four nights.

Still from Anatomy of Hell (2004)

COMMENTS: Sartre said Hell is other people. Catherine Breillat says Hell is other people’s bodies; or, more specifically, other genders’ bodies; or, when you get right down to it, women’s bodies.

A Woman goes to a gay disco and slits her wrists in the bathroom. She’s rescued by a gay Man, who takes her to a clinic to be stitched up. The Woman proposes to pay him to “watch her when she’s unwatchable.” He goes to her house for four nights, pours himself a few fingers of Jack Daniels to help him make it through the night, and they talk while she lies naked and exposed. “They fragility of female flesh inspires disgust or brutality,” he muses. “The veils [men] adorn us with anticipate our shrouds,” the Woman proclaims. (The conversation is not intended to be naturalistic; it’s a staged Platonic dialogue with a poetic overlay). While never verbally expressing anything but disgust for the Woman, the Man is drawn to experiment intimately with her body (including scenes involving garden tools, and worse). Then the arrangement ends. He is moved, and, in what may be a fantasy sequence, commits an act of brutality. That’s it; it’s partially successful conversion therapy.

Siffredi, a pornographic actor best known for his recurring “Buttman” character, turns out to be a surprisingly capable actor—although his moods are restricted to disgust and melancholy, both simmering. Casar is beautiful as she lounges around naked, but her role could be played by almost any beautiful nude actress. Although she shows more range than Siffredi, as any actress might, she has trouble putting across dialogue like “in intercourse, the act isn’t what matters, but its meaning.” Casar’s body double is anatomically correct. Breillat herself dubs the thoughts for both parties.  And that’s it for the acting—which is a problem, in what’s basically a character-driven two-hander (explicit though it is, it’s so anti-erotic that could never make the grade as a one-hander).

On release, Anatomy of Hell received a lot of understandable criticism for its overly-simplistic brand of radical gender philosophy. Taken literally, the film argues (explicitly and didactically, despite the poetic trappings) that men are disgusted by women’s bodies and instinctively long to damage them—and that this misogyny is even more pronounced in gay men. That’s not a position I would want to defend in a Ph.D. thesis. But while that literal reading is both ridiculous and offensive, there is another layer to the film that is hopeful. Despite his disgust at The Woman’s body, The Man is eventually seduced by it. And after the job is done, he finds himself changed by the experience: “I experienced total intimacy with her. And I don’t even know her name.” Radical posturing aside, Anatomy of Hell at least partly celebrates the alchemy of shared human bodies: that point when carnal disgust is overcome and physical commingling becomes a spiritual experience. Look past words to the magic of bodies, this wordy picture whispers. Though mercifully short, Anatomy of Hell is a hard watch, composed of dull, pseudo-profound dialogues broken by shock sequences designed to reinforce its putative thesis that female bodies are disgusting. It’s not recommended, but—if you can bypass the untenable literal reading its characters propose—this erotic experiment is more thought-provoking than its detractors suggest.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“But sometimes [Breillat] is just plain goofy, as in ‘Anatomy of Hell,’ which plays like porn dubbed by bitter deconstructionist theoreticians.”–Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by Motyka, who asked for more Breillat reviews and stated that Anatomy of Hell was “especially worth looking at, because of its rejection of a traditional plot.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Capsules

CAPSULE: THE IDIOTS (1998)

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Idioterne; AKA Dogma2: The Idiots

Recommended

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , Jens Albinus, Anne Louise Hassing

PLOT: A Danish commune finds meaning and community by acting like “idiots” (i.e., pretending to be mentally disabled), especially in public).

Still from The Idiots (1998)

COMMENTS: As Karen dines alone at a restaurant, she observes a caretaker attempting to feed two adult males who keep wandering over to disturb the other diners, insistently saying “hi” and grabbing the napkins off the table. Unperturbed when Stoffer, one of these “idiots,” grabs her hand, she follows the group outside, and even joins them in the taxicab when Stoffer refuses to release his grip. She is intrigued to discover the performance was all a sham, and Stoffer is actually the intelligent leader of a small, cult-like commune who stage these performances in restaurants, factory tours, swimming pools, office board meetings, and the like.

Far from being offended, Karen is intrigued enough to join the group. The rest of the movie then follows their antics as individual members seek to unleash their “inner idiot” by “spazzing,” mostly in public, but also among themselves. Although the movie establishes dynamics between the characters, in the end, it’s a bit like watching an unscripted, non-comedic version of Jackass—or, in its grosser moments, like scaled-back versions of the Vienna Actionists’ scat orgy in Sweet Movie. Possible motivations for this behavior are hinted at—shocking the bourgeois, playing a game, returning to a state of innocence, mocking the handicapped, championing abnormality, participating in a ritualistic group therapy—but ultimately, the idiots’ reasons for their idiocy remain as inscrutably individual as their activities are indisputably idiotic.

The movie is only watchable in a geek-show sort of way—up until a brilliantly executed final spazz that suddenly supplies a retroactive emotional heft to the entire exercise. That climax exists in an ambiguous space somewhere between catharsis and comeuppance, and raises the stakes of the questions that have been festering in our minds about these idiots. Is elective idiocy an insincere affectation, an emotional affliction, or a form of transcendence? Like their director, the idiots may be addicted to making people uncomfortable, but there is also a genuine sadness at the core of the exercise—at least, for some of the participants.

The Idiots is a Dogma 95 film; that is to say, it (aspirationally) follows the rules laid out in the Dogme 95 manifesto intended to revitalize cinema by de-emphasizing production values and returning to the roots of drama. Dogma films were intended to have no non-diegetic music (a rule von Trier violates in the very first scene), to be shot entirely on location, to use only natural light and handheld cameras, etc.: essentially, every story was to be filmed as if it was being captured by a television news crew. Despite co-founding the short-lived movement with Thomas Vinterberg, The Idiots was von Trier’s only Dogma movie. His next film, Dancer in the Dark, was a magical realist musical that was almost as far away from the Dogma credo as imaginable, while still remaining in the limits of the art-house film.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“This director, in other words, is replaying the guerrilla-theater spirit of the ’60s, but with the cleansing psychodramatic mysticism of a digital-age Ingmar Bergman.”–Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by Wormhead. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Capsules

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: SOLVE ET COAGULA (2020)

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Weirdest!

DIRECTED BY: Orryelle Defenestrate-Bascule

FEATURING: Orryelle Defenestrate-Bascule

PLOT: Orpheus’ disembodied head is rediscovered after years of contemplative solitude.

Still from Solve et Coagula (2020)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: An often dazzling combination of text, primal music, stylized vocalization, and surreal imagery, Solve et Coagula defies any conventional standards of cinema.

COMMENTS: A funny thing happened to me as I approached Solve et Coagula. I mentally began my review before even seeing it, planning on flippantly diving into a sea of glib remarks about Europeans, pornography, and art-house. About an hour into my viewing, this urge had morphed into the apologetically dismissive. However, once Orpheus’ head began lecturing a group of followers (and us) about human senses, something changed. My journey to tentative enlightenment only took two hours, but was a handy parallel to Orpheus’ journey. A third journey also took place, on the part of the director.

By any measure, “Defenestrate-Bascule” is a ridiculous name. I can’t believe it’s real, as its approximate meaning is the command, “throw the counter-balance out the window”. Experimental filmmakers are necessarily an eccentric breed, and in his own moniker Orryelle asks us to toss away our calibrated perspective. The request has merit: Solve et Coagula must be viewed unmoored from convention. Some elements are window-dressing (for example, the combination of stop-motion with live action, or the special effects that feel oh-so-very-1990s). What rips his movie from the canvass is the almost palpable energy—with two kinetic climaxes—that emerges from its Homeric narration and stylized repetition.

The first half, preceded by a sexually explicit proem to the goddess Erotica, is told cyclically, with lines expanding upon each other. The sentences are built visually on the screen in the form of the written word, while Orpheus (Orryelle Defenestrate-Bascule) wanders through woodlands, Hades, and a Maenad-infested riverside, speaking the words we see. This section ends with a nebulous cliffhanger: Orpheus’ head, chant-storytelling, floating disembodied along the water. There is some good to be found in this long introduction, but a lack of “punch” and the unwelcome anchoring of obviously real-life camera shots diminish the effect. This was the point that I became “apologetically dismissive.”

Sticking with this guide, however, proved well worth my while. Solve et Coagula is as inspired as it is flawed. Having endured the latter, I was able to soak up the former during the second half. Somehow, a headless Orpheus relating his woe of lacking a body, while demanding of his followers (and us) to use our bodies to make one for him, felt eminently more real somehow. Cinematically, Solve et Coagula hits its stride when it casts the trappings of a narrative framework aside and focuses on the physicality of the human form. In all my years I cannot recall witnessing video as palpably erotic as the long montage of bodies coalescing into one giant body for Orpheus; and the editing for the closing dance is the best job I’ve seen capturing what must have been a truly visceral experience for those filmed. When thinking on my front porch after the screening (a habit of mine), I found my brain bursting with things to talk about–and if that’s not a sign of a worthy work of art, I don’t know what is.

Solve et Coagula can currently be rented on Vimeo (adults only). More information, including details on an upcoming DVD/book release, can be found at the official site.