Tag Archives: Fantasy

Capsules

THE JACQUES RIVETTE COLLECTION

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Included in the set:

Duelle (1976)

Noroit (1976)

Merry-Go-Round (1978/1983)

Still from Duelle (1976)
Scene from “Duelle” (1976)

It’s heartening that lived long enough to witness a renewed interest in his work, and a resurgence in its availability, before his death in early 2016. Part of the group of directors who ushered in the French New Wave (along with Truffaut, , Rohmer, and Chabrol), Rivette made two features, Paris Belongs To Us (1961) and La Religieuse [The Nun] (1967) before changing his working methods. Influenced by an interview with , the events of May 1968, and improvisational theater, this shift towards improvised performance and experimentation resulted in L’amour Fou [Mad Love] (1969) and in pushing the aesthetic further with Out 1 (1970), followed by Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974).

A good portion of his films are available on DVD, although some of those were not the original versions (usually cut by the distributors due to time restraints). Fortunately, that situation is now being rectified by releases such as this one, which concentrates on some of Rivette’s 1970’s output that’s been difficult to view since the films’ initial release.

The films in the collection were the result of Rivette re-teaming with the producer of Out 1, Stephane Tchal Gadjieff, to do four films that were planned to be loosely interconnected. As events played out, only two related films, Duelle and Noroit, were made; a third was started, but production stalled and was abandoned. One more film, Merry-Go-Round, was completed in 1978, but didn’t see a release until 1983.

Duelle and Noroit were shot back-to-back, and as part of the planned four film cycle, the interconnections are very strong. An integral part of both films is the use of live music performed by musicians onscreen, and both involve an element of fantasy. Unlike Rivette’s previous two films, which utilized improvisation from the actors, these were scripted.

Duelle plays as a conglomeration of , influenced by (notably The Seventh Victim) and , with a subtle fantastical element. It starts out as a thriller involving a search for a valuable gemstone, but events turn out to be orchestrated by two opposing supernatural adversaries—the Daughter of the Sun (Bulle Oglier) and the Daughter of the Moon ()—engaged in a battle-by-proxy utilizing mortals as pawns.

Noroit is a somewhat loose adaptation of the Jacobean play “The Revenger’s Tragedy,” cast as a pirate adventure and the major roles gender-flipped towards women. Morag (Geraldine Chaplin) with the help of her accomplice, Erika (Kika Markham), plots and enacts revenge against a group of pirates, led by Giulia (Bernadette Lafont). It also has roots in elements of Duelle, as more preternatural events occur by film’s end.

Merry-Go-Round retains the live-music-performed-onscreen element of the previous two films, but downplays, if not completely eliminates, the fantasy. Two strangers, Ben () and Leo (Maria Schneider) are in Paris to meet a mutual friend—Leo’s sister Elisabeth—who does not show up. They band together to locate her, which leads them all around Paris where they encounter a variety of characters who may have some connection to Leo’s (presumably) dead father and a small fortune of 20 million francs. It sounds straightforward, but there’s also what appear to be disconnected side narratives of Leo and Ben, set on a beach and in a forest, in conflict with one another.

As a whole, this set provides a look at some fascinating, yet flawed films; which, one could argue is part of the charm of Rivette’s work. If your introduction to Rivette was Celine and Julie Go Boating (criminally still not available in the U.S. on disc), and you felt adventurous enough to see what the fuss was over Out 1, then this collection is the logical next step in your Rivette study. If you haven’t seen any of his films, I’d recommend seeing Celine and Julie and Out 1 first before jumping into the Collection.

The Arrow Films limited edition boxset includes both Blu-ray and DVD discs for the films, along with a booklet with essays from Jonathan Rosenbaum, Mary M. Wiles, Brad Stevens and Nick Pinkerton. Extras include Scenes From A Parallel Life, a featurette featuring an archival interview with Rivette about the films; interviews with actresses Bulle Oglier and Hermine Karagheuz; and an interview with Rosenbaum. The UK release also included Out 1 in the set, but as Carlotta Films had the rights for the U.S. release, the US set contains only the three films mentioned.

Canonically Weird (The List)

333. TUVALU (1999)

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“I felt very relieved when I was sixteen to discover cinema. To discover there was a land, a place, I call it an island, from where you could see life, and death. From another perspective, another angle, from many different angles. I think every young person should be interested in that island. It’s a beautiful place.”–Leos Carax

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , Chulpan Khamatova, Terrence Gillespie, Philippe Clay, Catalina Murgea

PLOT: Anton is a lowly, mistreated assistant at a bathhouse run by his blind father; he falls in love with Eva, the daughter of a sea captain. His real estate developer brother wants to tear down the bathhouse, and also seeks the hand of Eva. After a piece of rubble falls from the ceiling and kills Eva’s father while he’s swimming in the pool, an inspector gives the family a few weeks to bring it up to code or face demolition.

Still from Tuvalu (1999)

BACKGROUND:

  • Tuvalu was Veit Helmer’s debut feature after making six shorts.
  • The movie  was a true international production: director Helmer is German, male lead Denis Lavant is French, female lead Chulpan Khamatova is Russian, and (based on his accent) primary antagonist Terrence Gillespie (in his only known performance) is American. The movie was filmed in Bulgaria.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: While there are some great candidates, from the cavernous Turkish bath itself to Eva’s nude swim with her pet goldfish, we’ll go with the two dream sequences. While the rest of the movie is shot monochromatically, the characters dream in tropical color: specifically, in a negative-image palette saturated in pinks and pale pastel blues, with gold trim.

THREE WEIRD THINGS: Blind lifeguard; skinny-dip with goldfish; hat crosswalk

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Stylized to the T’s and set in a bleak world where crumbling Romanesque baths sit in fields of rubble, Tuvalu shows all the right cinematic influences along with the instinctual oddness necessary to be canonized in the halls of weirdness.


Brief clip from Tuvalu

COMMENTS: Tuvalu borrows its style from the weird world of silent Continue reading 333. TUVALU (1999) →

Canonically Weird (The List)

332. SURVIVE STYLE 5+ (2004)

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“What is your function here?”–Hitman, Survive Style 5+

Recommended

DIRECTED BY: Gen Sekiguchi

FEATURING: , Ittoku Kishibe, Vinnie Jones, Kyôko Koizumi, Yoshiyuki Morishita, Jai West, Reika Hashimoto, Yoshiyoshi Arakawa, Hiroshi Abe

PLOT: A man has killed his wife, but she won’t stay dead. In an initially unrelated story, a foul-mouthed, short-tempered English hitman with a translator in tow is expanding his operations into Japan. Their plotlines intersect with those of a middle-class father who has a disaster with a celebrity hypnotist, trio of teenage burglars, and an ad exec whose absurd commercial ideas amuse only herself.

BACKGROUND:

  • This is Gen Sekiguchi’s only feature film. He has also produced two short films and an entry in the 2011 anthology film Quirky Guys and Girls. He comes from an advertising and music video background, where he collaborates with screenwriter Taku Tada. The pair won the advertising award at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival.
  • Survive Style 5+ received little distribution (it garnered zero reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, and has never been released on DVD in North America), but word of mouth on the Internet has made it into an underseen cult hit.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: One character flying away on another, to the tune of “I Will Survive.” (Sure, fans already familiar with the movie may complain that this pick is a spoiler—but the new viewer will have trouble figuring out how things get to this point, right up until the very end.)

THREE WEIRD THINGS: Assassin with translator; pop as a microwave turkey; flying away

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Survive Style 5+ interweaves five stories–variously comic, absurd, supernatural, campy, and/or bizarre–including a series of surreal commercials imagined by one of the many oddball characters. It’s polished and stylish, yet consistently wild and unpredictable; an underground cult film that’s survived years of subpar distribution through enthusiastic word of mouth, and is just waiting to take off into the stratosphere.


Brief clip from Survive Style 5+

COMMENTS: Survive Style 5+‘s most memorable scene may be the Continue reading 332. SURVIVE STYLE 5+ (2004) →

List Candidates

NOVEMBER (2017)

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November has been promoted to the List of the 366 Weirdest Movies ever made. Comments are closed on this review. Please visit the official Certified Weird entry.

Recommended

DIRECTED BY: Rainer Sarnet

FEATURING: Rea Lest, Jörgen Liik

PLOT: Aided by witchcraft, a love triangle unfolds in an Estonian village in the 19th Century.Still from November (2017)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: It’s only February, and November is already our first contender for weirdest movie of 2018. Set in a world where our forefathers’ craziest superstitions are literally true, November weaves a Gothic tapestry of sleepwalking noblewomen, hags, bewitched friars, and dead ancestors who sometimes manifest as chickens. And, of course, kratts that turn into primitive helicopters. You could not have seen that one coming.

COMMENTS: At one point young Hans, listening to magical tales from an unlikely source, proclaims “Unbelievable stories! They’re so enchanting.” There is an overarching plot in November, but it takes a back seat to the enchanting digressions. Set in a 19th century that feels like the depths of the Dark Ages (aside from a few anachronisms like muskets and tobacco), November unspools like a compendium of folk legends. Beginning on November 1, All Souls Day, when the dead join their descendants for a light meal, the story takes us on a tour of peasant beliefs and traditions, with a few mini-tales recounted inside of the main plot: stories of mysterious women seeking passage across the river, of effete lovers mooning in a gondola. The dreamlike monochrome cinematography and a doom-laden musical score nurtures the magical atmosphere, while the griminess of the characters’ hygiene and the baseness of their morals adds a contrasting level of realism that makes this alternate Estonia strangely believable.

The most exotic feature of this magical realist landscape are the kratts, automatons made from whatever farm implements (or, as we see later, other materials) the peasants have lying around, powered by souls that must be purchased from the Devil. Before the opening credits we meet a three-legged monster cobbled together out of broomsticks, metal rods, an axe, a sickle, and a skull; it’s capable of airlifting a cow, and develops a nasty temper when it’s not assigned enough work. The kratts may be the most uniquely Estonian element here, but folkloric magic is an everyday part of these character’s lives: diabolic meetings at midnight crossroads, lupine transformations on the full moon, disgustingly compiled love potions, and a bizarre scheme to trick the plague into skipping over the village all play parts in the story. Persistent pagan beliefs dominate Christian ones, leading to absurdly humorous situations. The villagers see Jesus as a powerful deity who can be gamed for their personal gain, and find non-Church sanctioned uses for consecrated hosts. They’ve adapted the magical elements of Christianity to their own purposes, but haven’t internalized its ethics: they are a barbaric, mean, and backstabbing lot of louts, continually scheming and stealing from both their doting German overlords and from each other. This depraved condition may be imposed on them by the necessity of their hardscrabble existence and servitude. Young love, however, remains a beacon of pure idealism, even in this bleak world; only proving, perhaps, that some ancient superstitions remain with us even today.

Frequently astounding, with a new fabulous wrinkle every ten minutes, November will enchant fans of weird cinema, though its downbeat nature and lack of likable characters may make it a hard sell to your straight cinema friends. Cold, but lovely, like a frosty November morn, its fascinations lie mostly on the surface, but what a surface it is.

November opens in New York this Friday (Feb. 23), expands to Los Angeles on March 2nd, and will play major cities in the U.S. throughout the Spring. See the official site for a list of screenings.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…fantastical, strange, beautifully shot, wonderfully acted, and just the right amount of weird to give us this strange fairy tale that we feel it’s a world we might have inhabited in a past life.”–Shelagh Rowan-Legg, Screen Anarchy (festival screening)

Canonically Weird (The List)

317. MILLENNIUM ACTRESS (2001)

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Sennen joyû; AKA Chiyoko: Millennium Actress

“I find memories and dreams belong to the same category of artifacts. In other words, if we want to make a contrast, we have reality on one side, which is opposed by the dream, the memory or even a fantasy… They are on a different ‘layer’ than our reality and can be superimposed on it.”–Satoshi Kon (translated from the French)

Recommended

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Voices of Shôzô Îzuka, Shouko Tsuda, Miyoko Shôji, , Fumiko Orikasa

PLOT: A film producer and a cameraman interview Fujiwara Chiyoko, a famous retired Japanese actress. As she tells the story of her life, they find themselves absorbed into her flashbacks, which seem to mix scenes from movies she acted in with her actual memories. Genya, the interviewer, delivers a key Chiyoko had left behind at the studio, and reveals that he has personal motives for visiting the actress.

Still from Millennium Actress (2001)

BACKGROUND:

  • After making Perfect Blue, Satoshi Kon intended to adapt Yasutaka Tsutsui’s novel Paprika (which he eventually made in 2003), but financial considerations led him to tackle this less expensive project first.
  • Kon co-wrote the film with Sadayuki Murai, who also wrote the screenplay for Perfect Blue.
  • Tied for the Grand Prize in the Japan Agency of Cultural Affairs Media Arts Festival (in a deadlock with Spirited Away).

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Because they are striking, suggest transcendence, and bookend the movie, it’s the shots of Chiyoko in a spacesuit linger in the mind. Her discovery of a mysterious easel set up on the moon’s “pure white landscape” ends up as one of the strangest sights in Millennium Actress.

THREE WEIRD THINGS: Free cameraman with flashback; Godzilla cameo; lunar easel

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: An interviewer tries to get to the root of a famous retired actress’ life, including the significance of a mysterious object (a key) from her childhood. A series of decades-spanning flashbacks paint a portrait of a life spent chasing an unobtainable goal; only, the memories get mixed up with scenes from historical epics she starred in. It’s like Citizen Kane, but with ninja battles.

U.S. trailer for Millennium Actress

COMMENTS: Although much of the movie is a retrospective of Japanese cinema from the 1920s on, fictional screen icon Chiyoko Fujiwara’s career spanned less than a century, much less than a millennium. So how does the title Millennium Actress arise? From the fact Continue reading 317. MILLENNIUM ACTRESS (2001) →