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CAPSULE: LA CHIMERA (2023)

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La Chimera is currently available to purchase on VOD (more rental/streaming options available later).

DIRECTED BY: Alice Rohrwacher

FEATURING: Josh O’Connor, Carol Duarte,

PLOT: An Englishman in Italy with a mystical talent for discovering burial plots joins a group who traffic in ancient Etruscan artifacts while brooding over his lost love.

Still from La Chimera (2023)

COMMENTS: If nothing else, La Chimera‘s milieu is unique: a ragtag gang of modern tomb raiders, trading in a black market for Etruscan artifacts. We first meet Arthur (a slovenly, rakishly melancholy Josh O’Connor) in mid-dream, as he remembers the woman whose absence will lurk in the background of the rest of the picture like a ghost. Arthur, an Englishman who speaks passable Italian, has just been released from jail, and he soon reluctantly returns to his gang and their old racket: digging up ancient pottery for resale on the black market. They need Arthur because of his preternatural ability to locate old burial grounds, which he can do with a diving rod like he was dowsing for water. The crew is motivated by money, but Arthur, we are told, investigates the tombs because he believes he can find a legendary door that leads to the afterlife. Besides his crew, Arthur hangs out with Flora (Rosselini), an old friend who lives in a decaying villa. There he meets the oddly-named Italia (Duarte), a tone-deaf maid who shows an interest in the handsome brooding stranger. Will she be able to spark new life in him, or will he continue descending into graves?

La Chimera is a European-style drama, more focused on character than plot. It wanders about, in no hurry to get to the point, but rather allowing us to soak in the characters for 130 minutes. Rohrwacher enlivens the stroll with assays into multiple (not always congruent) styles, including a smattering of magical realist touches. She provides changes in film stocks, digital undercranking for comic montages, fourth wall breaks, a Felliniesque festival where the gang’s males dress in drag, an outlaw folk song about the “tombaroli” (grave robbers), and an affecting dream on a train where Arthur faces up to some supernatural ethical dilemmas. There is also a repeated vertical pan that always ends with O’Connor upside-down, to simulate the vertigo that accompanies a successful divination. But despite these touches, La Chimera hews close to the standard art-house drama formula. It is, to a large extent, a meditation on death; with tomb-raiding as a plot point, it would have to be. But it seems somewhat unsure as to what it wants to say on the topic. Arthur struggles with a death wish, which is something of an addiction for him, so perhaps it’s an ersatz cinematic take on Keats: “Ode on an Etruscan Urn.”

La Chimera has been receiving near universal praise from critics, as did Rohrwacher’s previous magical realist drama, Happy as Lazzaro. I must confess that the director hasn’t won me over yet, and I have difficulty figuring out what all the fuss is about. She’s a  craftswoman who wields cinematic techniques competently, but with no strong auteurial stamp. That’s not to say her films aren’t thoughtful and well put together; they just fail to stand out from the art-house pack.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Strange, aesthetically gorgeous and profound, La Chimera is ultimately just as unknowable as the liminal space that it protagonist inhabits within it.”–Tanner Gordon, Spectrum Culture (contemporaneous)

Capsules

CAPSULE: CLOSET MONSTER (2015)

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DIRECTED BY:  Stephen Dunn

FEATURING: Connor Jessup, Aaron Abrams, Aliocha Schneider, Isabella Rossellini (voice)

PLOT: A closeted gay teenager who wants to be a horror makeup artist finds himself inhibited from the same-sex experiences he craves due to a traumatic hate crime he witnessed as a child.

Still from Closet Monster (2015)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: If you want a coming out story, and you want it to be slightly weird, this is an option. If you want it really weird, you’d be better off with Der Samurai, however.

COMMENTS: In its short existence, the “coming out” film has already adopted certain clichés: the disapproving macho dad who fears a “wimp” son, the ambiguously homosexual/bisexual love interest, loss of virginity at an ecstasy-fueled rave. Closet Monster doesn’t throw away this boilerplate, but it does cleverly distract our attention from the usual structure with bizarre touches meant to evoke the troubled feeling of growing up different. Monster mixes in tropes from the horror movie (an appropriate import) and, in its most whimsical and salable touch, gives us Isabella Rossellini as the voice of Oscar’s hamster spirit guide (wittily, the pet is ambiguously gendered). A series of hallucinations, mostly stemming from a traumatic homophobic assault Oscar witnesses as a child, round out the weirdness.

Steven Dunn’s direction in his first feature is confident, although when dreamy Wilder enters the picture the will-they-won’t-they second act does drag. The horror angle, which seemed like the film’s  hook, gets pushed aside for the type of dramatic development we’ve seen many times before. But the actors are universally competent, led by conflicted Jessup. Dad Abrams has a nicely complicated character: he is more of an all-around mess—well-meaning but impulse-control challenged—than the simple homophobe he might have been. The horror scenes return at the very end, when Oscar confronts his repressed longings, including hallucinations involving vomiting bolts and a gory impalement with an iron rod. It ends at one of the most marvelously idyllic locations in Newfoundland, a mystical modernist cabin set on a rock outcropping overlooking the sea. Closet Monster is not the whimsically surreal gay horror movie we’ve been waiting for, but it is a decent watch while we wait for someone to perfect the formula.

Closet Monster won the award for Best Canadian Film at the 2015 Toronto Film Festival. At the time of this writing you can catch it streaming on Netflix.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Willfully weird tale of a gay youth in a world of confusion. Noisily off-kilter… the determined eccentricity of the entire conceit—liberally laced with moments of hallucinatory surrealism—weighs the movie down, creating an airless ambiance at odds with any youthful verve which might appeal to the viewer.”–David Noh, Film Journal International (contemporaneous)

 

Canonically Weird (The List)

201. BLUE VELVET (1986)

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“It’s a strange world.”–Sandy Williams, Blue Velvet

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , , Isabella Rossellini, Laura Dern,

PLOT: While home from college to visit his ailing father, who has suffered a stroke, Jeffrey Beaumont finds a severed human ear in a field. Though warned by his neighbor, Detective Williams, that the case is a police issue and he should not ask any questions, the curious Jeffrey decides to seek answers on his own, enlisting Williams’ daughter Sandy, a high school senior, in his investigation. The trail leads to a melancholy torch singer named Dorothy Vallens, and when Jeffrey hides in her closet after nearly being caught snooping in her apartment, he witnesses a horror he never imagined, which forever shatters his innocence.

Still from Blue Velvet (1986)
BACKGROUND:

  • Blue Velvet was David Lynch’s comeback film after the disastrous flop of 1984’s Dune.
  • Warner Brother’s commissioned a treatment of Lynch’s basic idea for the film, but in 1986 no major studio would touch the finished Blue Velvet script because of its themes of sexual violence. The film was produced and distributed by Dino De Laurentiis (who formed a distribution company just for this release). De Laurentiis was known for taking chances on risky or salacious movies, whether exploitation or art films. He gave Lynch final cut in exchange for a reduced salary (possibly hoping that Lynch would refuse his insulting offer and chose a more commercial project).
  • Blue Velvet is considered Lynch’s comeback film, but even more so Dennis Hopper’s. Hopper, who became a star when he wrote, directed and acted in the 1969 counterculture hit Easy Rider, developed a serious polydrug addiction problem throughout the 1970s. By the 1980s he had earned a reputation as unreliable and difficult to work with, and landed only minor roles after his memorable turn as a maniacal photographer in Apocalypse Now (1979). He entered rehab in 1983 and was sober for a year and a half before making Blue Velvet. Looking for a role to revive his career, Hopper told Lynch, “You have to give me the role of Frank Booth, because I am Frank Booth!”
  • Booth’s character was originally written by Lynch to breathe helium from his gas tank, but Hopper convinced the director that amyl nitrate would be a more appropriate inhalant for Frank. The actual drug the villain breathes is never specified in the film.
  • This was the first collaboration between Lynch and composer Angelo Badalamenti. Badalamenti was hired to be Isabella Rossellini’s voice coach for her singing numbers, but Lynch liked his arrangements so much he hired him to produce the film’s soundtrack. Badalamenti would work on the score of all of Lynch’s future films until INLAND EMPIRE, and is perhaps best known for the “Twin Peaks” theme.
  • , who played a part in all of Lynch’s feature films until his death in 1996, has a small part here as one of Frank’s hoodlums.
  • Lynch was nominated for a Best Director Oscar, losing to for Platoon. Dennis Hopper’s performance was widely praised, but was too profane for Academy consideration; he was nominated for Supporting Actor for Hoosiers, where he played an assistant high school basketball coach struggling with alcoholism, instead.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: “Suave” Dean Stockwell performing a karaoke version of Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams,” an illuminated microphone lighting his lightly-rouged face.

THREE WEIRD THINGS: Dream of the robins; candy-colored clown; dead man standing

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Nearly everyone describes Blue Velvet as “weird,” but most of the time, when pressed, it’s hard to pin down exactly why. Yes, there is sexual perversity, a campy and impossibly white-bread Lumberton, and one of the strangest lip-sync numbers ever, but if we were to actually sit down and graph Blue Velvet on an axis of Lynchian weirdness, we would find it closer to The Straight Story pole than it is to the incoherent extremes of INLAND EMPIRE. But despite the fact that Blue Velvet is among Lynch’s less-weird works, it’s one of his greatest. The clear and powerful presentation of key Lynch themes—the contrast between innocence and experience, and sexuality’s fateful role in marking that line—make it a crucial entry in this weirdest of director’s oeuvre. Blue Velvet‘s influence is so monumental that it would be a crime to leave it off the List of the Best Weird Movies ever made.


Original trailer for Blue Velvet

 COMMENTS: David Lynch’s Blue Velvet exists in a heightened reality—and a heightened depravity—but essentially it is a Continue reading 201. BLUE VELVET (1986) →

Canonically Weird (The List)

176. ENEMY (2013)

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“Chaos is order yet undeciphered.”–epigraph to Enemy

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , , Mélanie Laurent, 

PLOT: Adam, a professor of history, catches sight of a movie extra playing a bellhop who appears to be his exact double, and becomes obsessed with tracking him down. When they eventually meet they discover that Anthony, the actor, is Adam’s exact physical match, but has a nearly opposite personality, slick and scheming where Adam is passive and meek. Anthony, who has a rocky relationship with pregnant wife due to her accusations of infidelity, is drawn to Adam’s girlfriend; and though the professor wants to withdraw from their association, the actor’s machinations intertwine the two men’s lives.

Still from Enemy (2013)BACKGROUND:

  • Enemy is based on the novel “O Homem Duplicado” (literally “The Duplicated Man,” although the English translation was titled “The Double“) by the Portuguese Nobel laureate José Saramago. The novel has a very different, though equally chilling, ending than the film.
  • Director Denis Villeneuve and star Jake Gyllenhaal made Enemy back-to-back with the higher-profile, reality-based thriller Prisoners (2013). Enemy was made first but released second.
  • Villeneuve said that the plan to do the adaptation with Gyllenhaal came after a night of drinking in which the actor told the director he wanted to do the movie but needed to “dream” about it first.
  • Villeneuve said he wanted to make Enemy because he wanted to do something “free” in light of his anxieties over working under the constraints he feared would be imposed by a Hollywood studio on the upcoming Prisoners.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Enemy is one of a few movies whose most unforgettable image can’t be mentioned without entering the territory where spoilers dwell. Fortunately, there are plenty of runner-ups to chose from. With arachnid imagery dominating the hallucinatory scenes, it’s easy to pick the picture of a giant, spindly-legged spider looming over the smoggy streets of Toronto as the film’s iconic image. The movie’s TIFF poster took that precise route.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: As tightly controlled as a dictatorship and as enigmatic as a tarantula on a gold serving platter, the inscrutable Enemy evokes a panicky existential dread in the tradition of . The final scene will provoke debate for as long as people watch weird movies.


Original trailer for Enemy

COMMENTS: Enemy begins with the epigram “chaos is order yet undeciphered,” and I admit to having yet to decipher the twisty web of chaos the Continue reading 176. ENEMY (2013) →

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: ENEMY (2013)

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Enemy has been officially promoted to the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies. This initial review is left here for archival purposes. Please read the official Certified Weird entry and post any comments there.

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , , Mélanie Laurent, 

PLOT: A history professor becomes obsessed with tracking down a man who appears to be his exact double.

Still from Enemy (2013)
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: We have an unofficial rule that we won’t add a movie to the List until it’s come out on DVD, so we can study its nuances closely. You shouldn’t wait that long, however. If you love cinematic weirdness, you owe it to yourself to get out to the theater and catch Enemy now.

COMMENTS: Enemy begins with the epigram “chaos is order yet undeciphered…,” and I admit to having yet to decipher the twisty web of chaos the movie spins. Beginning with a fractured montage depicting one of those impossibly elegant and depraved invitation-only live sex shows that only exist in the movies, Enemy emerges from its abstract opening to focus on Adam, a melancholy history professor currently lecturing on the methods dictatorships use to keep their citizens in the dark about how they are being controlled. Adam’s life consists of little more than work and joyless sex with his girlfriend until one day, almost on a whim, he watches a movie and catches a glimpse of an extra who looks exactly like him. While most of us would find such a discovery “neat” and invite our friends over to the screen confirm the resemblance, Adam’s reaction is different: immediate uncomprehending horror, followed by an obsessive need to track his double down. Even the way we are shown Adam’s discovery is unnatural; we watch as what appears to be a lighthearted costume drama playing out on his laptop screen, except that there is no sound, only the ominous strings of the film’s thick (and excellent) neoclassical score. Villeneuve’s direction pumps out a subtle, constant stream of anxiety: the characters’ overly alarmed reactions to everyday events, throwaway lines of dialogue suggesting layers of unexplored subtexts, the cold and lonely modern apartments both Adam and his doppelganger glide through like ghosts, the jaundiced pallor of the movie’s interiors. But it’s not all endless cinemaitc restraint, as some startling arachnid imagery and a shot of an upside-down woman with an insect head attest. Altering his bearing to portray either the sensitive Adam or the brash Anthony, Gyllenhaal gives the best performance alongside himself since Nic Cage in Adaptation. From a technical standpoint his acting is sure to impress even causality snobs who scoff at Enemy‘s obscure logic. I had an issue with the ending—not with its content, but with its abruptness—but the movie’s unexpected final shot will provide enough speculative tinder to fuel a small industry of interpreters for years. Villeneuve shows an ability to evoke a panicky existential dread that rivals and fellow Canadian , while Enemy‘s concern with the frailty of identity places it somewhere on the venerable Persona spectrum.

After helming the Certified Weird Maelstrom (a drama narrated by a fish) and the grotesque gluttony short Next Floor, Denis Villeneuve’s career seemed headed for a more conventional turn after he scored more populist successes with the drama Incendies (2010) and the thriller Prisoners (2013). We’re happy to see he retains his urge toward the strange. And while Isabella Rossellini’s imprimatur always adds weird credibility to any film she appears in, we’re almost as thrilled by Sarah Gadon’s presence. Her preference for roles in oddball movies continues to impress—if she keeps this string up, she could become the next generation’s Isabella.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Gyllenhaal is impressive in a weirdly original thriller from Villeneuve that trips over its many legs at the finish.”–Jeff Baker, The Oregonian (contemporaneous)