Tag Archives: Magical Realism

Capsules, Shorts

CAPSULE: “THE WONDERFUL STORY OF HENRY SUGAR” (AND THREE OTHER WES ANDERSON ROALD DAHL ADAPTATIONS)

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FEATURING: , , , , , Rupert Friend

PLOT: “Henry Sugar” describes a man who learns how to see while blindfolded, and uses that skill in blackjack; the other three short adaptations involve a boyhood kidnapping, a poisonous snake, and a rat catcher.

Still from The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (2023)

COMMENTS: In 2021, Netflix bought the rights to the complete works of British children’s author . The jewel of this legacy, from Netflix’s perspective, is “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” from which they have produced a very horrible indeed Willy Wonka prequel film starring a discombobulated Timothée Chalamet. The acquisition left them with a number of smaller properties to exploit, however, including dozens of short stories. Up to the plate steps Dahl stan Wes Anderson (who adapted The Fantastic Mr. Fox as a feature film in 2009) to tackle four lesser-known tales.

The longest and most important of the miniseries is the 37-minute “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar,” which Anderson and Netflix chose to premiere at the Venice International Film Festival. It is a relatively simple but exotic fantasy about a man who studies an ancient yogic text to learn the art of X-ray vision so that he can cheat at blackjack, but ends up bored, wondering “what’s next?”. The plot and moral are slightly flimsy, but Dahl’s craft is in the telling rather than the destination. Anderson honors the author’s talents by keeping almost all of Dahl’s prose intact, with exposition and asides related by the actors speaking directly to the camera: first Fiennes, as Dahl himself; then Cumberbatch as Henry Sugar, describing his own thought processes beside his dialogue; then Patel, narrating a flashback; then Kingsley, narrating a flashback within the flashback. Diving even further into artificiality, Anders eschews the magic afforded by film for humbler forms of stagecraft. Backdrops are hoisted into the flyspace to reveal new settings; stagehands visibly hand the actors props; makeup artists walk on set to swap wigs and glue on facial hair; a bookshelf, wall and door slide in from different directions to instantaneously create a new set. The effect might be termed “whimsically Brechtian.” There is no ironic bite to Anderson’s procedure here; in conjunction with the preservation of the original prose, which casts the actors as slavishly at the beck and call of Dahl’s written instructions, these visible dressings serve as a reminder of the function of imagination in constructing a story as it’s related. It’s as if we’re watching from the perspective of Wes Anderson’s mind’s eye as he listens to the stories. With their emphasis on baroquely detailed settings and de-emphasis on emoting, Anderson’s works often feel narrated anyway, rather than enacted—like pop-up picture books read by a parent to a child at bedtime. This series follows up on Asteroid City‘s cognizance of the process of its own creation, likely taking the theme as far as it can formally go.

If you hunger for more after “Sugar”—and chances are you will, for these bon-bons are simple to digest and have a wide-ranging appeal—three shorter (a uniform 17 minutes each) stories follow, each in the same style, each with a few new surprises to offer. “The Swan” is a surprisingly gruesome tale of childhood bullying; “Poison” tells of a man lying deathly still in bed, afraid to move because of a deadly snake napping on his abdomen; and “The Rat Catcher” affords a nice grimy role for Fiennes and a chance for Anderson to indulge in a few seconds of stop-motion animation. The six featured actors appear throughout the four films in various combinations, often in multiple roles within the same short. All are charming, recommended, and delivered with perfect efficiently.

If you add the runtimes of the four shorts together, you get 100 minutes of celluloid, which is essentially a second 2023 feature for Anderson. It’s turned out to be a zenith year for the auteur (who also endured a series of viral memes early in the season). Having, I presumed, here reached the limits of what he can do with self-aware theatricality, it will be fascinating to see what challenge Anderson takes on next.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Neither twee nor saccharine, Anderson’s aesthetic tends to mirror the auras and oddball personalities of his films. In a work suffused with stupefying mysteries, the strange visions Henry Sugar teems with echo its drifters’ wide-eyed wonder as well as their creator’s. It’s an infectious feeling.”–Leonardo Goi, The Film Stage (festival screening)

It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: CAST A DEADLY SPELL (1991)

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DIRECTED BY: Martin Campbell

FEATURING: Fred Ward, Julianne Moore, David Warner, Clancy Brown, Alexandra Powers

PLOT: Private eye H. Phillip Lovecraft, who shuns magic in favor of old-school detective skills, searches Los Angeles for a missing grimoire.

Still from Cast A Deadly Spell (1991)

COMMENTS: Films set in other times and places sometimes turn to text prologues to help set the scene. The more that needs to be explained, the more convoluted and tedious the word scroll can become. So you have to admire the economical way Cast a Deadly Spell lays out the rules of the world we’re about to enter: “Los Angeles, 1948. Everyone does magic.” Boom, we’re done. Premise established, The Big Sleep meets Evil Dead, let’s do this thing.

At a surface level, the blend is just cheeky enough to work. Despite the specific references to H. P. Lovecraft (the detective and the author share a name, and little else) and his works (specifically, the Necronomicon, which serves as this film’s MacGuffin), Cast a Deadly Spell is content to pilfer its magic from any source handy. Lovecraft’s landlord and occasional girl Friday is a Caribbean voodoo priestess. Zombies are shipped in from West Africa to perform heavy manual labor until their bodies give out. (The racial element to this practice is left unexplored.) Unicorns are hunted for sport, gremlins could lurk beneath any car hood, and everyone uses supernatural powers to perform basic tasks: lighting cigarettes, carrying trays, filing papers and the like. It’s simple stuff, but it does create a strong feel of a world where magic is commonplace and even mundane.

Where the film truly succeeds is in capturing the 1940s crime thriller milieu. Screenwriter Joseph Dougherty has a good sense of the tropes and characters needed to populate the story, from the tough-but-fair police lieutenant to the poor little rich girl to the mysterious damsel with a secret (who, in this telling, is transgender, a fact the film treats with surprising respect, even if the characters do not). Dougherty also has a terrific ear for genre’s pulpy dialogue, from the hard-boiled explication of the hero’s moral code to any number of tossed-off bon mots, such as Lovecraft’s order at a swanky nightclub: “Bourbon. Show it some water, but be discreet.” Ward is perfectly cast, delivering this and other lines with exactly the right mix of cynical wit and world-weary sadness that marks him as the last honest man in L.A. The cast surrounding him is pretty solid, too: Moore is a sultry femme fatale not to be trusted, Brown is slick to the point of slimy, and there’s nowhere near enough David Warner with his malevolent dignity. All the elements are in place.

The two genres sit comfortably side-by-side for a while, with Lovecraft defiantly bypassing the easy path of magic, recognizing its corrupting influence. But the film can’t resist itself, and in the final showdown, it’s the monster movie that wins out, culminating in a special effects extravaganza (as much as its premium-cable budget can afford) that has little to do with its time or place. The ending is big, loud, and unworthy of its well-crafted setup, leaving behind unfinished plotlines and unrealized potential. It’s telling that we see monsters, zombies, and gargoyles simply fade away at the finale, as though the film couldn’t think of what else to do with them.

The cleverness of the basic idea doesn’t translate to any further breakthroughs; if you’ve seen a Sam Spade/Philip Marlowe tale, or even if you’ve seen newer takes like Chinatown or L.A. Confidential, then you’ve not only seen the style but a lot of the plot elements. And that’s okay; it’s a genre worth revisiting every now and then. The biggest problem for Cast a Deadly Spell is that the highwire mashup trick it’s attempting has been done much better. For example, Who Framed Roger Rabbit brilliantly joins the seemingly incompatible elements of noir and screwball animation in a way where each actually relies upon the other. By contrast, Spell is more of a patchwork than a true melange, taking bits from both styles but never really getting them to gel.

Dougherty penned a sequel, Witch Hunt, set at the height of the Red Scare. Starring Dennis Hopper as Lovecraft and directed by Paul Schrader (!), the latter film is by all accounts a dud. So stick with Cast a Deadly Spell, an enjoyable watch that hits its noir marks with just enough horror seasoning to catch your eye. You can wish it did more with its juicy premise, but let’s be grateful for the small gift we have. All the rest… that’s the stuff that dreams are made of. 

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Cast a Deadly Spell is a pleasingly bizarre mix of 50’s noir with elements of arcane horror with surprisingly high production values… a weird curio that definitely would never get made today…” – Garry Gallon, All The Ones That Got Away

(This movie was nominated for review by Adam, who said it was “So goddamn weird that I was angry at myself for never having seen it and angrier at the cult following it never got.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Capsules

CAPSULE: THE COW WHO SANG A SONG INTO THE FUTURE (2022)

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La vaca que cantó una canción hacia el futuro

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DIRECTED BY: Francisca Alegria

FEATURING: Leonor Varela, Mía Maestro, , Enzo Ferrada

PLOT: When her father is hospitalized from shock after her long-dead mother appears to him, Cecilia returns to her family’s dairy farm to care for him.

Still from The Cow Who Sang a Song into the Future (2022)

COMMENTS: Fans of cows singing songs will surely be satisfied with The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future; the bovines croon quite well, although it is up for debate just how far into the future their tunes echo. The rest of us will at least be willing to hear the movie out: it contains much intriguing strangeness, while also held back a bit by a tangled thicket of themes and the sometimes underwhelming familial drama.

The film begins with a shot of a mouse corpse that leads to a long pan over a forest floor to a riverbank where a carpet of beached fishes sing a song about death. This is followed by the appearance of Magdalena, who arises from the water wearing a motorcycle helmet and walks silently into town. We then turn our attention to Cecilia, a single mom doctor raising two children. We meet the elder, Tomás, trying on women’s clothes and discussing a vintage newspaper article about a woman who committed suicide by riding her motorcycle into the river. Cecilia rushes to her father’s side after he collapses from shock after catching a glimpse of what he believes to be his long-dead wife, looking just as she did the day she died. Cecilia and her children settle in at the family’s dairy farm, where her brother Bernardo attempts to revive the herd’s failing fortunes while the patriarch complains about his effort. Also on site is superstitious stepmom Felicia, the first to directly interact with silent revenant Magdalena, who gradually reveals herself to the others. Meanwhile, the cows get loose at night, while back in town people stage protests, blaming a local pulp plant’s pollution for the plague of dead fish.

I’ve tagged this movie as magical realism—it’s a rule that we must do so for any moderately strange movie hailing from south of the U.S. border—but at times, Cow feints towards actual surrealism. If Magdalena’s strange and unexplained return from the dead was the only thing going on here, Cow probably could be confined to the realm of magical realism; but the magic here extends beyond the realistic. There are, of course, the choirs of singing fish and cattle. There is Magdalena’s strange relationship with technology: she’s obsessed with cellphones and her mere presence turns on microwaves. A mysterious wound appears on Cecilia’s head, quickly healed and never explained. The zombie mom briefly takes up with a lesbian motorcycle gang. So, despite a primary focus on drama, things do get weird.

But The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future arguably attempts to deal with too many themes at once. The family dynamics are the primary focus, with the mystery of Magdalena’s death and return illuminating and catalyzing the interplay between the others. Ecological collapse forms the background: the deaths of fish, the disappearance of bee colonies, a sickness affecting the cattle herd.  There’s a nod to issues of how conservative Latino societies deal with LGBTQ members, and even a critique of industrial dairy farming practices. But, although everything connects, to a large extent, spreading all of these concerns over the course of a 90 minute movie means that each one gets short shrift: we never uncover the source of the river’s pollution, Tomás’ transgenderism subplot feels imported from a different movie, etc. Furthermore, the big family secret is not weighty or surprising enough to justify its delayed reveal; it’s delivered in a single sentence. Still, Cow works out well in the end, generating an optimistic feeling of rejuvenation and resurrection. The postmortem resolution of Cecila and Magdalena’s relationship loosely parallels the notion that there is still time for us to atone for our sins against the environment.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Rife with evocative symbolism, Chilean director Francisca Alegria’s feature debut is an audacious, surrealistic expression of acute ecological distress and various ideas pertaining to contemporary agita.”–Kat Sachs, Chicago Reader (contemporaneous)

The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future [DVD]

The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future [DVD]
  • Family drama meets magic realism in this compelling environmental fable about family, nature, renewal, and resurrection
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Capsules

CAPSULE: TOMMY GUNS (2022)

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DIRECTED BY: Carlos Conceição

FEATURING: João Arrais, Gustavo Sumpta, Anabela Moreira

PLOT: A group of Portuguese soldiers living an isolated existence find themselves haunted by Angolan ghosts.

Still from Tommy Guns (2022)

COMMENTS: It’s difficult to discuss Tommy Guns‘ plot for fear of giving too much away. It’s not the appearance of ghosts/zombies near the end of the film that causes an issue; there is another, even less expected third act twist to contend with. We’re safe in saying that the film opens in Angola in 1974, one year before it gained independence from Portugal, as a title card announces that fact in the first minute. The movie then proceeds with what is—slight spoiler here—a thirty minute prologue showing the death of an innocent victim of the ongoing violence, a burial in which an elder warns that the corpse’s spirit will rest uneasily, and an odd riverbank encounter between a lone Portuguese soldier and a local woman that ends with him eating her necklace.

Afterwards, we switch focus to a group of young Portuguese soldiers, a company of eight men led by a strict and ruthless Colonel, who spend their days in some remote outpost doing not much of anything. The film was leisurely, yet confusing, throughout the prologue; it slows down even further in this segment. Although the troop chases, and catches, a traitor, and there is one brief ghastly apparition, relatively little happens throughout the middle of the film: it’s an accurate depiction of the drudgery of military life, endless training and waiting and little action. Things finally heat up when the Colonel decides to import a stripper for the restless (and horny) young men, leading to a third act payoff that’s fairly satisfying. Connections to the opening are ambiguous, but potentially meaningful (a quote from Horace could be significant).

Conceição’s film, only his second feature length effort, is ambitiously structured and deals with Portuguese colonialism in a way that will be most meaningful to those well-versed in this history. The writer/director was born in Angola during the conflict detailed here, moved to Portugal as a teenager, and has traveled back and forth between the two countries since, so this particular slice of colonial history holds personal significance to him. Many events are symbolic: I suspect the encounter between the soldier and the Angolan native represents Portugal’s treatment of her colony, and the idea of the dead returning to trouble the living has obvious significance. Nonetheless, the movie’s awkward pacing makes it difficult for the director’s ideas to penetrate the malaise: little happens for long stretches, causing your mind to wander. Some characters (like the white nun from the opening) are superfluous, mere local color; more economical storytelling would have helped the message land harder. Some critics have complained about the disjointed nature of the script, but the film doesn’t really switch genres as violently as advertised; the early war drama and the later zombie element feel of the same somber piece. In fact, despite the appearance of the walking dead, it would be difficult to categorize the film as “horror” in any meaningful sense: it seldom strays from the path of magical realism it sets for itself. The resulting experiment feels weighty and worthwhile, but, unfortunately, not always engaging.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Conceição has created a smart, strange film that is disjointed because colonialism is a thing of disjointed desires, histories, and deaths.”–Noah Berlatsky, The Chicago Reader (contemporaneous)

Capsules

CAPSULE: BLIND WILLOW, SLEEPING WOMAN (2022)

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DIRECTED BY: Pierre Földes

FEATURING: Voices of Amaury de Crayencour, Arnaud Maillard, Mathilde Auneveux, Pierre Földes; Ryan Bommarito, Marcelo Arroyo, Shoshana Wilder (English dub)

PLOT: A salaryman struggles emotionally when his depressed wife leaves him; meanwhile, his co-worker is approached by a giant talking frog who insists that the timid accountant assist him in forestalling an earthquake set to devastate Tokyo.

Still from Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (2022)

COMMENTS: The blind willow of the title is a fictional tree; flies bear pollen from its blossoms and deposit it into the ear of a woman, causing her to fall into a deep, fairy-tale sleep. The fable is related from inside a flashback in one of the stories that compromise this semi-anthology film. It’s one of many mysterious strands running through Pierre Földes cinematic debut, adapted from six Haruki Murakami (Drive My Car) short stories. The film follows three main protagonists, and one anthropomorphic Frog, through dismal-but-bearable lives in a post-earthquake Tokyo. The movie marches the trio through bouts of catatonic depression, workplace humiliations, odd vacations, encounters with magical restaurateurs, ambiguous erotic and semi-erotic encounters, a search for a missing cat, dreams, and one epic, hallucinatory quest.

The stories are all suffused with gentle melancholy and a sense of humanity’s search for meaning. No answers are given or purposes uncovered, except, perhaps, in the case of accountant Katagiri, who, with the help of the movie’s breakout character, the loquacious and puissant Frog, finally achieves recognition for his years of long and thankless service. The film’s general tone is more attuned to Komura, who endures abandonment by his wife with quiet and insular stoicism, and Kyoko, whose dissatisfaction remains inexpressible, even to herself. The figurants the main characters sit beside on subways, buses, or cafeterias are all silent and spectral, drawn as translucent overlays. There’s something ghostly about the film’s protagonists, who move about as if they’re bound to the world by some unremembered purpose, so it only makes sense that they inhabit a spectral civilization.

The artwork reinforces the calm, poetic, dreamlike mood. Color palettes are muted, with static backgrounds; in the loveliest composition, two characters stand at a bus stop in front of what looks like a springtime watercolor landscape of cherry blossoms and tall grass, a brown mound of mountain arising in the deep background. At times, especially in scenes with Frog, the art can recall anime, although this is not as much of a stylistic touchstone as the Japanese setting might suggest. The movie takes time out for flights of fancy in several dream sequences—Katagiri finds himself flying through the sky in the belly of a worm who resolves into a train as he wakes—but also in waking daydreams, as when Komura sees the whorls of his nephew’s ear morph into a nude woman, or when a spectral salmon swims above two lovers in bed. These digressions harness the fantasy power of animation in a way that seems more natural than it would in a live-action feature, suggesting that the characters’ interior realities have as much emotional weight as their dialogue. Földes has an odd trademark of drawing his character’s lips unusually wide and dark, but this is a minor distraction.

The multitalented Földes, previously known mainly as a composer, not only adapted Murakami’s stories into the screenplay, directed, and wrote the score, but also voiced Frog in both the French and English versions. Perhaps only his love of Murakami’s prose pulled him into filmmaking, but I hope this isn’t the last we see from him. He’s too skilled at this to sit on the sidelines.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a film that’s lovely, mysterious and also, at times, fittingly odd… the film itself is sync with Murakami’s particular blend of the quotidian and the surreal.”–Sheri Linden, The Hollywood Reporter (contemporaneous)