Tag Archives: Melodrama

List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: SENSUELA (1973)

2 Comments

DIRECTED BY: Teuvo Tulio

FEATURING: Marianne Mardi, Ossi Elstelä, Mauritz Åkerman, Ismo Saario

PLOT: A young Sámi woman abandons her life of reindeer herding for the big city when she falls in love with a Nazi pilot/photographer.

Still from Sensuela (1973)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Sensuela is a difficult film to describe. A remake of Finnish director Teuvo Tulio’s own melodrama Cross of Love (1946), which itself was inspired by Alexander Pushkin’s 1830 short story “The Stationmaster,”  though neither film closely follows the text. In his updated version of a prodigal daughter’s journey, Tulio mashes together the modes of ethnographic documentary, commercial advertising, and softcore porn. All incongruously set to Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite, the result is ultimately unclassifiable.

COMMENTS: Did you know the Sámi geld reindeer by biting off their testicles? Neither did I, until I watched this movie. I don’t know if this is actually true in the real world, but in the world of Tulio it’s a fact, and one which proves shockingly relevant to Sensuela‘s loosely plotted narrative. Like and other low-budget outsider auteurs, Tulio clearly pursued his own cinematic vision, with relentless disregard for prevailing taste or convention.

Sensuela opens during WWII with three fighter pilots in the midst of battle, but this isn’t war as seen in any other movie. Painted backdrops of snowy mountains provide the landscape and cartoonishly simple sets, barely recognizable, represent the plane cockpits. To the sound of gunfire, two of the pilots collapse on their instrument panels, but the third survives.

Hans parachutes out of his damaged plane into the Arctic landscape below. Laila, a Sámi girl, crossing the tundra in her reindeer sled, discovers him and brings him back to her father’s yurt. While she nurses him back to health, they fall in love, but the war forces Hans to flee Finland once he recovers.

In the first of many confusing transitions, the characters reunite after what must be about twenty years (though neither one has visibly aged). Hans whisks Laila away to Helsinki where he works as a photographer and she becomes his hottest model. The novelty of the relationship wears off when Laila refuses to swing with the ’60s. They break up, but she continues telling her father she and Hans intend to get married.

What seems like a harmless white lie proves to be Laila’s undoing. After many trials and tribulations, she takes a job in a warehouse, falls in love again, and becomes engaged to one of her co-workers. Meanwhile, Laila’s father happens across her nude photographs and sets off for the city in a rage. After roughing up her roommate, he decides to go after Hans. The roommate warns Laila, who manages to reach Hans just before her father’s arrival.

Happy to see Laila again, Hans, surprisingly, agrees to go along with the deception. They’ll tell her father they’re still planning to marry, thinking he’ll leave once they calm his indignation. Instead, dad insists on remaining in the city for the wedding.

Laila and Hans decide to hold a fake marriage ceremony. They almost pull it off—until Laila’s actual fiancé crashes the “wedding” party and all hell breaks loose. In a classic over-the-top Tulio climax, emotions run hard and fast, and love turns to hate in the blink of an eye. Her fiancé renounces Laila, but Hans suffers the brunt of her father’s anger.

Unfortunately, it’s not all sex, drugs, and castration. Sensuela is honestly a train wreck, but it’s difficult to look away, as one can’t help but wonder what randomness will happen next. Stock footage pads the already overlong 104 minute runtime with gratuitous scenes of carnival lights, saunas, and loudly chirping birds. Even more -esque moments appear, with conversations taking place over static close-ups of a coffee table.

Tulio frames sex scenes from such awkward angles they detract from the sensuality implied by the title. Other scenes have such a contrived, stagey feel they can hardly be taken seriously. In a scene of Sámi watching a reindeer race, the crowd jumps and applauds in unison (especially unsettling because they also dress identically). The editing of the fight choreography has a strange, staccato rhythm, like the skips between comic book panels. This would work in an actual comic book adaptation, but in the context of Sensuela, it just adds to the film’s erratic quality.

Some film scholars categorize Sensuela as camp, citing Tulio as a forerunner of , Pedro Almodovar, and even . Others stress the director’s distinct lack of humor and jouissance, which work against his camp aesthetics. Sensuela echoes the grim morality of Tulio’s earlier melodramas, despite the hippy orgies. Laila’s look always retains an out-of-place 1940s glamour. With her buttoned up trench coat, high-heels and red lips, she looks like she wandered onto the wrong set from a film noir. This speaks to the film’s deep weirdness: Sensuela exists in its own world, without any concern for linear time or standard genres.

It’s interesting to note that Thriller: A Cruel Picture, a film that would help make “Swedish” a byword for sexploitation, was released in the same year. No such trend occurred in Finland. Sensuela would be Tulio’s last movie; after it bombed, the director retired into seclusion, rarely granting interviews about his life or forty-year career. Finnish cineastes continued to value realism and restraint, and Tulio’s films were always, very consciously, the exact opposite.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…best described as a psychedelic, Alice in Wonderland-like journey that has ample amounts of Brechtian melodrama. – Michael Den Boer, 10K Bullets [Blu-ry]

3 X Teuvo Tulio: Sensuela + Cross

3 X Teuvo Tulio: Sensuela + Cross Of Love + Restless Blood

  • A trio of surreal melodramas from Finnish director Teuvo Tulio including CROSS OF LOVE, RESTLESS BLOOD and the notorious SENSUELA

List Price : 37.79 $

Offer: 33.46 $

Go to Amazon
Capsules

CAPSULE: ÉL (1953)

3 Comments

AKA This Strange Passion

366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

Recommended

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Arturo de Córdova, Delia Garcés

PLOT: A Mexican landowner seduces a woman into marrying him, but his paranoid jealousy quickly poisons the union.

Still from El (1953)

COMMENTS: The career of Luis Buñuel breaks cleanly into three periods: the avant-garde (or first French) period, the Mexican period, and the renaissance (or second French) period. He begins in Paris with the revolutionary experiments of Un Chien Andalou, L’Age d’Or, and Land Without Bread; moves to Mexico where he directs commercially-oriented films after an unsuccessful flirtation with Hollywood; and then, in the twilight of his career, returns to France to produce masterworks such as Belle de Jour (1967) and Discreet Charm of the Bourgousie (1972) with the assistance of new collaborators Serge Silberman (producer) and Jean-Claude Carrière (writer). Of these eras, the Mexican period, from 1947-1965, is the longest—and it can itself be split into early and late periods, as Buñuel again achieves international notoriety with Viridiana in 1961, and re-emerges into surrealism with 1962’s The Exterminating Angel.

The Mexican period is often overlooked, and it’s undeniable that Buñuel was far less experimental in this era, placing commercial realities above personal passions, and sneaking in surrealism and social commentary where he could. But Buñuel was honing his craft in Mexico, and these films are still fascinating to see the development of his aesthetic. Naturally, he also made some great movies in these years, among which the psychologically astute Él (which translates in this context as “he”) is a standout.

The film begins, without dialogue and somewhat mysteriously, with priests ritualistically washing the feet of young men on Maundy Thursday. The gaze of our protagonist, Francisco, scans a line of boys’ feet and priestly hands until it alights on a pair of high heeled shoes supporting shapely calves; his eyes then turn at a right angle to travel vertically up the body to briefly meet the eyes of a young woman, whom we will later learn is Gloria. What this opening means—with its nods to the director’s foot fetishism and his complicated relationship to Catholicism—is a point for academic debate. But no matter; the story immediately takes a turn for the melodramatic, following Francisco as he seduces the demure Gloria (stealing her from her fiancé, an associate of Francisco’s), while expressing his vain desire to recreate his ancestral real estate empire. Francisco’s irrational jealousy emerges as early as the honeymoon, where he gets into a fight with an old friend of his bride’s that the couple coincidentally encounters. Gloria quickly realizes she has made a terrible mistake. Things escalate through beatings, a dangerous scene in a bell tower (which anticipates Vertigo), and finally a disturbing and menacing bit where Francisco gathers up surgical equipment for purposes you can certainly guess. In the end, Francisco has a complete psychotic break, allowing Buñuel to deploy some light surrealism (via editing) to portray the triumph of paranoia over objective reality. (This climax occurs, naturally, inside a church.) An ironic epilogue shows Francisco, now convalescing in a monastery, his demons at least temporarily at bay, zig-zagging down a straight garden path.

Buñuel‘s own process during the Mexican period follows the same path: he follows the inevitable line of conventional narrative, but zigs and zags into his own obsessions. The director claimed that Él was one of his most personal works, and we know from his wife Jeanne’s autobiography that Buñuel himself suffered from irrational jealousy and sexual repression. Thus, he identifies with Francisco, but only in a masochistic and self-reflective way: he’s too perceptive to deceive himself, as his protagonist does, into thinking he’s always in the right. The source novel, by a woman speaking from personal experience, reportedly focuses on social critique of the Mexican patriarchy and its mistreatment of women; this subject interests Buñuel as well, but he leans into the character study aspect of the material. It is a way to exorcise his personal demons, and despite the conventionality of the approach, Él is at heart a typically vituperative strike by Buñuel at the hypocrisy of the human heart.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a dark, troubling, classily produced melodrama. It may not have the showy, surreal touches of Buñuel’s best known work but it still packs a punch.”–David Brook, Blueprint: Review (Criterion Blu-ray)

Él (The Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]

Él (The Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]

  • Movie dvd

List Price : 39.95 $

Offer: 30.99 $

Go to Amazon
Today on sale with a special price!
Take advantage of this special offer now!
Capsules

CAPSULE: THE ACTOR (2025)

Leave a comment

366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: André Holland, , May Calamaway, Asim Chaudhry, Joe Cole, Fabien Frankel, , , , Youssef Kerkour, Simon McBurney, Tanya Reynolds, , Scott Alexander Young

PLOT: An actor in the 1950s loses his memory after being struck in the head by a jealous husband, and winds up in a small Ohio town trying to puzzle out his own identity.

Still from the actor (2025)

COMMENTS: For his solo debut feature, protege Duke Johnson takes on a neurological  dysfunction; but whereas his  mentor would tackle an ambitiously exotic condition like Cotard’s syndrome or Fregoli syndrome, Johnson restricts his theme to humble amnesia. Paul, an actor, is struck on the head with a chair when caught in bed with another man’s wife. He wakes up in a hospital with no memory—he has to be told his name and occupation—and is almost immediately run out of town by a detective who warns him that adultery is against the law and he’ll be arrested if he returns. He knows he is from New York City, but doesn’t have enough pocket change for a ticket there, so he ends up in a small Midwestern town working at a tannery. While there, he meets and romances nice—if eccentric—small-town gal Edna, but leaves her behind once he’s saved up enough for a bus ticket back to the Big Apple. In the big, wicked city, his former friends (a roguish lot) treat him like nothing has changed, despite the fact that he doesn’t remember them, and his agent gets him a small comeback role on a TV show. But will the fact that he can’t even remember names that were told to him a few minutes ago affect his prospects as a thespian?

Johnson’s uses blatant theatrical artifice to suggest Paul’s disorientation. Scenes are staged like a big budget play or a low-budget TV show. A third-person narrator occasionally interjects exposition. Some of the streets Paul walks through look like they are built on studio backlots, with large swaths of blackness disguising the emptiness of the warehouse. Elements from a cartoon bleed into the real world. His own life shows up on everyone’s favorite program “A Silent Heart” (which appears to be the only TV show in existence in Paul’s world). Paul discovers that some real items in his house look like impractical stage props. An invisible wipe tracks his journey from an interior to an exterior location. Voices may be slightly out of sync, and he glimpses vaguely familiar faces. Doctors try recovering memories through “narcoserum”-aided hypnotic regression, leading to a dream sequence that’s only slightly mistier than his regular reality. Paul’s cameo casting in “The Silent Heart” (which, not by accident, involves a trial) throws him into a Kafkaesque nightmare where his self-confidence in what he assumes is his own acting talent is overwhelmed by the reality that he is not capable of processing what’s going on around him. All of this creates an impressively dreamlike world, putting us in the mindset of an amnesiac for whom the world operates according to familiar tropes, yet feels unreal in its concrete details.

What “really happens” in The Actor is, for the most part, easily determined. But the confusing part is what it all means—why bother to tell this story that seems to arrive nowhere? Amnesia, in and of itself, is not usually the subject of a narrative, but a rather common (even a clichéd) device for seeding a mystery. Here, there’s no great reveal—not on the plot, the psychological, the thematic, or the metaphysical levels—although we frequently get the sense that some epiphany is just about to arrive. The colorblind casting ( was originally intended to play the lead) isn’t especially distracting, but seems to be a missed opportunity for adding another layer to the story; amnesiac or not, a black actor’s experiences in Jim Crow America would have a vastly different character than a white actor’s. In the end, the movie plays like nothing more than a dreamy demonstration of the life of an amnesiac, with no discernible deeper message beyond “all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” The fact that so many of The Actor‘s individual scenes create such effective senses of disorientation and anticipation makes the movie’s refusal to ultimately resolve itself an underwhelming and slightly frustrating experience. It’s a film that somehow manages to be intriguing without becoming actually interesting; its fascinations are entirely formal and theoretical. You should still probably check out whatever Johnson tries next, though; he has his cinematic technique down.

A word about that large cast: after Holland and Chan, the rest are listed in the opening credits simply as “the Troupe.” It’s reminiscent of the collective credit “the Mercury Actors” in Citizen Kane, and as in that movie, the end credits show clips revealing who played which role. Recognizing the actors is one of the unexpected minor treats of The Actor.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a weird, trippy, movie that has themes of reinventing oneself when you think it is too late to do so. André Holland is incredible.”–Tessa Smith, Mama’s Geeky (contemporaneous)

The Actor [Blu-ray]

The Actor [Blu-ray]
  • Blu-ray
Check Price

It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: TRACK 29 (1988)

Leave a comment

366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

DIRECTED BY: Nicolas Roeg

FEATURING: Theresa Russell, Gary Oldman, Christopher Lloyd, Sandra Bernhard,

PLOT: Linda leads a boring existence in a small southern town, taken for granted by her model-railroad aficionado husband; she is roused from her stupor by the arrival of Martin, a volatile young Englishman who claims to be the child she gave up for adoption at birth.

Still from Track 29 (1988)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: If Track 29 were only about the taboo subjects at its heart – sexual assault, incest, adoption, infidelity – it might get our attention for that audacity. But those touchy subjects pale in comparison to the outlandish manner in which these characters behave, seemingly immune to any rational expectations of behavior. For what could have been (and once was) an intimate drama, it’s a lot.

COMMENTS: The pairing of a screenwriter with a message and a director with vision is a risky thing. Two strong points of view can sometimes coalesce, but they can just as easily result in conflict and confusion. Usually, one of those voices has to dominate the other. Now, I’m not 100% certain what happened when a Dennis Potter screenplay wound up in the hands of Nicolas Roeg, but I’m willing to hazard a guess: Roeg won.

Potter’s script is based upon his BBC teleplay “Schmoedipus,” and it’s instructive to watch both because you can see where expanding the material has taken it from a comparatively sedate affair to become hyperactive and exceedingly peculiar. Much of Potter’s dialogue makes the transition intact, but the whole tone of the piece changes significantly. Opening up the setting from a cramped suburban London rowhouse to a sun-kissed beach community in the Outer Banks changes the stakes, as does the creation of a more violent backstory for the child’s conception and the introduction of railroads as an unexpectedly prominent theme. (The title is a reference to the lyrical location of the Chattanooga Choo Choo.) The characters themselves have undergone an enormous transformation. The middle-aged Elizabeth becomes Russell’s youthful, childish Linda; her husband’s tedious office job becomes Lloyd’s doctor with a toy train fixation, and the quietly seductive stranger played by Tim Curry on television is a wholly different animal as embodied by Oldman, fresh off his portrayal of Sid Vicious and primed to play the angriest of young men. 

Oldman is fully schizoid, turning on a dime from deranged madman to bereft toddler. (There is no reason for his character to be British, except that it reverses Potter’s gambit in the teleplay, where the young mother’s child has been shipped off to Canada.) His unpredictability is magnetic, as he lures Linda in with sweetness and just as quickly turns antagonistic. Amazingly, though, Oldman shares the wackiest scene in the film with Lloyd’s appearance at a model train convention that unexpectedly turns into a rabble-rousing political rally. As Lloyd becomes more histrionic on behalf of (double-checks notes) toy railroading, the crowd gets increasingly amped up. This is intercut with Oldman’s full-blown assault on Lloyd’s personal track Continue reading APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: TRACK 29 (1988) →

It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: SUDDENLY, LAST SUMMER (1959)

1 Comment

DIRECTED BY: Joseph L. Mankiewicz

FEATURING: Elizabeth Taylor, Montgomery Clift, Katharine Hepburn

PLOT: A brain surgeon examines the case of Catherine, a young woman who has been in a terrible state ever since the death of her poet cousin, inquiring into a mysterious incident in Europe.

Still from suddenly, Last Summer (1959)

COMMENTS: By the time Suddenly, Last Summer hit Broadway as part of a double-bill of one-act plays, was well-established as the pre-eminent voice – alongside Arthur Miller – of the American theater. With two Pulitzers, a pair of Oscar nominations, and at least three certifiable classics in his oeuvre, he was nearing the end of that imperial phase where almost anything he wrote could be staged and then adapted to the screen. The mere presence of his name on the bill was a commercial guarantee… even if his subject was a manipulative gay man whose indiscretions cause a group of feral youths to assault and eat him.

This is where “weird” comes into the discussion. You could easily place this alongside Williams’ most familiar works – the smothering maternal figure of The Glass Menagerie, the mental instability of A Streetcar Named Desire, the web of familial lies of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof – without a moment’s hesitation. The acting is juicily overwrought, the battle between the tight lips of Southern propriety and the sweaty brows of unexpressed emotions is pitched high. It’s just another Southern Gothic drama, until you get to Elizabeth Taylor’s climactic monologue and she finally tells everyone just what happened to her cousin Sebastian. That irrevocably alters everything that has come before.

In some respects, Suddenly, Last Summer could only have happened at the precise moment it did. Homosexuality was still an unmentionable curse (the filmmakers only got it through the Production Code by emphasizing that Sebastian pays for his sins with his life), and neither it nor any other transgressions – the Venable women procuring young boys to feed Sebastian’s sexual appetites, the cannibalism – are called out explicitly. But Williams and screenwriter Gore Vidal clearly felt empowered to pull the curtain back on these immoralities. The whole saying-without-saying approach would be nigh unthinkable a decade later. This was the precise moment where such subjects could be talked about, but only if they were talked around.

Talking is all there is left, and Suddenly, Last Summer indulges in it. Vidal does little to open up Williams’ play for the screen, with most of its running time spent in either Catherine’s hospital room or Violet’s decadent New Orleans mansion and elaborate garden. Whenever the movie feels stagebound, the actors chomp on the scenery; Taylor knows she’s got a scrumptious part, with monologues that are by turns defiant and distraught. Hepburn, meanwhile, delights in deploying a mannered cruelty, from her wonderfully theatrical entrance descending in an elevator right up until the moment Taylor shatters her illusions of her beloved son. (Clift, in their presence, is unavoidably vacant. He is reduced to establishing exposition). Yet it’s in the moments when the story leaves the soundstages and pulls away from acting showcases that it starts to go to some truly strange places. Catherine’s forays into the depths of the mental asylum need no words as she comes face-to-face with souls far more damaged than hers. Her account of her trip to the island of Cabeza de Lobo (Wolf’s Head) is presented as a mute play, with phantasmagoric images of the swarthy locals, the blazing sun, and her own revealing swimsuit. Throughout, Sebastian is never given a face, reinforcing his complete unknowability. The twist of his horrific end only gains power from what we almost see.

Variety’s original review dubbed Suddenly, Last Summer “the most bizarre motion picture ever made by a major American company.” Time has dulled the impact of the film’s content, but there’s still something off-kilter about the way it delivers its surprises. It’s almost like a horror film pretending to be a Tennessee Williams play, rather than Williams dabbling in the grotesque. Like its title, it reflects a moment that ends everything we thought we knew, and leaves us reflecting upon it long after.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“[Mankiewicz] has turned out a polished film, and one that deals boldly with the ugly theme, but he has certainly not wasted any subtlety on the job…. this bizarre homosexual nightmare becomes the one artistically persuasive section in an otherwise coldly fabricated melodrama.” – Robert Hatch, The Nation (contemporaneous)

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

Suddenly, Last Summer

Suddenly, Last Summer
  • The disk has English audio.
Check Price