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Capsules

CAPSULE: JEANNE DIELMAN, 23 QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES (1975)

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DIRECTED BY: Chantal Akerman

FEATURING:

PLOT: A widow performs chores around her apartment and prostitutes herself in the afternoons.

Still from Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: With its belabored 3+ hours (!) of a woman doing dull daily chores in long static real time takes, Jeanne Dielman is an example of how a movie can essentially swallow its own tail, achieving a level of surreality by emphasizing ordinariness and normality to an absurd degree. Like Andy Warhol’s “Sleep,” this deliberate experiment in extended boredom serves a purpose in the film universe; it’s just that that purpose isn’t to be watched by a normal human audience.

COMMENTS: When I read critics rave about Jeanne Dielman, I sometimes feel like I’m scanning reviews from the Bizarro World Times, dispatches from an alternate universe where up is down and audiences are enthralled by watching women shop for buttons and cook meatloaf for hours on end. (Vincent Canby’s claim that the frumped-up Delphine Seyrig “has never looked more beautiful” than in this film doesn’t help counter that impression that every review of the film was written on Opposite Day). It’s not that Akerman’s movie is a fraud or a failure. According to its experimental goal of exploring mundanity to its absolute limit, it’s a success, one that, for obvious reasons, other directors have rarely sought to repeat. But Jeanne Dielman is a formal exercise that no one other than a theoretician could love: we can’t bond with its affectless characters, its punishing three hour running time is a blunt weapon used to hammer home its hopeless message, and frankly, it’s just no fun. Watching this movie isn’t just taking your cultural vegetables, it’s gagging down a spoonful of cultural castor oil. Jeane Dielman‘s high artistic intent and ridiculous integrity of vision are too powerful to give the film a “beware” rating, but this is a movie that’s better read about than watched; heck, even Mlle. Dielman’s son would rather read than act in the movie. On its release the movie was adopted by feminists as a landmark statement on the crushing boredom of “women’s work,” but it’s not (and Akerman herself never claimed it was). That interpretation would require that the men and the working women in the movie—the son, the postal clerk, the waitress—were depicted as living lives of glamor compared to housefrau Jeanne. Rather, the film paints the entire adult world (or at least the “bourgeois” world) as morbidly dull: the only human beings shown enjoying any aspect of life in the film are children briefly seen running and playing in the street. The universal and almost unqualified praise for Akerman’s avant-garde oddity—which bludgeons the concept of “entertainment” with the same subtlety and affection as John Waters did for the concept of “taste” in Pink Flamingos—seems like it might make a great case study for a 20th century edition of “Extraordinary Aesthetic Delusions and the Madness of Critics.” For those who crave such things, a similar modern ennuiscape was sketched earlier, but with greater economy and magic, by in Dillinger is Dead.

After the marketing success of a line of toys based on Star Wars characters, figurines based on popular movies became huge sellers in the late 1970s and 1980s. Obviously not every toy company could afford to license a top-of-the-line property like Raiders of the Lost Ark, but the Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles posable action figure was almost certainly the most ill-advised attempt to cash in on the fad. I can still hear the radio spots created to coincide with the movie’s 1983 U.S. release: “Your Jeanne Dielman action figure makes coffee, entertains ‘gentleman callers,’ eats in stony silence, or just sits and stares at the wall, just like international screen icon Delphine Seyrig! For extra authenticity, the molded plastic face is incapable of expression. WARNING: to avoid risk of catatonia, toy should not be played with for more than three hours at a setting. Potato peeler and scissors sold separately.”

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Miss Seyrig has participated in a number of supposedly experimental films over the years, but in none as original and ambitious as this. ‘Jeanne Dielman’ is not quite like any other film you’ve ever seen…”–Vincent Canby, The New York Times (1983 U.S. theatrical release)

Canonically Weird (The List)

115. A REPORT ON THE PARTY AND GUESTS (1966)

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O slavnosti a hostech

“When one lives in a society that is essentially not free, it is the obligation of every thinking person to attack obstacles to freedom in every way at his disposal.”–Jan Nemec

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , Ivan Vyskocil,

PLOT: Seven people are pleasantly picnicking by a stream when they see a festive bridal party in the distance; they wonder if they can join in the celebration. Later, walking through the woods, a gang of men accosts them and takes them to a clearing where the leader interrogates them without explaining why. The bully’s adoptive father shows up, apologizes for the son’s crude behavior, and invites the party to the outdoor bridal banquet; the older man becomes upset, however, when one of the invitees decides to leave the party and strike off on his own…

Still from A Report on the Party and Guests (1966)

BACKGROUND:

  • Even under the relatively liberal 1967 Czechoslovakian regime, The Party and Guests was banned (at the same time as ‘s Daisies) because it had “nothing in common with our republic, socialism, and the ideas of Communism.” The movie was briefly exhibited during the Prague spring of 1968 then banned again after the Soviet invasion. In the second round of censorship, hardline President Antonín Novotný honored Party and Guests by naming it one of four films that were “banned forever” in the dictatorship.
  • The movie was filmed quietly and quickly in five weeks because director Jan Nemec was afraid that authorities would shut down the production.
  • Party and Guests was accepted in competition for the 1968 Cannes film festival, but the festival was cancelled that tumultuous year out of solidarity with striking French workers and students.
  • The common English translation of the title O Slavnosti a Hostech adds a pun on “party” (both a celebration and a political association) that wasn’t present in the original Czech. The American title also adds the word “report” (the British released it as simply The Party and the Guests).
  • None of the cast were professional actors; most were artists and intellectuals who held “counter-revolutionary” political views. Jan Klusák (who makes quite an impression as the bullying Rudolph) was a composer who scored many of the Czech New Wave movies (including Valerie and Her Week of Wonders), and later made music to accompany Jan Svankmajer shorts. Director Evald Schorm (“House of Joy“) plays the guest who decides to leave the party. This bit of casting suggested to the authorities that the film was a protest of their decision to ban one of Schrom’s previous films.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: The idea of a functionary sitting behind a desk, your fate in his hands and an enigmatic grin on his face, is the preeminent vision of bureaucratic totalitarianism from the 20th century. The incongruous twist A Report on the Party and Guests puts on this disquieting picture is to set up that desk in the middle of an open forest glade, with birds chirping merrily in the background.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: When discussing A Report on the Party and Guests, every critic is required to use two words: “allegorical” and “Kafkaesque.” The second descriptor explains why this quietly disturbing examination of senseless conformity earns its place on the List of the best weird movies ever made. After watching this quietly absurd totalitarian nightmare, I can pretty much guarantee you will scratch Report on the Party and Guests off your list of possible wedding themes.


Short clip from A Report on the Party and Guests

COMMENTS: Understated to the point of madness, A Report on the Party and Guests slips Continue reading 115. A REPORT ON THE PARTY AND GUESTS (1966) →

Capsules

CAPSULE: HELLACIOUS ACRES: THE CASE OF JOHN GLASS (2011)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Navin Pratap, Jamie Abrams

PLOT: An amnesiac man awakens in the post-apocalyptic future encased in a protective suit

Still from Hellacious Acres: The Case of John Glass (2011)

and patrols the desolate landscape searching for explanations.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: With its microbudget aesthetic of abandoned barns and homemade black leather cyborg-suits, this sci-fi indie set on the post-apocalyptic Canadian prairie is nothing like a Hollywood movie; but the minimal story is not engaging enough to justify considering it for a List of the 366 Best Weird Movies of All Time.

COMMENTS: In a sense, it may be pointless to review Hellacious Acres. This is a movie that doesn’t care what you think of it; it just wants to be itself. It stars a character who wakes up trapped in a synthetic, computerized black protective suit without knowing who he is or why he’s there, and who ends up in a hallucinatory delirium without accomplishing whatever his goal was. In between, he consults his video-game console glove for info on the world around him, learns how to eat and expel waste through the hose attached to his suit, and walks, walks, WALKS. (The trailer takes a perverse pride in pointing out the amount of WALKING in Acres, as does the soundtrack, which launches into an epic, doom-laden sludgy drone whenever John Glass puts his heels to the prairie grass). Events play out in real time. When Glass needs to find something to eat, most movies would either skip the sequence or compress the action through editing; here, we watch every second of him searching every inch of an abandoned house, forcing his way into a stubborn cabinet, studying each label he finds, laboriously sawing through the tin can, then discovering the contents are rancid—and starting all over again with a new can. It sounds like a cruel joke on the audience, but Acres‘ subtle sense of humor about its own lack of pace helps win you over: that involuntary wince you give when you see Glass reach for that second can, or the way he throws up his hands in exasperation as he circles through a menu on his control panel while trying to arm his deadly plasma weapon in the middle of a melee. The effects are not that special but Tremblay has uses his minimal budget with maximum effectiveness; the faceless costuming is creepy, and the video-game interface looks futuristic enough for the film’s purposes. The blasted farmland setting, with its almost comical number of barns repurposed to house teleporters, is also novel; it’s a more laid-back, rural apocalypse than we’re used to seeing in the movies. Most importantly, there’s plenty of weirdness filling up the empty spaces: a psychedelic opening with a disembodied voice giving the backstory while we look at a heat-imaging map of the resuscitated John Glass, a mutant baby encased in a jar, Glass carrying around (and carrying on conversations with) the severed hand of a fellow soldier, bad trips caused by teleportation drugs, a hallucinated waiter of the wasteland, and of course the lightbulb-shaped alien energy jellyfish that now prowl the Earth. In a final spit in the face to storytelling conventions, the tale ends in futility, with the protagonist insane, having failed at a mission that was never really clearly explained, having learned nothing of importance about himself and having unlocked no significant mysteries about the strange world he found himself in. This whole exercise in perverse pacing and post-apocalyptic hallucination is likely to leave even weird movie buffs perplexed about what they’ve just seen; imagine how “normal” folks would feel if they rented this by accident looking for a straight sci-fi adventure?

‘s first film was the still-unreleased surrealist experiment Heads of Control: The Gorul Baheu Brain Expedition (2006). He was last seen at 366 trying to provide us with a top 10 weird movies list (he was unable to limit himself to just ten titles).

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Hellacious Acres is bizarre… It really is one awkward flick that some folks may dig but others will blatantly hate.”–Ramius Scythe, Horror Chronicles (DVD)

DISCLAIMER: A copy of this movie was provided by the distributor for review.

Canonically Weird (The List)

100. UNCLE BOONMEE WHO CAN RECALL HIS PAST LIVES [LOONG BOONMEE RALEUK CHAT] (2011)

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AKA Uncle Boonmee

“Facing the jungle, the hills and vales, my past lives as an animal and other beings rise up before  me.”—Title card at the beginning of Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

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DIRECTED BY: Apichatpong Weerasethakul

FEATURING: Thanapat Saisaymar, , Sakda Kaewbuadee, Kanokporn Tongaram

PLOT: On his plantation in rural Thailand, the dying Boonmee is visited by living relatives and the ghosts of his past. As they ease him into death, the story is interrupted through vignettes that may represent his memories of past lives.

BACKGROUND:

  • Apichatpong Weerasethakul considerately refers to himself as “Joe” when speaking to Western audiences.
  • Uncle Boonmee is loosely based on a 1983 book by Phra Sripariyattiweti, a monk from Apichatpong’s hometown of Khon Kaen, Thailand.
  • The film is a feature-length component of Primitive, Apichatpong’s ongoing multimedia project, which also encompasses a number of video installations and the short films A Letter to Uncle Boonmee and Phantoms of Nabua.
  • Received the Palme d’Or at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival. Jury president Tim Burton described it as “a beautiful, strange dream.”
  • Sakda, who plays Boonmee’s nephew Tong, and Kanokporn, who plays his nurse Roong, played characters of the same names in Apichatpong’s earlier films Tropical Malady and Blissfully Yours, respectively. In both cases, it’s unclear if they’re meant to be the same characters.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Though it’s chock-full of beguiling, whimsical imagery, the single most memorable sight in Uncle Boonmee is that of a princess in a lagoon, undulating with pleasure as she receives oral sex from a catfish. (Unsurprisingly, the words “catfish sex” became synonymous with Uncle Boonmee‘s brand of weirdness immediately following its Cannes premiere.)

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Critics sometimes identify Apichatpong’s style as a mix of


Apichatpong Weerasethakul on Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

surrealism and neorealism, and this is a handy skeleton key for getting at Uncle Boonmee‘s weird nature. The film contains plenty of enigmatic images and seeming non sequiturs, but they’re framed as natural, even welcome steps in the cycle of life and death. The characters accept them nonchalantly, going along with the film’s dream logic and implicitly entreating viewers to do the same. No clear border separates the mystical from the mundane. And two hours in, when it feels like you should be totally inured to Uncle Boonmee‘s disorienting twists, along comes a denouement that renders everything else normal by comparison.

COMMENTS: An ox, having escaped its tether, strolls through the forest at twilight.  Eventually, Continue reading 100. UNCLE BOONMEE WHO CAN RECALL HIS PAST LIVES [LOONG BOONMEE RALEUK CHAT] (2011) →

Capsules

CAPSULE: LE QUATTRO VOLTE (2010)

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AKA The Four Times

DIRECTED BY: Michelangelo Frammartino

FEATURING: Giuseppe Fuda

PLOT: An old goatherd dies; a goat is born, grows up and dies; a tree is cut down and made

Still from Le Quattro Volte (2010)

into charcoal.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Le Quattro Volte is a strange document crafted to illustrate a strange thesis; its weirdness comes more in the conception than the execution, however.  Most of the time, Le Quattro Volte is like watching a National Geographic special with the narrator’s commentary track stripped away.  It can be mesmerizing if you’re in a contemplative mood, but it doesn’t put that “weird” feeling in your gut.

COMMENTS:  If someone accidentally wandered into a theater playing Le Quattro Volte and observed the sequence of events—there’s no plot, per se—without any preparation or background information, they’d be completely confounded by this mystical, dialogue-free film.  In the first forty minutes an old man herds goats, drinks ashes mixed with water, and dies.  In the next twenty minutes a goat is born, explores its world, gets separated from the herd, and dies (presumably ) under a tree.  In the second-to-last segment that tree is cut down by villagers, stripped of bark and branches and used as the centerpiece of a vaguely pagan tree-climbing ritual; for a finale, the trunk is chopped up and made into charcoal.  The end.  Puzzling, no?  Of course, having access to the pressbook we know [“spoiler” alert],  that the “quattro volte” (“four times”) of the title come from a quote by the ancient Greek mystic and mathematician Pythagoras, and refers to his theory that the human soul is composed of rational (represented by the shepherd), animal (goat), vegetable (tree) and mineral (charcoal) parts, and that the soul may be reincarnated at the moment of death into any of the four types of matter [end “spoiler”].  As the viewer journeys through Volte, he encounters a number of scenes which work as odd little self-contained film poems.  There’s the mysterious shot of a steaming mound that starts the film, a live goat birth, and a woman who measures out and wraps the dust she sweeps up from the church floor into a little bundle made from a magazine cover with the same precision a cocaine dealer uses when preparing an eight ball.  (There is a heavily ritualistic, almost sacred component to even the smallest actions in Le Quattro Volte).  Most impressive is an astounding eight-minute, one-take scene involving a passion play, centurions who unwisely park their pickup truck on a hill, and a vindictive sheepdog that should leave you wondering how in the world the choreography was accomplished.  The film is shot in sunny, tan Calabria, a picturesque region of rolling hills and rustic stone homes with tile roofs that seems unchanged by the centuries; many of the longshots look like landscape paintings from old Italian masters, but with figures slowly moving deep in the background.  People do speak in the film, but only off in the distance, so that speech is just sonic texture, like the barking of dogs, the bleating of goats and the rustling of leaves in the wind.  Language, and human activity in general, is abstracted in the film, marginalized, so that the fate of a man is no more important than the fate of a goat or a tree.

With landscapes, compositions and narrative pace that all resemble a picture postcard, Le Quattro Volte is art with a capital “A.”  As a film it can neither be generally recommended, or recommended against.  It’s intended for a specialized audience of aesthetes and film critics, and it’s a movie that’s unlikely to transcend that demographic.  If you’re at all intrigued by the description above, you’ll probably want to check it out.  But if you have your doubts about whether you can stand staring at the screen while an ant slowly crawls across a shepherd’s craggy face for minutes on end, then watching this movie will seem like taking medicine: you may sense it’s good for you, but you’re sure to grimace trying to get it down.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a devastating, profound and at times surreal work of art.”–Michael O’Sullivan, The Washington Post (contemporaneous)