Tag Archives: Paranoia

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, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE KILLING ROOM (2009)

Leave a comment

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

DIRECTED BY: Jonathan Liebesman

FEATURING: Nick Cannon, Clea DuVall, Timothy Hutton, Chloë Sevigny, Peter Stormare, Shea Whigham

PLOT: A group of civilians who think they are participating in a paid psychological test have actually been tricked into an off-the-books government experiment testing the limits of human endurance under extreme hardship and torture.

Still from the killing room (2009)

COMMENTS: MKUltra was a CIA program with the modest aims of determining how much the human mind could be manipulated to do the bidding of others. Their goals ranged from developing irresistible interrogation techniques to enlisting unwitting civilians as assassins. (It’s a favorite topic for podcasters; the CBC’s “Brainwashed” is a solid place to start.) In 1972, the director of the project retired, saying that the entire effort had been useless; the CIA responded by giving him its highest honor and then destroying most of their files on the program. It took multiple congressional investigations for any of this to get on the record, and there will undoubtedly be much that we will never know about the American government’s assault on its own citizens.

(By the way, I really have to hand it to the CIA for the masterful troll job they performed in sharing their role in MKUltra. It’s clear that the Freedom of Information Act required them to come clean about their activities, but they certainly weren’t going to make it easy on anyone, hence the brilliantly unreadable online post they created to share the depths of their depravity.)

A pre-title card in The Killing Room makes clear that while MKUltra was publicly disavowed, there’s no way to know for sure that the government isn’t still up to something shady. After all, wouldn’t it make sense that the War on Terror would dredge up some of the old plan’s nastier elements? Thus we have all the premise we need for a familiar tale of regular people discovering they’re in a trap and desperately seeking a way out, with some rumination on Benjamin Franklin’s thoughts about liberty and security for extra seasoning. Think of it as “Cube meets the Milgram Experiment with a dash of Saw” and you’re pretty much there.

As a thriller, The Killing Room is an effectively shrewd piece of low-budget, high-stakes filmmaking. Director Liebesman exploits the claustrophobic setting with a mix of jittery handhelds, obtrusive surveillance footage, and lingering closeups. He also finds a clever balance of techniques to manipulate his audience, from ticking-clock suspense to queasy uses for blood. Most impressive, he kicks off the experiment proper with a brilliantly executed piece of shocking violence, a terrific blend of sound, editing, and acting that goes off like a bomb. Whatever it is, it’s not boring.

This is the kind of juicy-monologue, emotionally heightened movie that actors love to be in, and some really get to strut their stuff here. Hutton, in particular, relishes the darkness and toughness of his Continue reading IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE KILLING ROOM (2009) →

It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED (1960)

Leave a comment

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

Recommended

DIRECTED BY: Wolf Rilla

FEATURING: George Sanders, Barbara Shelley, Michael Gwynn, Martin Stephens

PLOT: All the women of child-bearing age in the Midwich  become pregnant after a mysterious period of unconsciousness; their offspring have a distinctive appearance, mature rapidly, and behave in a manner quite unnatural.

Still from village of the damned (1960)

COMMENTS: For two years running, I have celebrated Halloween here with a classic 1950s goofball–monster showcase. So here we are, on the cusp of the 60s, and lots of things look familiar: we’re back in black-and-white, we’re back in England, and something is once more out to get us. But it’s a little different this time. This time, the beasts aren’t strabismus-afflicted giant birds or giddily bouncing brains. They’re children, notable for their platinum hair, their glowing eyes, and their sociopathic behavior. This time, our monster feels earnestly threatening.

We don’t get to them right away, though. The film cleverly serves up its surprises and horrors at a deliberate pace. We must first work through the mystery of the lengthy period of unconsciousness, which the authorities investigate seriously and thoroughly, diligently working through experiments that culminate in a terrible sacrifice. We never get a full explanation for that occurrence, though, because we’re quickly on to the conundrum of the many immaculate conceptions and the havoc they wreak among the populace. In fact, we’re well into Act 2 before we get our first encounter with the enigma of the curious children themselves, who can solve puzzle boxes as toddlers and who get revenge upon their mothers when the feeding bottle is too hot. (The filmmakers were right to forego the original title of John Wyndham’s book; “The Midwich Cuckoos” would have been too much of a giveaway as to the childrens’ origin.) This sense of compounding catastrophes keeps you off-balance like the residents of Midwich, never able to relax before the next dilemma arrives.

The children are appropriately creepy. Lead child David (Stephens, unconvincingly dubbed) does most of the talking, serving up uncomfortable sociopathy by directly confronting the shopkeepers who think them an abomination, or helpfully suggesting to his father that, “If you didn’t suffer from emotions, from feelings… you could be as powerful as we are.” However, the young terrors do most of their intimidation without words. A walk through the town shows the residents in a mixed state of fear and revulsion, responding to the cliquish collection of quiet children as if they were a rowdy biker gang. Luckily, all they need to do is put on their best wish-you-to-the-cornfield look  and the townspeople’s reactions do the rest. They come by their fears honestly, because we’ve seen that the children’s disapproval carries with it the threat of death. This is most evident in Continue reading IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED (1960) →

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: MICKEY ONE (1965)

Leave a comment

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

DIRECTED BY: Arthur Penn

FEATURING: , , Hurd Hatfield, Teddy Hart, Franchot Tone

PLOT: A small-time comedian in Detroit runs afoul of the mob and skips town, but remains drawn to the stage—and his longing for the spotlight finds him risking unwanted attention from his pursuers.

Still from mickey one (1965)

COMMENTS: A turning point in the annals of American cinema came when Warren Beatty and Arthur Penn teamed up to apply the iconoclastic stylings of the movement to a classic crime story of a protagonist on the run from a relentless pursuer. That legendary collaboration, of course, is Bonnie and Clyde. Which makes it interesting to discover that landmark film actually represents a second bite at the apple. Before Bonnie and Clyde could run, Mickey One had to crawl.

Ostensibly about a comic on the run from the mob, Mickey One is deeply uninterested in the details of its plot. (Beatty is never told explicitly what he’s done wrong, and his attempts to buy his way out of his troubles are not so much rejected as ignored.) Instead, we open with a montage of Beatty’s high-flying comedian living the high life, and then immediately descend into full-blown paranoia. He sets fire to all his identification, rips the satin piping off his tuxedo pants, grabs a seat in hobo first-class on the next train out of town, and quickly submerges himself in a series of the lowest-level jobs he can find, assuming the name that gives the film its title. 

At this point, Mickey One seems to be a story of a confident man forced to become weak but unable to pull it off. His fear is genuine; he immediately dashes out of a restaurant the moment he hears it might have mob connections, and he regards anyone who tries to interact with him with disgust and anger. And yet, watching his fellow hacks at the mic, he can’t deny the call of the limelight, and so he tries to walk the line between satisfying his need to perform and desperately trying to avoid sending up a signal flare to his pursuers. Trying to balance these contrary impulses is destroying him, and that’s the character study we’re here for. Beatty is all jittery energy and barely contained rage; he never really demonstrates any actual comic ability (a complaint Beatty lodged throughout the production), but he’s got the loose rhythms and the nervous energy of James Dean or young Paul Newman, never sitting still and chewing on his words like gum. He’s all exposed wiring.

But there’s a turning point when the film suddenly becomes about something else. In a tense sequence, Mickey is maneuvered into auditioning for an unseen impresario, a scratchy voice barking out orders from behind the harshest spotlight ever aimed at a stage. Mickey is utterly terrified that whoever it is in the darkness will end him permanently, but everyone else—his girlfriend, his agent, a persistent booker—all seem equally terrified of their fate if he doesn’t perform. And that’s when it starts to feel like Mickey One is an allegory. We’ve been treated to metaphor throughout the film. Car crushers devour tons of metal on the outskirts of town. The booking agent (played by Hatfield, who I can only describe as a poor man’s James Olson) has an office that’s entirely white and seemingly decorated exclusively in glass. Benevolent societies sing at street corners about the coming judgment day, while a street artist makes enormous mechanical constructions that are destroyed by the authorities at the merest hint of a malfunction. And then there are the voices, speaking to Mickey from behind blinding lights and through faceless cameras. It all hints at meaning something bigger, but this is the moment when Beatty seems to be dueling with nothing less than God itself. Small wonder that he would run at the first opportunity.

Mickey One feels like an ancestor to any number of future Warren Beatty showcases: the overconfidence of Shampoo, the raw paranoia of The Parallax View, the collision of crime and entertainment in Bugsy. And that’s no small accomplishment, to be a rough draft of a style of filmmaking and a type of character study that will be accomplished more successfully down the line. But it ends up being more of an augury than a film that stands on its own. In that sense, the film is very much like its hero in the final scene: eager to put on a show, but exposed to the elements and fearful of the reception that is destined to come.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“With its surrealistic, Felliniesque presence, ‘Mickey One’ is a stunning piece.”–Peter Stack, San Francisco Chronicle (1995 revival)

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

Mickey One

Mickey One
  •  
Check Price