Tag Archives: Political Allegory

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: EL CONDE (2023)

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DIRECTED BY: Pablo Larraín

FEATURING: Jaime Vadell, Gloria Munchmeyer,, Paula Luchsinger,

PLOT: Auguste Pinochet, former dictator of Chile and centuries-old vampire, contemplates whether it is time to finally die, and invites his family to his remote compound to discuss the dispersal of the fortune he looted from the country.

Still from El Conde (2023)

COMMENTS: In a world filled with so much death, it is one of the cruelest ironies that the people you want most to die never seem to oblige. Day after day, they go around fouling the very air they breathe and incurring your helpless wrath, a fact that honestly seems to fuel them and stave off their seemingly inevitable demise even longer. Sure, they may give off signs of ill health or mental decline, but they never actually take the crucial stuff of shuffling off, no matter how many Big Macs and Diet Cokes they clutch in their tiny hands. It’s exasperating.

Pablo Larraín feels your pain. Augusto Pinochet finally exited the Chilean presidential palace in 1990, but he continued to linger in the world for another 16 years, and in the public consciousness still after that, his crimes having had an immeasurable effect on the psyche of the nation. It probably explains why so much of Larraín’s career (when not profiling the notable unhappy women of the 20th century) has been devoted to examining Chile’s troubled soul. Still, El Conde marks the first time that he has confronted the man directly, and that appears to be because he has finally figured out who Pinochet really was: an undying, bloodsucking vampire.

Mapping the traits of a legendary monster onto the life of the man who disappeared thousands of dissidents turns out to be a fairly short walk. Pinochet’s hunger for power is attributed to his beginnings as a loyal soldier in the army of Louis XVI, where his distaste for revolution and anti-monarchal movements were born. From there, he goes from country to country helping to stamp out uprisings, until he finally arrives in Chile to lead the violent overthrow of the socialist government of Salvador Allende. Invoking the vampire legend is a canny choice, because it not only connects Chile to the broad historical arc of oppressive dictatorships, but provides a context to help understand the grotesque body count under Pinochet’s rule. It actually becomes more comprehensible to attribute it to a monster.

The luscious black-and-white cinematography (courtesy of Edward Lachman) lends an authenticity to the story of exclusively awful people. Vadell is suitably cadaverous as Pinochet, and his retinue — his duplicitous wife, his loyal majordomo, his venal children — all embrace their evil eagerly. The one character who never really clicks is Carmen, the undercover nun who Luchsinger infuses with a kind of wide-eyed wonder in almost every moment. This is intriguing when she openly encourages Pinochet and his family in their delusions of victimhood and entitlement, confusing when the narrator is telling us that she is an immensely powerful instrument of vengeance, and truly spectacular when she clumsily but eagerly takes on the capacity to fly. Compared with the vampire Pinochet’s austere, imperious flights over Santiago, Carmen’s tumbles in the sky are genuinely enchanting.

Ah, that narrator. She turns out to be the most important character in the piece, as her plummy upper-crust British tones point the way toward the film’s larger thesis. If you have an ear for voices and think she sounds awfully familiar, you’re probably right. It really is too delicious a secret to be spoiled (if you absolutely must know, let me just say that giving it away even by showing you a picture would be Crass), but it speaks to the larger metaphor that Larraín wants to convey. Pinochet, he tells us, did not arise out of the mists unbidden and commence a reign of terror. He was made, birthed by the same forces that always seek to enforce a rigid division of haves and have-nots and to reap the benefits. Ultimately, El Conde is not really concerned with the specifics of Pinochet or even Chile. It’s about the vampires who have sucked the lifeblood of humanity for centuries and (as the epilogue shows us) will continue to do so. We can take some comfort in the knowledge that death comes for everyone, but the evil that feasts on our ideals, our arts, our conception of what it means to be free… that evil is undying and elusive. The wish is not enough.

El Conde is a Netflix exclusive.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…kinda funny, very weird… The quirkiness of the characters and their brutal honesty create dialogues brimming with acid humour and sarcasm. This form of communication, along with the surreal situations that take place, make a very original and entertaining piece…” – Lucía Muñoz, Cut to the Take (contemporaneous)

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

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: SNOW WHITE AND RUSSIAN RED (2009)

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Wojna polsko-ruska (Polish-Russian War)

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DIRECTED BY: Xawery Żuławski

FEATURING: Borys Szyc, Roma Gąsiorowska, Maria Strzelecka, Sonia Bohosiewicz, Anna Prus, Dorota Masłowska

PLOT: Against the backdrop of ongoing tensions between Poland and Russia, Silny, a drug-using student, pines for his unfaithful girlfriend Magda; he sublimates his pain through hedonism, but begins to question his role in the universe and the very nature of his own reality. 

COMMENTS: Finding a suitable title to sell a movie to another country’s audience is not the least challenge foreign films face. If a direct translation doesn’t work, then you have to come up with something that makes sense to a different culture without betraying the original spirit. By this standard, Snow White and Russian Red is a pretty good effort, evoking the colors of the Polish flag while referencing two of the protagonist’s greatest foes: the cocaine that provides an escape and the oppressors who continue to loom over Polish life even decades after the fall of communism. Nice work, title translators.

The undercurrent of politics is a constant in Snow White and Russian Red, and Silny, looking like the lead singer of Right Said Fred and alternating between uncontrolled violence and tearful self-pity, is ill-equipped to understand any of it. He is supposedly pursuing a business degree, he is surrounded by decadent baubles of the West like beauty pageants and fast-food joints, and he dreams of living in a McMansion in a suburb where everything looks the same. But he’s continually drawn back to Magda, the hot blonde in the Soviet-red dress whose infidelities infuriate him and only make him want her more. They are beyond co-dependent; they are perpetually locked in each other’s orbits, pushed and pulled by gravity.

Someone more well-versed in the particulars of Polish politics and society could do a better job of deciphering the allusions that populate the film, particularly the women who simultaneously entice and frustrate Silny’s attempts to find escape through sex: Angela, the nihilistic goth who embraces suicide but also is protective of her virginity; Arleta, who seems to want Silny’s affections but consistently irritates him with insulting gossip; Natasha, the tough girl who teases Silny but is so focused on getting her next hit that she snorts powdered soup broth; and Ala, the cute nerd who loves her parents but gets physically aroused talking about this amazing 16-year-old writer she’s discovered named Dorota. Silny feels superior to all of them on an intellectual level, but consistently fails to score sexually. If director Żuławski (son of Andrzej) has any metaphor to convey, it’s that Poland is like Silny, neither fish nor fowl, small on the world stage but unsatisfied at home. 

But while there’s the sociopolitical allegory going on, there’s also a weirder level of surrealism that suggests what we’re seeing is somewhere beyond the realm of reality. Within the opening minutes, an irate Silny deploys cartoon physics to fling his erstwhile girlfriend across the room. When Angela gets sick during a two-person dance party, she spews sick like a fire hose, and then upchucks rocks. Silny engages in a ridiculous fight with nearly everybody in a public park, dispatching them with greater ease than Neo in The Matrix. But it’s only with Silny’s arrest for fighting that we jump headfirst into the rabbit hole, when he is led to the desk of a clerk named Dorota Masłowska. Those in the know will recognize that name as belonging to the author of the original novel upon which this film is based. (Also, the same teen author who got Ala hot and bothered.) Turns out that’s not just a cheeky tip-of-the-cap; we’re looking at the genuine article. We’ve actually seen Masłowska before, moping around in a striped hoodie and narrating some of Silny’s story in the first person, but now that they’re face-to face, she can demonstrate her omnipotence by forcing him to do her bidding and literally deconstructing the set. It’s a pivot that evidently comes straight from the book, a piece of meta-narrative that Żuławski replicates with the author’s participation. It’s also a twist that only muddies the waters. The godlike powers of the author don’t equate neatly to the forces keeping Silny down, or to Poland, for that matter. It’s just a whole other element that Żuławski and Masłowska want to play with, and it doesn’t serve the story or stand on its own. It’s a hat being worn on top of another hat.

After despairing about ever knowing what in his life is real, Silny rams his head into a wall and finds himself in Hell, which turns out to be a talk show where he fabricates his encounters with the devil for the audience’s amusement. Masłowska is in that crowd, too, and if anything sums up the arc of Snow White and Russian Red, it’s this: a character reckoning with things he can hardly understand, and the author who created him sitting in judgment. It’s a dance that seemingly has no end.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The visually splashy sophomore effort of Polish helmer Xawery Zulawski is just as helter-skelter as the spiky local literary sensation that inspired it, but is finally too thematically anemic to provide any real dazzle… no amount of wacky occurrences can substitute for any deeper insight or suggest possible solutions. This makes the film totally static on a thematic level, despite its pumping soundtrack, roving camera, often psychedelic lighting and snazzy (though thankfully not hysterical) editing. Effects work and wire-fu fight scenes add to the generally off-the-wall tone.” – Boyd van Hoeij, Variety (contemporaneous)

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

Wojna Polsko-Ruska

Wojna Polsko-Ruska
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Capsules

CAPSULE: MOEBIUS (1996)

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DIRECTED BY: Gustavo Mosquera

FEATURING: Guillermo Angelelli, Roberto Carnaghi, Anabella Levy, Jorge Petraglia

PLOT: A train vanishes within a vast subway system, and a topologist who happens to be a former student of the man who designed the transit line is tasked with tracking down the missing transport.

Still from Moebius (1996)

COMMENTS: For roughly a decade following a coup in 1976, the military junta that led Argentina waged a so-called “Dirty War” against suspected dissidents and opponents. The campaign amounted to state-sponsored terrorism, typified by widespread arrests without charge or trial, death camps, and even the taking of newborn infants to be raised by the families of favored families. (For what it’s worth, the Argentinian dictators had help.) The campaign of kidnapping, torture, and murder was widespread, and the suspected number of 30,000 people disappeared without a trace during the junta’s reign may be low.

So perhaps you can understand why a short science fiction story about a subway train that mysteriously goes missing might have some resonance to Argentine audiences. The hidden parts of history are an ever-present threat to those in power, so the questions the characters in Moebius confront go far beyond what happened to the train, and reach into the puzzles of why can’t we find out and who doesn’t want us to know.

That’s why the way the mystery within Moebius unfolds is surprisingly satisfying: via the turning of the wheels of bureaucracy. As the alarm of a missing train works its way up the chain, we see ever-higher levels of managers and functionaries confronted with the baffling report, with no dialogue necessary to convey their confusion. Ultimately, these same bureaucrats will be looking for a way to make the whole thing go away, because the only thing more dangerous to the powerful than an unknown is a bad known.

As the equivalent of a locked-door mystery, Moebius relies heavily on mood to do the bulk of the work. After all, our hero is a topologist, a mathematician who studies the malleability of surfaces. This turns out to be a canny choice for an investigator, given the metaphysical nature of the train’s disappearance, but it also means we shouldn’t expect a lot of riveting action.

At least as interesting as Moebius’ plot is its production: director Mosquera enlisted a crew of 45 students from the newly established Universidad del Cine in Buenos Aires. Despite their nascent skills, the film is a very polished product. In particular, antique cameras and analog editing bring an unusual sheen to the various clips of trains in motion, giving the Underground the feel of the underworld.

Ultimately, what makes Moebius strange is its reliance upon metaphor. It’s no coincidence that the final sequence begins in a subway station named for Argentina’s premier magical realist, Jorge Luis Borges. For as much as it may seem to be about a man looking for a train, Moebius never ceases to be about a nation confronting hidden truths that stubbornly resist the sunlight. The movie is effective as a tight little science-fiction tale, but the ghosts of the desaparecidos have another story they insist upon telling.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Pop culture’s given us glory trains, cocaine trains, trains to nowhere, and hellbound trains, but Argentinian director Gustavo Mosquera manages to wrap them all into one in this masterful mind-fuck.”– Gary Morris, Bright Lights Film Journal

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

Apocryphally Weird

11*. THE WOLF HOUSE (2018)

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La casa lobo

“Like in dreams, where one person can assimilate the attributes of another, the story and characters of the film take on different materialities. All of the changes in the house, characters and objects emphasize the permanent under-construction reality of the film.”–from the director’s statement to The Wolf House

DIRECTED BY: Joaquín Cociña, Cristóbal León

FEATURING: Voices of Amalia Kassai, Rainer Krause

PLOT: A prologue purports to be a documentary on a Chilean commune founded by Germans; we are told that the film that follows has been restored from their vaults. Those reels tell the story of Maria, a girl who strays from their community and finds herself hiding from a wolf at a mysterious house in the woods. There, she finds and nurtures two piglets, who gradually turn human.

Still from The Wolf House (Las Casa Lobo) (2018)

BACKGROUND:

  • The scenario was inspired by Colonia Dignidad, a colony founded by ex-Nazis in Chile. The colony was often described as a cult and was insulated from its neighbors by barbed-wire fences. From 1961 to 1996 it was led by Paul Schäfer, a refugee wanted for child molestation in West Germany. The colony became the subject of dark rumors among the locals, rumors which were validated after escapees told tales of systematic child abuse inside the compound. The cult survived by allying with Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who used the colony as a detention and torture camp.
  • Cociña and León had worked together, and sometimes separately, on a number of award-winning animated shorts before tackling this, their first feature film. The Wolf House took five years to complete.
  • Cociña and León took their sets on the road and worked on The Wolf House at various museums across the world, where visitors watched as they created the animation.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Due to the sheer volume and continually shifting nature of The Wolf House‘s liquid visuals, picking a single image is an imposing task. We will go with the grayscale eyeball that materializes on the house’s wall like a sketch drawn by an invisible pencil, complete with a semitransparent eyelid, a pulsating pupil, and the ability to shake the furniture with its glance.

TWO WEIRD THINGS: Pigs with human hands; magic Aryan honey

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: The Wolf House‘s experimental animation traps us in a constantly shifting nightmare dollhouse: Maria merges into and out of the walls, conjures human features for her pigs, and even the paintings on the walls can’t keep their shape for more than a second or two. The fascist-fairy tale tone is dreamily calm, and inescapably horrific.


Original trailer for The Wolf House

COMMENTS: It’s probably enlightening to have some background Continue reading 11*. THE WOLF HOUSE (2018) →

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CAPSULE: THE ANTENNA (2019)

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Bina

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DIRECTED BY: Orçun Behram

FEATURING: Ihsan Önal, Gul Arici, Levent Ünsal

PLOT: A building supervisor deals with strange occurrences after a satellite antenna is installed in his apartment building to broadcast new government-sponsored news bulletins.

Still from The Antenna [Bina} (2019)

COMMENTS: Set in a Kafkaesque cinder block, but clearly inspired by life in Erdoğan’s Turkey, The Antenna establishes its propaganda theme right away. Mehmet, an unassuming apartment building supervisor, listens to a government-sponsored radio broadcast as he dresses. Posters of a generic middle-aged strongman decorate the concrete pillars he passes as he walks to work through gray, deserted streets. The morning report declares that the government will be rolling out an elaborate communications system intended to integrate all media, one which will require the installation of a satellite dish on the roof of Mehmet’s building. This achievement will be celebrated with a special midnight broadcast—one which all citizens are strongly encouraged to watch.

Although the contemporary relevance is obvious, The Antenna is set in an indeterminately authoritarian time and place. Along with the drab utilitarian architecture, the celebration of satellite antenna television as cutting-edge technology suggest a Communist country in the 1980s. The film’s aesthetic is grimly Stalinist: residents wardrobes are almost all shades of black, white or gray (Mehmet is praised for the “seriousness” of his utilitarian, monochromatic suit). Only the younger characters, not yet fully integrated into this society, wear the occasional splash of brown, or even dull yellow or red. The cinematography favors shallow-focus shots, with background characters blurred, emphasizing each character’s isolation. Strong sound design contrasts with the grim visuals. Horror movie music plays from the pipes in the walls, and the noise of the outside world subjectively mutes when characters are in moments of crisis. At one point Mehmet’s ears are overwhelmed by a welter of staticky, overlapping propaganda broadcasts.

The Antenna builds a strong atmosphere of dehumanization and quiet despair, full of subtle threats, such as the way Mehmet’s boss playfully slaps his face to remind him of their respective ranks in the power structure. It springs some effective horror moments: black goo oozing from the wall and ceiling tiles, Mehemt seeing a column of anonymous identical silhouettes peering out of their compartmentalized windows. Angry synthesizers and VHS quality satellite broadcasts speak to the influence of Videodrome and other 1980s dystopias. For all of these virtues, however, the script lacks some urgency. It spends too long introducing us to the desperately bland lives of the tenement dwellers; even though the first kill comes 30 minutes in, it still feels slow. Nor does the two-hour journey build to a powerful climax. The ending is a series of weird visual and auditory metaphors, which happen to the characters rather than developing as a consequence of their actions. The grand finale is a confrontation with a lackey; we never burrow down to the source of the evil. Despite these reservations, debuting director Behram shows obvious skill in building fear. It’s a talent that might be better harnessed in service of a more propulsive script in the future.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…this atmospheric nerve-jangler tips its hat to David Lynch’s gothic surrealism and David Cronenberg’s squirmy body horror, with pleasing detours into Dario Argento-style lurid giallo mania, too… [a] hauntingly weird debut.”–Stephen Dalton, The Hollywood Reporter (festival review)