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It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE WRETCHES ARE STILL SINGING (1979)

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DIRECTED BY: Nikos Nikolaidis

FEATURING: Alkis Panagiotidis, Konstantinos Tzoumas, Rita Bensousan

PLOT: A group of washed-out wretches reunite.

Still from "The Wretches Are Still Singing" (1979)

COMMENTS: Nikos Nikolaidis is perhaps the Greek director most closely associated with the “Surrealist” label. His works often merge dreams with noir elements and social critique.  ” Singapore Sling” (1990) may be his most extreme movie, in terms of graphic scenes and fetish content, and is the most well-recognized internationally. However, in his own country he is most appreciated for his trilogy “The  Years of Cholera,” about people in the margins of society. Wretches, the trilogy’s first installment, has gained cult status, thanks to its witty dialogue and absurdism.

The opening scene sets the tone accordingly, giving a sense of ultimate doom. The plot that follows, revolving around the reunion a band of people in their late 30s- early 40s, develops retrospectively.   Alkis, a faded musician, calls for this gathering. He spends his time in his mansion reminiscing about Vera, his so-called ex-wife, attempting unsuccessfully to find her again through a plethora of liaisons with other women. His method is the epitome of nihilism, though. Nightly, he kidnaps, rapes, and then murders women reminding him of Vera, burying them in his garden right after. But perhaps, as a phantom of one of his victims claims, “Vera never existed, it is just the name of an era lost forever.”

As his friends gradually appear, we get to know their eccentric personalities. Kostas, with his cold demeanor, adds an element of deadpan humor to the table. Short, fat Christos is the “funny guy” of the group. And then there is Rita, the girl with the enigmatic past and a history of confinement in psychiatric hospitals.

Alkis now has companions for his savageries. The group proceeds to indulge in a variety of anti-social behaviors, always culminating in sex and death. There is a melancholy on the air for friends lost along the way, and a feeling of having lost control over their own lives. As Christos states while proposing a toast, “They took me in the university without asking me, they took me in the army without asking me, and without understanding how, I found myself married.” Their degenerate acts seem like a desperate attempt to reassert control over their fates.

Rita is the most marginalized character, not feeling at home even within the group. She feels used, in more ways than one; she stoically endures sexual assaults from her “friends” while asking desperately, in vain, for them to listen to her, even for a bit. She emerges as a complex, abused personality, full of contradictions.

Acting is a big part of the appeal here. Each character recites their lines with a musicality. The rich accompanying soundtrack, full of old blues, jazz, and rock and roll, also enhances the sense of nostalgia and regret, while the many night shots and blurry visual effects give the film a noirish, almost dreamlike feel.

The narrative is straightforward at times, yet has its surreal moments. A dead girl occasionally appears in the mansion, checking on the group and looking after Alkis. Everyone is apathetic, even after the most outrageous or bizarre occurrences.  Add a grim finale fully immersed in hopelessness, and you have an exquisite example of nihilistic cinema.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

No other English language reviews found for this film.

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

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CAPSULE: BAD LUCK BANGING OR LOONY PORN (2021)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Katia Pascariu, Claudia Ieremia, Nicodim Ungureanu

PLOT: Scandal erupts as a young teacher’s homemade sex tape leaks online.

Still from Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (2021)

COMMENTS: When a movie starts with hardcore imagery of a pornographic nature, you know you’re in for a wild ride. Bad Luck Banging is an emblematic work that put its creator, Radu Jude, on the map as one of the most controversial, subversive and uncompromising visionaries in the current cinematic landscape. It also dramatically changed our perception of contemporary Romanian cinema: by revealing a completely different direction than the social realism associated with the Romanian New Wave, it laid the groundwork for even more ambitious cinematic achievements like Dracula (2025).

After the brief albeit graphic introduction, the movie divides into three distinct parts. For the first, we follow our teacher protagonist, Emi, around Bucharest as she buys groceries and runs errands. The  almost documentary-like pacing of this section may not be ideal for casual viewers. The camera takes its time revealing  cacophonies and pathogens of the heroine’s urban environment. It’s a subversive “city symphony,” with Bucharest portrayed as it is, not in a celebratory light. It’s a subtle yet caustic commentary on the ethos of a post-industrial consumerist society.

Then, the second section begins. It is an interlude of sorts, disrupting the main narrative while taking the form of an abecedary and a collection of anecdotes and fun facts. Its playfulness and essayistic nature remind the viewer of and the experimentation of the in general. At the same time, it expresses a deeply cynical view of humanity, and especially of Romania.

The third part—slightly longer than the two before it—focuses on an official meeting between our teacher and frustrated parents regarding the online leak of the teacher’s homemade erotic videos, which transforms into a trial of sorts, with every parent acting as an archetype of Romanian society, judging our protagonist’s deeds. Each, from a leftist intellectual to oppressive figures representing the Church and the Army, express long-established opinions, mostly of the conservative kind. Taking place in an enclosed space, the whole segment maintains theatricality, with corresponding lighting. In the end, three possible endings are proposed (let’s just say that the last is the weirdest).

Music plays a major role, underlining the ironic moments. Paeans accompany atrocities, while battle hymns go along with pornographic imagery. Upbeat tunes signal the transition between parts. And let’s not forget M. A. Numminen’s catchy yet seemingly random Wittgenstein-based song “In Order to Tell” (1970) in the closing credits.

Bad Luck Banging can be discussed today not only as a satiric view on western society’s pathologies, but also as a relic of the Covid era. Everyone wears masks and social distancing is all around the news.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“It’s a methodology combining the horrific with the absurd, blending academic inquiry with farcical social critique, à la Buñuel.”–John Kupecki, Austin Chronicle (contemporaneous)

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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: BAD LIEUTENANT (1992)

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DIRECTED BY: Abel Ferrara

FEATURING: Harvey Keitel, Frankie Thorn, Zoe Lund, Paul Hipp

PLOT: A dirty cop indulges his many addictions as he pursues the culprits behind a horrible sexual assault on a nun.Still from Bad Lieutenant (1992)

COMMENTS: Central characters who are bad—flouting conventions, horrifying the prim and proper, indulging the id—are the stuff of Hollywood cliché. Between all the bad moms and bad teachers and bad Santas, these comical antiheroes can feel played out. But Abel Ferrara would never be lumped in with conventional showbiz trends, and his Bad Protagonist can in no way be misconstrued as a good-natured rebel thumbing his the nose at society. If anything, it’s the “Lieutenant” that’s superfluous in this title: our hero is a bad detective, a bad dad, a bad colleague, a bad gambler, a bad Catholic, a bad john. He drinks (sometimes upon waking up), he smokes crack, he shoots heroin, and he steals cocaine and sells it to drug dealers, keeping a little for himself to snort off any handy surface (including pictures of his daughter’s first communion). He robs criminals. He cajoles his colleagues into giving them their money and turns around and makes terrible bets with it. He cavorts with prostitutes, extorts teenagers for humiliating sexual favors… hell, when he shows up to a double homicide, he takes a lingering look at the victims’ breasts. And this is long before we witness him hurling vulgar invective at Jesus Christ. Ya get it, folks? The guy is just spectacularly bad.

Lost in the wonder of Nicolas Cage’s out-there turn in the quasi-sequel Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (and a third film supposedly in the works set in Tokyo and to be directed by Takashi Miike) is the fact that the original was a deliberate shocker in its own time. Ferrara pulls no punches, dramatizing every despicable moment in exacting detail as part of what my colleague Gregory J. Smalley called “an overwrought, magnificent Christian parable that sought to demonstrate God’s infinite capacity for forgiveness by presenting a character that audiences couldn’t forgive.” Bad Lieutenant is a Book of Job for its audience, dragging viewers through the muck and the mire and daring them to re-evaluate their notions of sacred and profane.

One should always be hesitant in using the word “brave” to describe an acting performance; it is just acting, after all. But Keitel’s work here is undeniably go-for-broke, and sometimes it borders on comedy to see just how horrible he’s willing to appear. He never stops talking, only yielding when a woman injects him with smack. He’s hostile to nearly everyone he encounters (including one of his kids portrayed by his real-life daughter). Contemporary critics made much of a full-frontal nude scene, a traditional line-in-the-sand for mainstream cinema, but Keitel is arguably even more naked in his fully clothed, emotionally raw confrontation with Christ, letting all his feigned confidence and gruff bravado drop in a desperate cri de coeur. The film’s Act 3 twist, in which he makes a series of questionable choices in an attempt to find redemption, only makes sense because Keitel has laid the groundwork for a character for whom no decision is unthinkable.

Bad Lieutenant is outrageous in the extraordinary awfulness of its title character, but not especially weird. Keitel’s troubles are entirely of his own making, and his desperate attempts to keep his head above water while insisting on tying more and more weights to his ankles have become more common in recent years, most notably in the frantic machinations of the Safdie brothers. Bad Lieutenant would make an excellent companion piece to the Apocryphally enshrined God Told Me To; both films force their central detectives to confront the nature of the Almighty and their unstable faith in the face of events in the living world, although their journeys are nearly polar opposites.

There’s an entertaining piece of subtext in the way Keitel’s fortunes mirror the championship baseball series that soundtracks the film. We learn from the outset that a comeback by the hapless New York Mets from a 3-0 deficit in a playoff showdown with the rival Los Angeles Dodgers would require nothing short of a miracle. (It’s a feat that would actually be pulled off for the first and only time 12 years later, by the 2004 Boston Red Sox.) Naturally, Keitel has stopped believing in miracles and so forsakes his hometown team, continuing to put his money and his life behind the ascendant Dodgers and slugger Darryl Strawberry, a prodigious talent who himself was infamously brought down by drugs. Of course, Keitel is in so deep to his bad bets that when things go south, he swivels on a dime from attaboy-cheering to racial epithets, punctuated by a gunshot to the car radio. Yes, he’s a bad, bad man, but it’s not his badness that brings him down. It’s his failure to heed the advice of another Met: “Ya gotta believe.”

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…an illuminating, excoriating descent into the cesspool of sin, self-loathing and defilement. This is not an easy film to watch… This bizarre ecclesiastical dimension is what makes “Bad Lieutenant” more than a shallow wallow in the muck. Ferrara does make his moral points, and though one feels dirtied in the process, there is an accompanying feeling of purification as well.” – Hal Hinson, Washington Post (contemporaneous)

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

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CAPSULE: ANATOMY OF HELL (2004)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Amira Casar, Rocco Siffredi, voice of Catherine Breillat

PLOT: A woman pays a gay man to observe her intimate moments for four nights.

Still from Anatomy of Hell (2004)

COMMENTS: Sartre said Hell is other people. Catherine Breillat says Hell is other people’s bodies; or, more specifically, other genders’ bodies; or, when you get right down to it, women’s bodies.

A Woman goes to a gay disco and slits her wrists in the bathroom. She’s rescued by a gay Man, who takes her to a clinic to be stitched up. The Woman proposes to pay him to “watch her when she’s unwatchable.” He goes to her house for four nights, pours himself a few fingers of Jack Daniels to help him make it through the night, and they talk while she lies naked and exposed. “They fragility of female flesh inspires disgust or brutality,” he muses. “The veils [men] adorn us with anticipate our shrouds,” the Woman proclaims. (The conversation is not intended to be naturalistic; it’s a staged Platonic dialogue with a poetic overlay). While never verbally expressing anything but disgust for the Woman, the Man is drawn to experiment intimately with her body (including scenes involving garden tools, and worse). Then the arrangement ends. He is moved, and, in what may be a fantasy sequence, commits an act of brutality. That’s it; it’s partially successful conversion therapy.

Siffredi, a pornographic actor best known for his recurring “Buttman” character, turns out to be a surprisingly capable actor—although his moods are restricted to disgust and melancholy, both simmering. Casar is beautiful as she lounges around naked, but her role could be played by almost any beautiful nude actress. Although she shows more range than Siffredi, as any actress might, she has trouble putting across dialogue like “in intercourse, the act isn’t what matters, but its meaning.” Casar’s body double is anatomically correct. Breillat herself dubs the thoughts for both parties.  And that’s it for the acting—which is a problem, in what’s basically a character-driven two-hander (explicit though it is, it’s so anti-erotic that could never make the grade as a one-hander).

On release, Anatomy of Hell received a lot of understandable criticism for its overly-simplistic brand of radical gender philosophy. Taken literally, the film argues (explicitly and didactically, despite the poetic trappings) that men are disgusted by women’s bodies and instinctively long to damage them—and that this misogyny is even more pronounced in gay men. That’s not a position I would want to defend in a Ph.D. thesis. But while that literal reading is both ridiculous and offensive, there is another layer to the film that is hopeful. Despite his disgust at The Woman’s body, The Man is eventually seduced by it. And after the job is done, he finds himself changed by the experience: “I experienced total intimacy with her. And I don’t even know her name.” Radical posturing aside, Anatomy of Hell at least partly celebrates the alchemy of shared human bodies: that point when carnal disgust is overcome and physical commingling becomes a spiritual experience. Look past words to the magic of bodies, this wordy picture whispers. Though mercifully short, Anatomy of Hell is a hard watch, composed of dull, pseudo-profound dialogues broken by shock sequences designed to reinforce its putative thesis that female bodies are disgusting. It’s not recommended, but—if you can bypass the untenable literal reading its characters propose—this erotic experiment is more thought-provoking than its detractors suggest.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“But sometimes [Breillat] is just plain goofy, as in ‘Anatomy of Hell,’ which plays like porn dubbed by bitter deconstructionist theoreticians.”–Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by Motyka, who asked for more Breillat reviews and stated that Anatomy of Hell was “especially worth looking at, because of its rejection of a traditional plot.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

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CAPSULE: THE IDIOTS (1998)

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Idioterne; AKA Dogma2: The Idiots

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , Jens Albinus, Anne Louise Hassing

PLOT: A Danish commune finds meaning and community by acting like “idiots” (i.e., pretending to be mentally disabled), especially in public).

Still from The Idiots (1998)

COMMENTS: As Karen dines alone at a restaurant, she observes a caretaker attempting to feed two adult males who keep wandering over to disturb the other diners, insistently saying “hi” and grabbing the napkins off the table. Unperturbed when Stoffer, one of these “idiots,” grabs her hand, she follows the group outside, and even joins them in the taxicab when Stoffer refuses to release his grip. She is intrigued to discover the performance was all a sham, and Stoffer is actually the intelligent leader of a small, cult-like commune who stage these performances in restaurants, factory tours, swimming pools, office board meetings, and the like.

Far from being offended, Karen is intrigued enough to join the group. The rest of the movie then follows their antics as individual members seek to unleash their “inner idiot” by “spazzing,” mostly in public, but also among themselves. Although the movie establishes dynamics between the characters, in the end, it’s a bit like watching an unscripted, non-comedic version of Jackass—or, in its grosser moments, like scaled-back versions of the Vienna Actionists’ scat orgy in Sweet Movie. Possible motivations for this behavior are hinted at—shocking the bourgeois, playing a game, returning to a state of innocence, mocking the handicapped, championing abnormality, participating in a ritualistic group therapy—but ultimately, the idiots’ reasons for their idiocy remain as inscrutably individual as their activities are indisputably idiotic.

The movie is only watchable in a geek-show sort of way—up until a brilliantly executed final spazz that suddenly supplies a retroactive emotional heft to the entire exercise. That climax exists in an ambiguous space somewhere between catharsis and comeuppance, and raises the stakes of the questions that have been festering in our minds about these idiots. Is elective idiocy an insincere affectation, an emotional affliction, or a form of transcendence? Like their director, the idiots may be addicted to making people uncomfortable, but there is also a genuine sadness at the core of the exercise—at least, for some of the participants.

The Idiots is a Dogma 95 film; that is to say, it (aspirationally) follows the rules laid out in the Dogme 95 manifesto intended to revitalize cinema by de-emphasizing production values and returning to the roots of drama. Dogma films were intended to have no non-diegetic music (a rule von Trier violates in the very first scene), to be shot entirely on location, to use only natural light and handheld cameras, etc.: essentially, every story was to be filmed as if it was being captured by a television news crew. Despite co-founding the short-lived movement with Thomas Vinterberg, The Idiots was von Trier’s only Dogma movie. His next film, Dancer in the Dark, was a magical realist musical that was almost as far away from the Dogma credo as imaginable, while still remaining in the limits of the art-house film.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“This director, in other words, is replaying the guerrilla-theater spirit of the ’60s, but with the cleansing psychodramatic mysticism of a digital-age Ingmar Bergman.”–Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly (contemporaneous)

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