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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: DAAAAAALI! (2023)

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Daaaaalí! is currently available for VOD rental or purchase.

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , , Jonathan Cohen, , Pio Marmaï, Didier Flamand, Éric Naggar

PLOT: A journalist attempts to interview Salvador Dalí, but the painter’s erratic behavior and demands constantly cut her attempts short.

Still from Daaaaaali! (2023)
Anaïs Demoustier in DAAAAAALÍ! Courtesy of Music Box Films.

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: If you asked who would be the most intriguing modern director to concoct a Salvador Dalí biopic, Quentin Dupieux’s name would be at the very top of the list. While other directors resort to bemused realism to tackle the Surrealist icon’s notoriously slippery persona, Dupieux is a kindred spirit who fearlessly jumps right in to what makes Dalí tick: the irrational, the nonsensical, the dreamlike. Confident in its refusal to explain its enigmatic subject, Daaaalí! is the only cinematic portrait one could imagine the real Dalí endorsing.

COMMENTS: More weirdly witty than funny and anything but insightful, Daaaalí! tackles its unknowable subject in the only way possible: as a dream. Aspiring journalist Judith somehow gets the famous artist to agree to sit down for a magazine interview, but when he finally arrives—after imperiously striding down a seemingly endless hotel corridor for long enough for Judith to hit the bathroom and order room service—he immediately shuts down the interview because there’s no camera. Then, when Judith reschedules and secures a camera for a second attempt, Dalí accidentally destroys it. And so on. Dalí serves as a negative force in the film, denying and sabotaging every plan that does not accord with his transient, selfish whims. It soon becomes apparent that, like Judith, we are never going to learn anything about the artist beyond his surface facade of arrogance.

But insight into the man is not what this movie is, or should be, about. Instead, Daaaaali! is thoroughly Surrealist in spirit, evoking Dalí’s aesthetics (and, equally, those of Dalí’s great frenemy, ). These men’s sensibilities are a perfect fit for Dupieux, who barely has to fine-tune his own eccentric predilections at all to tell this story. After the premise is established, we quickly spin off into a labyrinth of dreams and anachronisms (we see completed paintings, then later in the film we see Dalí in the process of painting them). Nothing encapsulates the playful narrative spirit better than the long digression (over a bowl of muddy stew with live worms) in which a priest tells the painter about a dream he had where he was shot by a cowboy while riding a donkey. That incident doesn’t end the dream, however; it keeps recurring throughout the film. We are quickly lost inside an arbitrary narrative structure that almost gets as confusing as Dupieux’s bewildering Reality. But we’re anchored in Dalí’s frustratingly quirky, self-involved personality, and in Judith’s repeated failure to capture anything of substance about her quarry.

There are basically four actors who play Dalí, plus one actor who plays old Dalí (a sub-Dalí standing to one side of the main story), plus at least one bonus Dalí who only appears for a few seconds. There could be more Dalís running about, but 4-5 Dalís seems like the most accurate number, without counting fractional Dalís. This use of multiple actors in a central role is, naturally, a reference to Buñuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire, just as the continuous failure to consummate the interview recalls the failed dinner party of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. The gentle anticlericalism shown by the repeatedly-shot priest character is also a decidedly Buñuelian touch. Dupieux adapts these Surrealist motifs so naturally that, as much as anything, Daaaaali! serves as a reminder that the Rubber auteur, while often trafficking in modern pop culture references like slashers and superheroes, is himself firmly anchored in the Buñuel/Dalí tradition. Dupieux even creates a living Dalíesque tableau to bookend the film: a piano with a tree sprouting from its cabin and a fountain spouting from its keyboard, draining into a piano-shaped pool. Although critics sometimes view Dupieux as a lightweight due to his prolific output and disinterest in tackling political or otherwise “weighty” themes, in actuality he stands nearly alone in carrying on this strain of classical European Surrealism. We may not learn much about Dalí in Daaaaali!, but hopefully people will learn more about Quentin Dupieux’s underappreciated talents.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“… great fun and appropriately strange, with Dupieux delivering a dream-layered understanding of artistry and impatience with palpable glee… ‘Daaaaaali!’ doesn’t build to a stunning conclusion. It moves slowly to weirder and weirder encounters, doing so with an assortment of performers portraying Dali, with everyone offering their fingerprint on the subject, making for flavorful acting choices.”–Brian Orndorf, Blu-ray.com (contemporaneous)

It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

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

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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) →

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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: RUMOURS (2024)

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DIRECTED BY: , , Galen Johnson

FEATURING: , , Denis Ménochet, Charles Dance, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Rolando Ravello, Takehiro Hira,

PLOT: G7 leaders gather at a conference to write a statement on an unspecified crisis; everyone else suddenly disappears, leaving the leaders stranded in the woods with masturbating zombie bog-men and a giant brain.

Still from Rumours (2024)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Ever since seeing the pre-release still of the giant brain in the forest with ivy growing on it, we knew Rumours was going to be weird. While the cast and budget may be bigger than usual, Guy Maddin proves he is no sellout, and the rumo(u)rs are all true: the movie does not disappoint in the oddness department.

COMMENTS: Seeing a Guy Maddin (well, a Maddin and the Johnsons) movie with known actors in an actual AMC theater is, in itself, a surreal experience. The fact that I was not the only one there was even stranger. Although it would be nice for other local Maddin fans to get a chance to come out and catch Rumours on a big screen—there must be at least one or two others in a metro area of one million souls—I was halfway hoping that the five other patrons had wandered in unsuspecting, lured by Cate Blanchett’s name on the marquee, and, like hapless G7 leaders, were about to be blindsided by a strangeness they could never have foreseen.

To be fair, it takes a while for it to sink in that this is a Maddin movie. There’s no homage to a particular cinematic era—the movie instead is a stylistic melange of soft focus, lavender lighting, and melodramatic musical cues, shot in academy ratio—and the broad political satire is far away from Maddin’s typical Freudian introspection. Perhaps this shows the influence of screenwriter and co-director Evan Johnson and third co-director Galen Johnson steering Maddin away from his usual fallbacks. But soon enough the absurd sense of humor reminds us that we are, indeed, watching a Maddin film. (My favorite joke may be when the French Prime Minister explains that the giant brain in the forest must be a woman’s, because it is “slightly smaller than a man’s giant brain.”)

Satirically, the movie is obvious rather than incisive, earning its laughs from its absurdities, not its relevancies. The G7 leaders have assembled to address a crisis they never get around to defining, instead meeting in small groups to draft statements that are made up of half boilerplate, half non-sequitur (items like the display of non-sexual physical affection within marriage make it into the statement, along with nonsense the American president mutters while talking in his sleep). The characterizations of the ineffectual statesmen and women are, to say the least, unflattering: the Italian Prime Minister does little but offer his companions lunch meat. In a ironic nation-deprecating joke, the most dynamic of the seven is the Canadian: he’s a horndog in a man-bun with a weakness for strong women, who has, or will, sleep with the entire female cast. But don’t do as the French Prime Minister explicitly suggests and look for symbolism in the leaders’ characters. Instead, embrace the UK’s atypical astute response when P.M. Broulez asks, “what does it mean that Canada is faster than Germany?” “Nothing!” It’s not specific shots at the political order, but the dreamlike elements of the masturbating bog-men, the giant forest cerebrum, and the treacherous A.I. chatbot that hit hardest in Rumours. We don’t know what has caused the apocalypse, or even if it is an apocalypse; all we know is that the world’s leaders are spectacularly unequipped to save us all from whatever weirdness is slouching towards the summit.

The relatively big exposure of Rumours made me slightly afraid that Maddin might have gone (slightly) mainstream.  My fears were assuaged when the credits rolled and the five other people in the theater all started loudly complaining to each other: “That made no sense at all!” “That was terrible!” “I wanted to leave but I just thought it had to get better!” “Who did Cate Blanchett owe money to?” They may have hated it, but odds are they would think about what they had seen later, and would never entirely forget the bizarre experience. It’s a response that I like to think would have had Maddin and the Johnsons chuckling. It certainly had me chuckling.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Sporadically ingenious, occasionally chilling and entirely bonkers… Maddin… responds to the call of the weird with a refreshing lack of pomposity.”–Jeannette Catsoulis, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

Rumours [Blu-Ray]

Rumours [Blu-Ray]
  • Rumours [Blu-Ray]
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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: MOTHER, COUCH (2023)

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Mother, Couch is currently available for VOD rental or purchase.

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DIRECTED BY: Niclas Larsson

FEATURING: Ewan McGregor, Ellen Burstyn, Taylor Russell, , Lara Flynn Boyle,

PLOT: A mother refuses to get up from a furniture showroom couch despite the best efforts of her three children—each, incidentally, from a different father.

Still from Mother, Couch (2023)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: The spanner ratchets up the pressure on poor David and his siblings, making for a whimsical-into-menacing story flow with waves of absurdity. In other words, the Beau is Afraid archetype, but with a happy ending.

Kind of.

COMMENTS: What does it take to break one mild-mannered Scotsman? Niclas Larsson’s film, Mother, Couch, explores this question, among several others. From the starting gun, however, it was clear that this was the question that would be on my mind, until it was either answered or the credits rolled. The opening scene pulls us into the awkward and uncomfortable world of David, as he uneasily navigates a run-down parking lot and then enters “Oakbeds Furniture,” a similarly run-down home furnishings department store where his mother has permanently ensconced herself, on the second floor, in the seat of a (rather expensive) Italian sofa. From there, events turn with an increasingly jittery surrealism.

The humor found in Mother, Couch is, not to mince words, a bit “Swedish.”1 Those of you who know, know, but to explain briefly: sitcom by long-suffering ordeal. (Not to stereotype this flavor of Scandinavian, but my admittedly limited experience suggests Swedes possess a heavy streak of wry fatality.) David—a magnificently middle-aged Ewan McGregor, neither the gung-ho heroin kid nor the sage Jedi—politely, and a touch pathetically, lets everyone roll over him: his laid-back-but-glib Welsh brother, his snarky American sister with permanently-affixed cigarette, and his dotty mother whose tongue is as sharp as the penknife she, inexplicably, brought with her. In true Buñuel–Dupieuxiène style, the links in this chain of events grow to such a weight as to bring David to bursting point (apologies for the semi-spoiler that answers my opening query).

Mother, Couch is soft-spoken in its eccentricity, allowing its quiet oddities space to breathe. F. Murray Abraham’s turn as both Marcus and Marco, Oakbeds’ twin owners, is a delightful two-fer of talent, with Marcus something of a David-double (calm, deferential, doormat), and Marco eventually threatening our hapless protagonist with a chainsaw when price negotiations for the titular couch hit the rocks. At times, Rhys Ifans and Lara Flynn Boyle each appear to be performing in a different film—for reasons which become clear as events progress. As for Ellen Burstyn, well, I alternately loved and loathed her, as her “Mother” character occupies perhaps three different narrative planes.

The movie kicks off with a glib bit of foreshadowing: the on-screen quotation, “It was all very simple, they were looking for a dresser. Blood wouldn’t spill until later.” Larsson positions the furniture motif throughout, with an unlikely key (given by mother to son) failing to open the half-dozen or more dressers littered around the store and the mother’s apartment. The simplicity of the premise gets things rolling. There’s hope in Mother, Couch, though it’s nearly crushed by a long history of lies and creeping irrationality. As Mother says, “You don’t stab someone in the back, that’s for sure. Not even family!” Ultimately (another semi-spoiler) she fails to follow her own advice, but I believe she tries. When she veers from this maxim, though, it doesn’t stop the first finale’s last supper, as family, old and new, gather together just before David suffers a (literal) sinking feeling.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…an all-star cast in a surrealist dramedy… What begins as relatively straightforward takes a fever dream turn that pushes weird off a cliff. This approach may appeal to the art house cinema crowd but will leave most audiences befuddled.“–Julian Roman, Movieweb (contemporaneous)

  1. As it well might be: Swedish director Larsson here adapts a novel by Swedish novelist Jerker Virdborg. ↩︎
Capsules

CAPSULE: THINGS WILL BE DIFFERENT (2024)

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DIRECTED BY: Michael Felker

FEATURING: Adam David Thompson, Riley Dandy

PLOT: After a bank job, a brother and sister retreat to a safe-house whose operators task them with thwarting an intruder, lest the pair become “wiped.”

Still from Things Will Be Different (2024)

COMMENTS: The finger prints of Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead are all over Things Will Be Different. Time lopping, mysterious antagonists, and close quarters abound. I can easily see why they hopped aboard Michael Felker’s project as executive producers. But Felker deserves the credit for crafting this delightful outing: he wrote and directed the screenplay. (He was also good enough to slip Benson into a cameo.)

A worried phone conversation over a black screen: something is amiss, the two speakers need to lay low, and it should be all over in less than two weeks. Cue opening scene. Sidney, scoped hunting rifle over her shoulder, enters a diner to meet up with her brother Joseph, seated at the restaurant’s counter, and also carrying a scoped hunting rifle. They retreat to a remote farmhouse, scaring off a few randos who contact the authorities about these gun-toting desperadoes. As the cops arrive, Joseph and Sidney dive around the empty manse, feverishly resetting the clocks and then retreating to an upstairs closet furnished with a rotary phone. Following exact instructions from a cluttered notebook, they telephone someone, leave a cryptic message, and wait.

And wait. Their first fourteen days go by pleasantly. They noodle around the property and consume the provisions provided by someone. On the final day, they clean up, and wait. And wait. And they discover something went wrong, forcing the siblings navigate the strange technology which allows their temporal disappearance, and reckon with their impressively dispassionate minders who inform the pair that they must have them “wiped” in order to minimize trouble. Trouble for whom? From what? And just how, exactly? The days and weeks and months drift by, as Sidney explores archives and sifts through the house’s mementos in search of answers, while Joseph makes a shrine of the bolted metal safe containing the hand-held tape recorder which acts as their means of communication with the future.

Things Will Be Different grips you, whether you’re watching the ups and downs of Sidney’s and Joseph’s relationship, or being drip-fed information about the menacing intruder—not too menacing, though, as there’s a Say Anything boombox nod—and the clerks running the show (and time) off-screen. Felker’s world hints at an administrative grandiosity to space and time, and Benson’s character is revealed as something of an office jockey who just happens to be responsible for some heavy-duty quantum physics-challenging maneuvers.

I suspect there are holes in the film’s logic, though there may well not be. In either case, Felker makes us invested in his characters: the brother and sister who are in the wrong place at the wrong time, as well as the functionaries burdened with the thankless task of pleasing their superiors. At the end of the day, manipulating time is just a bureaucratic chore undergone with the same zeal as any 9-to-5 office work. However, in Things Will Be Different, there really isn’t an “end of the day”—just the hope that on the next run-through, things may be go differently.

Things Will Be Different is currently available for digital rental or purchase. A DVD release is scheduled for late January of 2025.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a funky and eclectic science-fiction tale that aims to keep the genre weird.”–M.N. Miller, Geek Vibes Nation (contemporaneous)