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Apocryphally Weird

36*. THE NIGHT IS SHORT, WALK ON GIRL (2017)

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Yoru wa mijikashi aruke yo otome

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“I… wanted to portray the night as dream-like. This is the story of a girl who joyfully takes at face value what she observes seeing
people drinking and their relationships, so I wanted to create a feeling of the girl growing into adulthood, in other words, a fantasy for grown-ups.”–Masaaki Yuasa

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Voices of Kana Hanazawa,

PLOT: At a wedding reception, a Senpai reveals his indirect plan to win the affection of a black-haired Girl whom he loves from afar. The Girl barely notices him, however, instead following her urge to travel into the Kyoto night to experience the world as a young adult, including heroic bouts of drinking, a trip to an open-air used book festival, and an impromptu role in a traveling musical. In the end, everyone the Girl encounters over the night contracts a cold and she spends the early morning attending to them all—including the Senpai.

Still from "the night is short walk on girl" (2017)

BACKGROUND:

  • Based on the 2006 novel of the same name by Tomihiko Morimi (which has been translated into English). Yuasa had previously adapted Morimi’s “The Tatami Galaxy” for Japanese television.
  • Night won the 2017 Japanese Academy Film Prize Award for “Animation of the Year.”

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Whatever it is, it has to feature the indomitable titular “Girl.” The image of her astonished face as a crowd of onlookers, impressed by her unexpected boozing prowess, donate all of their cans of wine into her oversized goblet, is as good as any.

TWO WEIRD THINGS: Sophist dance, “The Codger of Monte Cristo”

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Eschewing the youthful chaos of his Canonically Weird feature Mind Game, Masaaki Yuasa proves that he can inject strangeness into the least weird of fictional genres: the romantic comedy. Tightly focused both stylistically and thematically, even while the footloose plot wanders from drinking binges to inconvenient plagues, Night walks through a flowery, hallucinogenic city straight into your heart.


Short clip from The Night Is Short, Walk on Girl

COMMENTS: A cross-dresser, a man who has vowed not to change Continue reading 36*. THE NIGHT IS SHORT, WALK ON GIRL (2017) →

Apocryphally Weird

35*. BUFFET FROID (1979)

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AKA Cold Cuts

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“The simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd.”–André Breton

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DIRECTED BY: Bertrand Blier

FEATURING: , Bernard Blier, Jean Carmet, ,

PLOT: Soon after telling a man in the Paris subway about his fantasies of committing murder, Alphonse discovers the man dying with Alphonse’s own switchblade in his chest. Rushing home, he teams up with a police inspector and a hapless criminal who confesses to killing Alphonse’s wife. The trio goes out into the world, confronting both a variety of people who wish to kill them or to be killed by them.

Still from Buffet Froid (1979)

BACKGROUND:

  • Writer-director Bertrand Blier won the César (France’s Oscar) for Best Writing for Buffet Froid. The film was also nominated in the cinematography, editing, and production design categories.
  • Buffet Froid feels very ian, even more so since Blier cast two actresses who had previously worked on Luis Buñuel films: Geneviève Page and Carole Bouquet.
  • Bernard Blier (Inspector Morvandieu) is the director’s father. It was his third appearance in one of his son’s films.
  • The role of the man harassed by Alphonse in the subway is played by an uncredited Michel Serrault, who is probably best known as Albin in the original La cage aux folles.
  • The opening scene is set in the Metro station at La Défense, which now sits directly underneath the monumental La Grande Arche building in the Parisian suburbs.
  • The film was not released in the United States until 1987. American critics were fiercely negative.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: It’s tempting to select the terrific jump cut when the leading trio is informed that they need to relax, and suddenly find themselves convalescing in front of a rustic cottage in the woods. But for a singular image, there’s great spectacle in the moment when a policeman responds to an emergency call only to find that he himself is the victim. His wide-eyed horror at being ushered into his deathbed while a string quintet assembles to serenade him into the great beyond is unforgettably hilarious.

TWO WEIRD THINGS: The widow moves in; assassin gets a head start in the water

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Buffet Froid is epic in its underplaying. Forget consequences; it posits a world where crime doesn’t pay because it doesn’t matter. The body count wouldn’t be out of place in a Hollywood thriller, but a strange combination of fear of dying and reluctance to be caught underlies everything. It’s telling that Alphonse doesn’t lose his cool when he finds his own knife sticking out of a dying man, or even when he discovers his wife’s murder (and murderer). No, it’s only when a man tells him bluntly, “Accept your responsibilities and I’ll be on my way” that he stops dead in his tracks. Buffet Froid depicts a world gone mad, but in the most controlled way possible.

Trailer for Buffet Froid

COMMENTS: Buffet Froid lays out its premise almost immediately. Continue reading 35*. BUFFET FROID (1979) →

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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: LEDA (2021)

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DIRECTED BY: Samuel Tressler IV

FEATURING: Adeline Thery, Nicolle Marquez, Douglas Cathro, Todd Mazzie

PLOT: After the death of her widowed father, Leda succumbs to visions during a pregnancy.

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Stroboscopic and synthophonic cues and miscues toy with the viewer as Tressler unravels his adaptation of the Leda myth, rendering a tragic tale as a cryptic, layered, dialogue-free nightmare.

COMMENTS: We have at hand four known events: Leda’s mother died young; her father dies unceremoniously during a fox hunt; her cousin visits after the funeral; and there is a wedding to a young local. But Tressler’s exposition is so slippery that even, perhaps, that last event is unclear. We also know a fifth component—not fact: Leda has recurring visions of an egg in the forest, and her mind is haunted by a swan. This mixture of loosely established narrative and striking dreams is saturated in bright lights, dark nights, too-white whites, and bloody sights.

Tressler’s dark dream is saturated with watery imagery. The opening scene is by a pond, where nothing is happening. Inside a stately—and near empty—manor house, a young woman lies hunched over in a bathtub, leaning forward, face down, as if drowning. A steady drip of subconscious dread intermingles with the drips of water, the steam of a kettle, and walking upon water. Leda alternates between wan and pallid, a doomed ghost traveling through a quietly tragic life and a sharply punctuated reverie. Tressler is, by nature if not vocation, a photographer, arranging his scenes with precision. The protagonist’s striking journey on beast-back through a luscious black-and-white idyll, with a sinister moon looming over a flare-tinged forest, is the stuff of high-fantasy paintings. A sudden-but-smooth visual flip of Leda tentatively crossing a pond’s surface in the dark of night swaps the sky for the aquatic in the blink of an eye. Sunlight has rarely been this worrying, and nature’s tranquility has rarely been this ominous.

Leda brings to mind “Meshes of the Afternoon”, in long-form, with repetitive shots, reverse motion, and a piercing absence of temporal and physical clarity. I was also reminded of the more recent short, “A Tale Best Forgotten,” a story conveyed through camera movement and illusions that also took place at an inhospitable home by a body of water. Tressler speaks masterfully with his camera; his characters speak not at all. Ambient sounds, a hypnotic score, and occasional scratches and flickers of stroboscope render the unclear into the incomprehensible. An egg looms large in the woods, a swan hovers fluidly between mysterious, ridiculous, and terrifying, and further deaths herald a troubling birth. Leda only fades to color in the final shot—a sombre combination of the film’s beginnings.

Leda is offered on disc in a 3D version (a regular 2D copy is included as well).

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Leda is unlike anything else out there. It is a bold, dazzling cinematic experiment that is as heartbreaking as it is surreal.” -Bobby LePire, Film Threat (contemporaneous)

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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: BEAU IS AFRAID (2023)

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Beau Is Afraid has been promoted to the Apocryphally Weird list. Please visit the official Aporcyphally Weird entry.

Beau Is Afraid is available for VOD purchase.

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , Patti LuPone, Armen Nahapetian, , Nathan Lane

PLOT: Anxiety-ridden Beau is scheduled to take a trip to see his domineering mother, but it becomes a nightmare as the universe conspires against his success.

Still from Beau Is Afraid (2023)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Ari Aster takes a break from elevated horror to film three hours of gonzo black comedy that captures what I imagine hour 36 of a nonstop meth binge must feel like: a tsunami of paranoia, hallucination, and self-loathing that seems like it will never end. It’s an experiment in excess that few directors ever get the chance to indulge in—a gamble that could make or break a career, or be forgotten and seen as an outlier oddity in an auteur’s oeuvre years down the road. Whatever it is, assisted by an (as always) all-in Joaquin Phoenix, Aster seizes the opportunity to present the type of big budget freakoutshow we’re unlikely to see again for a long time. It’s a weird movie happening; see it now, so years down the line you can brag to the next generation of weirdo cinephiles that you caught Beau on the big screen.

COMMENTS: I don’t think the new pills Beau’s therapist prescribes him at the beginning of the film are working. They may even be making things worse. Not only does the fact that they must be taken with water raise problems (and plot points) for a patient with an obsessive anxiety disorder who lives in a tenement with iffy plumbing, but we don’t really know much about how Beau sees the world before the medication switch. Afterwards, the city Beau sees around him looks something like Taxi Driver a few weeks before everyone flees town and officially signs up with a Road Warrior gang. The street on which he lives throngs with homeless ruffians, including a head-to-toe tatted thug who particularly has it out for Beau. The urban terrors are so hyperbolic that we can’t for a second buy that Beau exists in our world (little nuggets like a soldier who died in a non-existent campaign in Caracas suggest an alternate reality). By the time Beau discovers a bum clinging to his bathroom ceiling, we realize that we’re trapped far, far inside his paranoid mind, and the omnipresent threats we see through his eyes aren’t all there.

Like a symphony (maybe Bernstein’s “Age of Anxiety”), Beau Is Afraid is structured in four movements (with interstitial interludes flashing back to Beau’s boyhood). Between the beginning of his journey and his return to his childhood home, Beau makes two major stops along the way: first, at the home of a kindly couple played by Amy Ryan and Nathan Lane, then with a community of theatrical vagabonds who dub themselves the “Orphans of the Forest.” The film’s opening has an After Hours vibe, as an unbelievable run of bad luck—a stolen key, an apartment lockout, a naked stabber—conspires to keep Beau from setting out on his dreaded reunion with his mother. The last Continue reading APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: BEAU IS AFRAID (2023) →

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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: UNCLE KENT 2 (2015)

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DIRECTED BY: ,

FEATURING: Kent Osborne

PLOT: Defying advice from friends and professionals, Kent Osborne pursues his vision of making the unnecessary sequel to Uncle Kent.

Still from Uncle Kent 2 (2015)

WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: It’s alternately mumblecore, surreal, awkward, and spiked with one big shot of violence; all told, Kent’s journey through a San Diego convention is pretty strange. But its bed-rising, guest-star-studded 5 & 1/2 minute jack-off finale really took commitment.

COMMENTS: I became so intrigued that I very nearly looked up who the heck this “Kent Osborne” guy is. But no: I came to know him well enough through Todd Rohal’s Uncle Kent 2, with all his insouciant eagerness, playful eccentricity, and defiant self-satisfaction. The onscreen storytelling is low key madcap, with the inexplicable and impossible gelling with the mundane, like Walter Mitty’s daydream jaunts through banality. There are too few “fluffy” movies in the realm of weird cinema, and I am grateful for having met Kent Osborne in such an outing.

This Kent Osborne (Kent Osborne) faces difficulty only once, in facing down his one detractor: Joe Swanberg. Swanberg directed the little-seen microbudget mumblecore drama Uncle Kent, and sees no reason to revisit the premise (loose, indeed, though it was in the first place). He is an utter killjoy at the opening party scene. The following morning, Kent sees his physician on an unrelated matter (chronic ear-worm). After a very long “follow the finger” neural exercise, his physician advises strongly against his patient paneling at a convention in San Diego to promote his latest comic book, “Cat Agent.” But as Kent defied Swanberg’s downerism, so he defies medical advice. What ensues is a whimsical exploration of artistic living and convention culture that becomes increasingly masturbatory.

I will return to this “masturbation” in a moment, but first you should be grounded in an underlying premise behind Uncle Kent. The singularity is real, and it is coming. For those unfamiliar with “simulation theory,” in brief, it is very much as it sounds: we live in a simulation. All these developments toward computerized living are but a replay of something that has already occurred: mechanical intelligence, and humans confined to a Matrix-y way of living. The sweet thing about Kent in Uncle Kent 2 is, he doesn’t mind. He goes through motions, as we all do, with upbeat resignation. He revels in rewatching, and sharing, his own artistic output.

At the convention he makes the acquaintance of a “Cat Agent” cos-player, and the strangeness within his life and this movie accelerates. As he is about to have sex with her, the incarnation of his own mind’s work, she zaps out of existence. He gathers a post-Apocalyptic gaggle of citizens terrified by the rapture-style disappearances. In the middle of a pitch to a co-star of Uncle Kent, just after she requests he begin masturbating for her, she disappears as well. But, Kent masturbates anyway. He’s finished making a movie about himself and his work. Hotel staff, strangers, Swanberg, and even appear and interrupt but, the climax comes—as is its wont—and everything wraps up nicely. Rohal knows we’ve done this all before: mumbling, relationships, whimsy, low drama, mid-comedy, and you know what? That’s all right. We’ve got time to kill. Uncle Kent 2 is casually wacky ride (and unless you’re too close to the TV, it won’t make you go blind).

Uncle Kent 2 received a surprise Blu-ray release in 2023 from Factory 25.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“… the wtf movie of the year. Though it’s not likely to land with, or even screen to, a mainstream audience, Uncle Kent 2 is so thoroughly dedicated to messing with its viewers, the film deserves the very highest accolade at the piss-takers ball, if only such a thing existed.” -Zach Gayne, Screen Anarchy (contemporaneous)