Tag Archives: Sadomasochism

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: R100 (2013)

2 Comments

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , Lindsay Hayward

PLOT: A Japanese furniture salesman pays a secret bondage society so that dominatrixes will attack him at random times in public, but things go too far when they start showing up at his work and home.

Still from R100 (2013)
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: By the end, after a relatively conventional beginning, R100 has gone from a one-joke lashing to full-fledged absurdist pummeling. This black sex comedy is demented enough to make the List, but we do wonder whether one of Matsumoto’s other movies might better represent his weird movie legacy.

COMMENTS:The first half of R100 is rather ordinary. Relatively so: most people would consider a movie where a man’s date kicks him in the face at dinner, and where a dominatrix stands beside him and smashes each course of sushi the mortified chef places before him, very strange indeed. R100 begins its life almost as a drama, doling out hints of backstory about our masochistic salaryman, who struggles as a single parent of a young boy with a wife in a coma. The movie eschews the chance to explore his psychology, however; we never gain any insight as to how ritualized pain and humiliation helps him deal with his problems. Instead, R100 spirals off into crazier and crazier directions, as the dominatrix attacks he’s contracted for intensify, start to interrupt his normal life, and threaten the one thing he loves more than a good beating from a merciless leather-clad mistress: his child.

The public attacks on our hero get repetitive, as if R100 doesn’t know how it wants to develop its premise. Then, in the middle of the film, Matsumoto springs a number of oddities and radical tone shifts. There are metamovie interludes which explain the movie’s title: we are watching the work of a 100-year-old director who considers this material inappropriate for anyone younger than himself (thus R100—restricted to those over 100 years of age). The main narrative takes a turn into B-movie territory when our hero is forced to turn against the bondage club after an botched session with the “Queen of Saliva.” You know the movie is completely off the rails by the time the ridiculous “Queen of Gobbling” shows up (and when the film’s producers debate cutting her out of the movie). The climax, which features our formerly meek hero lobbing grenades at an army of dominatrices commanded by a foul-mouthed blond Amazon stuffed into a tight rubber teddy, seems like it could have been choreographed by a team consisting of , and Mel Brooks. And the coda takes the weirdness to the next generation.

The way R100 starts out off-kilter and slides into greater and greater absurdity will thrill many who view the film as a simple comedy. It’s enjoyable enough on that level, but there were hints of depth in the character and themes that were never explored, and this is something of a missed opportunity. Masochism is easily stated as a philosophy—from pain comes pleasure—but it’s nearly impossible for an outsider to comprehend this most counterintuitive of fetishes. Maybe that’s why Matsumoto depicts it as an incomprehensible enigma. Or maybe you just have to reach the century mark to get it.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…connoisseurs of weird, twisted sex comedy will revel in its transgressive, audacious mischief.“–Colin Covert, Minneapolis Star-Tribune (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by purplefig, who said it was “weird in that wonderfully insightful weird way only japanese cinema can deliver..” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Canonically Weird (The List)

201. BLUE VELVET (1986)

13 Comments

“It’s a strange world.”–Sandy Williams, Blue Velvet

Must See

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , , Isabella Rossellini, Laura Dern,

PLOT: While home from college to visit his ailing father, who has suffered a stroke, Jeffrey Beaumont finds a severed human ear in a field. Though warned by his neighbor, Detective Williams, that the case is a police issue and he should not ask any questions, the curious Jeffrey decides to seek answers on his own, enlisting Williams’ daughter Sandy, a high school senior, in his investigation. The trail leads to a melancholy torch singer named Dorothy Vallens, and when Jeffrey hides in her closet after nearly being caught snooping in her apartment, he witnesses a horror he never imagined, which forever shatters his innocence.

Still from Blue Velvet (1986)
BACKGROUND:

  • Blue Velvet was David Lynch’s comeback film after the disastrous flop of 1984’s Dune.
  • Warner Brother’s commissioned a treatment of Lynch’s basic idea for the film, but in 1986 no major studio would touch the finished Blue Velvet script because of its themes of sexual violence. The film was produced and distributed by Dino De Laurentiis (who formed a distribution company just for this release). De Laurentiis was known for taking chances on risky or salacious movies, whether exploitation or art films. He gave Lynch final cut in exchange for a reduced salary (possibly hoping that Lynch would refuse his insulting offer and chose a more commercial project).
  • Blue Velvet is considered Lynch’s comeback film, but even more so Dennis Hopper’s. Hopper, who became a star when he wrote, directed and acted in the 1969 counterculture hit Easy Rider, developed a serious polydrug addiction problem throughout the 1970s. By the 1980s he had earned a reputation as unreliable and difficult to work with, and landed only minor roles after his memorable turn as a maniacal photographer in Apocalypse Now (1979). He entered rehab in 1983 and was sober for a year and a half before making Blue Velvet. Looking for a role to revive his career, Hopper told Lynch, “You have to give me the role of Frank Booth, because I am Frank Booth!”
  • Booth’s character was originally written by Lynch to breathe helium from his gas tank, but Hopper convinced the director that amyl nitrate would be a more appropriate inhalant for Frank. The actual drug the villain breathes is never specified in the film.
  • This was the first collaboration between Lynch and composer Angelo Badalamenti. Badalamenti was hired to be Isabella Rossellini’s voice coach for her singing numbers, but Lynch liked his arrangements so much he hired him to produce the film’s soundtrack. Badalamenti would work on the score of all of Lynch’s future films until INLAND EMPIRE, and is perhaps best known for the “Twin Peaks” theme.
  • , who played a part in all of Lynch’s feature films until his death in 1996, has a small part here as one of Frank’s hoodlums.
  • Lynch was nominated for a Best Director Oscar, losing to for Platoon. Dennis Hopper’s performance was widely praised, but was too profane for Academy consideration; he was nominated for Supporting Actor for Hoosiers, where he played an assistant high school basketball coach struggling with alcoholism, instead.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: “Suave” Dean Stockwell performing a karaoke version of Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams,” an illuminated microphone lighting his lightly-rouged face.

THREE WEIRD THINGS: Dream of the robins; candy-colored clown; dead man standing

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Nearly everyone describes Blue Velvet as “weird,” but most of the time, when pressed, it’s hard to pin down exactly why. Yes, there is sexual perversity, a campy and impossibly white-bread Lumberton, and one of the strangest lip-sync numbers ever, but if we were to actually sit down and graph Blue Velvet on an axis of Lynchian weirdness, we would find it closer to The Straight Story pole than it is to the incoherent extremes of INLAND EMPIRE. But despite the fact that Blue Velvet is among Lynch’s less-weird works, it’s one of his greatest. The clear and powerful presentation of key Lynch themes—the contrast between innocence and experience, and sexuality’s fateful role in marking that line—make it a crucial entry in this weirdest of director’s oeuvre. Blue Velvet‘s influence is so monumental that it would be a crime to leave it off the List of the Best Weird Movies ever made.


Original trailer for Blue Velvet

 COMMENTS: David Lynch’s Blue Velvet exists in a heightened reality—and a heightened depravity—but essentially it is a Continue reading 201. BLUE VELVET (1986) →

Capsules

CAPSULE: THE DUKE OF BURGUNDY (2014)

5 Comments

DIRECTED BY: Peter Strickland

FEATURING: Sidse Babett Knudsen, Chiara D’Anna, , Eugenia Caruso

PLOT: An entomology professor and her student are very much in love, but their romance is threatened by the latter’s preference for BDSM practices in the bedroom.

18BURGUNDY2-facebookJumbo

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Though the subject matter might seem strange or unusual to some viewers, the film itself is simply an examination of two women who are going through a trial in their relationship. There is some bizarre dream imagery and a choppy narrative style, but nothing truly Weird.

COMMENTS: The Duke of Burgundy opens with a drawn-out sexual role play as the wide-eyed Evelyn (Chiara D’Anna) enters the house of domineering mistress Cynthia (Sidse Babett Knudsen) to act as housekeeper. Evelyn scrubs and shines and soaks as Cynthia thinks of more demeaning tasks for her to do, ending the day with punishment for unsatisfactory work in the form of urination into Evelyn’s mouth. This scene returns in multiple forms later, as we see different perspectives and points in time, serving as an anchor for our understanding of their relationship. The film unfolds over a semester at the isolated women’s school where Cynthia lectures and Evelyn studies, but most of the focus is on their private moments at home. As the persistent Evelyn comes up with new ways to be dominated, she believes she’s found the perfect partner in Cynthia, who is willing to act the dominatrix if it makes her lover happy. However, it soon becomes clear that the older woman is uncomfortable with the parts Evelyn creates for her, struggling to emotionally and physically abuse her lover even in the context of role playing, and then growing to resent her for her increasing demands.

Strickland made waves two years ago with his stunning, unnerving ode to giallo, Berberian Sound Studio, in which a British sound technician sinks into a paranoid fever dream while shooting a gory horror in Italy. Here, the director again treats the eyes to a sultry palette, ornate settings, and thoughtful camerawork, matched by an effective soundtrack that pairs fuzzy synths with the hum of insects. The opening credits use freeze-frame and oversaturation to reference vintage softcore film, but thanks to the soundtrack and visceral color choices, other moments are more reminiscent of a slasher. The retro vibe is heightened by the somewhat ambiguous setting and time period. Fashions and hairstyles suggest the 1950s or 60s, the aesthetic is more 70s, the landscape and architecture is classical, evoking rural Italy (though filmed in Hungary), and everyone speaks English with different European accents. He clearly devotes much of his time to mixing and matching different film references, from art house to grindhouse, but ultimately the focus is on the characters. Even the weirder touches, including frequent close-ups of insects and stark shots of architecture, are meant to communicate the sense of dread that is hanging over Cynthia and Evelyn’s relationship as they move into darker sexual territory. There is a palpable feeling of intimacy in Strickland’s approach, utilizing close-ups and lingering shots to effect a kind of quietude over most of the proceedings. It is easily to believe in this relationship, though the world around them is often hazy.

On paper The Duke of Burgundy sounds like it should be a sleazy straight male fantasy about lesbian kink, and yet Strickland forgoes all sensationalism—there isn’t that much (explicit) sex or even nudity shown. Evelyn’s mental stimulation is highlighted, as she derives pleasure from being locked in a chest, verbally berated, and sat on by Cynthia. The BDSM scenes are often treated with humor, not to make fun of those practices but to reveal the kind of goofy accidents or strange conversations that might come with it, and to break the tension for an unfamiliar audience. At other times they are presented in a cold, almost sterile manner, with Cynthia eventually injecting a form of revenge into their role play. What is both wonderful and striking about this film is its undertone of normalcy, its relatable and honestly touching portrayal of a romantic struggle, despite its apparently sexploitative premise. The basic story could easily be rewritten with different conflicts, with different genders, with different settings; the BDSM elements are both central to the narrative and secondary to the overarching theme. The film asks if sexual preferences can damage an otherwise strong relationship, and if personal contentment can exist without complete sexual fulfillment. It allows us to peek into something extremely personal, but universal, intermingling with our own insights and experiences, with a dreamlike style so lush and distinctive we still walk away feeling like we’ve left behind a world of fantasy. It might not be List-worthy, but it is certainly worth seeing.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…the question of who’s really in charge of these scenarios is complicated. Exactly the same deceptive quality can be found in the dreamlike artifice of Strickland’s film itself, set in a lush and aristocratic European fantasyland that’s entirely nonspecific as to geography and chronology… But while Strickland’s films already aren’t like anyone else’s, his real secret is that even in this strange constructed world, his characters feel like real people struggling with issues that aren’t exotic at all.”–Andrew O’Hehir, “Salon” (contemporaneous)

Capsules

CAPSULE: BLUE MOVIE (1978)

1 Comment

“I was really surprised at the success of Blue Movie. It was a film that should have startled all sexy film lovers because it was an anti-establishment film.” -Director Alberto Cavallone (commentary from the documentary included as bonus material on the DVD).

DIRECTED BY: Alberto Cavallone

FEATURING: Danielle Dugas, Claude Maran, Joseph Dickson, Dirce Funari, Leda Simonetti

PLOT: A photographer’s exposure to the images of war leaves him with a warped sense of reality. What others consider beauty enrages him and provokes him to abuse a trio of women in his life.

Still from Blue Movie (1978)
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Numerous hallucination scenes, grainy war footage and the overall fragmented film style provide Blue Movie with a nightmare/dream logic. Its softcore sex, scat, urination and heavily misogynist vibe will make it unsavory for many viewers. It is not without some weirdness, but Blue Movie is more unsettling than weird.

COMMENTS: Blue Movie opens with a woman fleeing an attempted rape. The woman is Sylvia who is picked up by photographer Claudio and taken to his home. Sylvia’s recollection of her assault does not match the visuals we are shown. Claudio questions her story, which Sylvia admits is not completely truthful; despite this he gives her shelter. While Sylvia’s story may not have been accurate there is no doubt she has been traumatized. She has flashbacks and hallucinations of being attacked. (One hallucination, of an arm reaching for her from a blood-filled bathtub, is too similar to a scene from ‘s The Tingler to be ignored).

We are then introduced to model Daniela. Claudio is verbally abusive to Daniela, who barely reacts to the ill-treatment. She tells Claudio “Every time I look myself in the mirror, I see that you were right. My face isn’t worth anything. I can no longer put up with myself. I’m fed up with what I am, Claudio, please, help me.”

The photographer meets a third woman, Leda, in a cafe. Leda has no money to pay for the coffee she has been drinking and offers the barista sex in exchange for payment. Claudio settles her bill and brings her back to his place. The town Leda is from was destroyed by an earthquake, and she offers to do work for Claudio, who makes her his secretary.

With the exception of a male character who is never named (IMDB credits him as “il negro”), these are the only people who inhabit Blue Movie‘s world. Claudio, the film’s antagonist, has clearly been affected by the images of war he has been exposed to. This is visualized by a barrage of grainy war footage scattered throughout the film. In the DVD commentary Claude Maran (the actor who plays Claudio) states his character had returned from Vietnam. Claudio possesses a collection of slides. He explains: “I began being a photographer when I was working as a printer for a war reporter. Those photos of mangled people, I could have snapped them. It was then that I became interested in cans.” This comment seems to indicate he had not actually been to Vietnam; either way, Claudio is one messed up cat.

The trio of women are a damaged group also. Daniela in particular consents to her abuse, believing she deserves it. Her imprisonment and subsequent humiliation is a hard watch. It is difficult to relay Blue Movie‘s story because it is somewhat plotless. We basically watch Claudio interact with the three women, always individually, like a dirty reality TV show. Cavallone includes a number of interesting and creative shots I found quite pleasing. Blue Movie has a very nice nightmarish, almost surreal feeling about it. The attractive cast, well-chosen props, sets and locations along with a soundtrack consisting of Bach and Scott Joplin added to the film’s watchability. I was especially fond of the finale. Although Blue Movie is downright illogical at times, I felt it was Cavallone’s intention to allow the viewer a peek at the perceived events of a fragmented mind. Be warned that Blue Movie is as trashy as it is artful: its perversion, madness, trauma, bodily fluids and softcore sex will be unpalatable for many. The scat scenes will be the most likely to engrave themselves into the memory. Daniela, kept locked in a room where she is treated like an animal, is asked to leave “an offering” in exchange for food. She defecates in a litter box and then scrapes her feces into empty cigarette packages. She is later photographed by Claudio while covering herself in her own feces.

Blue Movie was made on a low-budget and shot over seven days with non-professional actors who had no script to follow. Most of it was filmed in the home of producer Marial Boschero in Via Dei Giubbonari, Italy ,with location shoots in Santa Maria Di Galeria, “The Dead City,” a photographer’s studio in Via Della Camilluccia, and Lungo Tevere Tor Di Nona. Two prints of the film exist: a 16mm Italian theatrical release and a pirated 8mm version. Hardcore sex scenes were removed from the film for the theatrical release but exist on the pirated version. These scenes are included as bonus material on the DVD. This is the third DVD I have purchased from Raro Video and I have been suitably impressed, particularly considering the low price. The Blue Movie DVD comes with an eleven page booklet, “Blue Extreme,” a thorough 44-minute documentary on the making of the film, and deleted scenes taken from a 8mm pirated print. The picture quality transferred from the 16mm print is above average.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“… a truly unique, albeit bizarre viewing experience.”–Michael Den Boer, 10,000 Bullets (DVD)

See GOREGIRL’S DUNGEON ON TUMBLR for more (not-safe-for-work) stills from the film

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: TRANS-EUROP-EXPRESS (1967)

2 Comments

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , , Alain Robbe-Grillet

PLOT: A director (played by Robbe-Grillet himself) pitches a complicated story about a cocaine smuggling caper to a producer during a train ride, and the audience watches the results play out, revisions and all.

Still from Trans-Europ-Express (1967)
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: The second film from novelist-turned-director Alain Robbe-Grillet is a pioneering work of cinematic meta-fiction that prefigures the work of (among others) by putting a fictional author inside of the movie, one who supposedly writes the script in real time as we watch. Sometimes the story backtracks on itself, erasing old plot points or creating alternative scenarios. To make things even stranger, the protagonist of the movie-inside-the-movie is obsessed with bondage, and begins a relationship with an elegant prostitute who may help him fulfill his most excessive fantasies.

COMMENTS: Sitting on the Trans-Europ-Express from Paris to Antwerp, a director tells his producer that they should set a movie on this train; they decide it should be about drug smuggling. A man, who we’ve previously seen buying a suitcase to smuggle cocaine, walks into their compartment. The producer and director are invisible to him; he only sees the script girl. When he leaves almost immediately, the director comments “is he crazy?” “Didn’t you recognize him?,” asks the producer. “It’s Trintignant. What about using him in your film?” They then do proceed to use Trintigant in their film treatment. The story they concoct on the fly sends him to an Antwerp where everyone is either an operative working for the local cartel or a detective, and where he is sent on an increasingly Byzantine series of rendezvous to prove his worth and to obscure his tracks. Along the way he begins a relationship with the prostitute Eva, with whom he indulges his strangling fetish. After a series of double crosses and betrayals which are nearly impossible to sort out, because the director keeps rewriting the script, it all ends in tragedy at “Eve’s Witchcraft Cabaret,” a bondage-themed club with a naked girl chained to a rotating stage.

Despite the dark themes, Trans-Europ-Express is actually a comedy, though in a high-minded, very French way—more “witty” than “funny.” The movie’s abstract, Cubist twists on gangster scenarios recall ‘s crazy yakuza film Branded to Kill, also from 1967. Although it deconstructs the conventions of a genre picture in similar fashion to ‘s 1960 Breathless, the light touch and playfulness keeps Express from feeling as ponderous and self-important as the works of some of Robbe-Grillet’s New Wave contemporaries. At the same time, the movie’s perverse sexuality, related to the subconscious desires of Surrealism, ventures further into the forbidden than his contemporaries dared. Express‘ scenes of sexual strangulation, implied rape and even nudity were considered pretty hot stuff at the time, although they will look tame through jaded modern eyes.

Robbe-Grillet began his career as an experimental novelist, helping to found the avant-garde “nouvelle roman” genre. He turned to cinema after co-writing the script for Last Year at Marienbad with . Trans-Europ-Express was his second film as director. The Kino sub-label Redemption began releasing Robbe-Grillet’s neglected films, some of which have never been on DVD before, in 2014.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The result is both a pure example of narrative deconstruction – with some genuinely absurd moments – and a pretty weird experience for the viewer…”–Johnathan Dawson, Senses of Cinema