Tag Archives: Surrealism

Canonically Weird (The List)

188. EDEN AND AFTER (1970)

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L’éden et après

“The curtain falls and the audience applauds a bit, a smattering of polite applause. Then the host of the festival appears, the curtain opens, and he introduces Catherine Jourdan. Thundering applause! I think, ‘Good. It’s going well.’ I walk onstage all dressed up in my tux… Howls of disapproval! I wait for them to quiet down and say, ‘Please note, I’m the director of this film. This young woman has been in many films, but you never noticed her before. If you liked her in this film, perhaps I had something to do with that.'”–Alain Robbe-Grillet, recalling the debut of Eden and After at the Berlin Film Festival

Weirdest!

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Catherine Jourdan, Pierre Zimmer

PLOT: A group of college students take drugs and play games of chance (like Russian roulette) at a cafe called “Eden.” One day, a stranger appears and offers the students a taste of his “fear powder,” which Violette accepts. The man winds up dead, and a valuable cubist painting is missing from Violette’s room; the convoluted trail leads to Tunisia, and to sexual slavery.

Still from Eden and After (1970)
BACKGROUND:

  • This was Alain Robbe-Grillet’s first color film. In an interview he explains that he was offered the opportunity to do 1968’s The Man Who Lies in color but turned it down, partially because it was set in a forest and he did not believe Eastman Color film stock conveyed the color green very well. When he visited Tunisia and found locations with almost no green anywhere in the landscape, he decided that this would be where he would shoot his first color film.
  • Catherine Jourdan was a last minute replacement for another actress who had to drop out when her hair fell out after a botched dye job.
  • In making Eden and After Robbe-Grillet was inspired by the twelve-tone serial music of his friend Pierre Boulez. Instead of a regular plot, he listed twelve recurring “themes” for the movie, which would play off each other in a non-linear way: the story would be “a-narrative” or “a-diagetic” in the same way serial music was “a-tonal.”
  • Robbe-Grillet recut Eden and After, shuffling scenes in a different order, incorporating some unused footage, and adding new narration to make an entirely different (though equally surreal) movie titled N. Took the Dice (N. a pris les dés…—an anagram of L’éden et après). Dice was based on principles of aleatory (randomized) music, and was only shown on French television.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Originally a novelist by trade, Robbe-Grillet was known more for narrative playfulness than for visual imagination. Eden and After‘s sensual beauty and sadomasochistic tableaux marked his progression as a visual artist. This is arguably the director’s most sensuous film, filled with startling images. Nude, leggy French actresses, often victimized, constitute one of the film’s key recurring motifs. The picture of mini-skirted Violette, fetishistically shod in black leather boots, encountering her double in the blank Tunisian desert is a titillating but printable candidate. Perhaps the most unforgettable composition, however, is a shocking view of three dead, bound women posed against Inquisition-style torture equipment, one impaled on a bed of spikes, with blood spattering the white walls. That bloody fantasy is indelible, but perhaps a bit too strong, so officially, we will pick the similar but  tamer scene that Redemption Video selected for its Blu-ray cover (with the nudity cropped out). Three women lie in cages in a white void. Two wear white nightgowns, one is nude; two cages sit on the ground and one is suspended in the air; two wear blindfolds, one covers her eyes with her arm. A lamp, two halves of a wrought iron gate, and a white patio chair furnish the scene. What it signifies is anyone’s guess.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Fairly summarized as “Alice in Wonderland” meets “Justine” meets The Trip, Eden and After is what happens when a dyed-in-the-wool Surrealist (and unrepentant bondage fetishist) makes an acid movie for the collegiate set, composing the experimental script on principles analogous to the serial music of Pierre Boulez. Weird? A tad.


Clip from Eden and After

COMMENTS: You could construct a coherent story from Eden and Continue reading 188. EDEN AND AFTER (1970) →

Capsules

CAPSULE: BUTTWHISTLE (2014)

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DIRECTED BY: Tenney Fairchild

FEATURING: Trevor Morgan, Elizabeth Rice, Analeigh Tipton, Adhir Kalyan

PLOT: A pathologically nice guy rescues a cute but sadistic girl from a suicide attempt, and she takes over his life and poisons his relationships.

Still from Buttwhistle (2014)
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Buttwhistle is legitimately weird, from its random opening Scanners tribute to the detached coda, an obscene discussion of the law of non-contradiction. That is not to say that it’s an entirely successful enterprise, however; and although it’s not nearly as bad as you may have heard, it’s not a serious contender for one of the best weird movies of all time, either.

COMMENTS: Despite its “stupid” title, Buttwhistle is put together with care, and maybe even love, but it’s easy to see why this strange mix of slacker drama and deadpan absurdity infuriated most viewers. The first ten minutes are guaranteed to confuse, with too many supporting characters–girlfriends, bikers, cheeky British chums—introduced without much context, and some real non-sequiturs thrown in to boot. Stick with it and the plot will mostly sort itself out, however, though I wouldn’t expect every line of inquiry to be followed through to completion if I were you.

When, out of nowhere, easygoing Ogden catches Beth falling from the sky—presumably in a suicide attempt—the basic outline of this frog-and-the-scorpion fable becomes clear. Ogden is a terminal nice guy; it’s impossible to insult him because he turns every jab into a joke on himself (“You have an answer for everything!” “I’m not going to answer that.”) He’s the kind of guy who regularly checks in on his elderly neighbor, the friend you turn to when you’re out of doors and needed a floor to sleep on, no questions asked. Beth follows him home and stays with him with no discussion about the arrangement. She is Ogden’s mirror image, completely nasty and selfish. She amuses herself by spiting in Ogden’s food when he’s not looking. She takes a keen interest in both seducing her savior, and in surreptitiously turning everyone in his life against him.

Tonally, Buttwhistle is a strange egg. A lot of it has the feel of a hipsterish indie drama, but with inconsistent applications of absurdist humor. The influences are good: (Ogden talks about changing his name into the sound of an air horn, middle name “for which it stands”) and (when someone illogically calls Ogden’s phone and asks to speak to half of a pair of detectives currently interviewing him about missing dogs, the other partner grills the lad about the unsolicited call), but without the silliness of the one or the darkness of the other. A vision of an ex-girlfriend and a talking bar of soap give Ogden advice, he fights girls while dressed in drag, helps fix a biker’s plastic cybernetic hand, and so on. The performances are pleasant, and a number of small clever jokes land, but overall Buttwhistle fails to find sure footing. The message is that Ogden is too nice, too altruistic for his own good—but he’s so likable we don’t want him to change, which makes for an oddly non-cathartic tragedy. Buttwhistle‘s fractured aesthetic lacks sharp edges, but remains hard to grasp.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…surreal and senseless, with hopelessly inept execution.”–Geoff Berkshire, Variety (contemporaneous)

Canonically Weird (The List)

186. MOOD INDIGO (2013)

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L’écume des jours

“I like this way of seeing the world, the fact that everything is re-created and everything is possible in this world. It’s not from our time, it’s not the past or the future, it’s just sort of a science fiction of present day.”–Michel Gondry on Mood Indigo

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , Audrey Tautou, Omar Sy, Gad Elmaleh, Aïssa Maïga

PLOT: Colin, an independently wealthy inventor of gadgets like a piano that mixes a cocktail based on the tune played on it, meets the enchanting Chloe at a poodle’s birthday party, and the couple soon marry. His best friend Chick, meanwhile, is pursuing a romance of his own with his cook’s sister, while simultaneously battling an addiction to the work of celebrity philosopher Jean-Sol Partre. When Chloe falls victim to an unlikely infection—a water-lily grows in her lung—her medical bills bankrupt the couple, and Colin must take a job to pay for her treatment.

Still from Mood Indigo (2013)
BACKGROUND:

  • Mood Indigo is an adaptation of polymath Boris Vian’s 1947 novel “L’Écume des jours” (translated as “Froth on the Daydream,” “The Foam of Days,” or “Foam of the Daze“). The novel was adapted for film in the 1968 French effort Spray of the Days and 2001’s Chloe (from Japan).
  • Among other talents, Vian was a musician and jazz critic, and Duke Ellington was godfather to Vian’s daughter. The movie’s English title, “Mood Indigo,” comes from a famous Ellington number. Although Duke appears on the soundtrack and his ballad “Chloe” actually plays a part in the story, the song “Mood Indigo” is never heard or referenced in the film.
  • Jean-Sol Partre, the writer to whose works Chick is addicted, is, of course, a reference to existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre was a personal friend of Vian’s. (You have to be awed by anyone who counted both Duke Ellington and Jean-Paul Sartre among their close confidants).
  • The original version of the film released in France ran 130 minutes. In the United States and Australia, the film was re-cut to run only 90 minutes.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Trying to disguise the movie’s off-putting surrealism, Mood Indigo‘s U.S. marketers favored generic romantic comedy images of Tautou and Duris making lovey-eyes at each other (including one weirdish scene of them kissing underwater) to make it look like a quirky date movie. In fact, while Mood Indigo is sentimental at the beginning, it’s far more focused on handmade oddities (including a doorbell that scurries about like a beetle) and nonsense gimmicks than it is on romance, which is an afterthought and an excuse to root around in the director’s toy box. We think the most representative image is the inhaled spore that settles inside Chloe’s lung as she sleeps, covering her handmade heart with a coat of stop-motion frost.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Whimsical but weird, set in a peculiar Paris that could exists only in the dreaming mind, Mood Indigo is like Amelie on surrealistic steroids. If had suddenly gone soft-hearted and been given millions of dollars to make a romantic comedy, he might have come up with something like this.


U.S. trailer for Mood Indigo

COMMENTS: Unless you have a high tolerance for whimsical surrealistic excess, you may find yourself overstimulated by Mood Indigo Continue reading 186. MOOD INDIGO (2013) →

Capsules

CAPSULE: YOU AND THE NIGHT (2013)

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Les Rencontres d’Après Minuit

DIRECTED BY: Yann Gonzalez

FEATURING: , Niels Schneider, , Alain-Fabien Delon, Julie Brémond, Eric Cantona, Fabienne Babe,

PLOT: A couple and their transvestite maid invite the Slut, the Stud, the Teen and the Star to an orgy at their swinging Paris pad.

Still from You and the Night (2013)
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: It’s very weird, but it’s also super talky, super French… sadly, too talky and French to be enjoyable.

COMMENTS: You and the Night is one of those European arthouse sex films where people prefer talking about doing it to actually doing it. There’s not even any nudity until the thirty-minute mark, when a bit of male prosthetic business is pulled out as a reward for those who’ve stuck with it for this long. Instead, there is a lot of dialogue along the lines of “always follow the clues you see in dreams… especially when they’re terrifying” and a cross-dressing maid. The setup involves various sexual archetypes arriving at the scheduled orgy, then regaling the other guests with absurdist backstory. For example, in the most memorable flashback “the Stud” explains why he is late; his story starts when he was a six-year old poet and ends with him in a cell in his underwear being whipped by Béatrice Dalle.

About half way through, the structure shifts as we get a much longer fairy tale exposition explaining how our hosts came to be a threesome. This segment, which is the movie’s most interesting digression and might have made a good standalone short, involves a war, eternal vows, and a satanic prayer that must have been a blast for the translator to work on (“oh keeper of the schlong and wretched sepulchers…”). After this high point, however, Night dissolves into a trippy trickle of self-serious surrealism, with disconnected scenes set on a beach, in a cinema, and superimposed over the cosmos.

Visually, the film is geometric, cleanly modern and generally appealing, although Gonzalez loves the blue day-for-night filter a little too much for my tastes. Much better are the storybook mise-en-scene of the middle section, with painted suns and moons glowing over the spare desert and cemetery sets. The music is by an electronic band called M83; the tuneage sounds competent to these ears, but digital aficionados rate it highly. Overall, the languid Night didn’t have a strong enough sense of purpose appeal to me, nor does it strike me as the kind of work that’s notable enough to demand a spot on the List despite my personal lack of enthusiasm. But it’s not terribly offensive in any way, just tedious by the end. I do suspect it will appeal to some of our readers. It’s like a music video director’s conception of how a modern-day collaboration between the Marquis de Sade and Samuel Beckett would play out. If that sounds like a must-see to you, have at it.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…[a] chamber piece of sex, surreality and the absurd, like something by Luis Buñuel or Luigi Pirandello, or a sexed-up version of TS Eliot’s The Cocktail Party.”–Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian (contemporaneous)