Touki Bouki (1973, Djibril Diop Mambéty)

Inscrutable in its rebellion against both traditionalism and modernism, Touki Bouki represents the prison of both ideologies through a haunting and illusive succession of images, revolutionary in its disparity of tone and willingness to provoke. Its defining symbol lies in the struggle of an ox to avoid the killing floor of a slaughterhouse, wrestling hopelessly against the ropes that bind its legs. As the startled beast falls to the ground, unable to find balance, a butcher opens the animal’s throat and blood sprays from the wound, forming a pool on the white tile beneath its quivering form. It’s an unforgettable, potentially unethical, vision, one that encapsulates the lives of the protagonists as they struggle beneath the knife of a repressive culture.

Squeezed between a claustrophobic mass of colorful shanties and a sea of hostile foot traffic, life in Dakar is too close for comfort for the restless Mory and Anta, a pair of young lovers out of step with the morality of their parents and philosophy of their peers. Blazing through town on a motorcycle adorned with an ox’s horns, Mory has “no class, no job, no shame,” earning his keep through elaborate cons and sporting the care-free demeanor and shaggy locks of an American “hippie.”

Standing in direct opposition to pre-assigned gender roles, Anta abandons a life of scrubbing linens and housekeeping to attend college, finding a new form of oppression at the hands of her horny classmates, whom she rebuffs at every given opportunity. In retaliation for her prudence, a gang of student activists tie up and assault Mory, dehorning his mechanical steed and desecrating his symbol of individual freedom and masculinity. Helpless to the attack, Mory is brutalized and strapped to their truck like a trophy kill, resembling a cow awaiting its turn at the abattoir.

Desperate to abandon Africa and bewitched by the soulful cadence of Josephine Baker (“Paris, Paris, Paris” is prominently featured), the pair set their sights on a romanticized version of Paris, paying their way by swindling a state-sponsored wrestling event and raiding the closet of a decadent, homosexual acquaintance. Swept up in delusions of grandeur and drunk on their pilfered riches, the prodigal couple fantasize about their return home after years abroad, deified by the locals for their haughty French mannerisms, signified in their daydreams by Mory’s boater hat and tailored suit and Anta’s en vogue cigarette holder.

Ironically, the qualities they admire most in the French (class, wealth, autonomy) are the means by which they are ostracized, resulting in an uncomfortable realization atop an ocean liner intended for Gay Paree. As the French patrons loudly discount the Senegalese people as intellectually barren, unrefined and unartistic, Mory has a pang of conscience and dashes back into the capital, searching for his abandoned motorcycle. Discovering the bike in the middle of the street, totaled beyond repair, the boy learns a harsh lesson about human isolation, one that will follow him no matter his location or destination.

Merging the emotional with the aesthetic, Touki Bouki is a shade more personal than Badou Boy, but no less interested in blurring the line between reality and fantasy, often at the expense of narrative clarity. Djibril Diop Mambéty prefers to abandon coherence in favor of formal maneuvering, carrying the storyline on the viscera of his imagery, a tactic that functions through the photographic contrast between poetic beauty and crushing brutality. These opposing aspects often contend for space in a single sequence, best exemplified through the feverish dicing of shots of Anta’s sylphlike contours with the bleeding out of a frightened goat.

Whatever symbolic mileage the film gains from unsimulated depictions of animal cruelty is up for debate, but it’s hard to excuse exploitation for the sake of dramatic impact. In this case, it severely limits an otherwise exceptional work, forcing the audience to reflect on the responsibility of the artist in lieu of the despondency of the story’s characters.

Touki Bouki (International Film Circuit, 1973)
Written and Directed by Djibril Diop Mambéty
Photographed by Georges Bracher

Badou Boy (1970, Djibril Diop Mambéty)

Driven by the hypnotic energy of percussion and a frenzied blur of edits, Senegal’s Badou Boy reflects its political motivations through a dizzying manipulation of form, stitching together a comedy of exaggeration from the scraps of the French occupation. Wielding Western cinematic technique as a weapon, Djibril Diop Mambéty mocks the constraint of Gallic social strata through the lumbering of an entry-level police officer, one too overwhelmed by weight and blinded by aggression to capture his perp, the roguish “Badou Boy.” Motivated by the perpetual groove of Dakar’s street performers and an enthusiastic imagination, our crafty protagonist’s perseverance acts as a symbol for Senegal’s renewed vitality; a defiant smirk in the face of oppression.

Utilizing sound design to heighten narrative pace and experiment with scene transition, Mambéty juxtaposes incongruous voice-over with dialogue-free action sequences, allowing discussions to run through multiple scenes without relying on expository shots or talking heads. He also employs cheap post dubbing in a radical fashion, lending a surreal nature to characters’ damaged, off-beat vocalizations, effectively morphing the hacking cough of an old beggar into a churning, bestial din.

The Godardian self-awareness of his soundtrack works two-fold, both referencing genre and place in time, while permeating, even interrupting, the plot’s progression. An allusion to the American Western illustrates this technique brilliantly, creating a wall of Ennio Morricone-style guitar and yelping cowboys for Badou Boy’s one-horse carriage race, manifesting a musical accompaniment for his fantasy tangible enough to overshadow the Kora of a roadside busker, who comically scowls at the rambunctious racket.

The use of non-diegetic sound is jarring in its ambiguity, requiring the viewer to think about the placement of sound effects and their application into the narrative. When Badou Boy breaks to urinate on the bicycle of his adversary, in one of his many acts of defiance, we hear the flush of a toilet, despite the al fresco location of the transgression. Our initial response is laughter, assuming the gag to be a brief passage of potty humor, but pondering the sequence reveals solemn intentions. Mambéty is applying the formality of domestic life to the squalid conditions of Dakar, dignifying Badou Boy’s behavior by aligning it to middle-class amenities, despite the sharp contrast in environment.

Mambéty loves sneaking his agenda into inconspicuous settings, using benign objects like boomboxes to function as his mouthpiece. Interjecting acerbic barbs between Bossanova tracks, the acid-quilled satirist takes foreign and domestic on in equal measure, airing grievances with cowardly French politicians and the Senegalese officials that mimic their opulence. His bitterest indictment lies at the feet of administrative wealth, a powerful faction of society uninterested in public well-being, superficial enough to abandon peacekeeping conferences to revel in the glory of an “African species of luxury dog.”

The amplification of sound and subtlety of message make for an interesting contrast, especially when considering that the story is seldom motivated by the conveyance of dialogue. Plot and character operate as a canvas for symbology and the foot chase that occupies most of the film’s lean 55-minute runtime functions as a metaphor for conflicts between the old guard and new, the past and present, and the organic and inorganic.

Badou Boy is representative of both Senegal’s past and future, adorning the grill of his bus with a bundle of polychromatic flowers (pairing organism and machine) and defiantly riding a horse into oncoming traffic. Officer Al is his polar opposite, perpetually in a state of consumption, wiping his sweat-soaked brow with the petals of flowers before stuffing the crumbled remains into his mouth, subjugating the powerless as a means to attain authority.

The featurette begins and ends with portions of Al’s daydreams, glacially-paced murder fantasies that find the recalcitrant Badou Boy cowering in fear as the public servant looms over him. As Al chokes the breath from the boy’s lungs, the dying child clings tightly to the chainlinks of an adjacent fence, arms stretched out in an "X," equivalent to the crucified Christ. The violence of Al’s reverie betrays itself, carrying a prophetic image of the future of Senegal, one led by the collective resilience of the people and sustained tradition, only capable of imprisonment in the dreams of corrupt leadership.

Badou Boy (Maag Daan, 1970)
Written and Directed by Djibril Diop Mambéty
Photographed by Baidy Sow

Hyenas (1992, Djibril Diop Mambéty)

Marrying the rhythmic pace and sweep of comedy with the symbol-rich dogma of mythology, Djibril Diop Mambéty’s cinema occupies the space between contemporary and archaic, reflecting his native Senegal as it struggles for an identity in the modern world. Hyenas identifies this figurative struggle as one between morality and practicality, painting an unflattering portrait of a village desperate enough to murder their way out of destitution. Understanding the woes of poverty, but never sympathizing, Mambéty masks his intentions under a veil of good-natured humor, playing coy, just like his mob of best-intentioned townspeople. Beneath the surface lies a bitter condemnation of community, revealed by the increasingly insidious actions of his characters, who treat friendship as a smile to the face and an opportunistic knife to the back.

Broke and reeling in desperation, Colobane’s citizens clamor to solve their economic woes, laughably conducting town meetings under the scorching sun, as they are far too deep in debt to get the city hall furniture out of hock. The only shade comes in the shape of Dramaan’s general store, an oasis of booze and cigarettes, conveniently sold on credit and run without enough backbone to demand cash or refuse service. The emptiness of the desert landscape completely envelopes them, leaving the village as blank as an unpainted canvas, wanting for factories or motor vehicles or precious anything to alleviate the hopelessness.

Miraculously, a savior arrives in the shape of an ostracized prostitute named Linguere, who is both exceedingly wealthy and suspiciously generous. She once shared a child with the aforementioned shopkeeper, who’s done his best in the passing years to forget this pre-marital transgression, mostly out of embarrassment. Despite bad blood, the two share an amiable reunion, revealing an undying chemistry as they relive their life together and reflect on the unfortunate passage of time. These reminiscences carry a surprising depth and the film’s primary strength is its willingness to color in the characters through their reactions and interpretations of past events, refusing to pass judgment in the process.

Overjoyed by the couple’s happy reunion and clamoring for a taste of Linguere’s cash, the townspeople hold a ceremony in their honor, begging that Linguere help Colobane re-attain “its lost splendor.” They even nominate Dramaan for mayor, hoping to benefit from his association with Linguere and his modest successes as a businessman. Expecting a free handout, the greedy mob is surprised to learn that salvation comes at a price; Linguere’s sole prerequisite for replenishing the town coffer is seeing Dramaan executed for his crimes of abandonment.

Initially pompous and righteously offended, the townspeople refuse to kill one of their own, sighting religious convictions and benevolent banalities. Dramaan is comforted by their solidarity, but doesn’t realize that their kindness also comes with a price tag. The town raids his storefront the following morning, seeking kickbacks for protection like a band of Mafia enforcers, demanding his finest cognac and Cuban cigars. Unable to find a sympathetic ear with cop or clergy, both of whom have been handsomely rewarded with plush digs and gold jewelry, Dramaan desperately tries to skip town by railway car, only to be surrounded by the angry mob and forced into servitude.

Despite serious implications, Hyenas carries the peaceful flow of its landscape, moving like wind rustling through the trees and wholly unrushed by narrative drive. Drenched in ambient synth and subdued string, it drifts like a dream, converting the purely organic into the surreal, lending dialogue an almost hypnotized lull. This sense of separation repurposes what would often be played for suspense into dark comedy, forcing us to laugh at the otherwise reprehensible.

The casual poetry of the repartee, which is wryly amusing in passing, but resonant in the afterthought, carries Mambéty’s underlying meaning. When the police chief’s flashy new fangs distress Dramaan, he pacifies by saying “Let’s not make a mountain out of a gold tooth.” It’s an amusing response with heavily ironic undertones, since the townspeople have done just that, traded in their values and compassion for triviality and temporary financial security. Their vain lust brought corruption and violence to Colobane, with Linguere acting as their Golem; a representation of base instincts and superficial desires. However unpopular and undesirable, Mambéty infers that financial poverty is certainly better than one of the conscience and for Senegal to remain vital in contemporary times, both artistically and professionally, it must retain traditional values. It’s a cliché-laden greeting card in less capable hands, but Mambéty imbues a time-worn theme with righteous anger, delicacy and Wildian vivacity.

Hyenas (Kino International, 1992)
Directed by Djibril Diop Mambéty
Written by Friedrich Dürrenmatt (play) and Djibril Diop Mambéty (screenplay)
Photographed by Matthias Kälin
 

Pinocchio (1940, Hamilton Luske and Ben Sharpsteen)

Avoiding the darker implications made by Carlo Collodi’s novel, Disney’s adaptation of The Adventures of Pinocchio focuses solely on the innocence of a child in the face of temptation, using the eponymous puppet’s perilous journey as a funhouse-mirror version of adolescent life. By skipping school, lying and swilling ale, Pinocchio suffers surrealistic consequences for common youthful transgressions, becoming more inhuman with each avoidance of his conscience’s better judgment.

Told from the perspective of the boy’s conscience, a grasshopper puzzlingly named Jiminy Cricket, the cautionary tale opens by firelight in the workshop of woodcarver Geppetto. Without wife or child, the lonely craftsman fills his time by giving life to mechanical items, adorning his ornate cuckoo clocks and music boxes with pink elephants, happy families and carousing drunks. Geppetto captures his aspirations in his elaborate creations, but none more so than his boyish marionette, dubbed Pinocchio, whom he prays will transform into a flesh-and-blood child before his eyes.

As the craftsman rests, The Blue Fairy, summoned by his nocturnal yearning, grants the old man’s wish and converts the mass of carved wood and string into a sentient being. Though it resembles and behaves like an ordinary child, the transfiguration remains incomplete, only to be finished when the puppet proves that he can discern between right and wrong and avoid the seductiveness of youthful rebellion. The prospective boy agrees, but doesn’t comprehend the effort required to become a well-rounded human, merely mimicking the behavior and emotional responses of those around him, never questioning intent or seeking advice from his conscience.

The child’s inexperience begets blind faith and Pinocchio finds himself confronted by avarice, gluttony and dishonesty, succumbing to vice on every available occasion. Outside of Geppetto's care, the naive babe stumbles into the clutches of two anthropomorphic street urchins, a wily pair that hoodwink the lad into enslavement through the promise of fame and unrestricted pleasure. Miles away from home and abandoned by Jiminy Cricket, Pinocchio finds solace in his exotic locale (ironically named “Pleasure Island”), sucking down cheap cigars, playing billiards and chugging pints of cold beer.

Symbolizing the woes of blue-collar creature comforts, Pinocchio’s slide into amorality has serious repercussions and every child enchanted by the island’s lack of restrictions slowly morphs into a braying, ornery jackass. Sprouting a tail and floppy ears, Pinocchio fears the irreversibility of his actions and nearly gives up the fight to become a “real boy,” spared only by the arrival of his voice of reason, Jiminy Cricket.

The reunited pair traverse water and land to make the long journey home, but find Geppetto away from his post and his once vibrant workshop completely vacant. Crestfallen, the duo sulk before receiving a mysterious letter by way of white swallow, detailing the disappearance of the craftsman and his clipper ship. On a mission to locate his lost son, the heartbroken father’s vessel went adrift and was swallowed by a hulking sperm whale. Utilizing the resolve gained through personal experience and human error, Pinocchio manages to track his creator and save him from digestion, starting a fire in the stomach of the great beast that sends a plume of dense smoke into its throat, forcing expectoration and spewing the raft back into the ocean.

The sharpness of the animation emphasizes the size of the great creature, shown through deep blues and bulging eyes, swimming through the foamy water at magnificent speed and with maximum force. Color stenciling also adds a natural texture to the characters, not unlike a charcoal drawing, particularly in the subtle smear of the image, as if it was smoothed by a human finger. The darker woodgrain of interiors is nicely off-set by a wide array of shading, reflected in the colorful coat of the "Pleasure Island" coachmen and the knickknacks on the walls of Geppetto’s shop.

Pinocchio excels mostly through these minute artistic details, rarely capturing the flights of fancy found in Snow White’s kaleidoscopic visuals or Fantasia’s thematic complexity. Its symbols are fairly easy to decipher for a mature audience (i.e. whale = burden of loss) and its premise may be a thinly veiled plea for conformity, but the intended audience will find common ground with the title character and connect with his struggle to develop into a functioning adult. In this capacity, Pinocchio is a success, but when held under a microscope, it never strikes a comfortable balance between its fairy-tale roots and its contemporary satirical targets.

Pinocchio (Walt Disney Productions, 1940)
Directed by Hamilton Luske (supervising director) and Ben Sharpsteen (supervising director)
Written by Carlo Collodi (novel), Ted Sears (story adaptation), Otto Englander (story adaptation), Webb Smith (story adaptation), William Cottrell (story adaptation), Joseph Sabo (story adaptation), Erdman Penner (story adaptation) and Aurelius Battaglia (story adaptation)

Fantasia (1940, Norm Ferguson)

Fantasia is the most enchanting and perceptive of Disney’s animated features, interpreting the emotional resonance of song as bursts of radiant color and motion, personifying sound through image. Broken into seven segments and bookended by scholarly introduction, it has little in common with the children’s fairytales that preceded it, eschewing narrative structure in favor of formless abstraction, reimagining the orchestral symphony as stream-of-consciousness comic strip. What it loses in structural consistency, it more than makes up for in ambition and eclecticism, grasping at concepts as solemn as the genesis of Earth and the transformative power of faith, while maintaining a youthful whimsy and boundless imagination.

Easing the viewer into the unconventional format, the opening segment introduces us to the Philadelphia Orchestra as they tune-up, shrouded in mystery by backlighting and a moody, cerulean scrim. Commentator Deems Taylor clues us in on the players and the concept, explaining the three types of sequences to follow: the story, the portrait and the autotelic composition.

The opening number will be in the third vain, acting as “art for art’s sake” and demonstrating a collective chromesthesia, one that hypostatizes heard musical notes as splashes of ink or lines rolling over stenciled dunes. As the menacing strings of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor build, the shadow of the orchestra is shown illuminated in fuchsia light, changing in hue as the composition progresses, settling into a soft blue for the harp interlude. As the players intersect on screen and the rising sun encompasses the form of the conductor, the shot transitions to a bed of clouds where disembodied pieces of instruments and flecks of light symbolize sound. Each image is open to interpretation, welcoming you to see a face, jewels, the crest of a mountain or icicles amidst the formless mass of ink.  

Shifting toward traditional cartoon animation, but not necessarily into a conventional narrative, the Nutcracker Suite segment imagines the change of seasons as a magical event, initiated by insectile fairies that adorn the plant life with a glistening dew of light, inspiring growth or death. Insignificant natural objects, ranging from spiderwebs to mushrooms caps, are inseminated with supernatural power, sparkling like translucent glass and wobbling beneath the weight of their oversized helmets. As temperatures cool and the ice nymphs prepare to skate on the surface of the water, flower petals wither and fall from their stalks, morphing into waltzing dancers in hoop skirts as they skim the frigid surface of the water.

The least engaging, but most ambitious, portion depicts the birth of life on Earth by way of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, encapsulating our planet from a swirling starscape of “nothingness” to the domain of the dinosaurs. As lunar orbs of heat and tufts of gas give way to a volcanic landscape, the music swells to meet a rush of hot magma, spewed upon the rocks and reshaping the terrain, giving way to water and much cellular development. Though the color palette is not as lustrous as the rest of the feature, focusing far too much on earth tones and muted greens, the concept is rather progressive, painting a “coldly accurate” origin story without the involvement of a deity or artistic modesty.

Fantasia saves the divine for the finale, depicting the struggle between the “profane and sacred” atop the mythical Bald Mountain. As Satan stands on the precipice of the towering mass of rock, enveloping the valley below in his baleful shadow, ghastly skeletons rise from their graves and ascend toward his beckoning hands. Monochromatic apparitions ride cadaverous horses in praise of the black, winged beast, rising with the build of strings into their master’s clutches, swept up in the wind of a nocturnal cyclone. As the demonic beings gyrate before him, morphing from men into swine, Lucifer flings their bodies into the foggy blue abyss of Hell, conceptualized through swirls of incandescent light and blasts of psychedelic nightmare imagery.

The fallen angel halts his reign in response to faint church bells and harsh blasts of blinding light, frantically receding into his realm of eternal darkness. In the valley below, a troop of chanting monks stoically traverse an arched bridge, illuminating the water beneath with the flicker of their kindled candlesticks. As the cooing of their vocals soars and the fog lifts above the treetops, each beacon of light shines a rosy glow onto the wooded backdrop, revitalizing the landscape. Our final glimpse is captured through a slit of rock, slowly zooming into a verdant forest at dawn. As angelic female voices sing the Ave Maria, the golden sun peeks from beneath the mountaintop, symbolizing the power of virtue over malevolence.

The slow build of these closing moments is profoundly moving, perfectly capturing the transcendent nature of the imagery and its accompanying symphony. Disney’s animators have created an illustration that reacts to notes of music and interprets their meaning, realizing that film need not depend on the written word, but function as a physical representation of our collective imagination through a union of sight and sound.

Fantasia (Walt Disney Productions, 1940)
Directed by Norm Ferguson (supervising director)
Written by Joe Grant (story direction) and Dick Huemer (story direction)

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937, David Hand)

As pivotal as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was in the development and popularization of the animated feature film, it’s easy to lose sight of its achievements next to the constantly improving technology behind Computer-generated imagery and its cinematic product. Here is a film without the benefit of computer rendering, predefined demographic, celebrity vocal talent or hip source material, stubbornly out of step with its era (World War II was right around the corner) and little more than a relic in the Digital Age.

Yet, after 78 years, hundreds of successors and much industry “progress,” Snow White lingers in the cultural zeitgeist, maintaining significance through the allure of its imagery and the simplicity of its themes. You can feel the human touch behind every pencil stroke of Snow White’s hand-drawn environment, producing a crisp and radiant color palette overflowing with powdery whites and royal blues. Cheeks and noses are rosey as if blood runs through each character’s veins and every motion is poetic in its fluidity, making for a limber and organic human alternative to CGI’s coldness.

Its themes are just as rapturous as its sketches, but never overly complicated, functioning off of a template that would prove timeless, dealing in heroes battling villains and love conquering evil. Though fear and jealousy would play a big role in the film’s primary conflict, these emotions are transmitted through a heightened melodrama that never betrays its environment, always protecting the audience through the cloistered world of fantasy. The end result is as beautiful, scary and enchanting as fairy tales could ever hope to be, impossible to resist despite the passage of time and streamlining of the genre.

Walt Disney, the producer and creative force behind the project, understood the importance of ritual in cinema and used the opening moments of the film to transport us to a world of make-believe. As the camera pans over a white, live-action environment, the shot zooms in on the pages of a storybook, gradually transitioning us into the animated world with the turn of each leaf.

Our first vision is the cold stone wall of the Queen’s castle, slowly descending into a maze of shadowy corridors and crimson drapery. The narcissistic monarch sways before her mirror, beckoning the disembodied spectre that lies dormant within to tell her that she is the “fairest one” in all of the land. In a moment of defiance, the usually subservient oracle reveals the truth, bestowing the honor of most beautiful upon the humble Snow White, the Queen’s maid and reluctant stepdaughter.

In a fit of rage, the Queen yearns for the slaughter of the humble child, demanding a huntsman lure the girl into the woods, dismember her body and place her still heart into a bright red jewelry box. Though the hulking brute nearly goes forward with the plan, stalking behind the maiden with hatchet withdrawn, he comes to his senses and releases Snow White into the woods, an environment that proves to be as frightening as his attempts at murder. As the virginal princess scampers through the forest, the shrubbery comes alive around her, morphing branches into gnarled claws and logs into the snapping jaws of crocodiles, perfectly embodying a child’s imagined vision of the unknown through the frenzied handiwork of the animation team.

Sensing the innocence of the frightened child, the denizens of the forest rush to her aid, calming her through an avian harmony that matches the exquisite fragility of her own vibrato (gracefully sung by Adriana Caselotti). The affable creatures even guide her to an empty cabin for a moment’s rest, but the ever-subservient Snow White sees this as an opportunity to spruce up the dusty hovel, engaging the critters in a lively cleaning montage that humorously repurposes a tortoise as a washboard and birds as bedmakers.

Despite her best efforts at housekeeping, the diminutive diamond miners that occupy the cabin are initially suspicious of her “feminine wiles,” reluctant to scrub their grubby hands before dinner or share their beds with the modest chambermaid. It was only after taking an intense sniff of her simmering soup on the kettle and collaborating with her in song that they accepted the transient princess, vowing to protect her from her diabolical matriarch and keep her company until a noble prince whisks her off to “happily ever after.”

The collective behavior of these Seven Dwarfs carries on in the slapstick tradition, primarily consisting of awkward stumbles and painful pratfalls, the type that wouldn’t be out of place in a Chaplin short or Marx Brothers’ farce. Their names even smack of the absurd, mimicking their physical traits so closely that Snow White can pick out each one simply by gazing at their faces and pairing it with the appropriate moniker adorning their bedframe.

Just as the octet began to adjust to their new arrangement, the Queen got wind of the huntsman's ruse, uncovering the pig’s heart disguised as Snow White’s in the gold-encrusted jewelry box. Realizing that she has to execute the child herself, the Queen descends a spiral staircase into her cobwebbed potion room, mixing a toxic concoction intended to shock Snow White into a coma, curable only by “love’s first kiss.”

The transformation sequence that occurs in her occult lair is the closest Snow White comes to “pure cinema,” visualizing the Queen’s metamorphosis from elegant waif to cackling shrew through the juxtaposition of her changing form over the swirl of a bubbling cauldron and the winds of a torrential downpour. The glimmering candlelight and sublime shadowplay of her witch’s den also enhance the mood, proving more evocative than real-life experience and wrapping the viewer in the narrative while eliciting goosebumps and a genuine sense of fear.

This feeling of trepidation will evolve into elation in the closing moments and it's the range of emotions elicited that makes Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs so vital, compelling its audience to succumb to a world of make-believe unencumbered by modernity and cynicism.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (Walt Disney Productions, 1937)
Directed by David Hand (supervising director)
Written by The Brothers Grimm (fairy tale), Ted Sears (story adaptation), Richard Creedon (story adaptation), Otto Englander (story adaptation), Dick Rickard (story adaptation), Earl Hurd (story adaptation), Merrill De Maris (story adaptation), Dorothy Ann Blank (story adaptation) and Webb Smith (story adaptation)

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring (2003, Ki-duk Kim)

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring is an astounding work of visual majesty, one that is structured like a religious allegory, but far less entrenched in the symbolic or willfully abstract, illustrating its lessons through images rather than wordy sermonizing.

Following the life of a Buddhist monk from childhood to middle age and demonstrating the passage of time through the changing of seasons, the film uses religion as its guiding spirit, but never as a rulebook, aligning itself to the whole of humanity instead of the whims of its narrative. This breadth of vision makes the film a truly personal journey, one that bonds the viewer to the characters through shared experience and empathy.

The first chapter, “Spring,” focuses on a child apprentice and his abbot, a pair that reside in a floating monastery, surrounded only by serene, blue water and dense forest. The monk instructs the boy in the art of holistic medicine and herb foraging, delighting in the life of quiet contemplation he shares with the excitable child, whom he regards as a son. Despite his innocence and best intentions, the boy occupies his spare time by tying stones to snakes and fish, giggling wildly as they struggle to free themselves from the restraint. Unbeknownst to him, his master has observed these transgressions from a distance and plans to teach him a valuable lesson.

Awakening the next morning, the novice finds a hefty piece of stone fastened to his back, knotted just out of his reach. He begs incessantly for its release, but the monk, disgruntled by the boy’s cruelty, orders him to lug the burdensome weight into the forest and liberate his helpless captives. If the creatures die, the monk warns, “You will carry the stone in your heart forever.” The boy heeds this ominous warning, wailing uncontrollably upon finding the serpent crushed under the burden of the stone, finally realizing the weight of his irresponsibility and indifference.

As Spring fades and “Summer” blossoms into full bloom, we are introduced to the boy as a teenager, now tall and studious, despite an adolescent awkwardness and lack of social skills. When a distraught mother brings her depressed daughter to the temple for spiritual treatment, the young man quickly develops a childish infatuation, sharing his first sexual experiences with the girl in the seclusion of the rock bed that surrounds his aquatic abode. The couple remains undetected during theses dalliances, only getting caught after they take out the monk’s rowboat by night and fall asleep in a state of post-coital bliss. The wise mage, in an act of retaliation, pulls the plug from the boat and lets the cold morning water wake the sleeping lovebirds.

“Lust awakens the desire to possess,” the Monk scowls, expressing the jealousy inherent in sins of the flesh, but his strong-willed student doesn’t heed the lesson and abandons the temple, chasing after his object of affection. The young man releases a cock into the woods upon his exit, symbolizing his venture into the “world of man.” Above him, the clouds cover the sun, only revealing the passage of time and nature’s indifference to the matters of the heart.

Nearly a decade passes before the monk gets to lay eyes on his pupil again, only discovering the boy’s whereabouts through a mugshot printed on a crumpled piece of wet newspaper. Regrettably, the young man has lost his way in the secular world, violently murdering his adulterous wife and fleeing police custody in a state of frenzied panic. The report disturbs the aging cenobite, but he sees it as a final opportunity to instill wisdom into the fallen apprentice, and he waits patiently for the return of his prodigal son.

“Sometimes we have to let go of the things we like,” the Monk explains upon the boy’s arrival, but hubris and rage cloud the fugitive’s judgment and he attempts ritual suicide when untended at the temple’s altar. Realizing the young man’s intentions, the monk flogs him mercilessly with a switch, ordering him to carve a prayer into the dock as a way to purge the hatred from his heart.

The repetition and solitude of the task bring a calm to the tempestuous nature of the apprentice and the monk willingly releases him into police custody after he completes every step of the healing process. In a sad moment of realization, our stoic voice of reason reflects on his own loneliness and replicates the boy’s death ritual, gluing bits of cloth over his eyes and mouth before immolating himself atop his drifting rowboat. Beyond the growing flames, we see yellow and amber leaves shuffle off tree branches, a sign that Nature remains unphased by the melodrama of human crises.

Returning to his nest in the dead of “Winter,” the reformed apprentice resurrects the temple from a state of stasis, refurbishing the grounds and actively pursuing inner peace through meditative exercise. Finding the shell of his master’s boat frozen into the ice, he removes the monk’s teeth from the wreckage and sculpts a Buddha into a frozen waterfall, depositing the teeth between the statue’s eyes as a symbol of respect and honor.

In one final act of reverence, the monk ties a weight to himself as he carries the Maitreya Buddha up a mountain, reenacting the first lesson from his childhood. As he prays at the mountaintop, he observes the valley and woods from above, humbling himself to the power that nature holds over him and permanently separating from the selfishness of ego.

The last chapter circles back to “Spring” and shows the new master taking on a child apprentice. Left alone to play on the dock of the temple, the young boy shamelessly pounds on the shell of a frightened turtle, unknowingly repeating the sins of his father. It’s an image that would be easy to misconstrue as negative, but writer-director Ki-duk Kim only values an honest interpretation of life, elucidated through the repetition of images, drawing parallels between our experience, that of our parents and the communal experience of mankind.

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring (Sony Pictures Classics, 2003)
Written and Directed by Ki-duk Kim
Photographed by Dong-hyeon Baek

Orgazmo (1997, Trey Parker)

Occupying the bottom rung of the cinematic step ladder and maligned as morally corrupt and misogynistic, the “sex comedy” is a staple of American popular culture not for its crudity, but through the enduring power of its lurid imagery. Pubescent boys, the primary audience for this type of hot-blooded fare, blossom into sexuality by way of the buxom coeds and unrepentant horniness on display, embodying the desires and fetishes of each film’s protagonist, indoctrinated into the sub-genre’s culture of male supremacy and skewed version of sensuality.

Despite the worst of intentions, the reliance on photographic and eidetic attributes actually lends the “sex comedy” a certain merit, capturing raw emotion through the coded progression of image and sound, working in unison like an orchestra to wring out sexual desire and snickers in equal measure. If deprived of this attention to detail, we’d be left to focus on the quality of the storytelling, which is often as plausible as a Penthouse letter, and usually written with far less aplomb.

Orgazmo suffers this fate at the hands of an unskilled crew, plagued by haphazard framing and poorly blocked shots, making for a messy field of vision that limits the potency of its sight gags. Any goodwill generated by the amiable protagonist and surprising lack of objectification is immediately washed away in a sea of cheap phallic pyrotechnics and pictorial redundancy, further exposing the limited scope of the writing and staggering amount of racial stereotyping.

Spearheaded by Trey Parker, creator of TV’s South Park, Orgazmo beckons comparisons to that series, particularly in its willingness to push boundaries and confront religious hypocrisy, but fails to transplant the gleeful absurdity of the popular cartoon to a live-action environment. It succeeds in some capacity as blue comedy, getting extra mileage from an utter lack of prudence and profane penchant for porn-industry buzzwords, but has shocking little subtext, rarely utilizing its fascination with pornography or the Mormon faith as fodder for anything beyond a two-bit punchline.

Struggling to make ends meet as an LDS missionary, Joseph Young (Parker) accepts the lead role in a pornographic superhero movie, exchanging his moral piety for a $20,000 paycheck and an old-fashioned wedding at the Salt Lake Temple. An ex-theater major at Brigham Young and proficient martial artist, Young’s acting chops and physical build attract the attention of an enterprising producer, one that sees the crossover potential in his uncommonly wholesome leading man.

Though Young’s performance is purely platonic (a “stunt cock” handles the dirty work), his sidekick, “Choda Boy,” sees the sex industry as a natural outlet for his overactive libido and an easy way to subsidize his homemade science projects. The most amusing of these contraptions is the “Orgasmatron,” a raygun that incapacitates its victims through knee-weakening orgasm, something the pair humorously test on Orthodox Jews and geriatric women along the Sunset Strip.  

The story of this budding friendship and the hijinks of porn production are tolerable enough for the opening 30 minutes, harmlessly riffing on the business of selling sex to an undiscerning audience. The film’s rickety foundation is completely thrown off when Parker tries to make a statement on consumerism, morphing the eponymous tawdry skin flick into an international hit, replete with action figures and a cover shoot for Time Magazine. If that wasn’t enough to induce a roll of the eyes, it manages to get even more implausible after its twist, mutating into a tale of superhero vengeance that consists of nearly 60 minutes of crudely choreographed “chop-socky” spoofs and a cornucopia of illogical resolutions.

Nevertheless, all infractions could have easily been forgiven if Orgazmo had managed to be a tad insightful or intermittently funny. Only one moment elicited a chuckle, a stereotypical montage sequence that wittily name checked its cinematic point of reference, following a blur of spinning newspaper headlines with an image of Orgazmo adjacent to Citizen Kane on a theater marquee.

Apart from this brief moment of clarity, Orgazmo is a foundation built on half-baked ideas, masquerading as satire without the acerbic wit or conviction required to lampoon its subjects. As it stands, this is just an early curiosity from a talented social critic not yet developed beyond creative puberty.

Orgazmo (Rogue Pictures, 1997)
Written and Directed by Trey Parker
Photographed by Kenny Gioseffi

Teorema (1968, Pier Paolo Pasolini)

Overwhelmed with a narcotic dreaminess and possessing a supernatural allure akin to its lead character and primary symbol, Teorema merges the secular and the divine, drawing parallels between the physical response to sexuality and the emotional depth of spiritual devotion. Through “The Visitor,” Italian poet Pier Paolo Pasolini personifies the transformative nature of religion, depicting faith as both inspiration and frustration.

Acting as a link to his early work as a Neorealist, Pasolini opens on a colorless, flat, industrial landscape. It’s the workplace of the impoverished, disenfranchised and forgotten Italian people. Standing in a non-descript lot, a well-dressed factory boss conducts a television interview, turning over his stake in the company to the workers that fabricate its product. One journalist opines that this may lead to a “transformation of all mankind into a middle class.” It’s a striking thought, but the moment passes, whisked away in a quick edit to fog rolling over a barren desert.

This sneaky cut is the first instance of visual symbolism or, more accurately, the conversation Pasolini intends to conduct for the next 95 minutes. His mission is to engage his audience in the mystery of the narrative, knowing that the use of cinematic syntax will provoke a response. This revelatory moment compares the birth of a unified middle class to a sun-scorched landscape, completely drained of life, metaphorically linking corporate progress to passivity. This contentment will sap the worker of the drive to subvert, fight, be inspired and even create.

Pasolini brings the sterility of the desert to the city, landing on a Milanese street draped only in bleak, sepia-tone photography and carrying dreary echoes and moans regurgitated from mouths and mufflers over the soundtrack. Five humans wander through daily activities joylessly, only converging for an evening meal that feels machinated, as if it were enforced. They have no defining qualities except for the roles given to them by Pasolini: father, mother, son, daughter and servant.

Change rushes in without warning. The family has welcomed a guest (Terence Stamp), and with him come brilliant bursts of color, from the yellow cover of his book to the earthy hue of his khakis. The servant (Laura Betti) observes him from a far, unable to stop herself from focusing on the prominent bulge between his legs. She musters the courage to approach, sheepishly wiping ash away from his pant leg before scurrying off like a field mouse.

Stopping to reflect in the mirror, the servant is overwhelmed with guilt for her open display of sexual desire, slowly fingering for the religious images adorning the mirror’s frame, quietly asking for forgiveness. In a moment of insanity, she removes the hose from the stove and prepares to asphyxiate herself, only to be saved by our nameless object of affection, whose angelic face and piercing blue eyes relieve her of all inhibition. Freed of her self-consciousness, she voluntarily lifts her skirt and succumbs to his will.

Her fellow housemates also bare their souls and bodies to “The Visitor,” basking in his grace and figuratively stripping themselves of all allegiance to class and culture. These passionate moments share a striking similarity, structured like the movements of a symphony, opening with guilt and reluctance and building to a crescendo of acceptance and elation. Each encounter differs only in the resulting emotional response, brought on by “His” swift and unexpected departure. Those left behind struggle, channeling this frustration into miraculous acts or uninhibited hysteria, permanently out-of-step with the superficiality of the secular world.

Through the tangibility of sexual intercourse, Pasolini explains the abstractness of faith, comparing life experience, outside of the shell of the middle class, to an epiphany. Audiences screamed blasphemy in 1968, but none of his detractors ever seemed to grasp that his vehemence wasn’t directed at religion, but at the wealthy and politically powerful. Teorema was meant as an affront to the growing capitalist mentality in Rome and Milan, preferring intangible beauty and liberation over rationality and the banality of social status. Never has a rallying cry been so exquisite or metamorphic, possessing images as rich as an oil painting and enduring as Christian iconography.

Teorema (Koch-Lorber Films, 1968)
Written and Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini
Photographed by Giuseppe Ruzzolini

The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971, Robert Fuest)

Transporting the moody pipe organ and mythology of the Universal Monsters to 20th Century England, The Abominable Dr. Phibes is basically a modern reinterpretation of Dracula or The Phantom of the Opera, preserving the gloom, but abandoning the modesty. In place of that dated concern for good taste and subtlety are lavish set designs, inspired by the geometry and bold color spectrum of Art Deco, and a modern thirst for grisly excess, albeit one with tongue firmly planted in cheek. Nevertheless, this “more is more” style of filmmaking is actually what makes the film tick, resulting in a highly visual work that sparingly relies on dialogue, generating tension and titters through reaction shots and novel methods of execution (both literal and figurative).

The theatricality of the film is transparent from the first reel, introducing us to Dr. Anton Phibes (Vincent Price) and his nefarious plot exclusively through sensory cues. We ascend to an ornate marble stage from the subterranean depths of Phibes’ secluded mansion, carried by a pulley system and the pulsating sound of his pipe organ, accompanied gently by his animatronic, and remarkably creepy, mini-orchestra. As his symbolical rise from the grave concludes, Phibes takes his “fashionable” assistant, Vulnavia (Virginia North), into his arms and waltzes her through the desolate ballroom, rhapsodized by a sweeping overhead shot and the harmony of the pneumatic brass band.

This performance is the opening movement of their homicidal ritual, a step directly followed by an ingenious method of murder modeled after the Plagues of Egypt, boasting “ancient maledictions” like a mischief of rats or hailstorm, accomplished through comically convoluted measures. Phibes is both an acclaimed organist and Doctor of Theology and he utilizes his fields of expertise to pull off these highly ostentatious acts, all constructed to wreak vengeance on the nine-person surgical team that left his young wife dead on the operating table.

Phibes himself is as ceremonious as his acts of reprisal, constructing his battered body in the mirror much like one would assemble a costume, fabricating his face from rubber prosthetics and speaking through a tube stuck in his neck, attached by lengthy cable to a phonograph. His upper body scorched and vocal cords shredded in a fiery automobile explosion, Phibes’ only verbal communication is now in somber soliloquy to his dead wife’s photograph, emoted by Price through mournful and bitter facial expressions.

The surrealistic vibrancy of Phibes’ screen time is contrasted by the darkly humourous nature of the accompanying police procedural, which is always a pace or two behind and more of a highlight reel of ineptitude than a paean to shrewd detective work. Heading the investigation, Inspectors Trout (Peter Jeffrey) and Crow (Derek Godfrey) realize Phibes’ scheme early on, but are met with such hostility from their superiors and are so beleaguered by their own clumsiness that they usually arrive at the scene well after the carnage, left to gasp in amazement at a blood-drained corpse or skeleton sucked dry of its flesh by a voracious swarm of locusts.

The most tragic of their miscalculations results in the death of a surgeon in protective custody, sashayed directly into the spiked horn of a brass unicorn, a trap orchestrated by Phibes and completely unnoticed by the gabby and easily distracted head detective. The biggest chuckle of the film accompanies their efforts to conceal this cadaver, a sight gag that finds them twisting the lifeless body on one side of a partition as the screw of the unicorn’s horn drips blood on the other.

Delicate sensibilities will certainly be distressed by the levity of this sequence, but those with a stronger constitution will find much to smirk at and admire in The Abominable Dr. Phibes, particularly its ability to juggle tone and artfully compose a shot. The symmetry of its visuals and rich primary colors of the decor influence the tone, varying between earthy browns and wood grain in farcical moments and scarlet red and lime green in moments of tension and panic.

This unsavory marriage of humor and horror would be intrinsic to fright films of the forthcoming 21st Century, but not nearly as significant as the film’s closing sequence, which pits the only surviving surgeon against the clock in a mad dash to save his first-born son from a vat of acid. The Saw series would exploit puzzles and traps of this nature ad nauseum, but could never elicit the delight and disgust of Phibes’ conceits, favoring an over-crowded narrative to the simple pleasures of visual storytelling.  

The Abominable Dr. Phibes (American International Pictures, 1971)
Directed by Robert Fuest
Written by James Whiton and William Goldstein
Photographed by Norman Warwick

Witchfinder General (1968, Michael Reeves)

An ironic re-interpretation of the pastoral, Witchfinder General maintains the mode’s dewy pastures and vast exteriors, but replaces the romanticized viewpoint with a cruel cynicism and macabre palette. It strikes a unique juxtaposition between its content and landscape, shooting its sordid tale of torture and vengeance in natural light, swathed in shadowy dusk and fading blue skies, accompanied by the howling wind and creaking of tree branches against the night chill. For a horror picture, particularly one about a witch hunter, it completely abandons the supernatural, telling its tale of human avarice through an all-too-real and more frightening organic environment.

Our setting is 17th Century England, a nation divided in civil war and overwhelmed by a criminal element that exploits the lack of municipal law enforcement and superstitious nature of the populace. Richard Marshall (Ian Ogilvy), our protagonist and an enterprising member of General Cromwell’s army, rides from camp to the neighboring Brandeston to set eyes on his lover, Sara (Hilary Dwyer), and perhaps ask for her hand in marriage. Regrettably, his visit isn’t met with jubilation, as his betrothed and her uncle (an aging ecclesiastic) are in hiding from local allegations of idolatry.

Responding to a request from the Brandeston magistrate, Matthew Hopkins (Vincent Price), a lawyer and self-proclaimed “Witchfinder General,” and his brutish assistant, John Stearne (Robert Russell) travel to the village to interrogate and try the supposed blasphemers, a process that requires much physical torture and very little detective work. The technique used to break the will of Sara’s uncle is particularly brutal, consisting of needles strategically stuck in the back and waist to reveal the “Devil’s Mark,” a space on the skin consecrated by Satan that won’t bleed upon penetration.

The duo always garner a confession, but Hopkins never participates in the more sadistic aspects of coercion, leaving those to the aberrant imagination of his barbaric associate. Taking a backseat to the “action” is new for Vincent Price, but he turns in an admirably pared-down performance as the witchfinder, broodingly quietly, seeking only his due in silver and the bodily delights of a female subjugate.

Hopkins selects Sara as his latest conquest, allowing her to buy her uncle’s freedom through a litany of sexual favors, none of which will truly save the old man from the gallows. The abuse she endures at the hands of Hopkins and Stearne is truly repulsive and it’s hard not to notice that the female cast get the brunt of the sadistic interrogation sequences. Thankfully, this behavior is never advocated and only depicted to elaborate on the misogyny of the era, perfectly encapsulated in Hopkins’ statement on femininity as a “foul ungodliness.”

The only savagery that comes with the filmmaker’s stamp of approval is Richard Marshall’s retaliation, painted as Grand Guignol spectacle, drenched in cerise, fake blood and boasting a vivid eye gouging and the thudding cleave of a blunt axe. It was certainly provocative for the period, but the succinct flashes of grue don’t detract from the simple and evocative camerawork, which generates more menace through quick zoom and low-angle than gory retribution. Witchfinder General is also of philosophical merit, showing the contaminating nature of power and the profitability behind the “justice” system and prison industry, a theme that’s rather timely despite the archaic setting.

Witchfinder General (American International Pictures, 1968)
Directed by Michael Reeves
Written by Ronald Bassett (novel), Tom Baker (screenplay), Michael Reeves (screenplay) and Louis M. Heyward (additional scenes)
Photographed by John Coquillon

The Masque of the Red Death (1964, Roger Corman)

Inspired in equal parts by Edgar Allan Poe’s morbid fable and The Seventh Seal’s cloaked visage of death, Roger Corman’s rapturous rendition of The Masque of the Red Death is the most handsomely mounted of his eight Poe adaptations, seamlessly fusing the melodrama of Gothic horror to the existential malaise of world cinema. It also happens to be the most economical, utilizing overhead shots and novel framing techniques to broaden the physical space, further heightened by the gauzy nature of Nicolas Roeg’s photography, which employs soft focus to eroticize the setting and medium close-up to emphasize emotion.

Ravishing technical aspects aside, the film lives and dies by Vincent Price’s performance and his devilish take on Prince Prospero relishes in every bad deed and malicious act, grinning from ear to ear at the thought of manipulating his human subjects for entertainment’s sake. Price’s adaptability and nuance as a performer are what made him a matinee staple, but the subtle arrogance and vigor of his lead performance in Masque is particularly noteworthy, capturing the essence of Poe’s character as if he tore it right from the page.

Trampling through the shanty town that rests in the muddy reflection of his palace, Prospero, a pompous and pernicious nobleman, pauses to reward his underlings with invitations to a masquerade ball, unaware that a townsperson has been infected with the “red death.” Upon recognizing the symptoms on the blood-soaked face of an elderly woman, Prospero recoils in fear and demands the village be burned to ash, only absconding with three rowdy locals upon the request of his deviant cohort, Alfredo (Patrick Magee, typically wild-eyed and enthusiastic), who intends to utilize them as a source of amusement.

The male captives must live out their days as gladiators at the behest of the host, but Prospero has other intentions for the young Francesca (Jane Asher), the gamine female captor who bravely confronted him as he shamelessly scorched her village. Though her modesty and staunch Christian faith stand in direct contrast to his practical intellect, he is infatuated by her resolve and sees her as a suitable opponent to his belief system (or lack thereof).

Prospero’s sole purpose in life is to attain knowledge and he prays to Satan for supernatural wisdom and immortality, citing his nihilistic attitude as a more realistic alternative to compassion. He only begins to question himself when he sees Francesca shake off his advances, both sexually and intellectually, and is dumbfounded by her faith in an intangible God, one that doesn’t offer wealth or power.

The entire purpose of the masquerade ball is to increase Prospero’s influence over man and death, a desire that may reflect his own building insecurity. Testing his allegiance with Satan, Prospero decrees that his guests must grovel before him as thanks for their protection, a request they all too willingly accept, turning dignitaries and queens into braying donkeys that will scour the floor to sniff out a dropped pearl or discarded piece of meat. Their descent into pure revelry is humorous and decadent, lovingly orchestrated through choreographed dancing and an elaborate mise en scène that morphs pratfalls and stumbles into an ornate, epicurean ballet.

Prospero perceives this exhibition as a sign of his domain over death, but an unknown “guest” dressed in crimson red exposes his folly, unmasking the merrymakers to reveal their blood-splattered faces. Despite power and wisdom, Death divulges its inevitability, completely contrary to man’s whims or the bearings of religion. As a sea of dancing corpses surround the frenzied Prospero, he writhes and squirms in one last ditch effort to escape his fate, succumbing only when he comprehends the futility of his struggle.

Thematically, it’s refreshing to see an unbiased representation of death, one existing completely outside of the superstitions and religious institutions of man. The Masque of the Red Death takes this moral ambiguity seriously and constructs an ending that shows the grave as an equalizer, taking on the humble and the arrogant, completely without malice or partiality. It’s a philosophically heavy closing point for a histrionic horror film, but it’s this thematic complexity that makes Masque the most mature and vivid of Corman’s genre efforts.

The Masque of the Red Death (American International Pictures, 1964)
Directed by Roger Corman
Written by Edgar Allan Poe (story), Charles Beaumont (screenplay) and R. Wright Campbell (screenplay)
Photographed by Nicolas Roeg

Night and Fog in Japan (1960, Nagisa Ôshima)

Generating emotional resonance through interpretive camera work and operatic lighting, Night and Fog in Japan brings a heightened realism to the political drama, revealing clues to its mysteries by taking creative license with time and place. Utilizing a frame story to detail the experiences of members of Japan’s Communist Party, Nagisa Ôshima avoids the clinical nature of fact and allows the visuals to mirror the recollection of each story’s orator, drifting through events with the subjectivity of memory and the grace of a dream.

Directing his camera to move like the human eye, darting between sources of sound and action, Ôshima opens the film with a grandiose tracking shot, gliding stealthily through a wooded area and sneaking between the double-doors of a reception hall, resting in a symmetrical position before a bridal party and their ornate, tiered wedding cake. A speech from the couple’s mentor, a college professor, will be the focal point of this nearly 10-minute opening shot, drawing conflicting reactions from the politically-mixed guests of the bride and groom, elucidated through fluid camera motion and meticulous shot composition.

Roaming between past and present, the camera bases its location on the whims of the character captured in the frame, often marrying elements of the then and now through an overlapping musical theme or dramatic shift in lighting. The lack of editing allows for a seamless transition, moving freely between the manifold story threads, balancing action between the idealistic student revolutionaries of 1950 and the despondent, conflicted adults of 1960.

Chronologically, the narrative opens in an overcrowded college dormitory, one occupied by leftists revolting against the “AMPO” treaty, a military alliance that allowed the United States to intervene in any conflict on Japanese soil. Despite their easily definable goal and tight-knit support group, intraparty conflict quickly arose between the philosophically-minded members of the organization and the bourgeois mentality of the party’s leadership, precipitated in equal measure by youthful hubris and a lack of communication.

The greatest schism that the Zengakuren endured was in relation to a member’s suicide, which was arguably the result of party interrogation and libelous rumors. Two close friends of the fallen soldier tell his story in the present, crashing the nuptials to show opposition to the “with us or against us” mentality perpetuated by party leadership and to point fingers at the supposed culprit, dictatorial party leader, Nakayama. They see the reception as an opportunity to “tear off each other’s masks” and examine the compromises past members have made to attain the comfort of a “conservative life,” an existence that demands uniformity and opposes the true intent of the youth movement.

Ôshima’s film is an act of protest against this hardline political conservatism and the complacency it inspires, favoring the untapped potential of the individual to subvert collective memory. His ability to manipulate structure and time in Night and Fog in Japan was just as revolutionary as his politics, inventing a cinematic language that linked past and present together without the intrusive nature of excessive editing. The resulting work is a rich tapestry of visual beautiful and singular emotion, coasting on the kinetic energy of a constantly moving cinematic eye.

Night and Fog in Japan (New Yorker Films, 1960)
Directed by Nagisa Ôshima
Written by Toshirô Ishidô and Nagisa Ôshima
Photographed by Takashi Kawamata

The Wind Will Carry Us (1999, Abbas Kiarostami)

Bearing little resemblance to the Western notion of a “movie,” Iran’s The Wind Will Carry Us takes the pieces of traditional narrative cinema and drains them of the artifice of plot, score and kinetic energy. Broken from these constraints and unhurried by suspense, the visual image remains static, changing the medium from a vehicle for entertainment to one of quiet contemplation. Adapting to the flow of Abbas Kiarostami’s work requires some sacrifice, mostly to one’s patience, but the effort isn’t fruitless, as the inert eye of the camera captures guileless, organic beauty and allows us to inculcate our own experience onto the stock-still canvas.

Though natural elegance occasionally infiltrates the visual landscape, seen mostly in the sway of golden fields of grain, Kiarostami’s primary interest is the encroachment of industrialization on the environment, particularly through the automobile, which he uses as a figurative vehicle for shifts in culture values. He even stages his dialogue-driven moments around cars, either shot from a distance or by a camera mounted to the dashboard, passively recording conversations held within or through a crack in the passenger window. It wouldn’t even be absurd to consider the lead’s sedan as a member of the cast and Kiarostami loves playing with this symbol, even personifying the car through the words of his main character (Behzad Dorani), who compares the radiator overheating to a person “giving up the ghost.”

Thematically, the gravity, or lack thereof, with which Behzad talks about life and death reflect a growing “intellectual” condescension to tradition. Temporarily stationed in a remote village on assignment, Behzad treats the locals as if they were antiquities, subjects to be photographed and documented like a species of insect. Though details are scant and provided with little explication, one can infer that Behzad’s trip relates to a dying villager, either as journalistic or financial endeavor. The bitter irony is that, as he waits for a stranger to die, he ignores his own family’s plea for his appearance at a relative’s funeral.

Unstirred by personal connection, unless in relation to his profession, Behzad’s lifeline is his cellular phone and it’s amusing to see him speed along dangerous mountain roads to find a peak with a stable signal. Kiarostami’s prescience picked up on the forthcoming dependence on portable electronics far before it was an epidemic, recognizing our weakness for convenience at the expense of privacy and intimacy. Watching Behzad on his daily hunt for reception gradually becomes less amusing the fourth or fifth time it happens, especially as the viewer relates their own obsessive drive for “connectivity” to his embarrassing charade.

There’s a telling moment, midway through the film, when the camera acts as a mirror for Behzad as he shaves, his face occupying the screen as if it were our own. His reflection is the face of all human callousness, embodying man’s disconnect from natural order in favor of superficial knowledge and cavalier pride. His redemption, in the film’s closing moments, comes with an acceptance of life’s limitations and death’s certainty, seen by Kiarostami’s camera without reaction or judgment, provoking the viewer to find their own truth and make their own penance.

The Wind Will Carry Us (New Yorker Films, 1999)
Written and Directed by Abbas Kiarostami
Photographed by Mahmoud Kalari

Werckmeister Harmonies (2000, Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky)

Werckmeister Harmonies is a cinematic endurance test.

As each shot lingers far beyond the five-minute mark and characters’ ruminations become increasingly obscure, it’s impossible not to momentarily drift into deep thought or lose patience. It’s a shame that the pace is so uncompromising, because the photography is richly textured and emotional moments stirring. More adventurous viewers may be inclined to forgive 2-plus hours of meandering, but even those familiar with this type of rigorous artistic exercise will find Werckmeister more successful in concept than execution.

A kindred spirit to Andrei Tarkovsky, Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr specializes in stoic, cerebral think pieces, made up of hypnotic long takes, color-stripped photography and bleak mindset. At his best, his films are capable of striking a melancholic shroud over the audience (see Turin Horse), making the viewer a participant in a grim, funereal dirge. At worst, he can take an inconsequential moment and endlessly magnify it, trying to bring the sublime to the mundane. His efforts are high-minded and worthy, but not always entertaining.

Visually, Tarr is fascinated by the way objects and people cast shadows, guiding his lens towards the skeletal outlines painted by faint light under an opaque sky. The monotonous and rhythmic marching of his figures in the dark hypnotizes the viewer, drawing them parallel to the emotional isolation of his somnambulistic characters and reflecting the despair inherent in the life of the working poor.

In contrast to the zombies that occupy this dreary vision of Hungarian life, Janos, our protagonist, takes pleasure in the wonders of astronomy and the anticipation of a forthcoming carnival attraction. Promising a whale of massive proportions and a mysterious “prince,” the event fills Janos with child-like wonder, while it exacerbates his neighbors’ superstition and ignorance.

Gradually, the whale and prince create a spiritual rift amongst the townspeople, acting as epiphany for the open-minded and inciting violence in the corrupt and shallow. The concluding moments find the town in ruins, destroyed by a haze of chaos and fury provoked by a profound fear of change.

What sounds like a straight-forward narrative on paper unfolds as one endless, poetic non-sequitur. Characters speak in monologues that unravel like riddles, cloaked in esoteric navel-gazing of dubious meaning and eye-rolling pseudo-profundity (ex. “Great frozen mountains of refuse are everywhere”). The willingness to dissect these labyrinthine passages depends on the virtue and focus of the viewer, but diving into these murky waters may be a thankless task. What lies beneath a few moments of haunting brilliance is an impenetrable work of frustration, offering little reward for diligent contemplation.

Werckmeister Harmonies (Facets Video, 2000)
Directed by Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky
Written by László Krasznahorkai and Béla Tarr
Additional Dialogue by Péter Dobai, Gyuri Dósa Kiss and György Fehér
Photographed by Patrick de Ranter, Miklós Gurbán, Erwin Lanzensberger, Gábor Medvigy, Emil Novák and Rob Tregenza

Baise-moi (2000, Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi)

Baise-moi fancies itself a revolutionary picture, one capable of externalizing female aggression toward a male-dominated society and casting aside the coquettish bedside manner expected of the “fairer sex.” It certainly doesn’t bat an eyelash at raw carnality and wears its hostility toward mainstream sexuality on its sleeve, but it never marries this political ideology with its vision, instead banking on the power of shock tactics.

The resulting film is feeble in its execution and childishly sadistic in its demeanor, unable to express its ideas through visual storytelling or reconcile with the odious nature of its characters. It’s a shame, because female empowerment is rarely this righteously bitter and anarchic, but self-actualization can’t be gained solely through sexual dominance and cinematic art can’t be created without the skill set.

Nadine (Karen Bach) smokes and drinks in a dive bar, observing the patrons and eavesdropping on their supposedly private conversations. She snickers to herself as two men fantasize about a female with the capacity for giving great head, while another woman looks on nervously as her two-timing boyfriend ignores her and plays pool. She finds amusement in the female subservience on display, a role she believes she’s never had to play as a part-time prostitute and dominatrix. She has a realization days later, while being forced to perform oral sex on a john, that she doesn’t differ much from the obedient, crestfallen woman waiting beside the pool table.

Manu (Raffaëla Anderson) tends bar at her brother’s restaurant and is not only subject to his physical abuse, but to the aggressive tendencies of drug dealers and crooks in her neighborhood. Sharing a beer with an old friend in a brief respite from her life of servitude, she relaxes momentarily to expound on her disgust for local busybodies, only to be kidnapped by a roving gang of rapists. Though Manu is capable of remaining stoic during the act, believing it is her key to survival, her friend wails constantly to the delight of their unmasked violators.

The sight of a bloodied woman crying during an actual sex act is profoundly unsettling, churning the stomach and channeling the depravity found at the darkest recesses of 70’s pornography. The penetration shots linger for effect, zooming in on the sex organs, lasting long enough for us to question the motives of the participants and thoroughly distract from the pace of the film.

Coincidentally, Nadine and Manu take on their slave masters at the very same moment, killing the objects of their oppression in stereo, as if united by some cosmic force. Manu shoots her brother in the head as he rushes out to confront her rapists, an act she immediately regrets, signified by a gentle kiss goodbye. Nadine chokes her nagging roommate simply to shut her up, never realizing that an explosion of emotion could result in a lifeless cadaver.

The two meet by chance as they wait for the morning train and make a pact to drink, screw and kill until the law or the grave stops them. After warming up by shooting a woman at an ATM, the deadly duo hit the road in a stolen car and jump from hotel to hotel, leaving a litany of corpses in their wake. Each unlucky victim receives a unique execution, whether it be by the heel of a shoe, wheel of a car, hail of bullet spray or rain of fists.

This orgy of sex and death culminates at the “Libertine Club,” a setpiece that ends the film with a cataclysmic bang. As couples fornicate in a dimly-lit speakeasy, perfectly angled toward the camera eye, Nadine and Manu assassinate them while in the throes of passion, even shoving a pistol up a horny patron’s ass and blowing his brains out from the backend, despite its scientific improbability.

Whether intended as one last sick joke or a statement on the similarities between orgasm and death rattle, it manages to be the most excessive stunt in a film gorged on excess, a scene as arousing as it is grotesque. Yet, the directorial team claims the sex on display isn’t intended to be erotic, a claim I thoroughly dismiss, finding the throbbing electronic score, often accompanied by histrionic female moaning, to add a certain prurient thrust to the scenes of intimacy. The violent moments also aim to stimulate, hitting heights of cartoonish extremity, made even more disturbing by their proximity to unsimulated scenes of intercourse, calculated to spit in the face of false modesty.

I agree that so-called “softcore” and its implied morality is inherently dishonest, but Baise-moi doesn’t make a very compelling case for “hardcore,” instead leaning on the lurid aspects of the genre as a crutch when the writing isn’t strong enough to carry a scene. It’s also as disingenuous as the male-produced pornographic product, gazing endlessly at engorged genitalia, staging oral sex scenes to leave the face unobscured by hair and doing double or triple-takes of every explosive gunblast to the head. These are the same egregious methods used in pornography and this film falls flatly into that category, differing only in its length and sporadic narrative.

Baise-moi (FilmFixx, 2000)
Written and Directed by Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi
Photographed by Benoît Chamaillard

I Stand Alone (1998, Gaspar Noé)

“Life is a huge void.”

So says Le Boucher, the isolated, empty shell occupying Gaspar Noé’s intensely bleak I Stand Alone. We share this blank space with the unemployed horse butcher, getting a transmission directly from his battered psyche in an almost constant voiceover, obsessively spewing vitriolic rhetoric at his peers, whom he sees as opposition (the French title translates directly to “Alone Against All”) and the subjects of his inevitable vengeance.

The form mirrors the content of Le Boucher’s head, surging with roiling aggression and tension, shot in an oppressive 2:66:1 aspect ratio, trapping us in the degradative and nauseating nature of the visuals. Noé is an impudent provocateur, his words, sounds and images rolling atop each other in explosive bursts. Every aspect personifies the frenzy of violence, whether it be the acrobatic, lunging camera work, sanguinary visual effects or piercing gunshot echoes. His is the art of brutality, reflecting man’s worst characteristics through his protagonist: aggression, blind hate and emotional inarticulateness.

Each burst of blood-red gore and shot of penetrative sex illuminates the screen, challenging us to look, breaking the boundary between art and pornography. It’s a daring provocation, but a valuable one, separating entertainment from violence and sexuality and demanding that we take dehumanization at face value.

Acting as a sequel of sorts, I Stand Alone directly follows Carne, a work that famously (or infamously) began with a captive bolt pistol piercing the skull of a horse. Noé intends to strike us in a similar fashion, his filmic technique encapsulating the assaultive nature of the slaughter and his “hero” acting as an extension of the morbidity of factory farming. He also carries over the restrictive intertitles and typography from the previous film, cutting into the action with flat, one-word slogans (“MORALE”) in stark, block-lettering, always signaled by the bellow of taut, symphonic music.

A theme is presented in the opening seconds, entirely separate from the feature film, hinting at a political subtext beneath the forthcoming fury. A man waving a gun in a pub explains how laws and rules only tilt the scales in favor of the rich and how a counter-morality, a bullet from a gun, is the only way to impart balance. Money will prove to be the cruelest master in Le Boucher’s world and Noé implies here that the ethics of a wealth-based class system inspire cruelty and acts of desperation. In essence, the constructs of society make monsters of the lower-class.

From this introduction, action directly shifts into a recap of the previous film, telling “The story of a jobless butcher,” fleshed out before our eyes in sun-damaged photographs and roaring in our ears through dour narration. Abandoned by his mother and left orphaned after his father’s death, Le Boucher suffered a childhood of molestation, redeemed only by an early adulthood that brought him his own butcher shop and the sensation of breaking his lover’s hymen.

Sadly, happiness faded and history repeated itself, leaving Le Boucher and his mute daughter on their own, a situation that only intensified his feelings of lust toward the child. In a fit of blind rage and perhaps as a reaction toward his own incestuous desires, Le Boucher stabbed an immigrant worker in the face, assuming menstruation stains on his daughter’s skirt were the result of non-consensual sex. Ironically, his act of fatherly protection would permanently separate them, sending one to an orphanage and the other to prison.

Following the trip down memory lane, we arrive in the present, specifically Lille, France in 1980, time-stamped on the screen with the voyeuristic glee of true crime television. Le Boucher is now a free man, leaving his daughter behind and starting a new life in the suburbs with a pregnant barmaid, desperately hoping to escape “the dark tunnel of his existence.” His new bride even agrees to foot the bill for a butcher shop in his name, that is, as long as he finds temporary work at a deli counter to subsidize the cost.

Despite her best efforts to appease him, Le Boucher is insulted by her forward nature and feminine input, thoroughly emasculated as she negotiates business deals in his name. Each evening spent in her mother’s home and inquest into his unemployment is a blow to his fragile psyche and he relishes the opportunity to slander Sa Maitresse (his teacher) in his mind, spouting out “fatso” and “cunt” as his favorite descriptive slurs.

His constant critique of her pregnant form is exceptionally cruel and he completely foregoes sexual intercourse with her, opting instead for pornography as the less intimate alternative. The mechanics of porn perfectly reflect his personal ideology, an outlook that separates the unique aspects of a person from the functionality of their parts, much like the profession of butchery. In his eyes, if you’re a man, you only function as an erect penis, destined to penetrate in an intrusive manner. If you’re a woman, your only purpose is to be penetrated.

Noé depicts these interactions without simulation, showing the dehumanizing aspects of the commercialization of sexuality without eroticizing his human subjects. The only salacious moment is a dream sequence, depicting moistened fingers caressing folds of raw horse meat, illustrating the destructive passions of our corrupt lead and the vicious aspects of his occupation.

Arriving home late after an excursion to an adult movie theater, Le Boucher is greeted by accusations of infidelity and the taunts of an angry, pregnant wife. He barks back, ambivalently, until she draws metaphorical blood, questioning his libido and calling him “PEDE” (faggot). The slur resonates deeply, further contaminating his masculine identity and coercing him into asserting dominance. His reaction results in one of the most dreadful and disquieting sequences in the film, an unflinching depiction of feticide that the aggressor likens to grinding up “hamburger meat.” It’s a nihilistic response to a despicable moment, only appropriate for a man who likens humans to breathing sex organs, much like he correlates animals to their cuts of meat in his boucherie.

Noé employs the repulsiveness of this sequence to satirize the gore fetishism and apolitical nature of modern cinema. Striving for a more honest depiction of immorality, Noé saps his “kills” of entertainment value, leaving behind the harrowing and destructive nature of violence, a behavior influenced by fear, ignorance and poverty. Seeing these images outside of the guise of recreation, we’re left to question our implication in the proliferation of fictional violence and what it says about our own moral code.

I Stand Alone (Strand Releasing, 1998)
Written and Directed by Gaspar Noé
Photographed by Dominique Colin

Frontière(s) (2007, Xavier Gens)

Horror is a genre of options.

It can be based in reality or operate in the purely fantastic. It can rely on an antagonist or utilize atmosphere as a means of inspiring fear. It can be played for laughs, done with a straight face, present a sexual subtext, even reflect grace and beauty. The options are without limit and it would be hard to find another type of picture, outside of the erotic, that features so many sub-categories and offshoots. That being said, it’s startling how few modern horror films take advantage of the endless realm of possibility, instead leaning on the achievements of their forebearers, as if to benefit through association.

Frontière(s) is one of these gutless attempts, never stepping out of the shadow of its chief influencer and cowering in fear at the thought of coloring in its insipid attempts at political and racial commentary. It’s a pointless exercise in convention, aimed squarely at an audience far too familiar with this motif.  

The story opens on France in a state of chaos. As a fundamentalist right-wing government takes office, the public riots, depicted in a mélange of jumpy fictional footage and stock news clippings. Yasmine, our protagonist and reluctant future parent, runs from police, seeking shelter for her wounded brother who’s steadily losing consciousness. To make matters worse, her violent baby daddy and his crew of ne’er-do-wells are en route, hashing a plan to transport a copious amount of stolen cash to the French-German border.

Though Alex is a brute, capable of both beating a cop bloody and comparing a dying man to a used tampon, he concedes, driving Yas and her brother to the hospital while his criminal counterparts (Tom and Farid) make a dash for greener pastures. As the sun fades and tensions run high, the pair decide to stop at a hostel for a little R&R, only to be greeted by a suspiciously flirtatious pair of sisters and their hulking brother, who passes his time brutally skinning a buck on the kitchen table.

If just hearing this description threw up a red flag in your mind, prepare to roll your eyes when the boys overlook the staff’s dubious behavior and decide to book a room. By the time they witness and shirk off the family grandmother regurgitating dinner through a tracheotomy tube in her neck, mild frustration will turn to rage, due in equal parts to anemic writing and blatant plagiarism (see Texas Chainsaw Massacre).

Every tired cliché gets trotted out for a victory lap. The secret room filled with passports and cell phones, half-dead victims hung from meat hooks, the sadistic patriarch, the “final girl,” fetishistic Nazi imagery…

But wait, isn’t this all intended as some sort of political statement, paralleling right-wing conservatism to fascistic hate mongering? Possibly in more capable hands, but any flirtation with social importance is just a cop out, intended to disguise Frontière(s) true intentions. This is a splatter film dressed as satire, too callow and weak to take a shot at the powers that be and far too restrained to function as transgressive horror.

Frontière(s) (Lionsgate Films, 2007)
Written and Directed by Xavier Gens
Photographed by Laurent Barès

The Firm (1993, Sydney Pollack)

Delicately balancing between the emotional and the physical, The Firm succeeds as entertainment without ever defining itself, determining mood and demeanor on a scene-by-scene basis. Its refusal to create a singular narrative thread could have made for erratic and unfocused work, but it wisely ratchets up the suspense by alternating characters and concepts, drawing as much audience enthusiasm from its contemplative war of words as it generates from the rush of foot chases and narrow escapes.

Mitch McDeere (Tom Cruise, at his most cherubic) is our humble hero, a gifted, but grounded, Harvard Law student who slings pub grub in the evening just to keep himself and his beautiful wife financially afloat. As graduation nears, the lucrative offers start pouring in, but McDeere isn’t smitten until he meets with Oliver Lambert (Hal Holbrook), the man behind a quaint Memphis firm that stresses a conservative image and tight-knit, familial work environment.  

Mitch is drawn to the normalcy on display at Lambert & Locke, subconsciously striving to distance himself from a childhood spent in a trailer park and the embarrassment surrounding his brother’s manslaughter conviction. His desire to be a member of a family, at least one in the traditional sense, blinds him to the stranglehold the firm’s value system puts on one’s freedom of choice, effectively eliminating employee dissent through the promise of wealth and the facade of community.

Abby McDeere (Jeanne Tripplehorn), Mitch’s spouse, is far more cynical and suspicious of the company’s generosity, sensing the trepidation in co-worker’s responses to her pursuit of a teaching career and reluctance to have children. Her concerns seem unfounded, at least to the wide-eyed Mitch, but they’ll both soon discover that wishes go well beyond gentle insinuation and any insolence is recorded by the Lambert & Locke “security team,” a shadowy group tasked with tracing employee calls and dissuading illicit behavior.

While most employees buy into the groupthink lock, stock and barrel, cavalier veteran Avery Tolar (Gene Hackman) is afforded a “few minor rebellions,” revelling in every extramarital affair and liquid lunch purchased on the company dime. Equal parts charmer and sleazeball, Tolar is tasked with ushering Mitch through his bar exam preparation and easing him into the company’s bookkeeping affairs, a process that mostly consists of “business” trips to the firm’s crash pad in the Cayman Islands.

Despite first impressions, Avery doesn’t hide behind his duplicitousness, openly inspiring Mitch to bend the law without breaking it and expounding upon the silver lining of moral turpitude (i.e. wealth, power). Hackman’s nuanced performance makes this veil of confidence alluring, credible enough to convert our most moral Mitch into a master of deception and desperate enough to make the character’s fall from grace in the last reel touching and unusually revelatory.

Days before Mitch’s maiden voyage to the Caribbean, two of his peers mysteriously die on a scuba diving expedition, insinuated to be the handiwork of L&L’s security team and its intimidating chieftain,  William Devasher (Wilfred Brimley). Mitch is rattled by the news, but even more disconcerted by the reaction of his peers, who range from paralyzed by fear to borderline catatonic, as if they’re imagining their heads beneath the executioner’s axe.

Unwilling to forgo the dream just yet, Mitch dives headfirst into his work and a parade of domestic excesses (queue the montage), moving his conscience to the back burner for the foreseeable future. The status quo goes on uninterrupted, except for some marital strain, until Mitch’s headspace is thoroughly invaded by F.B.I. agent Wayne Tarrance (Ed Harris), who reveals that Lambert & Locke has lost 4 employees in a rather dubious fashion over the past decade. Tarrance’s evidence is circumstantial and he can’t prove the firm’s involvement, but he makes a compelling case and reignites Mitch’s lingering suspicions.

Intent on extracting information from the unofficial, offshore branch, Mitch tags along with Avery on a jaunt to the Caymans, under the guise of assuaging the concerns of a finicky client. While Avery freshens for dinner and drinks, Mitch rifles through a mountain of on-site files, intrigued by a set of boxes related to Chicago’s Morolto crime family. Realizing he’s stumbled onto something substantial, but not entirely sure what this wealth of information adds up to, Mitch puts a pin in his covert operation until a later date, getting temporarily seduced by Tolar’s business acumen and debaucherous habits. In a moment of weakness, Mitch succumbs to his basest instincts and solicits sex from a wounded girl on the beach, temporarily losing his moral high ground.

Up until this point, Mitch McDeere has been the film’s ethical center, infallible in the eyes of the audience, acting as a symbol of opposition towards the transgressive and immoral. Can his character function after a fault of this magnitude, since he’s now a participant in the pattern of behavior he intended to subvert? The Firm never offers up a definitive answer to this question, but it does enjoy playing with the dichotomy between good and evil wrestling within all men.

Perhaps as an act of penance, Mitch visits his brother, Ray (David Strathairn), in prison, recognizing how their lives run parallel (“both surrounded by crooks”) and his emotional need to make amends. Ray is surprisingly genteel and soft-spoken, never made bitter by Mitch’s resentment and apologetic for how his current legal predicament may affect his brother’s fledgling legal career. After clearing the air, the brothers agree to free themselves from their literal and figurative prisons: Mitch working on Ray’s parole hearing and Ray offering up the assistance of a reliable P.I. buddy.

Mitch enlists Eddie Lomax (Gary Busey), an ex-cellmate of Ray’s, to dig deeper into the recent Cayman scandal, a request rescinded within hours by Devasher’s trigger-happy security team, who seem to be one step ahead of Mitch and unwilling to negotiate with words. Witnessing the surprise office visit and ensuing execution, Lomax’s assistant, Tammy Hemphill (Holly Hunter), flees to Memphis in hopes of linking up with Mitch and devising a convoluted retaliatory plan, one that would both capsize the firm and help Mitch avoid becoming an F.B.I. informant. As if matters weren’t complex enough, Tarrance and team don’t just want Mitch to snitch on his co-workers, they want confidential information concerning his clients, particularly the Morolto clan, which could result in his disbarment and would most certainly lead to an early death. Can Mitch and Tammy pull off the Yojimbo-style con and survive unscathed?

As the plot thickens to a roux, a crucial shift in tone occurs, transplanting the focus from Mitch to his wife, Abby. Since Mitch only needs to function in action sequences from thus on, the film loses its narrative core without an emotional connection, shrewdly avoided by upping another character's participation. Abby takes over as Tammy Hemphill’s co-conspirator, flying to the Caymans to seduce Tolar and steal his secret stash of confidential documents. It’s a brilliant structural move, hindered a bit by the messy gender politics it brings to the surface.

Since Abby has a slight attraction to Avery, she wavers between the goal of her mission and her desire to sleep with him and, in essence, punish Mitch. Though she can’t bring herself to consummate the act of sexual aggression, Mitch still seems offended when he gets wind of her involvement in the operation. “Did I lose you?,” he asks sheepishly, as if to imply that infidelity on her part would be tantamount to a complete dissolution of the marriage. It’s a strange, paternalistic attitude to have if you’ve actually committed adultery, but Mitch’s confrontational line of questioning might not be the film’s point of view, but his own skewed sexual identity. Mitch has already revealed himself to be flawed and the increased female dynamic in the final hour of the film not only adds meat to Tripplehorn and Hunter’s roles, but might act as an admission of Mitch’s guilt.

It wouldn’t be a stretch of the imagination to assume that co-writer Robert Towne, the master scribe behind Chinatown, shaded in these strong women and added some polish to the film noir cliches peppering the film’s mid-section.  This richness of character is why the film succeeds and it resonates deeply during a final act solely dependent on taut direction. The editorial work is also crucial, with the team of Frederic and William Steinkamp perfectly capturing reaction and terror in one nearly dialogue-free scene.

Fearing that his house has been bugged and dying to illustrate the direness of his situation to Abby, Mitch cranks the home stereo to top volume and clutches his wife to his chest, whispering every detail into her ear. We initially get a close up of Mitch’s mouth, slowly and calmly enunciating, transitioning abruptly to Abby widening her eyes and allowing fear to envelop her furrowed brow. The passage feels like it occurs outside of time, eliciting a heightened attention through the soundless conveyance of words and sharpness of editing, drawing us deeper into the mystery.

The Firm manages to function as a tightly wound and thoroughly enthralling thriller, despite the foggy moral compass, shifting gears without losing steam and taking risks without undermining our devotion to the characters. It’s rather sophisticated for this type of fare and transparent enough to tell its story through the mouths of imperfect men.

The Firm (Paramount Pictures, 1993)
Directed by Sydney Pollack
Written by David Rabe (screenplay), Robert Towne (screenplay), David Rayfiel (screenplay) and John Grisham (novel)
Photographed by John Seale

The Gingerbread Man (1998, Robert Altman)

Enamored by the musicality of conversation and the dynamic of gentle improvisation, Robert Altman imbued his works with the messy charm of an actual bull session, bristling with the energy of a barroom brawl where the words fly as fast as the hypothetical fists. The linguistic sprawl of his work always felt organic, certainly a more natural alternative to the stilted delivery of most motion picture conveyances, where lines of dialogue are broken by an unnecessary edit or awkward pause. His ears could always ferret out an honest repartee and he respected his performers enough to free their characters from the prison of the printed word and let them create genuine moments.

His strengths seemed suited for a project like The Gingerbread Man, one so enraptured with Savannah’s richly accented drawl and manner of speech, allowed to linger on each bourbon-soaked syllable and Southern-fried idiom. Altman took full advantage of this abundance of local color, mirroring the eccentricities of the geography through the banter of his characters, aligning the pace of the film with the slow roll of storm clouds and the smoky lighting of a lawyer’s chamber. His attention to detail is impeccable, perfectly capturing the zeitgeist of coastal Georgia in every frame, but his obsession with authenticity proves to be a distraction within the confines of genre, resulting in a thriller of muddied logic and broad performance, flailing wildly between excess and ennui.

The story, culled from an abandoned John Grisham manuscript, focuses on Rick Magruder (Kenneth Branagh, unmannered and sophisticated), a high-profile Southern lawyer caught between a blossoming career and a floundering marriage. After a watershed victory in Florida, Magruder returns home for an office celebration in his honor, leaving the party with a hefty buzz and mysterious female companion in tow (a saturnine Embeth Davidtz). Desperate and drenched from the seemingly incessant downpour, our damsel in distress waxes pessimistic, cataloging domestic woes that outshine Magruder’s, nearly all relating to her volatile, delinquent father. The list of complaints runs the gamut from troublesome to humorous, boasting everything from violent outbursts to kleptomania to a distaste for footwear. Magruder might have laughed along with the audience, if he wasn’t so interested in playing the protector and drooling over the seductive Mallory Doss’ constant state of undress.

With his current relationship in purgatory (marital and parental) and legal career on hiatus, Magruder spins one passionate evening into an eternal flame, taking on his lover as a client, single-handedly tracking down her cult-leader father (Robert Duvall, channeling his best Boo Radley) and making a sterling case for his insanity and institutionalization in family court. Also along for the ride on this conflict of interest is Mallory’s curmudgeonly ex-husband (Tom Berenger), a blue-collar roughneck who fancies himself a tough guy, but seems to have run afoul of the relatively frail defendant on many an occasion. If that wasn’t suspicious enough, he corroborates Mallory’s story in court to the nth degree, contradicting his previous exclamations of distaste for his spouse and the legal system in general.

Magruder is too blinded by lust to detect the coincidences in Mallory’s story, but the audience sees the writing on the wall and can smell a set-up well before the final act, foreshadowed by sledgehammer visual cues that feature our nefarious female lead lighting a smoke in unison with the crackle of thunder. In his defense, Mallory’s father does make for the perfect fall guy, living in squalor with a pack of equally disheveled hobos and raving like a wild man in the courtroom. How Duvall manages to bring a certain dignity to this role borders on the miraculous, especially after participating in a prison break sequence that would be better suited for a film about Burke and Hare than an Altman ensemble drama.

By the time the action shifts into high gear and Magruder is forced into a game of cat-and-mouse with a cult hell bent on retribution, we’re asked to indiscriminately go along for the ride or left questioning the film’s rationale. Suspension of disbelief is reasonable, especially with works that make up for logic with visual and emotional enlightenment, but The Gingerbread Man is far too enamored with its own telegraphed plot twist to break free into the realm of popcorn cinema.

On a purely technical level, it’s something of a triumph, faltering only in invocation of the written word. The photography is tasteful and evocative, capturing the mahogany hues of Magruder’s office and the flicker of Zippo lighters igniting behind rain-soaked windshields. The best shots mirror Magruder’s obsessions, traveling gracefully up Mallory’s fishnet stockings, revealing small bits of flesh through puckered rectangular holes. Seedy motels and dive bars are also adorned with the glow of neon and artificial light, adding a warmth and texture to the visual composition.

Conversely, the sound mix is rather undefined and messy, diminishing important discussion beneath a wave of background clatter, deadening the usually lively blend of voices in Altman’s previous work. Matters aren’t helped by an unnecessarily jarring and thunderous Mark Isham score, likely utilized to mirror the perpetual patter of rain or inject some suspense into a deliberately paced film.

The performances, in most cases, accommodate the pace, particularly Branagh and Davidtz, who vary between smoldering sexuality and unmitigated fear. Robert Downey Jr. doesn’t fare as well in a supporting role, channeling his drunken P.I. from the pages of some torrid novel, never gelling once with the audience or a scene partner. An embarrassment of casting riches are left buried beneath the leads, strapped with underwritten characters or victimized by an overly complex plot. Duvall, Berenger and Daryl Hannah are all sequestered to the background, struggling to make an impression in fleeting moments at arm’s length from the meat of the story.

We’re also left to tread water at a distance from the core of The Gingerbread Man, all emotional connections obscured by a constant downpour of rain and tonal incoherence. The behavior and actions of the characters are just as ornamental as the setting, acting as nothing more than decor for an unsubtle and occasionally absurd potboiler. It’s a shame, because the mechanics on display are stunning and often quite brilliant, but Altman never sees the forest for the trees, bogging himself down in the minutiae of set dressing instead of focusing on the machinations of plot.

The Gingerbread Man (PolyGram Films, 1998)
Directed by Robert Altman
Written by Robert Altman (screenplay) and John Grisham (manuscript)
Photographed by Gu Changwei