Unholy in Toledo: The Skin I Live In

Let’s be clear about something: the title of Pedro Almodóvar’s 1987 film Law of Desire is both emblematic and entirely cheeky with regards to this filmmaker’s singular body of work. There are no laws where Almodóvar’s characters’ desires are concerned—at least none that can’t be broken in the spirit of audacity, subversion, showing off, or compulsive plot-twisting—just an immaculately crafted blur of reptile-brain urge and wild ambition, a confusion of longing, desperation, memory and gender.

His latest film, an adaptation of Thierry Jonquet’s 1995 novel Tarantula, plunges into some as yet uncharted (by Almodóvar at least) and especially unsettling territory, with the innovative, fabulously resourceful and seriously messed up plastic surgeon Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas, back with the writer/director who made his name for the first time in two decades) plumbing the unexplored depths of posthuman sciences in his efforts to restore order to his shattered family. There’s a beautiful young woman sequestered and constantly monitored in his rural Toledo home and laboratory. She’s both a captive, stolen away from a whole other life, and something invented. The mad doctor is, in a sense, building himself a new wife. He is attempting to recover a dead life. Most interestingly, his endeavour is driven by the conviction that all that makes us who we are is infinitely malleable once we start to tinker with the outside. The external, he believes, determines the external. And to be sure, in Almodóvar, surfaces really do matter.

Given such a premise, The Skin I Live In (La piel que habito) is often extremely creepy. It’s also perhaps a little too cool and clean and clinical, too bogglingly plotty and over-calculated to truly love, but the highly composed grand design has things to ponder, revisit and re-admire. (Like Hitchcock, Almodóvar makes movies that even when flawed are tough to truly exhaust.) The source material aside, the obvious model for this macabre tale of obsession, isolation and transformation is the great 1960 French horror film Eyes Without a Face, directed by Georges Franju, who also made a movie about an abattoir that has to be seen to be believed, or has to be seen to know how much you probably wish you didn’t see it. Most Almodóvar has very clear roots in earlier, beloved, canonical films, but this one doesn’t accentuate homage with much warmth, and there are only a few fits of his characteristic humour. (One highly memorable and totally appalling example of this includes an uneasy reunion between Redgard’s assistant and some guy in a tiger costume.)

I feel like I keep wanting to warn you all about what The Skin I Live In lacks, but the truth is that despite all that I was still totally engaged with it, and some months after first seeing it, I’m easily lured into thinking about it, drawn into conversations about it. It’s fleshy, prompts goosebumps, and gets under the skin.

Impossible constructions: murderous marital exit strategies manifest in Mr. Peanut

Escher's Relativity, 1953

“When David Pepin first dreamed of killing his wife, he didn’t kill her himself. He dreamed convenient acts of God.” The first sentence is already Hitchcokian, drawing us very calmly toward this floating idea, giving words to deep, dark, utterly common fantasies. The first chapter describes David and Alice Pepin’s marriage, 13 years old, childless, and affluent, thanks to David’s successful as a designer of video games, some of which share this novel’s debt to M.C. Escher, the Dutch artist who “invited and then thwarted you efforts to grasp the whole, at the same time making you feel trapped.” Marriage, its potential for ecstasy, but more pointedly its looping traps, is the theme of Mr. Peanut (HarperCollins, $32.99), US author Adam Ross’ debut. Ross’ grasp of the pitfalls of marriage, of habit and blame, anxiety and miscommunication, is extraordinary and offers little comfort. The vow states till death do us part. Perhaps, sometimes, it’s only natural for one to want death to hurry up already. The walls are closing in.

Adam Ross

There are three marriages—actually four, once we count the stories within stories in Ross’ Escher-esque design. There’s David and Alice, but David’s secretly writing a book, imagining his life as a crime novel, so there’s also “David and Alice,” and this second Alice may or may not have been murdered by David. She’s found on the kitchen floor, having died from anaphylactic shock after eating—or perhaps being force-fed—peanuts. Investigating Detective Hastroll is convinced Pepin’s guilty, perhaps because he understands the matricidal impulse. Hastroll’s wife is, not unlike Alice, nightmarishly passive-aggressive. She hasn’t gotten out of bed for months and won’t tell him why. “Men dream of starting over,” Ross writes. “They dream of a clean slate, of disappearing, of walking off a plane on a layover and making a new life for themselves in a strange city… Sitting in the living room, in his favorite chair, with his wife sobbing in her bed for hours on end, Hastroll understood this dream. Sit alone in the dark long enough, he thought, and it seems worth killing for.”

Hastroll’s partner is Detective Sam Sheppard, as in Dr. Sam Sheppard, who in 1954 may or may not have murdered Marilyn Sheppard, whose case may or may not have inspired the television show The Fugitive and its subsequent film version. Sheppard was convicted, imprisoned, and then later had his conviction overturned and was released. He died in 1970. In Mr. Peanut, he’s alive and well and on the NYPD payroll, yet still shares his real-life counterpart’s tragic past. In Ross’ most evocative narrative strand, the events leading up to Marilyn Sheppard’s death are described in great detail, especially Sheppard’s philandering, which Sheppard at one point considers part of some horrific karmic equation: “…at times he saw her death as being inextricably intertwined with their love, the terrible and logical conclusion of their togetherness, the culmination of a pattern of behaviour on his part that he’d been conscious of but waited too long to put to a stop.”

There are also characters like Nathan Harold, the sensitive, wise, possibly telepathic “disaster liaison” for United Airlines. Like Mobius, the dwarfish wifekiller-for-hire who prompts Sheppard to tell his story from his holding cell, Harold resembles a character out of Haruki Murakami at his most fantastic, not quite of this world yet vivid, and serving a clear narrative purpose. Both are surprisingly compelling, and their perspectives feel integral to the novel.

Dr. Sam Sheppard

Here’s what doesn’t feel integral: a number of overwritten passages, such as the one describing David and Alice's fateful hike in Hawaii, and the two university professors who turn up at the end to hold forth at considerable length on Hitchcock, marriage, and feminism, needlessly announcing themes Ross repeatedly implies elsewhere. Mr. Peanut is comprised of a rich and eerily resonant pair murder mysteries in service of an even better meditation in marriage. It threads its multiple narratives in a manner that’s intricate and fascinating, though its references to Hitchcock are excessive and simplistic, and it seems to want to be a closed circuit and offer a conclusion simultaneously. I’m willing to forgive everything because Ross’ prose is so precise, his observations so insightful, and his ambition is as laudable as it is overextended. The author is, for the record, happily married with children, and living in Nashville, Tennessee.

All about my dead mother: 24 hour Psycho, Psycho, Psycho II: window, Lightbox, idiot box

24 Hour Psycho Back and Forth and To and Fro

as installed in the Tramway, Glasgow

It yielded a very, very strange and fleeting moment of tranquility when I paused on King Street one night during the Toronto International Film Festival last September to observe a teenage couple holding hands, calmly watching the two projected images nestled against one another, hovering just a few feet inside the window. We were all of us just outside the newly opened TIFF Bell Lightbox, whose gallery housed the piece, and the street was bustling with people and traffic. Line-ups were filing inside and others still forming outside for the evening’s various screenings. The couple watched Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho Back and Forth and To and Fro. I watched them watching 24 Hour Psycho Back and Forth and To and Fro. None of us spoke for a long while. I wondered if how intimately they knew Hitchcock’s movie, what this might mean to them if they didn’t know it at all, if it was a sort of American icon you didn’t really need to experience to feel that you were already on familiar terms with, like Warhol’s soup can, the Statue of Liberty, or Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech. I felt tremendous satisfaction, seeing how transfixed the couple appeared, because like a million other people I love Psycho. It scares me and moves more now than when I first saw it, back when I was a little younger than the couple on the street. As for 24 Hour Psycho, I first saw that in Mexico City a few years ago at a massive Gordon retrospective, where it inhabited an enormous room, looming over its audience from a great height, and I was drawn into it for I don’t know how long. Time became slippery, both on screen and off. My first experience of it wasn’t too different from the sort of experience described in Don DeLillo’s Point Omega, which opens and closes with a man experiencing Gordon’s piece at the Museum of Modern Art. This experience, here in Toronto, was different, being outside, being in the street, not in the air-conditioned comfort of a museum. While the three of us stood there Marion Crane was alive on one screen and dead on the other. It was like the two screens were pages of a book from which many other pages had been ripped out, the pages that detailed Marion’s death. The kids walked away and I stayed on, watching. On one of the screens a pair of eyes were slowly, slowly moving in my direction, and I felt I couldn’t look away.


The story, you’ll recall, concerns a secretary living in Phoenix named Marion, who might be in love with a married man who owns a hardware store in another town—if it isn’t love it’s close enough, given her prospects. She’s entrusted with a not unsubstantial envelope filled with cash. She flees with that cash, almost gets to Fairvale, where the man lives, but she stops at a motel, meets a peculiar, lonely, yet oddly endearing young man. They sit in his parlour for a little while with sandwiches and milk, overseen by stuffed birds, and have what is easily the most intimate moment of human connection in the entire movie—what is one of my favourite scenes in any movie. Their encounter is essentially random, and proves to be devastatingly so. From this point things are turned on their head, a detective story begins, a swamp in consulted, certain scenes become almost funny, a sister arrives and maybe she’ll eventually take Marion’s place in the arms of the man, sort of like in that other story of a missing woman that came out the same year, Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’avventura. Seeing Psycho again I recalled a terrific moment in Hal Hartley’s Simple Men. If I remember correctly (it’s been many years), it’s early in the movie, and Martin Donovan, in defense of a woman he loves, barks out “Pushy women are great!” The Crane sisters, Marion and Lila, are pushy and they are great, though it’s the far sexier and cagier one, the one played by the inimitable Janet Leigh, that exits the movie halfway through. The 50th Anniversary Restoration of Psycho opens at Lightbox today. Unlike Gordon’s installation, you can’t see it from the street—you need to buy your ticket and be nestled in the darkness of the theatre. The movie looks gorgeous, the shadows deep and dense and almost eerily immaculate, so that every wrinkle in Marion Crane’s bare feet as she lies collapsed in the bathtub could be traced with a finger. The movie also sounds tremendous, especially every time the silence is cut by Bernard Herrmann’s dynamic, electroshock therapy score, which pivots bracingly from screeching violins to what sound like low fog horns from Hades. Another digression: I recently attended a Lightbox screening of The Godfather. I enjoyed it immensely, but every time the theme music started up I found it difficult to hear it as anything other than corny and over-familiar. Herrmann’s Psycho score by contrast never seems to get old. I get excited to hear it the same way I would to hear a beloved record. If by chance you’ve never seen Psycho—and if you haven’t stop reading this and just go already—I can’t really think of a better introduction. If you know Psycho, know how chilling, psychologically rich, and formally interesting it is, do yourself a favour and see this latest re-release.


Between, I’m going to guess, the ages of about nine and fourteen, I watched Psycho II so many times I lost count. It came out in 1983. I taped it off TV and for some reason just kept returning to it late at night when my parents were in bed and I couldn’t sleep. I just returned to it for the first time in about twenty years and it was the weirdest feeling—though most of it left my conscious memory, watching it again I could anticipate almost every line and gesture, but only about thirty seconds before it happened. I wish I could tell you that my revisiting of Psycho II after all these years was rewarding. Truth is it’s not very good. It actually opens with a bafflingly awful idea, replaying Hitchcock’s shower scene in its entirety as a sort of vestibule, as if to remind you what this sequel will never come close to living up to. Anyway, after 23 years of being locked up Norman Bates is declared “restored to sanity” and allowed to take a job in a diner and reinstate himself at the Bates Motel. It is, of course, utterly fascinating to see Tony Perkins re-inhabit the role of Norman. His speech patterns and body language and odd paucity of affect suddenly resemble those of Andy Warhol. Preposterously, a very young, vulnerable, and holy-cow-beautiful Meg Tilly comes to live with Norman in the house where he had his troubles. Rather quickly the killings begin, but it doesn’t seem like it’s Norman doing them. Could it be Mother? Is this going to be a zombie movie? Answers eventually come, though they don’t make much sense. Director Richard Franklin has studied his Hitch and echoes the master director’s swoops and close-ups, and even painstakingly quotes the shower scene—that very same one we just saw at the top of Psycho II—with nearly as much fidelity as Gus Van Sant. If Franklin and writer Tom Holland really wanted to mimic Psycho however then they would have had to have made Dennis Franz the protagonist for the first half of the movie. Incidentally, Franz turns 66 today—happy birthday, Dennis!

Buried: it all happens below the surface

High-concept at a low budget, Buried promises to be the most claustrophobic mainstream movie in history. It’s hero, Paul Conroy (Ryan Reynolds), is an American truck driver working in Iraq who’s been kidnapped, sealed in a pine box, and buried alive. His captors have left him with just enough devices to forestall complete resignation to slow death by asphyxiation: a mobile phone, a flashlight, a canteen, a lighter. But batteries die, gas burns up, and reception’s not so good underground, particularly when all your calls are to the other side of the planet. Paul needs to get help, but even if he can speak to an actual human instead of an inane voicemail service, his chances of being rescued are still despairingly slim since he doesn’t know where he is. He flips out more than once, but flipping out uses up an awful lot of air.

One actor, one very cramped location, limited light sources. (It's like Phone Booth, except you don't have to close down a New York City street! Or even a phone booth!) It’s a challenge—or, if you prefer, a gimmick—that might have appealed to the gambler—or, if you prefer, show-off—in Alfred Hitchcock—Rope squeezed into a casket, but with plenty of opportunities to cut—and the master of suspense is even given a subtle nod in the film’s opening credit sequence, which distinctly recalls the work of Hitchcock collaborator Saul Bass. Director Rodrigo Cortés and his cinematographer Eduard Grau, who’s recent work includes A Single Man, do an admirable job of finding an engaging variety of angles to hold our attention and continually reinforce the unnerving immediacy of Paul’s confines.

But Buried is a fundamentally dialogue-based story, so it’s up to screenwriter Chris Sparling to provide dynamics and stave off audience numbness through unrelenting hopelessness and terror. Reynolds isn’t an especially interesting actor to watch go through this twisty nightmare, and there’s not a lot of room for mystery or subtlety in any case, but he’s clearly committed. Black comedy and political commentary are ultimately the film’s most reliable tools, with Paul having to endure conversations with heartless employers and absurd bureaucratic hand-offs every time he tries to contact authorities. He gradually realizes that his is not the first such situation that American diplomats have had to deal with, which may or may not be a source of comfort.

Aside from its central metaphor—a means of imparting just how deeply embedded we are in Iraq—I’m not sure that anything in Buried will deepen our understanding of US misadventures abroad, but I don’t know that this was ever a real priority. The effect being sought here seems to be a delicate balance nearly unbearable discomfort and blood-curdling entertainment, and for whatever that’s worth to you, I’d argue that Buried delivers it in spades.

Infernal affairs: L'Enfer d'Henri-Georges Clouzot

Henri-Georges Clouzot with Romy Schneider on the set of L'Enfer

Henri-Georges Clouzot had endured dismissal from the German film industry for his Jewish associations, dismissal from the French film industry for his Nazi associations, and a bout of tuberculosis between. Upon resuming filmmaking in 1947 he directed some of the greatest French films of the postwar era, such as The Wages of Fear and Les Diaboliques. The latter was adapted from Boileau-Narcejac’s novel, a property hotly desired by Alfred Hitchcock, who would come to greatly admire Clouzot’s realization.

The Clouzot-Hitchcock connection is curious. Both specialized in nerve-rattling thrillers permeated with nastiness and mental instability. Both were exacting in their craft, famed for their meticulous storyboards, which were followed with such precision that Hitchcock had suggested only half-jokingly that he needn’t show up on set. But the influential critics who would soon become France’s leading filmmakers ostracized Clouzot as resolutely as they revered Hitchcock, and by the end of the ’50s Clouzot might have felt his own relevance slipping away under the force of the New Wave. He sought to refurbish his art, was immensely taken with the formal and erotic innovations in Fellini’s 8 1/2, and set out to create a film that would plumb his own anxieties. L’Enfer would demolish Clouzot’s reputation as an antique. It would be a story of sexual obsession, a radically subjective descent into the debilitating jealousy felt by a less-than-attractive older provincial hotel manager (Serge Reggiani) toward his luscious younger wife (Romy Schneider). But it fell into the familiar trap: too much money, too much ego, and a virtual absence of anyone who might challenge the director’s authority. L’Enfer was never completed, though a tremendous amount of material was shot, not enough for a reconstruction, but more than enough to create a documentary about the project’s development and catastrophic collapse.

Directed by Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea, L’Enfer d’Henri-Georges Clouzot uses interviews with Clouzot’s associates and collaborators and workshop performances of scenes never filmed to provide context and flesh out Clouzot’s narrative respectively. Yet nothing in this making-of-a-movie-never-made is half as compelling as watching Clouzot’s archival footage set against Gilbert Amy’s alternately brooding and abstract acoustic-electro score. Clouzot dug out everything save the kitchen sink to assemble a stockade of poppy, kaleidoscopic images, grotesque distortions, colour manipulations, and cock-teasing shots of Schneider, scantily clad or even naked, water skiing or suggestively smoking cigarettes. One image shows her tied to train tracks, breasts heaving in fear, as a charging locomotive approaches. Whether this material could have amounted to more than an assembly of fascinating, arousing and well made, if dated, imagery is difficult to determine, but as the promise of something lost it’s utterly seductive.

L’Enfer d’Henri-Georges Clouzot is otherwise sturdy but pedestrian, something we can be grateful for having even if it isn’t exactly great in itself. Even on the level of providing pertinent historical facts it’s a little light, with an abrupt ending that gives little sense of the production’s aftermath, and no mention whatsoever of the 1994 Claude Chabrol film made from Clouzot’s script. There certainly isn’t any insight into what might have saved L’Enfer, even of the most fanciful sort. My dream version of the film? A complete re-shoot in which Reggiani is replaced by Clouzot himself, puffing away on his pipe, trapped in the sun-soaked erotic nightmare he himself created.

The Ghost Writer: how to write yourself in, and out, of history

He has no name, and offers very little with regards to his past. He’s supposed to be a ghost: anonymous, invisible, not really here. But this ghost, brought to an island oppressively cloaked in wintry clouds to infuse some flavour into the insipid memoirs of a former British PM, will be punched, pressed, provoked and prompted to delve deeper into his subject’s past than professional etiquette would have it. Just as the ghost arrives his subject is hurled into a maelstrom of disgrace, accused of handing over terror suspects to the CIA for torture and subpoenaed by the international tribunal in the Hague.

The ways in which The Ghost Writer mirrors real life are numerous. Though the PM is dubbed Alan Lang, this is clearly the next-best thing to an explicit indictment of Tony Blair by Robert Harris, former BBC journalist and author of the source novel. Lang’s disillusioned Foreign Secretary Richard Rycart seems loosely based on the late Robin Cook. There’s a US Secretary of State that so carefully resembles Condoleezza Rice as to almost be camp. And yes, the scenario eerily evokes the ongoing house arrest of director and co-scenarist Roman Polanski. But however tempted one might be to read The Ghost Writer as allegory, the movie demands to be appreciated as exactly what it is, an engrossing, somewhat artificial thriller, realized by Polanski with inspired classical economy. He imbues the whole with characteristic wit, cynicism, and a billowing dread that somehow remains playful.

Look at how Polanski opens the movie: Cars are ushered off the Woods Hole ferry that connects Martha’s Vineyard, where Lang holes up, to mainland Massachusetts. But one car seems to have been abandoned. Night falls, and the car is towed away. As gray dawn exhales upon a local beach a body washes up on the shore. The sequence is a shrewd, disarmingly detached vestibule to the main action. No central characters are introduced. Well, not exactly. That body belonged to one Mike McAra, Lang’s former press aide and his first ghost writer. McAra’s ghost will haunt all that proceeds, his nameless replacement retracing his footsteps, recovering his research, even sleeping in his bed. The protagonist lured into assuming the role of someone perished under mysterious circumstances is a theme familiar from some of Polanski’s finest work, most notably The Tenant. It’s a condition to which Polanski displays a unmistakable affinity, one that interrogates the hazy region where free will dissolves into the caprices of merciless destiny. Crucially, the protagonist is neither innocent nor fully cognizant of what sort of trap he’s slipping into. No one’s ever innocent in Polanski, but that doesn’t mean knowledge will save you.

As Lang, Pierce Brosnan is a perfect blend of exhausted diplomacy and draining charm. Olivia Williams and Kim Cattrall play Lang’s spouse and secretary, and both, sexy, smart, and a little scary, exude far greater control over Lang’s affairs than Lang himself. As the ghost, Ewan McGregor makes up for the protagonist’s dearth of conventional character development by playing each and every moment as potentially decisive, his actions at once motivated by a fatal curiosity driven by frustrations over a sub-mediocre literary career and the intoxication of letting oneself be dragged under by an overpowering wave. There are pleasingly portentous cameos from Eli Wallach as an old hermit and Tom Wilkinson as a reticent Harvard professor, absently patting the arms of his chair.

Polanski, working mostly on a German soundstage, handles everything with supreme confidence, unconcerned with the scattered holes in Harris’ labyrinthine plot and staging minor key set-pieces with bold efficacy, including a clever use of GPS that Hitchcock would surely have appreciated and a final, brilliantly staged single shot so chilling that Hitchcock would never have been allowed to end a movie thus in his Hollywood heyday.

Under the influence of a reckless moment: The Headless Woman

It begins with an accident on a country road. The driver, the sole occupant of the vehicle, stops the car, but keeps her eyes forward. Her name is Verónica, or Vero, for short. She does not examine what it is she’s run over, and this moment of decision or neglect or shock and confusion extends like a prolonged exhalation—or better yet, like a scream trapped in one’s throat. The moment is maddeningly still, chilling, and transfixing. Vero composes herself and drives on.

Things start to get strange. Vero goes to a hospital to be examined. She goes to a hotel instead of going home, even though home doesn’t seem that far away. She sleeps with a man who is not her husband, whether out of habit or in a sudden fit of desire is uncertain. She takes a shower with her clothes on. Of course, we don’t know yet where her home is. We don’t know yet who her husband is. We don’t know yet that she even has a husband. Exposition has been forsaken in lieu of something tantalizingly ambiguous. We’re asked to collect clues on our own, to stay a little more alert than most movies ask us to be. If you treasure the experience of entering a mystery blind you might want to consider just watching The Headless Woman (2008) and reading the rest of this later.

Vero’s behaviour is as compelling as her motives are nearly inscrutable, to the degree that certain sequences become comical, such the one that finds Vero sitting calmly in the waiting room of a dental clinic, as though she’s a patient and not one of the resident dentists. Vero banged her head in the collision—does she suffer from amnesia? There are more than enough noir flourishes in The Headless Woman to suggest such a movie-movie conceit. There’s something sufficiently elliptical in this slowly unraveling tale to suggest that all that follows may be the depiction of some extended fugue state. We’re immersed in subjectivity. We’ve perhaps entered a dream, but if so it isn’t a dream of mist and echoes but one of precise and vivid realist detail. One from which one doesn’t ever entirely wake.

This is the third film from the Argentine director Lucrecia Martel, who had something of an art house hit with The Holy Girl (04), which is warmer than this latest film and actually a sort of comedy. Martel’s uncompromising sense of open-endedness and refusal to orient audiences either narratively or morally is tempered by her humour, her singular eye for fascinatingly peculiar bits of human interaction, and her immaculate, almost classical craftsmanship—a combination that’s allowed her to make her last two films under the auspices of the Almodóvar brothers, who are credited as co-producers. Although it played in very few theatres in Canada and the US, The Headless Woman is now available on DVD from Stand Releasing, which means that we can watch and re-watch it and piece together the shards of Vero’s posttraumatic daze. Once you do it’s surprising how coherent Martel’s narrative actually is—there isn’t a minute of this movie that’s not integral of the whole.

Yet the film’s brilliance, what makes you want to bother to seek out this coherence in the first place, is that no matter how much plot you glean certain shadows linger, expanding beyond the immediate story until it spreads into the sociological. Vero’s world is one where race and class-based inequities are less discreet than ours, and the meaning of her crime in this context can hardly be missed. When Vero gradually begins to recall or accept what’s transpired and attempts to resolve the situation however she can, the film’s creepier implications are revealed. She needn’t worry about her hit and run being discovered because there are others of her same social standing who, like friendly little elves, are cleaning up her mess while she recovers.

As remarkable as Martel’s writing and direction is, The Headless Woman would still be only half a movie were it not for the central performance of María Onetto. With her bottle-blonde hair—which she eventually changes, like a guilty heroine from Hitchcock—her heavy lidded eyes, and her sedate smile that could speak to some inner mischief as easily as serenity, Onetto reminds me most of some tranquilized version of Gena Rowlands in A Woman Under the Influence (74). Neither ingratiating nor alienating, Onetto doesn’t judge Vero but instead fully embodies her to the point where, against all odds, we identify with her. As with many a noir protagonist, we know she’s done something at least a little awful, even if we’re unsure of the gravity of the consequences of her actions—yet we can’t take our eyes off of her. And neither can Martel, who frames Onetto in ways that are endlessly curious, paying special attention to her neck and ears. Martel and Onetto insist on our intimacy if we’re to stick with the film, until by the end we too feel a little headless, totally intrigued, entertained, creeped out, and probably wondering what these women will do next.

Reflections in a hollow eye: Four by Hitchcock

Alfred Hitchcock was prolific enough that though he’s the most famous director in history the breadth of his filmography remains unseen to all but the most ardent admirers. One of the pleasures of Hitchcock comes from tracing the obsessions, variations and attempts at reinvention found throughout the corpus. In the latest of their economically priced packages, Turner Classic Movies has smartly curated a quartet of films under the no-nonsense title of TCM Greatest Classic Films Collection: Hitchcock Thrillers. Only one of these rests firmly in the essential canon, but the others are consistently fascinating, complex, often deliciously queer, and above all revealing glimpses into the filmmaker’s psyche. Two of these find Hitchcock deliberately working against established strengths, embracing unfamiliar styles while simultaneously imbuing the films with an unusual abundance of personal content. Not to mention casting actors in roles that ignite a compelling frisson between their star images and private lives.

Joan Fontaine meets Cary Grant on a train. He gropes her in the darkness of a tunnel, inserting himself in her cabin once she fits the bill for his bump to first-class. This is a kind of romance, but Suspicion (1941) is choked with psychological trauma. Grant’s an opportunist, a no-good bon vivant, his ruthlessness disguised by boyish charm, his words of love accompanied by no strenuous efforts at sincerity. Like Gloria Grahame in In a Lonely Place (50) Fontaine spends the film’s duration wondering what violence her beloved is capable of, but in Suspicion the ambiguity never ends—even the final scene feels less like resolution than yet another of Grant’s quick-saves. Though the story was cobbled on compromise—the source novel ends very differently—the result is something marvelous, a pitch-black metaphor for everlasting romantic love. It is everlasting because it can never grow stale from comfort.

Another train, another chance meeting. What strikes me most when I revisit Strangers on a Train, many years after my first awed teenage viewings, is just how utterly homoerotic—perhaps homophobic—the picture truly is. Based on Patricia Highsmith’s novel, this story of men who meet by accident and agree, however tacitly, to swap murders, is most rewarding when read as one of male-to-male seduction, a sort of gay Fatal Attraction (87), where Robert Taylor’s mama’s boy pseudo-aesthete genuinely does seem to act on the hero’s behalf, strangling the hero’s conniving wife, her glasses tumbling into the grass, bearing witness to their owner’s death as he silently lays her down and puts her to sleep. That hunky Farley Granger seems not entirely convincing as the tennis-playing hero trying to marry a senator’s daughter serves the film splendidly. Hitchcock, who’d already deftly exploited Granger’s homosexuality in Rope (48), clearly doesn’t believe his hero’s innocence and neither do we, tainting the ostensible resolution with palpable unease, greatly improving what might have felt like a triumph of closeted blandness over perverse insight.

I hadn’t seen I Confess (53) and always assumed it was a flawed curiosity. I didn’t expect it to be so boldly laced with uncertainty and so gorgeously photographed. Nor was I prepared for Montgomery Clift as the Québécois priest accused of murder. Clift’s performance is itself the most elegantly ambiguity-laden thing in the film, tormented, and conspicuously cagey. I Confess is a film of architecture and faces, mainly, of looming steeples and nerve-wracked gazes. The establishing shots seize the Quebec City exteriors in high contrast, tilted images that upset purely on a design level. Again, Hitchcock’s hero has privileged knowledge of a murder, the killer, somewhat nonsensically, taking him into his confidence, playing out some experiment in loyalty between male outsiders. The killer’s hilariously endowed not only with Hitchcock’s fear of authority but also given a wife with the same name as Hitchcock’s: Alma (Spanish for soul). Again, Hitchcock uses his star’s sexual ambivalence brilliantly. Did the beautiful, troubled Clift abandon romance and enter the priesthood because he’s secretly gay? By the end, Clift’s married ex-girlfriend spills her guts, Alma spills her guts, the killer spills his guts. Everything we need to know about the murder’s been explained. But we never learn what’s really up with Monty. The film’s hero is by far its greatest mystery.

An even more serious, less glamorous film, The Wrong Man (56) finds Hitchcock suspended somewhere between the poles of noir and neorealism. There’s an oft-told anecdote about how Hitchcock’s father had his five-year-old son imprisoned on a lark, and Hitchcock saw his anxieties about police reflected in the strange but true story of Manny Balestrero, a Queens bassist fingered for robberies he didn’t commit. In the wake of McCarthyism Hitchcock conjured his most Kafkaesque vision of America, where the assignation of guilt has the potential to impose guilt upon you. This nightmare scenario unfolds through a hybrid of dream-like artifice—a long, weird dissolve suggests that Manny’s prayers to Jesus are instantly answered by his double, walking a lonely street somewhere—and in some of the most realistic settings in Hitchcock. The subway rumbles past the windows of apartments and offices, through the shops where the cops escort Balestrero and, in a bizarrely malevolent procedure, force him to revisit the scenes of his ostensible crimes. Henry Fonda is perfectly cast as Manny, the jazz musician who neither drinks not does drugs and is always on time. He was the everyman who could be any man. It’s a shame he’d never work with Hitchcock again.

Wrong man, washerwoman, murderer, archduke, baronette, pin cushion, puppet: Essential Art House Volume IV

A little film festival captured in a starkly handsome black box, Essential Art House Volume IV contains a diverse selection of titles, some previously available on the Criterion label and some new to DVD, some familiar and some forgotten, nearly all of them absolutely worth the attention of any hungry film lover.

Is there any film more relentlessly entertaining that The 39 Steps (1935)? I considered not bothering to watch it again for this piece, but I couldn’t resist. Alfred Hitchcock’s breathless adaptation of John Buchan’s novel travels light, with its hero, Richard Hannay (Robert Donat), an ordinary tourist turned wanted man with perhaps the cinema’s least convincing Canadian accent, going from a London theatre, where a riot breaks out over some guy’s demands to know the age of Mae West, to his apartment, where he fries up a giant haddock for a soon-to-be-dead lady spy while smoking a cigarette, to a train bound for Scotland, where a brassiere salesman shows his wares, to a Highlands farm, where he evades capture with the aid of a heartbreaking Peggy Ashcroft, to… Oh, just watch it already, whether for the first or fourteenth time.


Adapted from Émile Zola’s 1877 novel L’Assommoir, Réne Clément’s Gervaise (56) chronicles the titular Parisian washerwoman’s struggles with poverty, physical handicaps, gossipy women, small business management, motherhood, slovenly alcoholic men, the impossibility of class advancement, and burning desire. It’s brilliantly rendered, with exteriors that recall Cartier-Bresson, a series of ordinary tragedies exacerbated by stubborn pride, and several extended sequences, such as a riotous cat fight involving buckets of water, and ending with naked ass-spanking; a noisy, working class wedding party’s impromptu visit to the Louvre in their muddied boots and skirts; and a gloriously carnal dinner party centered around the consummation of an enormous goose that culminates in a most unexpected confrontation between Gervaise’s former and present lovers. The portrait of a busy household teeming with scruffy kids and merrymakers who seem determined to stay together no matter how absurd the circumstances seems to look forward to John Cassavetes’ unruly ensemble works, though Cassavetes would surely have had that goose wind up on the floor. The conclusions the film draws are bleak as can be, but it remains insistently alive throughout, thanks in no small part to Maria Schell’s captivating and heart-rendering performance as Gervaise, teary-eyed over her goose, longing for the blacksmith she can’t possess, or singing ‘Let Me Sleep’ to a mass of friends huddled in silence around a table. Wonderful.

Can’t say the same of Le Jour se lève (39), much as I truly wanted to. It’s ultra fatalistic, was directed by Marcel Carné, stars the effortlessly charming Jean Gabin, is considered a prime example of poetic realism, and the filmmakers were so hardcore—or, you know, stupidly reckless—they used real bullets in one scene. For all that, this flashback film attempting to understand what drove Gabin to murder a guy underwhelmed me with its fairly banal conclusions about human weakness, its quaintness with regards to romantic love, its lack of any real comment on class, and its lapses in logic—is it me or are the trigger-happy, teargas-wielding police who besiege Gabin’s apartment overreacting just a touch?


Anatole Litvak’s Mayerling (36), based on Claude Anet’s play Idyll’s End, is a heady French romance concerned with the opposite end of the socioeconomic spectrum, detailing the overpowering attraction between the Archduke Rudolph, heir to the Austrian throne, and the teenage daughter of a Baron. Rudy’s a married playboy shackled to the dictates of his pivotal political position, permitted nearly every indulgence but genuine freedom and the ability to take a bride of his choosing. Embodied by Charles Boyer and Danielle Darrieux, who would later reunite for Max Ophüls’ masterpiece The Earrings of Madame de… (53), the lovers are nearly drowned by the almost endless parade of opulence and activity, including a puppet show, a game of ring-tossing around the necks of swans, a ballet, a grand ball, and a wild, hedonistic party that finds the Archduke pouring booze over the bosoms of many fetching ladies and finally shooting his mirror reflection. Yet the moments Boyer and Darrieux do share are appropriately fleeting and delirious, all glinting eyes and sudden realizations delivered in long dissolves and fluid montages.

The films in Essential Art House Volume IV would seem to have no special connection save their revered status, but I couldn’t help but note that the majority of them feature a climactic death scene played out in the first rays of dawn. This includes a film that boasts what’s surely one of the great bravura movie deaths ever, Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (57), his inspired, deeply eerie, fog-enveloped adaptation of Macbeth set in feudal Japan, which ends with Toshiro Mifune flailing hysterically through his fortress under a hail of arrows that turn him into a human pin cushion. It should be a perfect place to end this series, except that I still haven’t gotten around to Powell and Pressburger’s Tales of Hoffmann (51), their adaptation of the Offenbach opera, which—here’s a weird fact for you—just happens to be George Romero’s favourite film. I still have to watch it, but I’m almost certain there are no zombies anywhere in the movie.

By the time I get to Phoenix: Psycho, in all its trauma and fascination, returns on DVD

It is for me one of those genuinely inexhaustible movies, and, though its violence pierces me only more deeply as time goes by, I find myself returning to it more than any other. Psycho, newly released on a special edition two-disc set from Universal, with a beautiful new transfer and unusually good supplements, has that crystalline character of something that yields new or richer readings or sensations with every handling. It forbids and seduces at once. As the brutal set pieces in the shower or on the staircase or in the basement grow more familiar, the relatively mundane moments—Marion’s hurried negotiations with the used car dealer; Sam and Lila’s negotiations in the nocturnal gloom of his hardware store, brimming with sharp objects—grow in fascination. It’s one of the few Alfred Hitchcock films not about glamorous people, yet its morbid allure is colossal.

The story? Two no longer young lovers meet for another tawdry rendezvous and feel a decisive moment looming over their stalled relationship. He’s been married, is struggling financially, and proud, painting for her a sad picture of the two of them living meagerly as monthly alimony payments are sent off in the mail. She’s a secretary, is starting to feel life close in, is ready to dive into domestic hardship with him, and offers to lick the stamps. Back at work a client of her boss leaves a huge amount of cash which she’s meant to deposit but instead pockets. She packs a suitcase and makes a break for the nearby town where her boyfriend lives, that always hesitating hunk unaware he’s in love with a felon. She drives through a rainy night, tires out just as a motel with vacancies shows up on the side of a lonely road. She checks in, meets the lonely, sensitive, clearly unworldly and maybe unstable but still innocent-seeming proprietor. He’s the wispy, soft-spoken twin of her boyfriend, and serves her sandwiches and a huge jug of milk while his batty old mother mutters curses in the house overlooking the motel. She starts to wonder if she hasn’t gone a little crazy. Everyone goes a little crazy sometimes... Given its stature, I’m going to keeping writing here on as though you’ve seen Psycho. If you haven’t, well, my friend, you’re in for something special.

The horizontal lines that push steadily across the screen during Saul Bass’ famed opening credit sequence, accompanied by our first taste of Bernard Herrmann’s masterfully portentous, nerve-fraying score, strike me now as a graphic preview to Norman Bates’ hand slapped over his mouth after “discovering” the bloodbath. Better yet, these lines resemble the viewer’s hand closed over eyes that can’t help but continue to watch. Psycho is nothing if not an ocular web. The peephole Norman watches his naked prey through; the montage that sinks us into that bloody drain hole and then circles out from Marion’s dead eye in the film’s chilling mid-point; the gaping hollow pits that stare back at Lila from the shriveled head of Mother: the mere act of looking never feels so passive after Psycho but rather something all too easily corruptible.

It was Lila’s third-act sequence of looking at things that caught my attention most intensely during my most recent viewing. She enters Mother’s room, sees the antiquated mirrors and dresses, the strange decorative objects and, most bizarrely, the deep impression of Mother’s presumably rarely moved body on the bed. She enters Norman’s room, sees the dolls and examines that untitled book we’re never allowed to glimpse. And Hitchcock keeps cutting between these objects and Lila’s pointed gaze—not unlike his cutting between Marion’s eye contact with her rather confusedly troubled looking (tipsy?) boss as he crosses the street in front of her car—reminding us over and over how very purposeful and consequential this activity of looking is. Reminding us, too, of the unnerving, seeming randomness of things, the constant details, like Marion’s uneaten lunch or the exacting date and time given at the top of that first scene of Marion’s hotel room tryst with Sam. If an individual’s death has seldom been so horrifyingly palpable as that of Marion’s in Psycho, surely this is partly due to the randomness Hitchcock so lovingly emphasizes in every conceivable way, right down to the casting of a star in what in other hands would seem the disposable role.

And what a strange and utterly perfect star performance it is. Janet Leigh is so damn good in Psycho because she’s as supple and cagey as her final adversary. Whether looking luscious in her bra with her boyfriend or in the office where she works, Marion is never quite penetrable. Indeed, it’s her eyes that remain remote. Other than hints of panic—with the car dealer or the cop—her eyes don’t betray her. Until she meets Norman, and only then do they begin to truly soften. Norman, his insecurities so eloquently, so tenderly embodied by Anthony Perkins, talks to Marion about “private traps” and here we have, in all its bravura irony, the most poignant moment of connection between two people in the whole movie. Marion is still guarded, yet she’s engaged to the point where this strange young man will actually cause her to turn around and go back to Phoenix, to return the money and accept punishment. But just as her private trap becomes illuminated for her, she has of course walked right into a different sort of trap beyond her ability to avoid, and moves straight into one of the most enduring evocations of sheer trauma in cinema history.

Tender mercy killings: murderous intentions clog perky postwar spousal calm in Ira Sachs' Married Life, now on DVD

1949, the Pacific Northwest. Buttoned-down Harry (Chris Cooper) is in love with Kay (Rachel McAdams), a war widow apparently one-third his age wearing in her first appearance a conspicuously vertiginous bun in her supernaturally Hitchcock blonde hair. Harry's in love, so Harry needs to leave his wife Pat (Patricia Clarkson). But Harry fears the shock will kill poor Pat, and thus Harry figures he’d best beat the grim reaper to the punch and just quietly, mercifully poison her to death. Watching all this from the sidelines and itching for a chance to get in the game is Richard (Pierce Brosnan), Harry’s dapper, dashing old buddy with the sly eyes who wears his hat just so. He offers his cabin in the woods for Harry and Kay to tryst the night away but all the while has his eyes on the prize.

Based on John Bingham’s 1953 novel Five Roundabouts to Heaven, which also goes by the decidedly less cagey title of The Tender Poisoner, Married Life ostensibly excavates post-war repression but really works best as a multiple character study and mood piece that bows devoutly in the direction of the filmmakers whose work drew upon the shadow side of that period’s optimistic façade: Douglas Sirk, Max Ophüls (or at least The Reckless Moment, that marvelously coded domestic noir) and the aforementioned master of suspense. There’s even a scene in which a fateful decision is made while watching a James Mason movie. Directed by Ira Sachs, this movie, a cocktail of equal parts neo-noir and black comedy, is nicely paced and quite engaging, if rather over-calculated and over-reliant on conventional attitudes toward the era’s conformist principals. But maybe its themes seemed just so 1949, or at least 2002, the year of Todd Haynes’ sublime Sirk homage Far From Heaven—Married Life didn’t have much of a life at the box office. It’s now looking for a new one on DVD.

Married Life's distance from its 60-year-old story becomes critical rather than just temporal by way of pairing its characters’ outwardly dominant traits with their polar opposites. Harry is the picture of the gentle company man and supportive spouse, but he’s fucking homicidal; Pat seems the ever-adoring, erotically undemanding homemaker about to get ditched for a younger sexpot, but truth is she’s a minx who thinks people get married first and foremost to get laid on a regular basis; Richard is the poster boy for elegantly aging sexual nomadism but deep down is getting all choked up about settling down and picking out the curtains with Kay. In every case these potentially too-cute character reversals are given breath and texture by the superb cast, Clarkson especially. Only McAdams feels a bit flat here. Totally hot, but flat. (Just like, to twist an expression, Georgia asphalt.) After seeing her shine in The Lucky Ones, it strikes me as kinda funny that she’s more at home playing a soldier than a soldier’s wife.