Rolling sunder: Rubber on DVD

What reason does a tire need to quiver to life in the middle of the Mojave Desert and undertake a killing spree? What reason do a dozen spectators need to gather in that same desert with binoculars and sleeping bags and comment on the tire’s actions as though they were (like us) watching a movie? What reason does a pantless man need to share a cheap motel room with a wild turkey? Before we even have a chance to posit such queries to Rubber, one of its central characters, a Lieutenant Chad (Stephen Spinella), addresses the camera (and us) with questions of his own. “In the Steven Spielberg movie E.T., why is the alien brown?” Chad asks. “In The Pianist, by Polanski, how come this guy has to hide, and live like a bum, when he plays the piano so well?” The answer: “No reason.” (Unless of course you consider something like systematic Nazi antiSemitism to be a reason.) Every movie, Chad assures us, has an integral element of “no reason.” Which is perhaps another way of saying that the movie is the reason. So what’s the reason to see the movie—this movie? It certainly isn’t to ask more useless questions.

Rubber, out on DVD tomorrow from Mongrel Media (or on the 14th from Magnolia in the US), seems like a playful essay on artifice. (The audience-chorus, who at one point collectively launch into a feeding frenzy right out of a Living Dead movie, is reminiscent of devices seized by the American avant-garde theatre of the 1960s.) Thing is, there’s not much thesis (beyond, say, the notion that the things we discard will rise up from our collective anxiety and slaughter us in our ironic bewilderment), but there is a whole lot of playfulness. Recalling both Scanners (1981) and numerous Stephen King narratives, Rubber is a meta-horror about a telekinetic tire named Robert. His first victim is a plastic bottle, quickly followed by a scorpion, before moving on to larger and messier mammals. The tire’s got something on its mind, it seems. It’s got feelings. It’s infatuated with a lone traveler played by the pretty older sister from Fat Girl (2001). It even has memories: there is an allusion to some smoky tire genocide.

Quentin Dupieux, aka Mr. Oizo

Rubber is the second feature from French writer/director Quentin Dupieux, aka: Mr. Oizo, recording artist for Ed Banger Records, following the little seen Steak (2007). There’s much to recommend Rubber on a bit-by-bit basis, though it runs out of fuel long before the end of the road. Regardless, its audacity, resourcefulness and propulsive silliness convey an appealingly distinctive sensibility. You’re left with the impression that there’s plenty of tread left on Dupieux’s goofball imagination.

Sanguine properties: The Last Mistress

It says a lot about the almost singular subversion of The Last Mistress, not to mention the progress of Catherine Breillat as a filmmaker honing very particular themes, that for no less than half of the movie’s duration, we have the young, delicately handsome Ryno de Marigny (Fu’ad Ait Aattou) divulging the breadth of his impressive sexual biography to the Marquise de Flers (Claude Sarraute), an elderly woman and protective grandmother of Hermangarde (Roxanne Mesquida), the virginal and rather unhappy looking young beauty who’s to be Ryno’s bride. Alternating between Ryno’s measured recount and flashbacks to his tempestuous ten-year affair with La Vellini (Asia Argento), a sort of verbal seduction unfolds in precisely the context that would seem to forbid it most. But the Marquise assures us that she is still a woman of the 18th century, which is to say, a woman of the Age of Reason, now biding the end of her life in the Age of Romance. She’s worldly, and she’s game. She listens exquisitely. The year is 1835, the city Paris.

This also says something about how much the movies can still learn from the novel. Based on Jules-Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly’s 1851 novel Une vieille maîtresse, or The Old Mistress—the English-language title being a dopey compromise that deletes the dreaded term “old” from the promotional materials—Breillat’s eleventh and by far most expensive and glamorous feature possesses an unusual, bisecting structural elegance that compliments the intricacy of its narrative, one rife with erotic struggle, surrender and self-realization. It begins with Ryno entering Vellini’s boudoir for one last premarital fuck, which of course will not be the last by far. As we’re ushered back into the development of their affair, we see how deeply it’s rooted in the ecstasy of antagonism, with Ryno only winning the venomous Vellini’s affections after he’s been shot by her elderly husband in a duel. Once the bullet is extracted from his chest, Vellini rushes to his weakened figure to suckle the fresh blood. She feeds upon Ryno, as he, in his way, will upon her in turn. Her erupted lust is, you know, kinda repulsive. And totally hot.

The illegitimate daughter of a Spanish matador and an Italian princess, la Vellini is a social outlaw, undeterred by the local consensus that a 36-year-old, ostensibly homely woman leading a life of sexual abandon is deeply unseemly. As mapped out by Breillat and Argento, arguably the two most notorious bad girls of contemporary European cinema, Vellini’s trajectory is marked by aggression and orgasms—and, let me tell you, Argento makes the movie orgasm into some sort of new art form here. Vellini, with her defiant, devastatingly hard stares—the way she licks an ice cream cone makes the promise of fellatio at once enticing and scary—is the devouring one and thus, in a sense, the masculine half of the pairing, while Ryno, with his full lips and pale features, pursues more gently, playing the feminine. The overturning of traditional gender roles is itself a part of what makes their collision dynamic, and, as the Romantics would have it, destined for misadventure and courting peril.

Breillat’s shrewdest tactic comes in her balancing of formalities with recklessness, containment with the carnal. The production design is immaculate and softly hued, the costumes artful but largely understated, with the few flourishes counting for a lot in terms of character, and the camerawork, courtesy of Giorgios Arvanitis, who also photographed Breillat’s Anatomy of Hell and her masterful Fat Girl, is painterly—the painter, mind you, would have to be Goya—and presentational, with speakers frequently gazing squarely toward us as though posing for a portrait—which, of course, they are. The brazen qualities, the rawness of the movie, is kept largely within the confines of the narrative itself, while the directorial style is largely clean and only coolly confrontational. It’s a marriage made in the heaven preserved for shameless provocateurs, some sublimely seedy place where Breillat and Argento can recline with their feet on the table, while the rest of us watch, in shock, here and there, but in this case, more often in awe. The Last Mistress is pretty delicious.