A liquid abyss: Diabolique

Its opening credits appear over the face of a scum-slathered swimming pool. Before long it’ll convert a bathtub into an instrument of murder, and that neglected pool will become an improvised sepulcher, enveloping human remains when full, resembling an open grave when drained. The very sight of it transformed into an empty cavity causes a woman to faint. “Nature abhors a vacuum,” someone remarks in explanation. Diabolique (1955) is an immaculately controlled study of corruption, hinging on the precarious alliance that might be taken up by a wife and her husband’s mistress upon agreeing that some people truly deserve to die. It’s also among the most elegant examples of the cinema’s use of water as a sort of liquid abyss, something mysterious, unstable, untrustworthy, and often tellingly opaque.

Diabolique was the seventh feature from director Henri-George Clouzot and the high-water mark of his commercial and critical success. Liberally adapted from the novel Celle qui n’était plus by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac (whose narrative conception was similar, though it featured a very different configuration of characters), the film brims with Clouzot’s characteristic evocation of rampant dread and decay. Set in a dreary provincial boy’s school, the story concerns the killing of the sadistic, miserly headmaster Michel (Paul Meurisse) by his wife Christina (Véra Clouzot, the director’s wife), daughter of a wealthy Venezuelan family and the school’s financial benefactor, and Nicole (Simone Signoret), one of the school’s teachers and Michel’s undisguised lover. Their world is already poisonous: the staff is largely uninterested in or simply cruel to the students, the salads are spoiled and the fish is rotten (which doesn’t dissuade Michel from forcing Christina to eat it in the film’s most appallingly unforgettable scene of humiliation). Someone mentions that it’s important to take holidays because “the body needs to eliminate its toxins,” yet it’s difficult to imagine how long a holiday one would require to flush out all the toxic sludge, both literal and figurative, that might accumulate in one’s body while existing in this place.

The murder of Michel seems to go off without a hitch, until his body, transported in a large basket (rhymes with casket) and deposited in the school’s pool, fails to stay put. There’s a secret, malevolent force at work that may or may not be supernatural (and the film’s final scene maintains this ambiguity even after it seems to have been resolved). The ongoing failure to secure knowledge of Michel’s corpse’s whereabouts begins to grind away at the women’s psyches, most notably that of Christina, who suffers a heart condition and seem the more guilt-ridden of the two. Though less experienced than her costars, Véra Clouzot (who herself suffered a heart problem, one that would end her life only five years alter) gives a superb performance, imbuing Christina with a distinctive fragility that reveals itself only gradually, building up to a climatic scene that encloses the actress in a Val Lewtonesque chamber of shadows and dread, and capitalizes beautifully on her arresting eyes and physical rigidity. Signoret is characteristically confident and intriguingly evasive, her coolness recalling some of Lauren Bacall’s best performances from the previous decade. Clouzot’s exacting approach to suspense, notably devoid of scoring, depended greatly on his leads to map out the incremental twists in the narrative, and Madame Clouzot and Signoret fulfill their duties and some.

Criterion’s new DVD and blu-ray release of Diabolique (which they originally released on DVD man years ago now) arrives with a gorgeous new transfer, new cover art, and new special features, most notably an interview with historian Kim Newman concerning the film’s influence on countless thrillers and horror films. Yet the filmmaker who most readily springs to mind whenever I watch Diabolique is one that Newman fails to mention: Roman Polanski, whose morbid humour, commitment to high craftsmanship, fascination with perversion and penchant for nosy neighbours make him a very strong candidate for the contemporary filmmaker whose best work most closely resembles that of Clouzot’s.

Wilson: 71 fragments of a morphology of chance

The eponymous protagonist of Daniel Clowes’ graphic novel Wilson (Drawn & Quarterly, $23.95) may or may not be a sociopath. He typically greets complete strangers with flamboyantly presumptuous terms of endearment like “brother” or “sister.” In several of the 71 single-page, six-paneled episodes chronicling several years of his troubled if largely banal life we see him make what appears to be genuine attempts at meaningful contact with a fellow human—only to be inevitably disappointed with the response his random act of conditional kindness incites and thence counter-respond with a venomous outburst of pent-up rage. In one episode he waits seated at the post office for no apparent reason other than to convince a stranger to hold onto a large box he’s filled to the brim with dog shit. Wilson does love his dog.

Wilson, like Clowes, was born in the 1960s, hails from Chicago, and currently resides, for reasons he can’t muster, in Oakland, California. Wilson’s baffled by the modern world. He sees a man take a nocturnal dump on a sidewalk. He notes with horror the inexplicable proliferation of nail salons in his community. He struggles with despair: “Not only will I leave no trace of my existence behind, there won’t even be anything from my entire generation lift in another fifty years…” His wife Pippi left him 16 years ago while pregnant. Wilson fantasizes Pippi fell into a life of drug-addled prostitution. They eventually reunite. They seek out their long-lost and now teenaged daughter, who they take on a road trip, though some may call it kidnapping. Wilson’s life accumulates in drama, yet fails to yield the desired sense of order and inner peace, not to mention gainful employment. The final episode, however, may suggest some soul-fortifying autumnal revelation. If this is the case, Wilson, who can usually be relied upon to think out loud, decides not express it. This sudden reticence might sound perverse, but I take it as evidence that certain deeper sensations are simply ineffable.

The way Clowes draws a motel swimming pool makes it hard to tell if it’s full or empty. There’s a deliberately elusiveness to the visuals in Wilson, most notably in its ongoing alternating of jarringly different drawing styles, which render Wilson consistently recognizable yet in an ongoing state of flux. Here he seems younger. Here he has a lazy eye. Here he’s a good 40 lbs overweight. Here his body looks like an orb on sticks. If Clowes were primarily a filmmaker we could say that he shows two main tendencies, one toward the twisted surrealism and narrative density of David Lynch, the other toward the cerebral formalism and uneasy balance of misanthropy and affection of Todd Solondz. Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron is very much in the Lynch mode. Wilson is more Solondz. But it’s good Solondz. Initially Wilson threatens to amount to nothing more than one depressing punch-line after another, but something’s quietly building in Clowes' hapless character. He nears the precipice of accepting the world. Maybe. In any case his willingness to try to make peace, to communicate, maybe even to gather something like a family around him, is hilariously, almost touchingly relentless. His persistence allows him to take risks the best of us mightn’t ever venture.

J.G. Ballard, 1930-2009

From the beginning he scrupulously surveyed a landscape the rest of us strive to keep at bay. He spent a pivotal portion of his youth in a Japanese internment camp, where violence, death and collapse were regularly on display. He lost the love of his life and mother of his young children while still in his early 30s. Yet despair and hopelessness seemed other to him. In his stories and novels he rendered with great precision and unfettered imagination what other writers merely drape in bathos. In his second novel The Drowned World (1962), he described a London visible only by the tips of its tallest buildings, the remainder completely submerged following a global catastrophe spurred by melting icecaps. “Their charm and beauty lay precisely in their emptiness, in the strange junction of two extremes of nature, like a discarded crown overgrown by wild orchids.” Later in the novel we’re given a tour of an underwater planetarium, which is to say we’re given the stars far below the surface of the sea. Such gifts are common in the work of J.G. Ballard.

When characterizing Ballard’s tales, whether fantastically dystopian or chillingly realist, one’s repeatedly tempted by the term “alienating,” yet what makes the work so arresting and provocative is the fact that his protagonists aren’t really alienated at all. They witness horrors that, rather than simply deadening affect, awake a new level of fascination with phenomena far grander in scale than individual lives or even civilizations. Like the experimental plants and animals bred in the laboratory of Ballard’s ‘The Voices of Time’ (60), his characters break away from conventional responses to their environment by utilizing some dormant impulse locked inside all of us, perhaps in our very genes. To read his books is to stimulate, as Martin Amis described it, “a disused part of the reader’s brain.” Transcending genre, form and, most gleefully, taste, Ballard remains singular. He died last Sunday morning in London, following a long struggle with cancer. He was 78.

James Graham Ballard was born to British parents in Shanghai in 1930. They lived luxuriously in an enclave upon whose fringes existed a world both “extravagant and cruel,” boasting a wild assortment of exotic crime. “Anything was possible, and everything could be bought and sold,” Ballard wrote. “In many ways, it seems like a stage set, but at the time it was real, and I think a large part of fiction has been an attempt to evoke it by means other than memory.” In a transformation that would echo again and again in images of abandoned buildings, empty pools and grounded aircraft, their protected world would be left a spectral cavity once the Ballards were placed in internment in 1943. Ballard received lessons in poverty, charity, starvation, solidarity and pettiness. He ate maggots for protein. And he was always curious, amazed and basically cheerful. “Seeing everything displaced and rearranged in a haphazard way gave me my first taste of the surrealism of everyday life.”

In 1946 Ballard returned to England, bombed-out and miserable, a victorious nation that behaved as though defeated, a place where “hope itself was rationed.” Ballard went to medical school, where he became transfixed by the cadavers he was assigned to dissect, seeing in their faces a palimpsest of experience. He then went to Moose Jaw with the RAF, and it was on the Canadian prairie that he discovered science fiction, the genre that would ignite his mind. He married Mary Matthews in 1955 and settled in Shepperton to have three kids and start in earnest his prolific writing career. Mary would die suddenly of pneumonia in 1963, leaving Ballard to do all the domestic and money-earning duties while still engaging in a dynamic social life in swinging London. His memoir Miracles of Life (08) is dedicated to and named after his beloved children, who he remained close to all his life. Yet happy families, or even unhappy families, were never to be a significant subject of his work.

Apocalyptic scenarios fuelled many of the early novels, yet the more Ballard interacted with the familiar contemporary world, the more truly unnerving his fiction became. The Kennedy assassination, his wife’s death, Vietnam, his memories of wartime Shanghai, and his interest in new feats of consumerism, fetish-making and media sensationalism merged to create the image/event/prose graft of The Atrocity Exhibition (66), aligning Ballard far more with Jean-Luc Godard or Andy Warhol at the peak of their powers than with the likes of Isaac Asimov. One of Ballard’s most infamous novels, Crash (73) encompasses the radical approach to speculation Ballard had taken, subverting our response to trauma into an obsession with configurations of modern embodiments of affluence and glamour. His characters survive car crashes only to then crave and even design more of them, erotically, wholly, seeking some psychotic communion. When David Cronenberg adapted the novel into an equally controversial film of the same name (96), it made for one of the most fruitful collaborations between two uncannily like-minded artists of the late 20th century.

Empire of the Sun (84) ushered him into the literary mainstream. A fictionalized retelling of his Shanghai experiences, it melded Ballard’s crisp, coolly poetic language with nostalgia and tenderness. From here, the bulk of remaining body of work would stick largely to the format most clearly outlined in High Rise (75), tales of cloistered, antiseptic colonies—gated communities in Running Wild (88) and Cocaine Nights (96), an elite business park in Super-Cannes (00), a giant exurban shopping mall in Kingdom Come (06)—where the deadening effects of modern life invites transgression, the promise of control invites tacit agreements to lose control, and a state of anarchy is longed for by exactly those who sought to maintain order. I reviewed most of these when they came out, and it never ceased to amaze me how these explicit variations on a theme in each case the same story could yield fresh insights.

I never met J.G. Ballard but I’ll miss him nonetheless. His voice so rarely gave comfort, but there is a sort of vertiginous exhilaration to be found in his probing of our collective psyche and precarious ambitions. His body of work is too alive with possibility to be considered fatalist. His fecund mind sought to unearth the secret contract between surrealism and social commentary. And he did his part in ensuring that the British novel would not succumb to quaintness. Like the protagonist in ‘The Garden of Time’ (61), he has felt the final crystal of life dissolve in his hands, but he’s left us a vast field of jewels to pick through and marvel at in his absence.

There's plenty more on Ballard to be found at The Daily. 

3 Women: Altman's puzzling, oneiric, flawed masterpiece

Sometime in 1977, while his wife was frighteningly ill and in hospital, Robert Altman went home to get some much-needed sleep and literally dreamed of his next movie. All he knew was that it would be set in a desert, have something to do with identity theft, star Shelley Duvall and Sissy Spacek, and be called 3 Women. Those were the days before Altman’s commercial cred was lost, M*A*S*H and Nashville were still fresh victories, and all Altman had to do was stop by the 20th Century Fox studios on his way to the airport, throw his skeleton of a pitch at Alan Ladd Jr. and within minutes he had a picture deal. He didn’t even miss his flight.

3 Women is an enigmatic jewel from that magic period of freedom for Altman. His dream infused the film not only with raw materials of cast, theme and setting, but with a strange atmosphere of aquatic veils, exaggerated colours, a weird dialogue of opacity and transparency through steam, reflections, shadows and rising heat. Yet it also delved into a small, isolated pocket of the US swathed with a loneliness and frailty amidst dusty kitsch Americana (mini-golf, shooting ranges and dirt bikes) and superficiality. It’s perplexing as all hell, and I’m not certain it ever quite reaches the full circle it strives for, but it makes as crystalline and lasting an impression as anything Altman’s ever done.

The first moments are transporting: A woman painting a mural is seen through a tumbling aquarium. And then we see an indoor pool, following elephantine legs which intermingle with more aged torsos walking and wading. Gerald Busby’s atonal score heightens the slightly alien aura. The pool is a spa for the elderly and infirm, a place where young women gently guide patients through simple exercises. The spa’s model employee is Millie (Duvall), an oddly beautiful and utterly by-the-book young woman possessing a certain women’s magazine glamour. We meet Millie as she trains Pinky (Spacek), a new employee who seems even younger, eager though mischievous. “You’re a little like me, aren’t you?” Millie says to Pinky at one point, and Pinky takes the comment to heart: what immediately begins between the two women is hard to put your finger on, but it’s as though Pinky initially exists devoid of some essence of personality, and her hero worship of Millie becomes something both more profound and sinister.

For all its emphasis on theme, ambiguity and aesthetic, refined performances are crucial to 3 Women. Duvall is simultaneously beguiling and pathetic as Millie, nurturing her attractiveness yet living in a virtual vacuum of human affection, and the magic of her performance is partially attributable to the fact that she practically invented her character, writing the diaries we hear her read, the shopping lists and recipes (Duvall even bought the groceries to make Millie’s ridiculous cheese spray hors d’oeurves). And Spacek transforms so seamlessly in the film’s second half of metaphysics and narrative leaps, going from child to temperamental seductress and back to child again. As well, both are funny, wearing their characters’ abundant eccentricities as though they were totally normal.

3 Women clearly owes something to Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, but it lives in its own separate world with its own psychic implications. Everything in 3 Women conspires to some larger, unspoken event: the Bohdi Wind murals of sexual monsters painted in empty swimming pools by Willie (Janice Rule), the third woman of the title; the snobbish twins at the spa who seem content to communicate only with each other; the appearance of an elderly couple who may or may not be Pinky’s parents but who haunt Millie with their otherness and repellent age. What does it all mean? The good news is that the audio commentary Altman provided for Criterion's DVD release a few years back is often illuminating without ever trying to explain it all. The rest is up to us.