Death trip: Enter the Void

Central to Enter the Void is not so much a character as a point of view. Oscar (Nathaniel Brown), a young American living, loafing and dealing various drugs in Tokyo, is observed relatively little (though for a while we get a rather thorough study of the back of his head) yet is, in the loosest sense, present in every scene. Gaspar Noé uses Oscar’s consciousness as a cinematic vessel: we see and hear what he sees and hears, a device familiar from its fleeting employment in slasher films but, documentaries aside, is rarely used in extended duration, some memorable exceptions being Russian Ark, The Lady in the Lake, and the first part of Dark Passage, whose title could easily be substituted for the one Noé settled on for this, his follow-up to Irreversible and third feature as writer/director/editor/cinematographer/provocateur/

etc.

Enter the Void follows, or rather inhabits, Oscar as he gets profoundly stoned, walks to a nightclub, gets killed, and thence drifts in spirit-form through a narrow network of past and present. His life seems to have consisted mainly of one major source of trauma (his parents’ death in a car accident when Oscar was a child, an event he was present for) and one of comfort (his sister, with whom he’s made a pact to always be together, even after death). It is in any case these items that doggedly haunt Oscar’s afterlife and Noé’s project. Over and over we witness the accident from the backseat, the lifeless bodies, the sister wailing. The memory repeats until it no longer shocks us nor deeply troubles Oscar, the implication being, I suppose, that he’s letting go of earthly woes. Over and over we visit Oscar’s sister (Paz de la Huerta, frequently naked and, less appealingly, screaming), usually while she’s getting laid or dancing in a g-string. Oscar’s protective impulse and incestuous desire for his sister merge into a single focused longing for reunion that finally manifests in a sequence that ushers Oscar toward reincarnation via one particular anatomical dark passage that, it’s probably safe to say, the movies have never taken us through before.

Equal parts mind-blowing and incredibly boring, I can no more deny the tedium of Enter the Void than I can its ingenuity. Maybe that’s just it: displays of ingenuity are tedious, at least when undertaken by artists who seem drawn to nothing so much as their own sublime gimmickry. (To be fair, the tedium is surely more oppressive in the 160-minute version I’ve seen than in the 137-minute version that’s screened in some theatres.) The first half-hour or so, where Oscar trips out to visions of branching galactic veins of pulsating, morphing beauty, where paranoia burgeons and fades, where his buddy Alex (Cyril Roy, oddly charismatic, and giving the closest thing to a two-dimensional performance) comes by to explain the Tibetan Book of the Dead (Noé’s source material), is easily the most engaging and witty section. Noé’s evocation of Oscar’s reeling response to his narcotic cocktail, which includes DMT, is uncanny: anyone who takes drugs for extra-medicinal purposes will recognize the sensations carefully conjured here. But once Oscar goes astral, momentum and insight is largely discarded. Yes, the soaring-over-Tokyo camerawork is wondrous, a milestone even. But Oscar’s a bland cipher, his afterlife hardly the sort anyone truly invested in spiritual questions would choose for such extensive cinematic examination. His posthumous wandering might have worked better as an installation or visionary video game, which it resembles in many respects. Stanley Kubrick and 2001 especially are touchstones, though Noé has yet to muster up even Kubrick’s negligible level of interest in characters. Enter the Void is one hell of a trip, but you may find you’ve come down long before its final fade to black.

Raw sensationalism on a shoe-string: Shock Corridor and The Naked Kiss on DVD and BD

For those who invest their hours in the careful examination of cinematic artfulness, Sam Fuller’s best movies have a way of grabbing your presumptions by the throat, throwing them out the window, kicking them down the street, and setting fire to them just before they get run over by a truck. Fuller was a master of raw, unbridled sensationalism. His method of social critique was to lunge at a sensitive subject before dragging it half-conscious into the hot-lit arena. His work prompts us not to forgo the appreciation of cinematic elegance but to redefine it. A black mental patient convinces himself he’s a white supremacist and leads a posse of fellow inmates howling down a corridor to exact a mock-lynching, or a bald-headed prostitute beats her drunken pimp to the floor with a spike-heeled shoe, and we’re hurtled into a territory where tenderness is the progeny of audacity, where emotional precision emerges from melodrama, and where poetry rises out of action like smoke signals. “If anything irritates anyone,” Fuller once declared, “that makes me happy.”

Criterion’s new editions of Shock Corridor (1963) and The Naked Kiss (64) form a sort diptych portrait of Fuller’s transition from a career forged partly within the studios to one of arduous independence. Low-budget, sparely furnished, continuity-negligent and starkly illuminated—with photography from the great Stanley Cortez, who shot The Magnificent Ambersons (42) and The Night of the Hunter (55)—these movies prowled the greasy peripheries of American life for tales of murder and prostitution, corrupt public services and pedophilia, incest and repressed rage. The discs feature numerous terrific supplements, including an episode of The South Bank Show that finds its featured guest Fuller in top-form, but their most inspired elements are the illustrations that adorn their packaging and screen menus, courtesy of Daniel Clowes, author of the graphic novels Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron (93), Ghost World (97), and David Boring (00). Enveloping these movies in Clowes’ art enables us to better appreciate the graphically dynamic, sophisticated comic book quality of Fuller’s work.

Shock Corridor opens and closes with an epigram from Euripides that implicitly instructs us to regard what unfolds here as myth rather than mere realism or social commentary. It’s about an ambitious reporter named Johnny Barrett (Peter Breck) who pretends to have sexually assaulted his sister so as to gain admission to a mental hospital where a patient was murdered by a still-unidentified assailant. The woman reluctantly posing as the victimized sibling is actually Johnny’s girlfriend Cathy (Constance Towers), an unhappy burlesque dancer whose nightly act is captured in an extended long shot that renders Cathy puny and isolated, her choreography far more awkward and tawdry than would a conventional montage of close-ups and medium shots. In one of the movie’s masterstrokes, Fuller then revisits the burlesque act during Johnny’s institutionalized nightmares, in which a miniature ghost version of Cathy dances scantily-clad around Johnny’s sleeping head, taunting him with allusions to the desires that, now living in confinement, he can no longer satisfy.

The murder mystery is to some degree a macguffin, Fuller’s excuse to get his arguably already unstable hero into the ward with its seemingly endless central corridor—the forced perspective enhanced by Fuller’s use of dwarves pacing in the middle-ground—and mold the inmates into overt surrogates for the ostensibly normal Americans outside the hospital gates. There’s the aforementioned black KKK leader, a morbidly obese man who believes he’s an opera star, a communist turned southern Civil War nut, a nuclear physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project but has regressed into infantile doodling, and a dude who thinks he’s pregnant. EST, nymphos and hallucinations come into play. Fuller piles on hysteria with a paint roller—no one could actually believe this to be an accurate representation of the mentally ill—yet there’s a precision to the neuroses that aspires to some vivid, outrageous parable. One of the movie’s most stirring effects is its peculiar use of sound, especially Johnny’s voice-over, which seems to be coming from a half-busted speaker phone on the other end of a drain pipe. Or maybe it’s just coming from the other end of that long, abysmal corridor from which it seems no one fully returns.

The Naked Kiss opens with that arresting sequence noted above, the one with the bald-headed hooker. Her name is Kelly (Towers again, in an utterly fearless performance). We quickly discover that she’s got a maternal side to her, a soft spot for crippled kids especially, that she’s an autodidact with a thing for Beethoven and Byron, that’s she’s capable of changing her life completely if they’d let her, and that she’s also got one wicked violent streak. Two years after breaking ties with her chiseling pimp, Kelly's grown her golden locks back and finds herself in a small town, where she immediately has a date with a local cop named Griff (Anthony Eisley) who tells her to keep her tricks on the other side of the river, where a madam named Candy keeps a stable of delectable “bonbons.” Kelly opts for retirement from prostitution instead and finds work at a hospital for sick kids. She discovers a hidden talent for inspiring joi de vivre in the youngins through dress-up games and elaborately arranged musical performances, which culminate in Fuller’s most brilliantly shameless sequence, in which Kelly and the flamboyantly untrained tykes share vocal duties on a melancholy little ditty translated from the French, entitled ‘Mommy dear…’

Kelly also wins the heart of Grant (Michael Dante), the ascot-wearing scion of the town’s founder, a wealthy bachelor who uncannily intuits Kelly’s dreams of self-betterment. The relationship irks Griff, Grant’s best friend, who begins a campaign to drive Kelly out of town. But complications I can’t bear to spoil here arise and Kelly’s past is exposed in tandem with the perverse underbelly of the town itself. Fuller feasts on the hypocrisy of it all, though his relish never interferes with his bracing narrative economy. The Naked Kiss is a scathing take on the “woman’s picture”, like Douglas Sirk with all the nerves exposed, complicated in its vulgarity and the intensity of its affection for its flawed heroine. Deliciously over the top, it’s perfect in it way, and might be seen as the last fully realized work Fuller would make, capping a period where the writer/director/producer seemed permanently on fire. He’d made 17 movies in 15 years. In the next 33 he’d make only five more.

Toxic bureaucracy: The Crazies

The horror begins in the home, with brother frightening sister, father killing mother, and the whole house going up in flames. A military aircraft transporting biological weapons has crashed somewhere near Evans City, Pennsylvania, and infection is hypothesized to be spreading through the water supply. The primary symptom seems to be dementia, which in some cases can turn homicidal. But among the conceptual masterstrokes in The Crazies (1973) is the conceit that even in such a cozy, conventional, middle-American community—or perhaps especially in such a place—it’s actually pretty hard to tell which citizens are infected and which aren’t. Once NBC suit-wearing military troops invade the town, evacuating frightened people from their homes, the line between the panic and repressed aberrant behaviour it prompts is nearly indistinguishable from the hypothesized bacteria-induced psychosis.

In anticipation of the impending remake, Metro Cinema is screening George Romero’s original Crazies this Friday. Though Romero made a couple of features in the interim, genre fans will regard The Crazies as the proper successor to Romero’s groundbreaking Night of the Living Dead (68). This tale of a horrific disease, born of America’s cabalistic military-industrial complex, devouring a community, rendering its citizenry a mass of babbling, violent monsters, leaving only a handful of ill-equipped renegade survivors to fend for themselves, is after all, like Romero’s debut, essentially a zombie movie. And as with any good zombie movie The Crazies is grotesque satire, a commentary on the hysteria, perversity, and murderous fury bred from middle-class complacency and on government forces that when under threat are not inclined to act in our best interests.

Our heroes include a lusty pregnant nurse, a stoic fireman, a green beret, and a bearded biochemist, hilariously played by Richard France, expressing his frustration in Wellesian tones. The real nightmare they confront is not actually that of the mysterious contagion but of incompetent and rapidly metastasizing bureaucracy embodied by the invasion of disorganized military officials. Romero, acting as his own editor, stages and cuts sequences so as to evoke equal disorientation between viewers and the people on-screen, utilizing disruptive flash cuts, a cacophony of voices and sound effects, and a dizzying collage of close-ups and inserts, which makes the rampant over-acting from his enormous acting ensemble, many of whom were residents of Evans City, recruited on the spot to play themselves, even more bombastic.

Mister Romero

Even while the movie storms ahead in an aggressive flurry of deliberate confusion, Romero has a knack for keeping us grounded in inspired banal details. The soldier who quietly steals a couple of slick-looking fishing rods in the midst of forcing a screaming family out of their home, the military official who goes to light a cigarette and forgets he’s wearing a gas mask, the father who complains about the new generation’s loose morals before attempting to have intercourse with his daughter. (Has he caught the crazies, or is he just an inveterate child molester?) The Crazies may not be quite as atmospherically charged or fully realized as Romero’s very best, and all the drama class shout-acting gets a little tiring, but it’s these little particulars, the fragments of ordinary life that Romero refuses to overlook, that remind us of his unique and lasting contributions to the movies.

TIFF '09: "People can't help it if they're monsters..." Two films about weird families

By isolating its family from the rest of the world, Greek writer/director Giorgos Lanthimos’ Dogtooth (Kynodontas) arguably gets a little closer to the bone with regards to just how deeply our parents impress upon us all an idea of how the world supposedly works, how we might find a reasonably safe place in it, should we ever have the opportunity. Depicting the quotidian routines of three adult children and their mother, the lot of them confined to a fairly luxurious gated country home by their patriarch, the film is essentially a smart, very dark comedy, only gradually yielding its insights and particular heights of strangeness.


The family’s cloistered existence is made replete through the appropriation and nearly surrealist manipulation of language. The sea is a chair. A motorway is a strong wind. A pussy is a big light, which if shut off leaves us engulfed by darkness. The planes that fly overhead are toys, and the children long for one to fall from the sky so they can possess it. Their obedience is ensured through the invention of artificial dangers while their sexual education is provided by anonymous guests procured by their tireless dad. But with time a serpent will enter their garden, bringing with it VHS tapes of Rocky and Flashdance, and their innocence is doomed to be broken.


Dogtooth creeps up on you, and by its end presents us with a surprisingly resonant equation and an elegant final image. Lanthimos’ style is detached, in keeping with the wryly anthropological nature of the whole premise, leaving the actors to really breathe life into the whole, which they do a truly remarkable job at, one deserving of some special ensemble award. I saw one of them at a festival party and was tempted to say hi, but the mariachi band was very loud, I felt shy, and wasn’t quite sure how to tell her that I really loved the way she liked her sister’s arm.


Another very different, if equally uneasy examination of family, Life During Wartime (nothing, sadly, to do with the Talking Heads masterpiece of first-person terrorist funk pop) is Todd Solondz’s sequel to Happiness. This leads us of course to more couples crying in restaurants, but also to a continuation of its predecessor’s enquiry into living with despair, uncertainty, and most especially pedophilia. “People can’t help it if they’re monsters,” declares Bill (Ciarán Hinds), himself a convicted pedophile. The statement is hardly a satisfying conclusion in itself, but Solondz seems interested in exploring the theme of forgiveness as much if not more than that of understanding, and forgiveness becomes an unusually fraught topic of conversation here given that a number of the characters are Israel sympathizers.

Life During Wartime ultimately feels less than fully realized, and its plot turns on a few pretty thin conceits, though it does have some superb sequences that could almost stand alone as fragments of some greater study of how emotionally crippled adults negotiate their way through thorny realms of need. I couldn’t help but wonder if it may have been more affecting had it used its original cast, but I can’t complain about the new one assembled, which beside the weirdly fearsome Hinds includes the always wonderful Allison Janney, Charlotte Rampling, Ally Sheedy, and Paul Reubens as a ghost.

More TIFF a-coming...

Animals, criminals, labyrinths of desire: three by Shohei Imamura

Sometimes it seems it’s the sheer unruliness that makes it so enduring, this still-underappreciated oeuvre with its gleefully grubby chaos and quasi-anthropological fixation on a postwar Japan inundated with foreigners and overrun by undesirable elements, a mélange that so audaciously breaks away from the officially sanctioned decorum and exquisite classicism exemplified by the films of the revered Yasujiro Ozu. But Shohei Imamura (1926-2006) apprenticed under Ozu, working up through the system as was demanded back then. So while his cinema reads as fiercely antithetical to the Ozu model, it’s equally informed by its discipline and moral query. Imamura was indeed a rebel in the Japanese cinema, an iconoclast and genuine mischief-maker, a middle-class kid obsessed with perversion, “the lower depths,” and basic instincts. But his rebellion had a cause and one hell of a technique. We can see it ripen in the breakthrough films collected in Criterion’s new Pigs, Pimps & Prostitutes: 3 Films by Shohei Imamura.

Set in the port town of Yokosuka, the wildly entertaining Pigs and Battleships (61) is crowded with US troops looking for diversion and locals doling it out, their unease with American vulgarity offset by envy. The title aligns Americans with brute machinery, the Japanese with swine, but comparing people to animals in Imamura should never be reduced to derision. In this cruel world where puppies are drowned, where heads get smashed through windows and dunked in gasoline, where sharing of a can of pineapple rings is the best a girl can expect from her boyfriend in the immediate aftermath of her abortion, regarding human behaviour as animalistic feels somehow affectionate.

Haruko (Jitsuko Yoshimura) works in a bar. Her goofball boyfriend Kinta (Hiroyuki Nagato) joins an extortion gang starting a pig farm. Much of what drives Pigs and Battleships is Haruko’s gradual acceptance of the lack of prospects in her current situation. It’s her escape that lends the story its battered optimism. Yet Kinta also has his journey of self-discovery. “Advised” to take a rap on behalf of a superior, he instead takes a stand in a magnificent climax where men are swallowed up in a sea of swine and a hail of bullets. In collaboration with cinematographer Shinsaku Himeda, Imamura captures the mounting absurdity in captivating camerawork that echoes the jazzy dynamicism of Sam Fuller, trailing hungrily after the action as it careens away.

Haruko became a prototype for Imamura’s heroines, tough, take-no-shit women who typically outfox and outlive the insecure men who attempt to govern them. Tomé (Sachiko Hidari), heroine of The Insect Woman (63), is remarkable not only for her endurance but her adaptability. Raised in a nest of incest and squalor, she survives alternately as a factory worker, labour organizer and prostitute, and the massive economic and ideological shifts undergone by Japan over the course of Tomé’s life are subtly reflected in the lessons she learns through experience.

The film’s original title translates as Japanese Entomology, and this may bring us closer to the heart of Imamura’s perspective. As embodied by Tomé, a people known for their traditionalism are shown as perfectly changeable when faced with issues of survival. Like the insect struggling to traverse a hillside in the film’s opening moments, the final image of Tomé trudging up a muddy country road is a portrait of dogged vitality. Imamura’s camerawork further emphasizes this sense of portraiture through the unpredictable use of freeze-frames, halting scenes not for aesthetic so much as studious pleasure. He lingers on fragments of action, intrudes on the continuity of spectacle. Perhaps it’s also a way of relieving pressure. Just as her father relieves the ache in the nursing Tomé’s under-milked breasts through his infantile suckling, so Imamura eases back and break the image apart when the narrative becomes too weighty.

Intentions of Murder (64), arguably the masterpiece in this superlative trio, appropriates several of its predecessor’s themes and hones them into something less carnally comical but more focused. Sadako (Masumi Harakawa, stunning) is a plump, uncultivated maid who becomes a common-law housewife after her employer impregnates her. Imamura puts Sadako through some harrowing but transformative experiences, arriving at a very strange yet satisfying form of catharsis. She’s assaulted in her home by a bumbling thief. She fends him off impressively, and the fight in her seems to arouse the thief. Rather than commit a straightforward rape however, the thief loosens Sadako’s bonds and attempts to generate something like consent. Their coupling is fraught with ambiguity to say the least. No one films a sex scene quite like Imamura. His bodies seem always to be feverishly clenched by repression and urge.

In keeping with cultural codes, sex with the thief leaves Sadako initially planning suicide before desperately craving food. Hunger trumps tradition. Eventually, despite being stalked by the now romantically obsessed thief—actually a middling nightclub drummer with a fatal heart condition—despite the abuse of her asshole husband—an asthmatic librarian—Sadako will develop a new inner fortitude. And the final section of the film especially, perhaps prompted by a haunting, vertiginous dream sequence, finds Imamura exploring newly expressionistic terrain, a cinematic poetry built upon snow, trains, distance and dread. It’ll leave you wondering where he’ll go next. The answer can be found in The Pornographers (66), also available from Criterion, which rewards expectations generously.

Walking after midnight: on Steps, sex, power, identity, and the mystery of Jerzy Kosinski

I first read Steps ten years ago. I knew nothing about the book or its author. I’d picked it up more or less randomly in a bookstore and found I’d gotten a dozen pages in before coming up for air. It was my first Jerzy Kosinski, and looking back now, it seems it must have really hooked me, because I know that by the end of that year I was traveling through Central and Eastern Europe with a stack of books that were at least half Kosinski. It felt appropriate to be reading this body of work, so startling in its exacting perversions and flights of savagery, while moving through a part of the world where people seemed always to be consuming such tremendous amounts of meat, and while I brooded over the end of what felt like an especially bloody century. I was very young and hadn’t yet realized that all centuries are bloody. By pure chance, it was also during this trip that I first saw Being There, the movie adapted by Kosinski from his own novel, which happened to be screening at a Prague cinematheque.

I return to Steps now because I’ve been meaning to and because I’ve long wanted to direct readers to this strange and, it still seems to me, kind of forgotten Polish-American author, one who was not so long ago such a sensation, as well as a source of much controversy, particularly concerning the authorship of his most acclaimed novel The Painted Bird. For many reasons Steps seems an ideal introduction to Kosinski, though it was long after reading it that I realized just how emblematic of Kosinski’s philosophy it was.

When I first read Steps, with its many very brief first-person anecdotes and tales spanning wildly diverse places, milieus, professions and situations, I’d just assumed its narrators were many. Much later I read Passing By, a collection of Kosinski’s essays, and noted that he kept referring to “the protagonist of Steps.” It hadn’t occurred to me that all the scenarios contained within this book could happen to one person. More importantly, it hadn’t occurred to me that one person could perform such a variety of actions, some tender, some cruel, some altruistic, some murderous. Like I said, I was very young. And I wasn’t yet familiar with the novels of Jerzy Kosinski.

The protagonist of Steps begins by recounting a story in which he enters a poor village to have his laundry done. When he goes to pick up his clothes a young seamstress eyes his credit cards as he shuffles his belongings around. She asks what they are and he explains that with these plastic cards one can buy whatever ones wants without using any money. He tells her that if she meets him later in secret he’ll take her away, buy her things, and she’ll no longer be poor. The episode ends with the protagonist simply fulfilling this vaguely sinister promise. The next episode reverses the power dynamic of the first. The protagonist finds himself on a small, impoverished island with no funds. Desperate and starving, he meets some tourists, older, unattractive women, who feed him but in exchange ravish his youthful flesh. These stories set the tone for all that follows.

Steps is about power and identity, about domination and metamorphosis. Nothing is fixed. Sexual desire is most characteristically described in terms of the desire to possess another. The narration itself is rigorously dispassionate, carefully isolating memory from emotion. So if my initial inability to register the novel as being the story of one person seems naïve or unobservant, my only real defense lies in the fact that the protagonist makes no effort whatsoever to unify his memories and experience with any overt sense of self-development or emotional build. And this is what makes the book, along with all of Kosinski’s best work, so fascinating, chilling in its detachment and depiction of oppression, moving in its proposal that a person can do or become anything he or she wants to. (Should I add here that Kosinski took his own life?)

The protagonist shifts consistently between voyeur—tellingly, he was a sniper while in the army—and instigator of action. In another early episode he works as a ski instructor at a resort near a tuberculosis clinic. At night he watches some of the other male instructors tryst with some female patients in the open area between their facilities. He describes their meeting in the moonlit snow: “The silhouettes touched and merged as if they were fragments of a shadow being mended.” The night and the distance renders the people into shadows; contact renders them into a single mass. Later the protagonist conducts his own affair with a particularly ill patient. She makes love to him by touching his image in her mirror; he later makes love to her by touching her photographed image.

Kosinski is not an author who finds sexuality banal. The routes to sexual contact seem infinite under his gaze. These routes are at times abhorrent, with incidents including deception, prostitution, bestiality, incest and rape. In one of the most fully fleshed out episodes, based on a real incident, the protagonist, again traveling in the countryside, discovers a woman whose been held captive in a cage by a farmer and alerts the police. However, before he does so he confesses, “there was something very tempting in this situation, where one could become completely oneself with another human being.”

In the book’s italicized intermediary passages by contrast, conversations between two lovers, the honesty with which sexual contact and romantic love is discussed is disarming, brave and often insightful. “You only know me in a certain way,” one lover explains, imparting upon the other the unavoidable, involuntary ways we tailor our identities for the view of others. This unknowability isn’t meant to invoke despair but rather to acknowledge the ways we enter into each other’s stories, touch each other’s lives and beings, and how we change, relentlessly, in spite of the dictates of memories and people who claim to have us pegged.

TIFF '08: Kuroawa, Assayas, Kore-eda and others keep it all in the family

John Cale lives in a hippy commune in Patagonia. That’s really all I needed to know. A friend suggested I see Salamandra and, knowing full well of my special fondness for Cale and the Velvet Underground, he started his hard sell with the above item and I told him just to stop there. Cale’s brief, rather crazed appearances—chomping into glass, toying with a knife, singing in Spanish with a junkyard band, replete with a ragged chicken bone for percussion—comprise several of the highlights in Pablo Agüero’s feature debut, which follows a young single mother, freshly released from some sort of institution, as she uproots her six-year-old son from his established life with his grandmother and whisks him down to El Bolsón to live amongst the unwashed, the heavily bearded and the incense-drunk.

Agüero errs on the side of unimposing, his observational hand-held camera seeming to will precious little into action, counting on our connection to the protagonists, the boy in particular, and the rising absurdity of their deeply dubious attempts at roughing it in this cold, wet and largely unfriendly place to engage the viewer. The images frequently yield layers of metaphor, and the technique overall works well enough, though it’s difficult not to wonder if things couldn’t be pushed a lot farther, if the real hard work still to be done by Agüero wouldn’t involve driving his nervy, New-Agey, curly-haired mom past the point of mere constant nail-biting and deluded nattering. Still, an interesting, and certainly very sensitive picture that offers a glimpse at a most marginal life.

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” so goes the famous opening sentence of Anna Karenina. Salamandra is just one of many films showing at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival that deal in some compelling manner with the grand old theme of family life, a theme that when applied to drama hardly requires the word ‘dysfunctional’ to be placed before it. Happy or unhappy, TIFF ’08 sees a number of families struggle to realize some fresh level of self-knowledge both for its parts and as a whole. And I think the finest—and funniest—example of this that I’ve managed to see came from one of the festival’s most pleasant surprises, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Tokyo Sonata.

Kurosawa is most famous for his distinctively brooding and image-centered horror films, such as Cure (1997), Charisma (00), Pulse (01), and my personal favourite, the über-creepy Séance (01). As far as I’m aware, Tokyo Sonata marks Kurosawa’s first stab at comedy, and I have to wonder if it isn’t in fact his real calling. His horror films are smart, infectious and remarkably chilling, but they can also be overly ponderous and, in the case of Pulse in particular, simply over-long and limpid. It’s difficult to describe just what a refreshing about-face this new film signals without simply seeing it for yourself. Yet it occurs to me that the film does actually have something in common with Cure: where the characters in the older film are afflicted with a disease that drives them to kill, the protagonists in this new film seem to be afflicted with one that makes them crazy to start their lives over—even the little kid.

The downsizing of Ryuhei Sasaki (Teruyuki Kagawa), the result of his company’s outsourcing to cheaper China, is the catalyst. He goes home that night and begins the familiar charade, not telling his wife and children what’s happened and instead putting on the suit and pretending to go to work everyday. He mostly hangs out at the library and eats his lunch with the homeless. He meets another unemployed businessman who goes so far as to set his phone to ring every hour so can feign business calls in public—even though there’s usually no one around he could possible need to impress. It sounds pathetic, yet it actually impresses Ryuhei deeply. Ryuhei spends most of the movie looking like his head’s about to blow up, and I guess he can’t help but admire the other man’s mood-management.

We soon see that all three male members of the Sasaki clan are deceiving the family for their individual reasons, the quiet 12-year-old Kenji (Kai Inowaki) being the most sympathetic. When he’s suddenly struck one day by the lulling sounds emanating from a suburban piano class, Kenji asks his parents if he can take lessons and is brutishly denied by his newly emasculated dad, so he goes in secret, using his lunch money to pay. Meanwhile his remote older brother is secretly joining the US military just as they decide to send more troops to Iraq, and his over-burdened and under-loved mother is slowly descending into quiet desperation, nearing bottom and its accompanying implosion.

There are characteristically elegant, beautifully composed sequences here, such as the opening, in which papers blow through the empty house during a storm, or the moving finale, which manifests the title as something more than just an homage to Ozu’s classic. But much of Tokyo Sonata is sharply focused on clear, concise storytelling, terrifically goofy comic interplay, and steady character development, each strand of the narrative building to the point where there is a synchronicity of panic boiling over. It goes on for a while, but is never less than diverting and propulsive. There are moments of utter cruelty and hopelessness, yet Kurosawa somehow pulls things together in such a way that the film finally finds itself lighting upon a coda of redemption and new awakening.

If Ozu can be traced in the title and broad themes of Tokyo Sonata, from the intermediary landscape shots on down, he’s positively haunting virtually every aspect of Still Walking, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s latest, a heartfelt, often solemn, but still vivid, sensual, lovingly detailed and warm depiction of familial differences amongst adult children and their elderly parents, most of them irreconcilable. Centered quite simply around a family reunion, this is the sort of movie where no viewer can fail to recognize some fragment of their personal experiences. Kore-eda’s film was inspired by stories he was told by his own mother in the months before she died, and his story is very much informed by the absence of a key family member.

This same sort of near-palpable absence is equally essential to Oliver Assayas’ Summer Hours, which finds three adult and nearly estranged siblings—played by the impressive trio of Juliette Binoche, Charles Berling and Jérémie Renier—negotiating their way through what seems an inevitable complete break with the past after the death of their mother, wonderfully played by Edith Scob, the striking actress who many years ago starred as the titular victim of Eyes Without a Face (60). Marred only by a few unneeded scenes of bathetic weeping, Assayas’ survey of the increasingly rapid erosion of artifacts that bind us to our families and our collective history is at times positively biting and all-too resonant. But the film is also brimming with humour and, with its special, loving attention to its younger supporting characters, is equally invested in nurturing a sense of regeneration.

Okay, one last film before I sign off here, and one which brings us back full circle to Latin America. Dioses is Josué Méndez’s second feature, and reveals a genuinely propositive sense of camera placement and movement. Concerning an upper-class Peruvian family that includes a father, a teenage daughter and son, and the father’s new girlfriend—a dead ringer for Halle Berry, should that grad your attention—Méndez takes a series of more or less conventional dilemmas—a party girl with an unwanted pregnancy; an angry young man sick with his sinking into bourgeois rot and in love with his sister; a gold-digger painfully ashamed of her indigenous background—and frames them in such a way that we’re often able to re-examine our assumptions. Ménez has a knack with these slow zooms out and back in he uses, his juxtaposing of music and image in seemingly contradictory ways, and his fun game of having characters move in and out of frame from unexpected places.

The way Méndez conveys Diego’s inner anguish in particular is frequently tender, perverse and hilarious all at once, cutting to Diego’s amusing permanent scowl at inspired moments. The treatment of Eliza on the other hand can feel trite, especially in the very cutty scene that finds her rehearsing inane comments to make when around her new coven of snobby middle-ages wives, but the performance of Maricielo Effio, which shifts in subtle ways, goes a long way to gaining our sympathies. She’s the bridge between the worlds of wealth and poverty in Peru that Méndez seems very keen on imparting upon us, though the handful of scenes with the servants are some of the most telling of all. These women, always present and rarely visible, are in their way members of the family themselves, interlopers into a realm of elitism that, as its portrayed here, seems on the brisk of collapse under its own dead weight.

Savage Grace: the rare occasion where we could use a little less of Moore and a whole lot more of something to truly care about

This long-awaited second feature from director Tom Kalin, who made such an impression way back in 1992 with the Leopold and Loeb retelling Swoon, comfortably nestles up against its predecessor with regards to categorization: it’s a true crime movie, involving sex, horrific murder and characters with deeply pretentious ambitions, and it’s as queer as any movie can hope to be, with its personage mixing in all sorts of combinations untraditional, kinky, or downright deviant.

Besides apparently being exactingly tailored to the thematic interests of prolific producer Christine Vachon (an instrumental force behind Swoon, Boys Don’t Cry, I Shot Andy Warhol, Party Monster, The Notorious Bettie Page and Infamous), it’s the sort of material that also seems to draw in some of our finest actresses of a certain age, especially those who continually crave adventure and edge. Given that Joan Crawford is long gone, I can’t think of a better choice for the star role of Savage Grace than Julianne Moore—yet at the same time I think it might just be the worst, or at least the least enjoyable performance I’ve ever seen Moore give. But then, are we even supposed to enjoy this movie? Even the somber enjoyment of more closely understanding some bleak, troubling aspect of human nature?

Narrated by the real Tony Baekeland, Savage Grace dramatizes the story of his life leading up to his notorious arrest in 1972 at the age of 25. It says a lot about Baekeland’s life that the real star of his story is actually his mom, Barbara (Moore), heiress to the Bakelite fortune, an uncultured, desperately unhappy society woman who, after being abandoned by her understandably demoralized husband (Stephen Dillane) for her son’s girlfriend, focuses all of her overbearing energies on her only child, who she constantly needles, travels all over Europe with, lives with and, as it turns out, has sex with. Tony himself (played by the suitably stunned-looking Eddie Redmayne, once more, as in The Good Shepherd, the psychologically under-developed son) is rather a wisp of a boy next to her, nervous, uncertain, largely unloved and internalizing more rage than most of us will ever know.

For those of us who aren’t survivors of incest but always suspected it made for a pretty miserable home life, Savage Grace, the antithesis of Murmur of the Heart in more ways than one, certainly confirms that and some. But I suppose what’s truly terrifying in this utterly tawdry tale is not the aberrant sex itself but the suffocating mothering from which the sex is but one manifestation, and hardly the most toxic. Savage Grace is really a sort of horror movie about the stifling effects of family and affluence, one beautifully photographed in exquisite locales and filled with beautiful people, where the monster just keeps coming back to embarrass herself and everybody else with her incredibly awkward attempts to seem sophisticated before throwing yet another shrill hissy fit.

I didn’t actually know Baekeland’s story before seeing Savage Grace, which is just as well—at least there were some surprises. But these surprises, like Kalin’s craftsmanship, itself a bit overdone and noodlely, didn’t make Baekeland’s story any more enlightening, just grotesque, sad, jarring, intermittently fascinating and ultimately kind of pointless.

The Furies: not quite as hysterical as the French would have it, but one hell of a sexy, violent, transgressive western melodrama nonetheless

The Furies, one of three westerns directed by Anthony Mann in 1950 following his triumphant string of dazzling noir thrillers, would have to be considered an exceptional movie in any genre. Set in the 1870s, it’s an epic drama about a charismatic, tyrannical widower lording over a vast New Mexico ranch, an impotent son to which he’s indifferent, and a bold, self-determined daughter whose role is uncomfortably close to that of a wife. It’s also a story about deception, sexual dominance and, as the plot would have it, good and bad bookkeeping.

At the film’s dramatic centre is a formidable woman, played by the singular Barbara Stanwyck, grappling fiercely for control of an enormous piece of property and a legacy even larger. Along its periphery are secret love affairs with Mexicans squatters, ghosts of a vanishing frontier, vestiges of colonial chaos, and long-simmering tensions that find release only in unbridled explosions of violence. It’s a marvelous, complex, perverse, horrifying—there are strong does of mutilation and humiliation—and often touching movie that, for all the issues it fails to fully resolve, should be regarded as something very near greatness.

T.C. Jeffords was Walter Huston’s final role. He brings to the aging patriarch an ingratiating blustery swagger that delicately functions as a beard for bone-deep insecurities. Owner of the film’s titular ranch but chronically foolish with money, he’s one three men to be kept, controlled or conquered by his daughter Vance (Stanwyck), the only thing standing between the Juan Herrera (Gilbert Roland) family and homelessness, between T.C. and Rip Darrow (Wendell Corey), the gambler-turned-banker whose family are the rightful owners of a strip of The Furies and whose father was killed by T.C. long ago. All of these men, in one way or another, are Vance’s lovers. “I’ve always worked my own leather,” boasts Vance, who the adoring T.C. dubs a “she-fox,” who publicly taunts her father’s authority, staking claims on what’s otherwise deemed a man’s domain. When T.C. brings home a woman (a wonderful Judith Anderson) who threatens to replace Vance as matriarch—and true controller—of The Furies, Vance unleashes her wrath, suffers the consequences, and promises to tear everything away from her father.

Among the pleasures of The Furies is watching how Stanwyck and Mann collaborate, resulting in a performance simultaneously seductive and frightening. Locking eyes with each of her male opponents, Stanwyck uses that weirdly amphibian gaze of hers like some Medusa with a perm, and tosses off a peppering of sharpened jabs with her distinctive deadpan. Yet she also conveys such heights of desire and rage, and Mann frames her performance brilliantly in the film’s signature scene of sadistic violence. Mirrors, conventionally symbols of feminine vanity, here become the visual birthplace of female oppression and injury. Stanwyck’s groping for her dead mother’s scissors as her rival gloats before her makes for a majestic moment of unease.

Mann himself, traditionally deemed above all a genre craftsman, has recently been the subject of a call for reconsideration from critics who think he deserves to be elevated to auteur status. (For a strong example, see Richard Combs' piece on Mann in the May/June 2007 issue of Film Comment.) Over the past year or so, without actually trying to, I’ve wound up watching a lot of Mann films—like Raw Deal (48), Border Incident (49), a work that in its way bridges noir and western traditions, and The Naked Spur (53)—and am now more than happy to jump on this critical bandwagon, the latest driver of which is The Criterion Collection, who, with The Furies, now add his name to their list of distinguished featured filmmakers.

I’m sure some readers must wonder why I give so much ink to Criterion releases, but a quick survey of their new package for The Furies pretty much speaks for itself: besides the customarily superb transfer, they offer a beautifully illustrated box, a book featuring a smart essay and archival interview with Mann, DVD supplements like a vintage interview with Huston, a new interview with Mann’s daughter, and a surprisingly good British television interview with Mann from the 60s. And, get this, you also get a handsomely bound paperback edition of Niven Busch’s source novel. They actually give you the damned book!

My favourite extra here though would have to be the audio commentary from historian and western specialist Jim Kitses. I saw him give a talk about Ride the High Country (62) a while back and was deeply impressed by his arguments for ever-closer readings of Sam Peckinpah's work and of westerns as a platform for every conceivable sort of human drama. I also really like his big moustache. Regarding The Furies, he laments the diminished role of Juan and the other Mexicans in Charles Schnee’s adaptation while praising the film’s other transgressive elements, emphasizes the hints of incest between Vance and T.C., directs our attention to the films’ multi-generic threads, and makes a strong case for the western as the genre that best suited Mann’s obsessive interest in familial conflict.