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.

To be assembled posthumously: The Windmill Movie on DVD

Richard P. Rogers was born into East Coast WASP privilege and most of its accompanying neuroses. His people summered in the Hamptons. They sent him to Dalton and Harvard to make something of himself. But Rogers became an experimental and documentary filmmaker—a filmmaker’s filmmaker, marginal and respected. He also became a beloved educator at SUNY Purchase. His familial legacy left him with pangs of unease regarding his inability to accumulate wealth and a facility with small talk and tennis. He was simultaneously envious of his more successful (ie: rich and famous) peers and so hopelessly rebellious there was no way he could ever have followed their paths. Most scandalously, he fell for Jewish girls, and eventually, while dying from cancer, even married one, the esteemed Magnum photographer Susan Meiselas, with whom he’d shared decades-long romance marked by long absences and affairs with other women—Rogers was an unlikely yet prodigious Don Juan. He died in 2001 at the age of 56.

Rogers was undoubtedly a man of many curious and contradictory qualities, but those listed above are the ones that linger with me after seeing The Windmill Movie (2009). It’s a strange and fascinating artifact: a memoir by proxy, an 80-minute essay constructed from some 200 hours of material shot or collected by Rogers with the vague intention of being either a self-portrait or a critique of the culture that spawned him. Maybe, inevitably, both. It was produced by Meiselas and David Grubin, and directed, edited and written by Alexander Olch, a student of Rogers with a somewhat similar background and a sense of kinship strong enough to encourage Olch to compose narration in Rogers’ voice. Watching The Windmill Movie, you can’t help but wonder if it wasn’t all designed this way, if only unconsciously. Keep in mind: though you may not have heard of him, Rogers was a prolific, hard-working, at times very personal filmmaker—not a dilettante. So if he never finished his Windmill, even when diagnosed with a terminal illness, it might be that he never truly planned to. It’s someone else’s Movie now, someone else’s portrait, though still suitably subjective, poetic, uneven, uncertain, and shot through with lust, indecision, and existential doubt. It’s available this week on DVD from Zeitgeist.

Remarkable images reappear throughout The Windmill Movie, as though circling Rogers’ psyche. Hands at a garden party, the corner of a sail brushing reeds, pretty young bronzed thighs on bicycles or beach blankets: one of the possible themes of Rogers’ project was summertime, the feeling that important things happen in this seemingly most leisurely of seasons. Rogers recalls being taken to the beach as a child and falling in love with other people’s mothers. He reflects on his own mother, abandoned by his father. She appears before his camera, in old age, wearing a wig, at one point shoveling dirt into a car. You imagine her sharing cocktails with reclusive socialite Edie Beale, made famous in the Maysle Brothers’ Grey Gardens (75) and a Hamptons neighbour.

Olch’s assembly is respectful, but not too respectful. He doesn’t flatter Rogers. He understands the perils in making a film about a filmmaker struggling to make a film about a dead filmmaker struggling to make a film, and thus grounds The Windmill Movie in specific memories and encounters, successes and failures. Some of Olch’s additions don’t entirely work. Rogers’ old friend, actor and playwright Wallace Shawn shows up, reads aloud some of Rogers’ musings, and finally feels underused, present mostly as a talisman. But for the most part Olch finds ways to honour his subject while establishing his own voice. There’s little in The Windmill Movie to indicate Rogers’ accomplishments as a filmmaker (nor is this film the place for it), but thankfully Zeitgeist has included two really wonderful shorts by Rogers: ‘Elephants: Fragments of an Argument’ (73) and ‘226-1690’ (84), which chronicles a year in Rogers’ life via views from his New York apartment window and messages left on his answering machine.

Barry Hannah's Ray: A country doctor's self-examination slides into chaos and reverie

Does anybody here remember Barry Hannah? I’m sad to say I was not even aware of this celebrated Mississippi author until I’d heard of his death at age 67 this past March. They ran an archival interview with him on Fresh Air, and I was enchanted by Hannah’s voice, his vaguely ornery pauses, and his conversation with Terry Gross about guns and religion and the habits of bad men. Wikipedia offers this quote from the author, which seems to tell us a lot about Barry Hannah: “Sometimes you don’t want to arrange your memory. I love the pure chaos of it and just the reverie of it for its own sake.” I’ve just read Hannah’s slim but utterly arresting and often appalling 1980 novel Ray (Grove, $15.50). The chaos and reverie breathes on the page.

As with Daniel Clowes' Wilson (see the preceding post), Ray’s eponymous protagonist slides back and forth between ecstasy and despair and seems to have trouble adapting to the modern world, to avoid becoming another “casualty of the American confusion.” He sees his country as fundamentally ambivalent, representing “rage and gentleness together.” Perhaps this is part of the reason why Ray sometimes fantasizes that he’s a veteran of the windswept battlefields of the Civil War, where he delivered many men unto death, as well as of Vietnam, where he, for real it seems, flew a Phantom. Ray is a resident of Tuscaloosa. Ray is both a doctor and a sick man, conducting on these pages a precarious and wildly deluded self-assessment that bleeds into self-re-invention via Hannah’s eloquent and rigorously subjective first-person prose. Ray’s a drunk and foot-fetishizing womanizer of insatiable lust. Hannah tracks Ray’s most recent stab at marriage to a blue-eyed woman with a “small friendly vagina,” and his observances of his similarly unhinged and even murderous friends’ misadventures. Ray is a frequently disgusting man and just as frequently charming and hysterically funny and audacious—at least within the confines of his fragmentary self-portrait.

Hannah endows Ray with a poet’s linguistic facilities: “I have seen the moon make an opaque ghost of the backyard, and I have seen the Hooch animals roam out into it, smelling the life of themselves. They enter the border of visibility and pass through it into the uncanny.” Hannah takes equal care to render Ray a probably hopeless misanthrope-asshole on the verge of total mental collapse: “I don’t feel that good about women anyway, nor gooks, nor sand-niggers, nor doctors, nor anything human that moves, with its zealous raving habits.” Already a published author of scholarly medical studies, Ray has threatened to write a paper on women, who, he muses, “enjoy revenge more than the worst Apache.” Yet Ray has his moments of surrender to all those less offensive things he most deeply cherishes: “To live in delight of healing, flying, fucking.” Ray is the music of a terrifying id, and Hannah neither glorifies nor condemns his subject. Rather, he recognizes something ugly and fascinating in Ray’s DNA that is common to more of us than we might care to admit, and not just racist sexist sociopaths from below the Mason-Dixon line.

Vulgarian, historian, voyeur, exhibitionist: the one and only James Ellroy

He mounts the stage to applause lustier than what greets most sexagenarian novelists, but still he demands more, waiting silently for the claps and cheers to whither before gesturing with feigned impatience to keep it coming. We comply, and he soaks up our squeezed adulation with Mussoliniesque stoicism. James Ellroy has arrived. He’s in Toronto to promote Blood’s a Rover. His opening speech rallies against “the internet invasion,” invokes Elliot, Sexton, and Houseman—supplier of his new novel’s title—before paying tribute to Knopf, his publisher, rendered in this bat-shit reverie as a prophet dog who came to Ellroy moments after his birth—his parents had slipped out for a drink—and deigns Ellroy the savior of literature, author of a string of future masterpieces, decrying that in the year 2009 he’ll publish a book that will single-handedly reverse the downturn in the global economy. Ellroy then promises an afterlife of divine promiscuity to everyone in he audience who purchases ten copies. He’s quite insistent that we each buy ten copies. As though storing up for the Apocalypse.

Blood’s a Rover’s the final installment of Ellroy’s ‘Underworld USA’ trilogy. It picks up where The Cold Six Thousand left off, covering 1968 through 1972. Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King are dead. Black militancy is on the rise. Organized crime’s setting up house in the Dominican Republic. “I wanted to tell the story of the unsung leg-breakers of history,” says Ellroy. “Bad men in love with strong women.” The bad men include Dwight Holly, muscle for J. Edgar Hoover, Wayne Tedrow, ex-cop and drug-runner, and Donald Crutchfield, a kid with a penchant for peeping who becomes swept up in a tsunami of lethal clandestine activity. Prominent among the women is Joan Rosen Klein, an enigmatic, sexually ambivalent, leftist shadow figure. There’s also a gay, black undercover LAPD cop who easily constitutes one of Ellroy’s most intriguing and sympathetic creations. The novel runs over 600 pages. It’s dogged and ambitious, a labyrinth of conspiracy and conjecture through which Crutchfield functions as our sole convoy. It is at times almost comically grotesque—the cameos from Hoover and Howard Hughes especially—yet it also features some of the most emotionally textured interactions Ellroy’s ever penned.

Ellroy’s most famous for his ‘L.A. Quartet,’ which includes the novels The Black Dahlia and L.A. Confidential, though I’d argue his real masterwork is his 1996 memoir My Dark Places, in which Ellroy traces the investigation into his mother’s unsolved 1958 murder with chilling clinical detachment, describes his own desperately lonesome youth of window-peeping, drug addiction, Oedipal fixation and homelessness, and chronicles the re-opening of his mother’s case in partnership with Detective Bill Stoner, whose portrait is crafted with such elegance and compassion as to anticipate the most compelling of Ellroy’s later protagonists. My Dark Places is so astonishingly frank, its author’s public persona so shameless in every sense of the word, that Ellroy would seem every interviewer’s dream subject—you can ask this guy anything. But Ellroy’s also the emphatic architect of his own image. Descended from a long line of Scottish preachers, empowered by his considerable height, he holds court more easily than he converses. He's a practiced showman. He is also however a perfect gentleman, inquisitive, playful, observant, hilarious, and endearingly unabashed about his neediness. I truly enjoyed his company. I met him at Random House’s Toronto offices the morning after his triumphant Harbourfront Centre reading in early October.


JB: With Blood’s a Rover your fiction begins creeping into a period that you actually lived through as an adult. Does having personal memories of history change how you write about it?

James Ellroy: I was ten when this trilogy begins, 24 when it ends. So it’s my youthful cognizance. But frankly I was bombed. I was very self-absorbed. I recall history bopping around on the margins of my consciousness, but I didn’t care particularly.

JB: You expressed antipathy toward Martin Luther King when you were young.

JE: I was a dipshit kid. Now I revere Martin Luther King. He is in every way the moral voice of the trilogy. You live, you learn.

JB: You’ve endowed the character of Donald Crutchfield with an awful lot of the young James Ellroy—he lost his mother at ten, takes Dexedrine, does B&Es. Would you say this overlapping of characteristics your method of entry into the story?

JE: Crutchfield’s a real man. He’s a security consultant. He was a wheelman back in the ’50s and ’60s. He’s ten years younger in the book than he is in real life. We share certain passions. We interested in crime. We both love boxing, particularly the lower-weight, Latin fighters. He told me about the wheelman world and I thought this was something I couldn’t have invented. So I cut him in for some proceeds of the book and he gave me access to history I wouldn’t have had otherwise.

JB: But, for example, him mom being from Wisconsin, like yours?

JE: That’s all made-up.

JB: So was it important for you to give him some of your own history, neuroses and experiences?

JE: I was out to attack the iconography of my own life in a way that I’d never done before in fiction. He’s very much me. He’s a genius. He’s indefatigable. I did not go to the Dominican Republic and eat herbs and kill people. Or invade Cuba. Or disrupt the Democratic Convention in Chicago. I didn’t do those things. Did Crutch? Ask him. I think he’d probably avoid the question. He was a way in, and I began to see the viability of the construction early on because I’ve never written a dipshit kid. He’s impressionable. He’s malleable. I never say it in the book, but he’s never been laid.


JB: Crutch’s also a voyeur, as you once were. Voyeurism permeates the book. I think the dominant characteristic that you nurture in your depiction of J. Edgar Hoover’s also a deeply entrenched voyeurism.

JE: Hoover was a celibate homosexual. I swear to you I don’t think he ever had sex with man, woman, or beast. Or centipede. The idea that he would show up at the Waldorf Astoria in drag is preposterous. He was much too repressed. Much too circumspect. He liked to bullshit with big, rugged, good-looking men. But the idea of being a identified as homosexual would have been repugnant to them.

JB: To get back to voyeurism, do you find that by channeling this aspect of your persona into varied points in your story it enables you to rocket forward into a new kind of writing? Because in many ways Blood’s a Rover is departure from your earlier work.

JE: It is a departure, and I’m glad you mention it. It’s about the women. About women with children. It’s about the lost boy finding his way to some women who disperse and cut him loose in the end. The women are smarter than the men, stronger-willed, undeterred.

JB: So maybe what you’re doing is surpassing voyeurism. These female characters are more sculpted than you’d expect when the author’s viewpoint is that of an outsider looking in. Last night you spoke about how part of what accounts for the eight-year gap between The Cold Six Thousand and Blood’s a Rover has to do with recent tumult in your personal life, and the role that women played in your recovery.

JE: I had a crack-up. You think I’m skinny now. I was 20 pounds lighter. I couldn’t sleep. I’d been working way too hard for too many years. I’d neglected my marriage. I went on a book tour for five months. I went to five European countries and 32 cities in the US and Canada. I can’t sleep, I can’t sleep, I can’t sleep, and I’m just going full-boar, performing every night. I was losing it baaad. I was out to dinner with a colleague in Chicago, and I went to the bathroom and I forgot where I was. I thought I was in Toronto. I passed out in the Pfister Hotel the next day in Milwaukee. Meanwhile my marriage tanked, and damned if there wasn’t a woman named Joan, and damned if there wasn’t a woman named Cathy, who I changed to Karen in the book. I dug as deep as I could into my own life. Helen Knode, my ex-wife and best friend, said Cold Six Thousand was too rigorous in its presentation of a very complex text. Go back to your art. So this is a much more heartfelt book than the two that preceded it.

JB: There’s a tenderness that recalls moments in your early novels, but it seems conveyed with more conviction, complexity and vulnerability here.

JE: I’ve learned a lot about myself, and put everything I could into this.

JB: Was it important to inject a theme of racial reconciliation into Blood’s a Rover?

JE: I recall the times, and I recall a tenuous coming together of whites and blacks because it was cool.

JB: But you’ve got some of the unlikeliest guys imaginable making peace with the black community, with black women in particular. It’s interesting to arrive at a point in your body of work where racial animosity isn’t just a given, something casually accepted.

JE: You’re very deft. PC people want racist to be a defining characteristic, rather than a casual attribute. You’re supposed to like these guys despite their vile sentiments and vile expressions. Dwight Holly’s obsessed with racial invective because he feels guilt over killing Martin Luther King, because he’s a Klansman’s son and he knows it’s wrong. But all these guys need women to show them the way.


JB: Do you think you might be able to attract more female readers with this book?

JE: I don’t know about developing a significant female readership at this point in my career. It’s a very male vision. It’s an American vision. It’s a Protestant, heterosexual vision. Don’t look for me on Oprah. Don’t expect me to be invited to the Obama White House.

JB: Would you like to be invited to the Obama White House?

JE: I’d like to look around. I'd like to ask Obama if being President of the United States the biggest fucking blast on Earth. George W. Bush would laugh like hell. Bush’s dad would laugh like hell. Ronald Regan would love it. Clinton would be beside himself. I think Obama’s a stiff. I don’t think he’d get it. He’s tremendously self-important and he’s humourless. He has an infectious smile. I watch the media so little, so I only get snippets of him.

JB: You’ve often said you don’t read anymore, don’t really keep up with the cultural current, but I know you’ve at least read Don DeLillo. You’ve read Libra.

JE: 20 years ago, yes.

JB: I think it’s interesting that both you and DeLillo have created bodies of work around an idea of Americaness, not really pinpointing it, but circling it continually. When you read Libra, or any other DeLillo, did you feel a certain kinship?

JE: Libra knocked me on my ass. Flat on my ass. I’d never read DeLillo before. He’s very self-conscious. He’s more than a little self-important. He’s much, much more intelligent than me, much more learned. I may be a better writer moment-to-moment because I’m not that self-absorbed. And I am a vulgarian at my core. But that he gave us this portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald as this overachieving, grandiloquent American snoop before me gores my goat. That thesis of his, that the JFK assassination is the world’s most over-glamourized business dispute killing, that Jack mandated his own death by fucking with Castro, unleashing a tidal wave of forces, all of whom were professional killers—organized crime, crazy Cuban exiles, renegade CIA guys—who couldn’t get Castro, who had to kill somebody and it had to be him: it’s astonishingly deft and complex. The best explanation I’ve ever heard. I had a slight correspondence with Mr. DeLillo. We met by accident at an Amsterdam book fair and had breakfast. He’s a difficult man. He’s reserved. He’s very intellectual. He’s almost impenetrable. Yet I’m fond of him.

JB: I was also thinking about the way you evoke these mountains of files in Blood’s a Rover. This also echoes Libra, obsession embodied in paper and ink.

JE: It’s an epistolary novel. The characters are all file hoarders. That’s how you solve crimes: you read files. A shit detective will read a file ten times, a great detective 50. He’ll find something nobody ever found. There’s no postmodernism here. This is not a comment on me. This is just the way it was done then. An interviewer said this is a comment on the death of the analogue age. Beats me, I’m computer illiterate. I will do anything to simplify my life in order to think more efficaciously and live in bygone periods.

JB: I was surprised to learn you don’t do much first-hand research.

JE: I trust myself to extrapolate fictionally. I hire researchers to compile fact sheets and chronologies so I won’t write myself into error. I had a ten-second girlfriend in France the better part of two years ago. She was Spanish-fluent, and we were going to go to the Dominican Republic together. But what is the DR? Shitsville-fucking-USA. What, I want to go to some third-world slum? So I sent a friend of mine who’s an inveterate traveler. She came back with some slides, maps, history. She sat me down with her foldout computer. I looked at it for 45 minutes and said that’s enough. I got it. It’s fiction—you extrapolate. I knew about Joaquín Balaguer. I knew he was this tall.


JB: I was also surprised to learn that you’re a man of faith. Did this spring from your addiction recovery experiences in the ’70s?

JE: I’ve always been a man of faith. I had a Christian upbringing. People are astonished at this. It’s a happy way to live. I’m not a Creationist. I believe in evolution, as do most Christians. Like most Christians I don’t bomb abortion clinics, don’t beat up homosexuals, don’t lynch black people. If you look at my books there is always, however tenuously, a note of redemption struck at the end. Even if it’s a cliffhanger. The books are profoundly moralistic.

JB: I’m fascinated that you spend so much time in the very dark, frequently grotesque world of your books and still maintain faith in some cosmic order.

JE: I believe in love. I believe in the conjunction of men and women. I am as fuck-struck and sex-crazed as I was when I was 20. I just met an extraordinary woman who I think will be the love of my life and it’s an amazing experience. I blundered around a lot. I’m very fit at 61, and I’m back where I was at 14—obsessed with classical music and women. I don’t think about much else.

JB: What do you think about when you lie awake at night? Or have you beat the insomnia?

JE: I’ve gotten over my fear of death. I’ve largely gotten over panic attacks. Faith helps. It’s just suppressed emotions, repressed sexuality. It’s all that crazy shit that accumulates in your body. Although I’m not a freak, I have chased women compulsively for many years. But I always had the crazy idea that I’ll meet a woman one day and that’ll be it. And damned if it didn’t happen. Just when I thought it’s my karma to lie around in the dark waiting for women to call and then go out like a pitbull and attack the female race, it happened.

JB: When My Dark Places came out you were often quoted as saying that you don’t believe in closure. Has that changed?

JE: No. I think life is open-ended. I think the cosmos is open-ended. Of course, I could be wrong. We’ll see.

The postman that just keeps ringing: Jeirchow

Thing about a past is the more of one you’ve got the less you need to talk about it. Thus Jerichow begins with tight-lipped Thomas (Benno Fürmann) leaving a funeral in the company of two men, who take him to an old country house. The deceased, we soon learn, is Thomas’ mother, the house his inheritance. The men, we gather, are old pals who probably won’t be pals much longer. Thomas owes them money and payment’s long overdue. The pals take Thomas’ savings and leave him sapped and abandoned in his own yard. He takes a long nap, woken by nuzzling fawn the next morning. We learn he was a soldier in Afghanistan, now dishonourably discharged. He’s broke, his prospects decidedly narrow. He takes a job harvesting cucumbers.

Until something a little better comes along. By chance, Thomas meets Ali (Hilmi Sözer), a supplier to a number of snack bars in the region. He seems to have a solid business, impressive capital, a significant drinking problem, and a much younger, pretty blonde wife named Laura (Nina Hoss). Thomas helps Ali out of a jam and is rewarded with a job as Ali’s driver. Despite Thomas’ reticence, the men develop a certain masculine camaraderie. It’s a little one-sided, but Ali needs a friend he can trust because he sure can’t seem to trust his wife. Ali’s consumed by jealousy, yet, strangely, he also seems to almost encourage Thomas’ attraction to Laura, who’s even less voluble than Thomas. The three spend more and more time together. Ali drinks far too much. We wait, wondering how long it will take for lust to sprout fangs.

The only other film I’ve seen from German writer/director Christian Petzold is his 2007 feature Yella, which shares interesting similarities with Jerichow: an uneasy relationship between automobiles and water; an unexpected business opportunity on offer with a minimum of questions asked; a steady narrative progression built upon just the right number of expository clues to keep us intrigued; and Hoss, whose striking beauty is odd enough to encourage our interest and whose mere gaze feels at once vulnerable and guarded. The most distinguishing trait these films share however is extra-filmic. Other than the fact that it’s a personal favourite film of mine, I won’t tell you what the source material is for Yella here, since there’s a great pleasure to be found in recognizing it yourself, and anyway if you really want to know you can find out easily enough elsewhere. But I will tell you that the inspiration behind Jerichow is one of the great hard-boiled crime novels of the 20th century, one that’s been explicitly adapted into two Hollywood movies and surreptitiously drawn upon by many, many more.

Jerichow takes as its blueprint James M. Cain’s enduring and infinitely malleable 1934 novel The Postman Always Rings Twice, shaking it to life by focusing on different aspects of it than previous incarnations. The doomed scheme undertaken by the lovers out of desire and a healthy dose of greed occurs far later in the proceedings. There’s less time spent generating the sexual connection between Thomas and Laura—whose name even rhymes with Cain’s Cora—and more spent nurturing the peculiar pathos of Ali, who’s outsider status as a dark-skinned, rather unsavoury immigrant matches that of Cain’s Greek truck stop proprietor. Thus Petzold imbues Jerichow with a subtle commentary on modern German multiculturalism, making Ali seem destined to always be regarded an Other, a lonely man far from his homeland with a wife he essentially purchased—Laura, like Thomas, has a shady past that we’ll learn just enough about to help us understand what she’s willing to do to escape it. In an especially sly nod to Cain’s text, the first explosion of physicality between Thomas and Laura is so intense as to draw blood. Yet in one of numerous twists on Cain’s text, Petzold swaps which gender fissures the flesh of the other.

Petzold has crafted here a satisfying neo-noir, mining a seminal proto-noir narrative for his set-up while rigorously exploring the alternate routes it might take. His cool, unobtrusive style avoids expressionistic flourish and is not invested in any noir or neo-noir traditions. It seems to arise from an individual worldview and an affection for genre only exceeded by an investment in finding variations that speak to a new audience. Where it all ends is clever and unexpected, though it’s so terse it may leave some hungry for a denouement on par with Cain’s gritty end of the line. For others, the final scene might just feel like the perfect cliff to drop off of, a vertiginous plunge into the abyss that may itself inspire yet further ventures into this fecund territory of sordidness and longing.

Disappearing act: The Last Metro on DVD

There are numerous levels of masquerade to enjoy in François Truffaut’s The Last Metro (1980). Not only do we have a movie about the mounting of a play, but one in which virtually every character must deceive the others as a means of survival. This is Paris in 1942, and the Germans have moved in.

Actress Marion Steiner (Catherine Deneuve) has assumed management of the Théâtre Montmartre following the disappearance of her husband, the admired yet conspicuously Jewish director Lucas Steiner (Heinz Bennent). They rehearse a play called, aptly enough, Disappearance. It stars Marion and Bernard Granger (Gérard Depardieu), a doggedly persistent pussyhound and fresh transplant from the Grand Guignol. Just as the icy Marion maintains a secret life whose locus lies within the bowels of the Montmartre, Bernard’s amiability seems a cover for some conspiratorial activities that find him skulking in the alley. Of course the real conspiracy ’s been designed by Truffaut and co-scenarist Suzanne Schiffman, who only gradually reveal the ways in which Marion and Bernard are unwittingly aligned.

Oscar-nominated and César-showered, this was the most commercially successful, audience-friendly film of Truffaut’s late career. Yet there’s something quietly subversive about its tone. Rather than portray occupied France as a grim, claustrophobic and inherently corrupting environment, Truffaut, reflecting on his own childhood memories, paints it with unapologetic nostalgia. His attention to detail is often whimsical. A voice-over informs us that the theatres and cinemas were always full, the offer of warmth, escape and the community facilitated solidarity through spectatorship. The Nazi presence isn’t trivialized, yet neither is it dwelled on. It’s a potentially catastrophic nuisance that must be endured, and Truffaut’s Parisians, the compromised and courageous, do what they must. For all the ostensible desperation underlying The Last Metro, it’s played as elegant lark rather than grave drama.

Perhaps unsurprisingly given this approach, what makes Marion and Bernard memorable characters has everything to do with the actors and little with the material. Bernard especially feels only sketched out by the script, leaving a disproportionate share of the fleshing out in the thankfully capable, burly hands of Depardieu, whose presence, as always, is considerable. (I loved the scene where he tries to analogize his lust as being “like craving a hot croissant.”)

For me the dominant source of pleasure in The Last Metro however is simply its craftsmanship, the culmination of several talents having worked together over many years. The images, photographed by the great Néstor Almendros, are washed in a warm array of reds, oranges and browns. The quick fade-outs fall over clipped scene endings like a soft hush. There’s a wealth of sensuality generated from the mere—and oft repeated—glimpse of Deneuve’s legs as they’re caressed. And there is in this a portrait of a no-longer young but still tender marriage that’s rendered moving by a touch so light it almost has to be French.

Is This Desire?: Daniel Bergner takes readers for four illuminating walks on the wild side

There’s a school of ostensible common sense that tells us our sexuality is among the most banal aspects of our identities, but a modicum of experience tells us the particularities of individual desire can form the threshold of mystery, and of deeper understanding. You meet someone, you go to bed, you discover, to use a fairly common example, that they like it a little rough. Maybe a lot. How far do you follow their lead? Spanking? Choking? Bondage? Elaborately constructed rape scenarios? How dynamically does your desire tangle with theirs? Where does play end and perversion begin? How much of this is experimentation? How much is base need? What exactly is it that this person is chasing?

Daniel Bergner’s The Other Side of Desire: Four Journeys Into the Far Realms of Lust and Longing (Ecco, $32.99) penetrates the labyrinth of human desire not with the intention of carefully mapping it out so as to make future travels through its terrain safer. This slim, engrossing collection of four essays is concerned rather with the varying ways we cope or even thrive with the strange desires that drive us, that sometimes compel us to feel guilt or keep secrets, that separate us from the comfort of social norms. Hard conclusions are few, but the book brims with insight and compassion. However, unless you share some of the unusual proclivities reported, I can’t promise you’ll find it sexy. In fact, some of it is positively alarming.

Jacob Miller is the most harmless and, sadly, most traumatized by conformity of all Bergner’s subjects. Jacob has his quirks. An American, he really, really likes Toronto, which he considers some utopia of social harmony. And Jacob really likes feet. I know, the Toronto thing seems weirder, but it’s the foot thing that messes him up. He can’t even listen to a weather report promising however many “feet” of snow without going orgasmic. And he feels ashamed of it. Bergner’s relentlessly inquisitive but also respectful of Jacob’s fetish and his difficulty in accepting it—something certain readers may lose their patience with. (Bergner also uses this first essay to lubricate things tonally. Within the first few pages we know we’re not in for anything overly clinical, not after Bergner’s casual use of terms like cock, fuck, and, my personal favourite, one that Bergner perhaps coined: “footcunt.”)

Baroness is the presumably self-designated moniker of Bergner’s second subject, a female sadist—apparently a real rarity—and successful clothing designer, though her recent work has been tailored exclusively for latex. She maintains a happy marriage to a guy with a ponytail and zero interest in getting a brutal beating while getting off. Her other life is rife with activities that many might have a hard time defining as sex at all. She recounts the time she had a guy slathered in honey and roasted on a spit. “I feel like God,” says Baroness. “There is a stillness when I’m about to use the bullwhip, or my wand if I’m about to set someone on fire. Have you ever watched an animal that is scared, caught in headlights or conscious of your presence... you can feel time stopping.” Baroness can be hard to take, but Bergner’s open-minded immersion into her populous milieu is fascinating.

The book’s longest essay, one which originated in The New York Times Magazine, for which Bergner is a staff writer, concerns Roy, a man convicted for molesting his stepdaughter. It is the book’s most controversial and troubling foray into abnormal sex, and in some regards its most vital. Roy is sympathetic. His actual crimes were relatively minimal. He’s nothing if not regretful, seeks therapy for his urges and is engaged to an adult woman with whom he’s open about his past. But Bergner, who has two children, questions how much he can trust Roy, while asking equally difficult questions about memory and innocence and how the nature of our sexual experiences change as we reflect on them. This essay ends with the book’s most eloquent and haunting image, one of Roy literally trapped on a fence as he attempts to flee a scenario that threatens to mirror the one that he claims first drew him into his longing for preadolescent flesh.

The fourth and final of Bergner’s essays is so good it’s worth the asking price alone—it even has a happy ending. It’s a love story, about Laura, a young woman who loses her legs in a car accident, and Ron, an older photographer resolved to the fact that he’s attracted to the disabled. Laura is Ron’s perfect woman: smart, cute and legless. The mind reels at the conclusions one can draw from such a kink—I immediately thought of something I read years ago about the inherent misogyny of Gauguin’s Polynesian women, with their absent/incomplete limbs. But Bergner addresses these concerns shrewdly and concisely, all the while stressing the polemical value of Ron’s erotic photographs of disabled women.

In each of Bergner’s essays, he shifts dexterously between the narratives of his central subjects and, just as interestingly, those working to better understand and treat their cases. Most often, Bergner finds the available theories to be in direct conflict, and a consistent debate concerning nature versus nurture lies at the heart of the matter. Bergner also draws upon art and literature to elucidate the stories he tells. He discusses Nabokov’s Lolita, of course, with regards to Roy, but also the life and work of Surrealist sculptor/photographer Hans Bellmer (author of the lead-off image) and German writer/artist Unica Zürn in relation to Ron. (I found myself wishing Bergner would also discuss J.G. Ballard’s infamous novel Crash, made into the equally infamous David Cronenberg film, which has often been criticized as absurdly grotesque for its proposed equation between accident and injury and eros—a proposal which resonates intensely with Ron and Laura’s story.) Through it all there is much to learn about things like gender difference, genetics and cultural conditioning, yet there’s also a subtextual analysis of something more fluid and elusive: the psyche’s unwillingness to go with the program. When it comes to our intimate lives, The Other Side of Desire proves that each of us is stubbornly unique, and yet none of us are beyond some contact with the sublime.