Waiting for Katelbach: Criterion in a Cul-de-sac

Cul-de-sac (1966) opens with the stark image of a road bisecting a flat landscape and a car’s slow approach. Slow because it’s not being driven but rather pushed by Dickie (Lionel Stander), a loud, shirtless, ogre-like, middle-aged gangster with one arm shoved into a sling. Dickie’s Hitler-moustached, comparatively diminutive cohort, Albie (Jack McGowran), sits up front, quietly nursing a gut wound. They’ve somehow wound up at what looks like the very ends of the earth, following the telephone wires under the assumption that they must surely lead someplace worth going to. Echoing the dynamics of some of the director’s early short films (‘Two Men and a Wardrobe,’ ‘The Fat and the Lean’), the pair resembles some variation on Beckett’s tramps; indeed, they are waiting, not for Godot, but for the mysterious and equally elusive Mr. Katelbach to come and rescue them from perdition.

As the tide rises and threatens to swallow the car, Dickie finally discovers a looming sign of salvation straight out of myth: an 11th-century castle, the one, it turns out where Rob Roy was written, inhabited only by the nervous, pedantic, bald-headed George (Donald Pleasance) and the much younger, very attractive and frequently naked Teresa (Françoise Dorléac), the two of them married less than ten months and living out here with many chickens, a well-stocked wine cellar, a room full of George’s bad paintings of Teresa, and a fridge containing about 900 eggs. Dickie invades the castle, devours many eggs and bottles of wine with the table manners of a grizzly bear, and immediately asserts himself as a sort of paternal authority figure; George and Teresa comply with his demands, even when he poses no immediate threat (though one of the film’s most entertaining sequences finds Teresa responding to a surprise visit from friends by suddenly ordering Dickie around like he’s their butler; she calls him “James”). A very weird sort of improvised family unit falls into place, prompting a surprising intimacy between the two men, who get stinko and touchy-feely with each other, and discuss life and women. At one point George even shaves Dickie.

This essentially sums up Cul-de-sac’s premise: one odd couple meets another in a cold, vast, isolated setting. What unfolds is a film that snakes seamlessly between comedy, thriller, siege drama, horror, and social critique, all of it truly inspired and amounting to what is probably the most sui generis project of Roman Polanski’s career. Yet, scripted by Polanski and his long-time collaborator Gérard Brach, the film never feels indulgent or aimless. Every scene pulls us deeper into something. Everything moves toward its end.

I first saw Cul-de-sac when I was maybe 16, and it somehow came to emblematize something very seductive about the European 1960s for me. So, like a lot of people, I’ve been waiting for this one for a long time, and Criterion’s DVD/blu-ray release rewards patience. The film, shot in black and white (and countless shades of grey) by Gilbert Taylor, is riddled with haunting images, alternating between hot sunlight and gloom, and Criterion’s transfer is suitably gorgeous. The disc also features a terrific documentary about the film’s arduous production and a vintage British television program featuring a fascinating and comprehensive interview with Polanski just as he was enjoying his first taste of global renown.

African Cats: Disnifying the wild Savannah

The first thing you should probably know about African Cats is that, despite its being billed as such, in no way should this Disney production be mistaken for a documentary. (Okay, actually, the first and perhaps last thing you need to know is that it's Disney, but I'm not willing to wrap this up quite so patly.) Brimming with truly spectacular, no doubt arduously apprehended images of Kenyan flora and fauna, of mist, thunderheads and endless skies, the presence of the cameras recording the action are never acknowledged; though the film features plenty of fighting and killing, the bloody brutality and messy mating habits of the film’s subjects are discreetly eschewed; Harry Potter composer Nicholas Hooper’s heavily illustrative score emphasizes adventure movie theatrics over observational accentuation; and while Samuel L. Jackson’s colour commentary runs all over this thing there’s a conspicuous dearth of zoological facts to be gleaned. Unless you consider “water buffalos are grumpy” to be a statement of high educational value.

Assigning names to and even presuming to discern the thoughts of its cast of lions, cheetahs and crocodiles, (“To Mara, Fang is the best dad ever”), Jackson’s effortlessly charismatic voice-over anthropomorphizes these animals to the max, exploiting their abundant cuteness to explore, among other themes, the difficulty of single-parenting. (Incidentally, Fang’s not such an ideal patriarch after all: he hogs all the food, abandons his wife, and doesn’t say thanks when the lady lions defend the pride from a rival lion gang. The narrative imposed on these animals is not dissimilar to that of a gangster saga, replete with a conflicted moral code about traditional family values.) Highly questionable as this approach may be, there’s no argument that it can occasionally prove perfectly entertaining, such as in the scene where Jackson offers a sotto-voiced approval of a cheetah’s attack on a gazelle (“Successssss!”). It makes you wish co-directors Alastair Fothergil and Keith Scholey would have let Jackson off the leash a little more so he could go all the way and improvise a few funny voices for the animals. Alas, if only Disney didn’t cling to their irritating dictum to render everything at once tasteful and utterly shameless.

Winter's Bone: Hiding in the backwoods

Somewhere in the Ozarks, though it could be any number of places cradled beyond the fringes of modern prosperity, we can no doubt find communities just like this, where men are either absent or to be found cooking up drugs, driving trucks, or just getting wasted and mean and violent, while tough women do the grunt work, finding something to eat, holding down the fort—perhaps literally—and just generally negotiating for their family’s survival. Sometimes music is played on fiddles and guitars, and when this happens it’s just about the only time we see men and women enjoying each other’s company in Winter’s Bone, though surely there are other unseen interactions, love-making at least, that would explain how these people keep going, how one generation follows another.

Debra Granik and her co-scenarist Anne Roselini’s adaptation of Daniel Woodrell’s novel embraces both the harsh beauty of its setting and the utter bleakness of its portrait of life among these rural poor, their abandoned cars, muddy clothes, and burnt-down meth labs, their lack of work and surplus of weight. Unlike Ang Lee’s 1999 adaptation of Woodrell’s Ride With the Devil, it’s a fairly humourless movie, though I think its tone is imposed less by Granik’s striving for seriousness than by the needs of story and genre. This is a thriller driven by desperation. Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) is only 17, but she alone is responsible for raising her much younger siblings. Her mother’s incapacitated and her father who knows where, maybe dead. She needs to find out, because he’s apparently skipped bail and the family’s property could be taken away. Ree spends the movie going from one unfriendly door to another in search of someone, anyone, who can help, even her extended family, not necessarily an advisable resource in this place where blood ties can lead to bloody conflicts and certain households maintain a mafia-like grip on the meager local economy. “Never ask for what ought to be offered,” Ree instructs her little brother, which is another way of saying steer clear of anything that feels like less than straight-ahead generosity.

Yet, while there are definitely times in Winter’s Bone when the menace feels overcooked, generosity is not alien to this place or to this story. Though Ree gets threatened, beat-up, and abandoned, she also has a neighbour that lends her feed for her horse; a friend saddled with a small child and a dink for a husband who nonetheless gives her a ride when she needs it; an uncle’s girlfriend who gives her a joint to chill out after a terrifying encounter in the uncle’s kitchen; she meets one of her dad’s girlfriends, played by Twin Peaks’ Sheryl Lee, who tries to give her a useful lead on dad’s whereabouts (so that’s what would have become of Laura Palmer had she lived); she’s saved from possible death by that same very scary aforementioned uncle (John Hawkes, a near ghost of a man); she’s given some good advice from a US military recruiter who can see that she, like so many in her part of the country, is considering the army just for the money.

Ree’s already proven her resilience before the story even begins by caring her family and home and teaching the kids to fend for themselves, even to hunt and skin squirrels if occasion calls. “Do we eat those parts?” her little brother asks, looking at the squishy, steaming guts. “Not yet,” Ree answers flatly. Ree will prove her fortitude again and again, discovering inner resources she probably didn’t even know she had along the way, and Lawrence gives a tremendous performance, one that feels like pure adrenaline with no time to waste on ingratiating winks. But the story rewards Ree’s almost mythical testing of will, not with anything like a fantasy happy ending but with the simple reassurance that when things go from bad to worse, with a little bit of luck, someone will be there who gives a shit, and will extend any free hand they can.

"There is such a thing as the bliss of evil...": Werner Herzog on The Bad Lieutenant

Call it a twisted little demonstration of the vagaries of karma. Corrupt cop saves guy from drowning and gets saddled with chronic, agonizing back pain for his efforts. Cop is celebrated as a hero while descending deeper into corruption, gambling, gobbling narcotics swiped from the property room, cutting deals with crooks, and generally harassing, threatening, and soliciting sexual favours from civilians. Plus, he’s a total showoff. But then, just when it seems things can’t get any worse, that he’ll never crawl out of the pit he’s dug for himself, everything starts to go his way. Enemies are eliminated. Creditors become pals. Problems disappear. His previously flailing football team even wins a game. We’re left with the possibility that he may be reformed, though it’s difficult to tell. He remains prone to hallucinatory visions of nature, and the lure of chemical therapy never quite dissipates.

Who is Terence McDonagh? He’s played by Nicolas Cage, so we already know not to make presumptions. He’s the titular antihero of The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call: New Orleans, which suggests that this sordid tale we’re watching unfold is just one of many pit stops along some longer road to perdition. Of course it also suggests the movie’s somehow related to Abel Ferrara’s cult classic Bad Lieutenant (1992), though connections are limited to their both featuring lieutenants, and the lieutenants are really bad. Perhaps it’s most useful to regard Terry as, above all, a Werner Herzog protagonist, a terminally marginal male, enigmatic, ecstatic, tainted with hubris, capable of violence, witness to revelations or mirages, a tormented refugee from the dark wilderness of the subconscious. Of course, this is also a cop movie, with a lot of perfectly corny generic cop movie shenanigans. The weirdest thing about The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call: New Orleans, even weirder than it’s absurdly double-coloned mouthful of a title, is that Herzog, author of Aguirre: Wrath of God (72), Stroszek (77), Fitzcarradlo (82) and, more recently, Grizzly Man (05) and Encounters at the End of the World (07), directed it at all. Yet the result is a deliciously improbable success, a shotgun marriage of off-Hollywood exploitation and Herzog’s eccentric, romantic, doom-laden outsider art.

It’s also the marriage of Herzog and Cage, who gives one of his most captivating and imaginative performances, steeped in gleeful pathology, seemingly seized by some invisible force that compels him to do things like terrorize a little old lady in a wheelchair with an oxygen tank. He waits for her hidden behind a door, shaving. Herzog and Cage introduced the movie to a very excited capacity crowd at the Ryerson Theatre during last fall’s Toronto International Film Festival, where both The Bad Lieutenant and Herzog’s My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done had their Canadian premiere. Cage played it cool while Herzog played the showman, a position to which he’s naturally suited. In that unmistakable Bavarian-accent, Herzog merrily boasted about how “Herzog delivers the goods!” He explained how he instructed Cage to “turn the pig loose,” and Cage dutifully complied. Is Cage the new Klaus Kinski? Is Eva Mendes, who plays Terry’s call-girl girlfriend, the new Eva Mattes? Such comparisons do injustice to either party, but it’s clear that this new, increasingly almost multiplex friendly Herzog has found a fresh and reliable muse for his lessons in darkness, an actor who also just happens to be one of the biggest box office draws in the world.

When offered time with Herzog I was thrilled, even though the interview would only run about 25 minutes and would be a roundtable rather than one-on-one. This meant that I’d be sharing Herzog with a handful of other writers, including some who appeared shy of legal driving age and a kindly older lady who a tendency to interject with questions that have nothing to do with the topic at hand. Herzog was utterly charming, irreverent, frequently hilarious, playfully aggressive, and occasionally evasive. It made for a surprisingly funny group discussion. The first young woman to ask Herzog about The Bad Lieutenant got the ball rolling with an ill-advised question the director eagerly pounced upon. I think he made her a little nervous.
“How did you make this remake your own?” she asks.
“Explain remake,” Herzog counters, his eyes narrow, fixed dead on his subject. His body is motionless. “What is the remake?”
“Well it was already… Cause, I mean…”
“Explain it.”
“Cause, uh…”
“You are the one who is challenged now.”
“Cause it’s based on a film by Abel Ferrara.”
“No it is not. Explain that. How is it based on a film by Abel Ferrara?”
“Cause it basically follows a similar… It’s based on a screenplay that was…”
“It is not. What is similar there?”
“Okay… Yeah… Nothing.”
“So why do you call it a remake? Why use the term? Because it’s floating around somewhere.”
“Okay, I’ll ask another question…”
Herzog smiles and sits back and gestures for everyone to relax. “It was just a title that was owned by the producers,” he explains. “They hoped to open some sort of franchise. That is the only connection.”

I get my first chance to pose a question. I try something I’d never normally use as an opener, but the clock’s ticking. “I was thinking that the protagonists in both The Bad Lieutenant and My Son, My Son, like many of your protagonists, are men who commit terrible transgressions yet are seized by unnerving visions of the natural world. I wonder if you see these visions as somehow being redeeming qualities in these characters, or if these visions are what drew you to these stories.”

“I don’t think in such abstract terms,” Herzog replies. “There was a good story in both cases. I didn’t really make much choice. The film projects that I do always come like burglars at night. Like a home invasion! I just get them out. It is legitimate that you ask a question like that, but there are much simpler reasons why I do it. The Bad Lieutenant, a wonderful opportunity to work with Nicolas Cage. We kept an eye on each other for three decades. It never occurred to either of us that we should work together, and then, almost at the same moment, we thought this was an outrage. We started to try to find out about each other. I stumbled onto this screenplay and that same day I got a call from Australia from Nicolas Cage and within less than 60 seconds we were in business.”
“Do you feel any personal connection with these characters?”

“I only know that both are welcome new members to my family of characters. They’re comfortably seated at the table. Your question is certainly correct even if I don’t spontaneously connect to the way of thinking.”

Another writer asks about Cage, in what way was his performance a revelation?
“It’s not a revelation,” says Herzog. “I just pushed him to his limits. Just by my standing next to the camera and lingering there, he knew he had to go for it. He knew this was not a boy-scout field trip! But I’m not one who torture his actors like Kubrick would have done with 120 takes, completely senseless. I shoot two, three times and then it’s over.”
The kindly older lady interjects. “Woody Allen likes one or two shots. He likes to go home at 5:00, he says.”
“Well, he’s lazy bum,” says Herzog. “I’m not finishing my days early because I want to go home by 5:00. I finish it because I know this is the best we could have done.”

A young fellow asks about William Finkelstein’s script for The Bad Lieutenant, noting how much it seems like Herzog’s work, especially the iguana sequences, and lines like “Do fish dream?”
“That’s all mine,” admits Herzog. “And the entire beginning. I said to Billy Finkelstein that the beginning is boring. In his original screenplay the bad lieutenant rescues someone who is suicidal and jumps on the tracks of an incoming subway train. So what? I said we have to start it completely vile and debased and evil from the first moment, so I invented the flooded prison tract and they’re betting over how quickly the forgotten prisoner is going to drown. Also, I wanted to have more substance to the relationship between the young woman and the bad lieutenant, so I wrote the scene with the pirate treasure and the sterling spoon he gives to her as if he were handing over his whole childhood dreams. And of course the iguana and dancing souls, that’s all mine. But it was a very nice collaboration. I liked Billy so much I gave him a part as a gangster. He’s the one whose soul is dancing, with the pink jacket.”
“That’s a very impressive performance,” I blurt.
“Yes,” agrees Herzog. “I make everyone good.”
Everyone laughs.

The young woman who asked the first question returns. “In the movie you see Nicolas Cage being rewarded even though he’s constantly behaving badly. Do you feel that way about American society? That bad behaviour is constantly being rewarded?”
“We must be cautious,” says Herzog. “We are into movies. Nicolas asked me, ‘Why is he so bad?’ And I said don’t bore me with conceptual questions. And he laughed! He said, ‘Is it his childhood? Is it drugs? Is it New Orleans?’ I said to him, ‘There is such a thing as he bliss of evil. Let’s go for that.’ He just nodded and understood what I meant. But don’t draw too many connections to real life and real society. This is movies.”
Another writer says, “You’ve said that fiction is more interesting than truth…”
“No,” Herzog interjects. “Fiction is more interesting than fact. Truth is something way beyond all that.”
“Yet in terms of shooting locations,” she continues, “you vastly prefer a real city with a real story to a studio where you can control everything. Is that because the fact of landscape is inescapable?”
“I’ve never been a person who would ever like to work in a studio,” says Herzog. “Working in New Orleans was quite fascinating. I think the screenplay was written originally to be set in New York or Detroit, and the producer Avi Lerner was very apologetic and said, ‘Werner, we have to look after money, could you consider to do it in New Orleans because we have these fantastic tax incentives in Louisiana?’ I said, ‘Sure, wonderful! Can it get any better? Yes, let’s move to New Orleans!’ And what I didn’t know was that Nicolas Cage was pushing very hard to have it be in New Orleans because he loves the city. He speaks of renewal or being reborn in New Orleans. Whatever he actually means by that is certainly of deeper meaning for him. You can see that city is in a way a leading character. I avoided the clichés, Bourbon Street and voodoo and jazz musicians and you name it. It’s a very bleak…”
“And good restaurants,” says kindly older lady. There is a long pause. No one knows what to say. Kindly older lady breaks the silence. “But I don’t understand bliss of evil. I’ve never felt very much bliss of evil. I’ve felt bliss of good.”
“You are speaking of personal life,” Herzog says to her with a warm smile. “I’m speaking of movies. It’s figments of fantasies. We have to make a distinction. You have probably lived a blessed life so far. The bad lieutenant lives elsewhere.”

Rough crossing: Sin Nombre

A revved-up hybrid of City of God and El Norte, nurtured and probably tamed by the Sundance Institute, US writer/director Cary Joji Fukunaga’s debut Sin Nombre, or Nameless, may not be as generic as its title suggests, what with its impressive landscapes, its novel and genuinely chilling brutality, and its surprisingly exquisite score (courtesy of Hollywoodland composer Marcelo Zarvos). But this infernal tour of Mexico’s decidedly unfriendly railway lines and its most grotesque nests of rural gang violence is nevertheless an obedient child of Hollywood convention. Amidst all the fighting, fleeing and filleting onscreen, another battle is being waged between a young filmmaker’s vigorous desire to invoke gritty, incendiary realism and increasingly frequent injections of sentimentalist deus ex machina. As we charge toward the climax there’s not much ambiguity surrounding which of these opposing forces will win out.

Willy, a.k.a. Casper (Edgar Flores), at first seems to represent just about the worst thing in his local Southern Chiapas branch of the horrifyingly vicious Mara Salvatrucha, founded decades ago in Los Angeles. He may not have erased his face with tribal tattoos like the gang’s ultra-scary alpha male leader—who provides us with the creepiest image of parenthood since Mike Tyson graced the Father’s Day issue of GQ—but as we meet him he’s ushering in a new member that still looks a couple of years shy of puberty. Sure, Smiley (Kristyan Ferrer) may have ended up in Mara Salvatrucha anyway, but if Willy didn’t recruit him at such a tender age the kid might have at least had a chance. Smiley’s initiated into their fold in the customary style: he’s ordered to kill an unarmed and terrified member of a rival gang held captive for just such a ritual. Smiley’s victim will soon be chopped up into dog food, just more grist for the mill, but the experience seals Smiley’s fate. Willy, whose tattooed tear is Fukunaga’s little giveaway that he’s really not such a bad egg, will steadily move toward redemption. Things for Smiley on the other hand will only get worse.

Despite the high drama surrounding all that unfolds around Willy, Sayra (Paulina Gaitan) will emerge as our real protagonist. Her trajectory will take her from her Honduran village, hopping freight trains northward in the hope of making it all the way to New Jersey, where some family and a presumably better life awaits. Where the movies have more commonly explored the hazards of clawing one’s way onto US soil, the illegal migrants in Sin Nombre are clearly lucky if they even make it that far. Willy and Sayra will cross paths, and once he’s made a violent break with Mara Salvatrucha, Willy will become Sayra’s designated protector, even though she may be in more danger what with Willy’s ex-comrades on his tail. There could even be a love interest here, but you have to give credit to Fukunaga for steering clear of cursory romance in the midst of a story to desperate and blood-soaked to really make room for it. It’s one of the few deviations from cliché Fukunaga manages to hold onto.

With its images of migrants clinging to nocturnal trains like flies on a wounded animal, Sin Nombre leaves a deep impression, a sense of the trail of fear and ambition that branches off into the distance far beyond the relative serenity of the US/Mexico border. Above all, we’re given here a striking portrait of a world still on the move against all odds, of the Americas as a largely lawless wilderness where shelter is either absent or shrouded in bureaucracy and the worst kind of opportunism is able to flourish. In a way it’s almost a better documentary than it is a drama. It makes you wonder how Fukunaga will distinguish himself from here on out. Outsiders have often made great storytellers, but this gringo brought just a little too much luggage with him on his travels south.

Waste, disposal: Gomorrah

Based on the 2006 Italian non-fiction bestseller that made its journalist author Roberto Saviano into both a literary sensation and fugitive from the mob at the age of 26, Gomorrah is a sprawling crime film involving a range of characters and narratives linked via their individual contributions to the poisoned ecosystem of the Camorra, the powerful, organized syndicate whose influence seeps deep into the social fabric of its native Naples, of Italy, and beyond. As directed by Matteo Garrone, this is a film that weaves its way through an immense grid of institutionalized crime as though it were charting an infernal floor plan in time. It’s an epic without the token grandiosity. An epic of pathos? Anyway, something uniquely monstrous, cold and fascinating, and not to be missed.

Waste and disposal form the bedrock of Gomorrah. The proliferation both literally and figuratively throughout is a product of the film’s structural and thematic elegance. That life is cheap here is made clear from the slaughter in the spa that kicks things off. The motives behind these killings are left unexplained because, really, what difference does it make? The carnage is conveyed flatly, the camera nonplussed by the display of a few more bodies being tossed into the mafia’s self-generating meat grinder. Garrone’s approach to the material emphasizes the network and durability of crime, not its allure, because its allure isn’t even necessary in a milieu that dutifully perpetuates its existence. The world of Gomorrah is deterministic. There is no ethnic charm. There is no glamour, no beauty, no opera to the violence, no catchy tunes or flamboyant editing or orgasmic geysers of blood. But there’s plenty horror and insight, too, or at the very least inspired exposé. You have to admire Martin Scorsese for coming on as presenter of Gomorrah for its North American release. It’s in many ways the antithesis of the sort of exhilarating, frenetic bloodletting found in several of Scorsese’s most celebrated films, but Scorsese’s smart enough to recognize that this is precisely why the film is vital. By taking distance from its subject, by capturing it in a documentary style conventionally alien to the genre, Gomorrah excavates the myth of the crime syndicate in a way I don’t think we’ve seen before.

There are two young punks (Marco Macor and Ciro Petrone) under the idiotic belief that they can work independently and even in opposition to the Camorra. They delight in stealing a secret stash of heavy weaponry, and a memorable sequence finds them stripping to their underpants and running along some sludge-lined shoreline blowing random shit up. There is a dour money handler (Gianfelice Imparato) who makes the rounds of the dismal housing complex that functions as the film’s nucleus, collecting and doling out payments. There’s a 13-year-old (Salvatore Abruzzese) who feels ready to be recruited into the Camorra, allowing himself to be shot in the chest while wearing a battered old ballistic vest. “Now you’re a man,” he’s told afterwards. He seems so young, but his youth’s put in perspective by a bleakly comical scene in which a large crew of little kids are employed to drive trucks whose pedals they can’t reach and whose dashboards they can’t see over. In one of the film’s most surprising narratives we find a compromised tailor (Salvatore Cantalupo) who risks his life to teach a warehouse full of Asians the finer points of haute design and construction. He’s escorted to the training facility in the trunk of a car. The tailor was for me the closer thing the film offers to identification, perhaps because of the character’s almost singular thread of integrity, perhaps for the simple fact that Cantalupo gives such a curiously detailed and intriguingly enigmatic performance.

My favourite part of Gomorrah however involves a businessman (Toni Servillo) and his apprentice (Carmine Paternoster) who find locations for their hired crews to illegally dump toxic waste. It’s rare to find modern stories that explore waste disposal as a major theme, through Don DeLillo’s Underworld serves as a brilliant prototype. Where we put the colossal heaps of poisonous trash is arguably one of the great taboo subjects, its invisibility—at least in wealthy countries—being essential to our false sense of peace with our surroundings. It’s an inspired metaphor that manifests here in some awesome and troubling imagery. The burial of undesirable matter is brutally echoed toward the film’s end, when the bodies of undesirable men are disposed of through similar means. I suppose the only hope we’re given that this state of affairs might change comes through the implication that, sooner or later, everything poorly interred will rise to the surface.