Cronos: moving parts

An aging seller of antiques is bitten by a strange device, begins to thirst for blood, and is rendered immortal, yet the word “vampiro” is never uttered in Cronos (1993), allowing our experience of the film to expand far beyond the limits of genre or myth. This is a film where the balance of explicit and occult knowledge is kept carefully calibrated at all times. We know only what’s essential, even if what’s essential sometimes includes the seemingly trivial. Every character, even the most minor, is endowed with distinct attributes, eccentricities and preoccupations, most all of them concerning the imperfections of the flesh, while at the film’s centre lies an insectile machine inexplicably compelled to merge with flesh, blood and bone, luring all those who make contact with it into fathomless addiction.

When I first saw Cronos I was delighted to discover a horror film that seemed to share the labyrinthine thematic network of David Cronenberg’s corporeal cinema, so rich as it is in cerebral metaphor and arresting, guttural imagery. Yet Guillermo Del Toro, Cronos’ writer and director, would prove to possesses his own unique imaginative universe, one which embraces the fabulous and the supernatural in ways antithetical to Cronenberg’s materialist sensibility. Cronos was but the first giant step in a prolific career that would quickly, and rather deftly shift between the commercial and the personal. Nevertheless, even after The Devil’s Backbone (01) and Pan’s Labyrinth (06), Cronos remains my favourite Del Toro film. It’s not as lush nor as honed as the later work, but it has a shaggy perfection all its own, and that special air of an exuberant, exacting young artist trying everything for the first time. Del Toro has said that the worst thing a filmmaker can have is everything he or she needs, and maybe there’s something about Cronos that generates some extra electricity out of sheer hunger and determination. The film is now available on DVD and Blu-ray from Criterion.

So Jesús Gris (the great Federico Luppi, giving a marathon performance) unknowingly falls victim to the 400 year-old device. It comes to him by accident, latching onto first his hand and then his heart, its golden claws inserting themselves into his skin. Thenceforth desirous of human blood, Gris is haunted by need, and like any junky he endures humiliating scenes to fulfill this need, such as licking some stranger’s nosebleed off the marble floor of a public washroom. Gris is hunted by one Ángel de la Guardia (Ron Perlman, so funny and precise in his bits of behaviour), the nephew of a dying industrialist (Buñuel regular Claudio Brook) who knows of the device’s powers and wants it for himself. But Ángel would just as soon never find the device; he’s waited too long already for his uncle to die and leave him the generous inheritance which will finally allow him to get that nose job he’s dreamt of for so long.

Death and vanity loom over everything in Cronos, and the film brims with ghoulish humour. It also features moments of touching connection between Gris and his eight year-old granddaughter Aurora (Tamara Shanath). Aurora speaks little and rarely drives the action, yet she might be the film’s real heroine, hiding the device in her teddy bear—just like little Pearl hides the money in The Night of the Hunter (55)—and gradually learning to let go of her grandparent as a child’s first brush with death. That sense of loss and wonder is what lingers in the film’s final moments, and most especially its closing dedication to Del Toro’s grandmother, their relationship having inspired the one shared by Gris and Aurora. It’s a satisfying, somber resolution to a captivating journey through morbid pursuits, one that in all its errant Catholicism, its peculiar relationship to the United States, its wily suspicions about its colonialist past, and its inventive violence, could perhaps have only come from Mexico.

The Tourist: Searching for Mr. Wrong

The movie opens with all these guys following Angelina Jolie around with cameras, scrutinizing her every move, so you could be forgiven for wondering if you’re watching a documentary. But no, this is Paris, Jolie speaks with an English accent, she receives an envelope with cryptic instructions, and we get about 40 different camera angles just to cover a half-minute of action—and if those clues don’t assure you that we’re in the realm of pure hokum, the deliriously fussy, overbearing, almost instantly annoying James Newton Howard score will. The director is Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, who helmed The Lives of Others. Like that earlier film, this one is heavy on surveillance. Consequence, not so much.

You could shave off the first 15 minutes of The Tourist and just start the thing with Jolie’s expensively tailored mystery vixen approaching Johnny Depp on a train, since he is, I think, our protagonist, or at least steals every scene from Jolie. She’s given precious little to do aside from look gorgeously worried; Depp, bearded and slightly husky-looking, at least gets to be funny and bumblingly charming. He’s terrific in their early exchanges. If only he and everyone else didn’t have to speak so many of their thoughts aloud. Redundancies accumulate, the bloat becoming near-palpable by the movie’s mid-point. I haven’t seen Anthony Zimmer, the French film The Tourist is based on, but if nothing else the original was at least shorter.

So Jolie uses Depp, a Wisconsin schoolteacher meandering through Europe on holiday, to mislead British fuzz and some nasty thugs led by a billionaire Steven Berkoff. The heavies all want to track down Jolie’s ex-lover to collect some six-figure debts—could Depp be that rascal in disguise? The Tourist is a Wrong Man movie, playing like Polanski Lite or neo-Hitchcock, with its doubles, snarling villains and chase scenes through the lovelier canals of Venice. If I sound grumpy it’s only because the movie had every reason to be fun, if forgettable. Unfortunately it’s far too dumb to generate suspense, and the deeply predictable “unpredictable” ending is wildly nonsensical. The movie also fails to offer us a single truly compelling character, one we can believe in, even on the story’s own flimsy terms. Jolie’s character wears this medallion on a bracelet that features the two heads of Janus. She says her mom gave it to her to remind her that everyone has two distinct faces. But after watching The Tourist, two sounds luxurious. Me, I would have settled for one.

Faces and names: Johnny Handsome on DVD

Dark Passage

There’s this point in the wonderfully dream-like, and, to my mind, widely underrated Dark Passage (1947) when the movie casts off the single point-of-view through which the entire first third is rendered, and the protagonist, Vincent Parry, finally appears before the camera. We knew all along it was Humphrey Bogart, but it’s only from this point on that Parry looks like Bogart. After escaping from prison, Parry has surgery that transforms him from some beefy guy with a moustache into Bogart, and I’ve always been fascinated by this process through which the protagonist suddenly becomes the movie star, by the implication that the face we all know was only hiding, that it had to be arrived at, to be earned, in order to be introduced into this bizarre crime story.

Though I hadn’t seen it since I was a kid, the thing I always remembered about Johnny Handsome (89) was that it operated on this same principle. Mickey Rourke was a big star at the time, a different sort of actor than Bogart, yet one who’d inherited something of Bogart’s persona. Johnny Handsome doesn’t hide Rourke from view for its first third, but it does obscure Rourke’s visage behind prosthetic bone distortions and tumours. Johnny’s a career criminal who gets nabbed when his cohorts in a New Orleans coin shop heist betray he and his best friend, the only person who ever loved him. Once incarcerated, an attempt is made on Johnny’s life. While in hospital, Johnny meets Forest Whitaker’s benevolent Dr. Fisher, who has a theory that “surgical rehabilitation can be a deterrent to criminal recidivism.” He’s trying to tell Johnny that giving him a normal face might change him into an upstanding citizen.

So the moment finally arrives when the cruelly dubbed Johnny Handsome becomes the genuinely handsome Rourke. Of course, it’s less shocking than it’s perhaps meant to be—the brilliance of the collaboration between Rourke and the movie’s talented make-up artists winds up making Johnny nearly as charismatic and expressive when deformed and ugly as when he looks like Mickey Rourke. No matter, Johnny Handsome is an efficient and gripping neo-noir, one of the best such works from Walter Hill’s most active decade as director. It’s now available on DVD and Blu-ray from Maple.

The characters in Hill’s earlier The Driver (78) are only ever identified by their vocations, ie: “the Detective,” as though actual names would be too sissy. This conceit served to emphasize archetype over personality, and, accordingly, the characters’ actions adhered strictly within the dictates of their roles. Johnny Handsome is only slightly looser in this regard. The cast is amazing, but their characters are essentially resigned to the very determinism that Dr. Fisher is crusading against. Thus an extra-mean Lance Henriksen and a colossally haired Ellen Barkin are really bad bad guys and stay really bad until the end. Johnny was always a man of honour drawn to crime and stays a man of honour drawn to crime. Morgan Freeman has the only role that’s trickier to discern, playing a laid-back, rather Satanic cop who wants to nail all the crooks, Johnny included, and wants let the crooks themselves do all the heavy lifting. He basically just hangs around, massaging the wheels of fate until he gets precisely what he wants—and man, does he look good in a hat.

The pleasures of Johnny Handsome are in watching fatalism run its course in the most dynamic way possible. There’s style without any fancy stuff, brute violence without gratuitous gore, sex without skin. Like the surgeons who carve the unwanted flesh and sinew from Johnny’s face, Hill sculpts the movie down to pure muscle, until it’s the leanest Don Siegel movie Don Siegel never made. Who knows? Maybe if you shaved off Hill’s beard, did a little nip ‘n’ tuck, and sent him to the gym for six weeks, he’d turn out to actually be Don Siegel.

Dead on arrival: Jonah Hex

A long time ago, in the days before plastic surgery, confederate super-solider Jonah Hex (Josh Brolin) sees his family roasted alive at the hands of the super-evil Quentin Turnbull (John Malkovich) before being left dangling from a cross with a nasty facial disfigurement that will make the consumption of beverages forever cumbersome. As the days pass Hex gets so close to expiry that even when the noble Crow Indians revive him he retains the ability to converse with the dead, a gruesome parlor trick that comes in handy in his new vocation as half-zombie bounty hunter. So Johan Hex is a supernatural western of sorts, based on the DC comic that I only remember because my uncle Ricky used to give me his copies after he’d read them, along with his old Sgt. Rocks. (Is it just me, or did only middle-aged bachelors buy all those war and western comics back in the 1980s?)

Jonah Hex was directed by the guy who brought us Horton Hears a Who. It was written by William Farmer and the guys behind the Crank franchise, which is only slightly more indicative as to what’s in store. Jonah Hex is about as dumb as the Crank movies, and it shares the Crank movies’ particular brand of exaggerated, cartoonish violence, yet it has nothing of the go-for-broke audacity or absurd digressions that arguably distinguish the Cranks somewhat from the rest of your sub-Guy Ritchie actioners. There’s not much going on in Jonah Hex, which results in its merciful brevity—it runs about an hour-twenty—yet also results in a paucity of characterization that renders the potentially colourful leads one-dimensional and shuttles those handy Crow Indians so far into the background as to make them crude functionaries, yet another variation on the “magical negro,” merely happy to help the white hero along his journey before dissolving back into the woods.

The score could be described as Metallica meets Morricone, though once having met they apparently have to say to one another. Even under rubber Brolin maintains charisma, yet he really has little to do other than grunt and take heaps of punishment. Malkovich has a new funny wig to add to his collection but otherwise is unremarkable in another payday villain role. Megan Fox plays the prostitute who apparently spends her free time at the rifle range and it’s true she has very nice legs. Her close-ups however are only one of many shots in the movie that seem digitally enhanced for absolutely no reason at all. At least Michael Fassbender has some fun as an inventively tattooed thug.

Nocturnes: Kazuo Ishiguro's variations on a theme always amabile, rarely animato

In Kazuo Ishiguro’s most widely admired novels, such as The Remains of the Day, When We Were Orphans or his most recent, Never Let Me Go, memory’s vice grips conspire with some essential inward tendencies within his narrators to gradually reveal intricate discrepancies between the personal story being relayed and the larger story of the world surrounding. Unreliable narrators constitute a well-mined trope in fiction, but Ishiguro has raised it to a highly particular, melancholy art though crisp, concise language, inventive narratives, a sly manipulation of genres as varied as science-fiction and mystery, and, most especially, an unusual willingness to immerse himself so fully into the minds of his protagonists. I’ve pretty much adored everything he’s written, and greatly admired its daring variation, so I guess I’ve set the bar pretty high.

Still, with Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall (Knopf, $29.95), Ishiguro’s first story cycle, I began to wonder if the one literary boundary Ishiguro’s genius can’t quite traverse is the one that separates the needs of long-from from the short. The stories in Nocturnes are each perfectly absorbing and worth the relatively brief investment required, but taken either as separate components or as a whole—which is presumably the author’s intention—they never quite ascend to Ishiguro’s established heights of emotional complexity. As with all Ishiguro’s work, these stories—of vagabond third wheels trying to interpret the cryptic tensions that exist between couples; of musicians who never quite make it as big as they’d hoped; of lives in stasis contrasted with lives in upheaval—observe the precariousness of nostalgia and the pitfalls of poor communication with knowingness. The problem might simply be that few of these characters truly come to life so as to make that knowingness resonate deeply.

In ‘Crooner,’ Jan, a cheerful young Polish guitarist living in Venice, plays for tourists on the piazza circuit, one of whom being Tony Gardner, a 60ish, once-famous American vocalist. He asks Jan to play backup during a moonlight serenade for Garnder’s wife Lindy. They discuss strategies for injecting specificity of feeling into one’s performances, cultivating those unuttered mental images that imbue one’s playing with texture. What Jan has in his mind—memories of his mother taking consolation in Gardner’s records during bleak days in Communist Poland—differs greatly with what Gardner has in mind—memories of a marriage that for his wife has essentially been a career move. Jan says of his playing: “I tried to make it sound like America, sad roadside bars, big long highways, and I guess I was thinking of my mother, the way I’d come into the room and see her on the sofa gazing at her record sleeve…” Each is lost in private, disparate reveries, but if Jan’s reverie is slightly clichéd, I can’t say I ever bought into Gardner’s story at all. Like a number of the larger-than-life Americans found in Nocturnes, he feels like a conceit.

Lindy Garder however is more developed, particularly since she’s able to return later in ‘Nocturne,’ the fourth story, which—get this—finds Steve, a struggling Los Angeles saxophonist, agreeing to allow the rich man who stole his wife from him to pay for Steve’s plastic surgery, a dubious effort to help forward the unhandsome session player’s lagging career. Steve winds up spending his post-surgery rest period in the posh hotel where he meets the slightly older, rather convincingly batty Lindy, who’s just gone under the knife for the third or fourth time. There are several moments in Nocturnes where Ishiguro, who mastered a Kafkaesque comic vernacular in his underrated The Unconsoled, strains for laughs. But once Steve and Lindy meet, the both of them traipsing around the hotel in the middle of the night with their heads wrapped in bandages, at one point trying to retrieve a stolen trophy from the bowels of a roast turkey, I have to hand it to Ish: this stuff is pretty hilarious. And it cries out for a younger Woody Allen and Diane Keaton, say, to do the movie version.

But in ‘Come Rain or Come Shine,’ similar hi-jinx are thwarted by an uncertain tone or too much repetition. Middle-aged university pals reunite. They’re so comfortable with each other that they can insult each other and, despite protests to the contrary, insist they know what the other is thinking to increasingly absurd degrees. Basically, they don’t listen to each other. This not listening goes on for a while. Again, Ishiguro holds things together. He never betrays the basic traits with which he’s endowed his protagonist—though he does, rather improbably, have him imitate a dog. But what he has endowed his protagonist and his narrative with here is pretty limited, even for a short story. The more serious ‘Malvern Hills’ is similarly founded in a solid premise—young English guitarist meets long-married Swiss tourists so oblivious to each other they don’t seem to exist on the same planet—that doesn’t arrive at a very satisfying resolution.

Which leaves us with ‘Cellists,’ the collection’s final and in some ways strongest tale, partially because while being written in Ishiguro’s customary first-person, the narrator is telling the stories of other people who remain sufficiently enigmatic as to make us wonder about what really transpired between them and where their paths led them in the shadow years after the story finishes. It concerns Tibor, another talented young musician from another Eastern European country—Ishiguro’s quite sensitive to the distinctive experiences of Eastern Europeans who fall under the spell of Western music—whose taken under the wing of Eloise, another American musical celebrity—or at least that what Eloise advertises herself as. Eloise is a fascinating question mark, existing on this strange frontier where it’s hard to distinguish between what passes as lived-in wisdom and as pure fantasy. Her true nature is fundamentally unknown to us, yet what we do know about her are details so carefully arranged that we leave the story wanting to know more without feeling we’ve been ripped off.

Vivre le peau nouveau: Eyes Without a Face

Firstly, it’s a movie consumed with surfaces: a woman in a shiny black leather raincoat stalks Paris in an equally slick, black, beetle-like Citroën; black water at night swirling like an abyss; trees along a roadside at night awash in an x-ray glow of headlights; a carefully-placed pearl choker of milky white; stainless steel medical equipment that reflects hard light in its immaculate cleanliness; a satin gown that renders the wearer a perfect little doll, one whose face is encased in a smooth, immobile mask devoid of human flaw; and in that mask a sight so tragic and gruesome that the frozen camera can’t turn away, can only mercifully fade to black.

Originally released to much outrage and disgust in 1960, George Franju’s Eyes Without a Face (Les Yeux sans visage) was too well crafted to be dismissed as just another exploitation horror flick. Nobody seemed to know what to do with it, and so it was destined to achieve its classic status only gradually. It's still absolutely chilling and quite singular, a skin-crawling tale of obsession, arrogance and murder both lyrical and clinical. As Carlos Clarens wrote in his 1967 Illustrated History of the Horror Film, with only his second feature (after numerous shorts and documentaries), Franju had lit upon “the elusive alliance of poetry and terror.”

Doctor Génessier (Pierre Brasseur) works in a clinic near his sprawling estate outside Paris. Though highly regarded for his advances in plastic surgery, Génessier has withdrawn from social life following the disappearance of his daughter Christiane (Edith Scob), who literally lost her face in an accident in which Génessier was the driver. Everyone, her fiancé included, assumes Christiane has suicided; she’s in fact secretly confined in her father’s mansion, awaiting the experimental surgery that her father has promised will give her back her face, surgery requiring the face of another, unwilling, donor.

Synopses don’t suit Eyes Without a Face. The story, simple as a fairy tale, builds at a deliberate pace, offering information in short doses and building suspense with little exposition. Early scenes in which Génessier’s devoted assistant Louise (Alida Valli of The Third Man) prowls the Latin Quarter, smoking cigarettes and sizing up young women are presented ambiguously, and Franju gives an ominous degree of attention to simple movements through doors, down corridors, up stairs, as though our sense of architecture were essential to our understanding of the drama silently unfolding. It’s weird, and through its unsettling weirdness works very well.

I mentioned surfaces: the cold brilliance of this story, cleanly adapted by the team of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac (Les Diaboliques, Vertigo) from Jean Redon’s novel, lies in our peculiar attachment to our faces, that body part most closely associated with our sense of identity, thus the surface reflects unseen depths. But ironically, though Franju lingers on many faces throughout, its probably Christiane’s mask that, while unspeakably creepy, is also the most affecting face in the movie. Animated only by voice and gestures made by her thin limbs, the mask becomes a haunted and haunting thing, with Scob constituting the movie’s closest thing to a truly sympathetic person.

Uncontrollable and uncooperative, flesh itself is an independent force in Eyes Without a Face, a sort of precedent for David Cronenberg’s flesh-driven films. But by the wondrous, beautiful final images, aflutter with newly released doves, dogs and leaves caressed by evening breeze, we see that Eyes Without a Face is also about the spirit, adrift in a world full only of imperfect houses in which in can dwell.