The unforgettable Fire

For some reason Quest For Fire (1981) was one of the first movies I bought on DVD, and ever since I’ve had a hard time convincing people to watch it with me and I don’t understand why. It’s set 80,000 years ago. It was directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud and adapted from J.H. Rosny aîné’s novel by frequent Polanski collaborator Gérard Brach, with everybody speaking pre-historical lingo created by Anthony Burgess. It inspired a song by Iron Maiden and a band from Toronto. It was filmed in Iceland, Scotland, Kenya, and in the badlands of Alberta where I once roamed as a boy, and its landscapes are beautiful and vast.

There are various tribes in Quest For Fire, representing various stages of man’s evolution. The story follows a trio of Neanderthals who, not knowing how to build a fire, go out in search of one they can steal and bring back to their friends. The Neanderthals resemble an especially hirsute hippie desert death cult whose members drank the Kool-Aid and lived, except that in doing so they lost the capacity to form sentences, seem permanently stoned, and are now forced to constantly breathe through their mouths. Violence is everywhere, and women have it especially tough: rape is a casual occurrence. But we see our heroes improvise peace summits with wooly mammoths and fend off a bear. Ron Perlman (in a role that would threaten him with a strange sort of typecasting) discovers the humour in head injuries. Edmontonian Rae Dawn Chong invents the missionary position. One guy attempts to castrate another with his teeth. Everyone’s always panting, crying, salivating, jabbing, screaming, pointing, humping, waddling, running, grunting: being an actor in this movie would have been awesome. In fact several sequences are very much like some acting workshops I’ve attended.

My special fondness for Quest For Fire probably can’t be entirely explained, but I always visit museums of natural history in every city I pass through (I love the dioramas), and my favourite part of 2001 (1968) by far was always the ‘Dawn of Man’ sequence, so perhaps some part of me just instinctively responds to tribal frenzy, inarticulate yearning, and unkempt hair. Edmonton's Metro Cinema is showing Quest For Fire as part of their ‘Turkey Shoot’ series, but this is no turkey. It’s rich and fascinating, and, for obvious reasons, really, really funny.

Don't look back: Irréversible

Doubling back to revisit Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible (2002) for the first time since its initial release, after having recently endured Enter the Void, the New French Extremist’s most recent work, offered diminishing returns with regards to the film’s overall sleaze-bag sensationalism while its notorious mid-point rape scene remains genuinely unbearable, which is some sort of accomplishment. Moving chronologically backwards through its deceptively simple urban Straw Dogs revenge narrative, Irréversible begins in what appears to be a dingy flop house where a mostly naked, daughter-molesting ex-con laments how “time destroys all things,” thus announcing the theme from the outset, lest we fail to grasp it on our own. (In any event, the film ends with this dictum appearing as a closing title card. All in caps. Noé is nothing if not thorough.) From here we hit a gay sex club called the Rectum, a Halloween-lit cavernous labyrinth of cock-sucking and flagellation, and rise to our first climax in which Pierre (Albert Dupontel) smashes a degenerate’s face to a pulp before a handful of cheerfully masturbating spectators, among them the director himself. Take that as you will.

From here we jump back to find Marcus (Vincent Cassel) and Pierre on their way to said face-obliteration, attacking and insulting both a Chinese cabbie and hermaphrodite hooker along the way. “Off to the Rectum!” shouts Cassel, clearly instructed to repeat the word “rectum” as often as possible. (It is fun to say, I suppose, and, like the film's title, has the added benefit of requiring no translation into English.) After this, which is to say before, Marcus’ unspeakably lovely girlfriend Alex (Monica Bellucci) is anally assaulted and viciously beaten for eight unblinking minutes in a red-painted underpass—yet another rectal tunnel! After this, presuming we’re still watching, we learn why Alex took the tunnel, listen to a long, banal, repetitive conversation about sexual pleasure on the métro, and discover a secret Alex has been keeping that makes her fate that much more appalling and tragic.

Time diminishes shock value. Irréversible’s structure is cleanly aligned to its themes of entropy and inescapable doom, though, seeing the film again after all these years, its effect-before-cause formalism strikes me as little more than a nihilist-sadist pulp thriller version of Jeopardy!: answer first, question second. This is mostly because once you get the gist of Noé’s concept and adjust your senses to the vertigo-inducing camera work there’s little left to explore and so very much to deplore. The actors are obviously of a higher caliber than those in Enter the Void, but they have little to say (the dialogue is blather) and not much to do besides endure ghastly torment or exact medieval violence. I don’t think I’ll be reversing through this one again.

Atrocity Exposition: Winter Soldier

He can’t remember how many times he’d seen prisoners bound and blindfolded with copper wire and thrown from mobile US aircraft, but Rusty Sachs, 27 year-old veteran of the US Marine Air Wing, thinks it must have been somewhere between 15 and 50. Sachs describes this activity, performed in the spirit of competition (the prisoners were being tossed from choppers not only for sadistic amusement or some perverse notion of efficiency, but to see who could throw theirs the furthest), in the opening moments of Winter Solider (1972). This documentary, chronicling the Winter Solider Investigation, which took place during the winter of 1971 in a Detroit Howard Johnson, wisely gets right down to business. Nothing that’s discussed over the course of the film’s 96-minute running time is for the faint of heart or anyone nurturing illusions about Americans in Vietnam. Winter Solider, along with Hearts and Minds, is one of the essential films about Vietnam, and as such is utterly devastating.

The film was produced by the Winterfilm Collective, which included Sachs, documentarian David Grubin, and Barbara Kopple, who would go on to make Harlan County, USA (76), another of the greatest, most valiant nonfiction films of the era. But the decision to attribute Winter Soldier to a collective rather than a single filmmaker or even handful of filmmakers is appropriate. Few films seem as necessarily subservient to simply assembling participants for the purpose of condensing and conveying vital information. What sensibility emerges feels very much the product of likeminded activists whose private ambitions are secondary to the event unfolding before the cameras. Solidarity is woven into the film’s core. All we get, interspersed with footage from the war, are testimonies, both formal (speakers on stage, with a microphone, before a small public) and informal (veterans and citizens comparing notes during breaks in the hearings). Among those veterans who speak out against the war is future Presidential candidate John Kerry. The images, particularly the long, unbroken close-ups, are somewhat overexposed, with lots of hot white in the Caucasian faces, the details blasted from the background, nothing to distract from what’s being said and how, all of it very wintry indeed.

What’s discussed? The list of atrocities could consume the span of this review and some. Torture, rape, mutilation, humiliation, disembowelment, destruction of property. The slaughter of children. The regarding of all Vietnamese as the enemy, especially once they’re dead. Wildly inflated body counts. Nightmares. Patriotism. Racism, perhaps as a bottom line that goes so much deeper into history and the social fabric than the then-current conflict. Soft-spoken and handsome in his dark beard, Scott Camil, who was discharged after having received 13 medals and attained the rank of Sergeant, recalls going to Vietnam to find out what kind of a man he was. Even after witnessing countless flamboyant violations of the Geneva Convention, Camil still believed he was doing what was right for his country. Beyond the atrocities committed, beyond policy, beyond whatever we can regard as history or as an ongoing, fundamental concern about government and war, Winter Solider haunts us with the question of how it is Scott Camil became what he became for the four years he served. At least we know that whatever he became, he could somehow, eventually, come back from it, and tell his story.

Winter Soldier screens this weekend at Edmonton's Metro Cinema.

House arrest: Paranormal Activity

She’s a nice girl, but she has a history. She’s been followed all her life by something unseen, something which makes its presence felt in other ways. Katie is an English major, good-humoured, pretty, but somehow plain. Micah is a day trader with a large house for them to share. He’s got average guy looks, style and attitude, and an average guy’s fear of commitment. Everything about Katie, Micah and the house they occupy is so rigorously ordinary it’s nearly anonymous. There’s almost no décor to speak of. They don’t have photos on their computer desktops. But we know people like this, who like things new and clean and comfortably boring. Their relationship is founded on such unspoken acceptance of the status quo. Their characterless home becomes a blank slate upon which fear can slowly spread across.

Everything we see and hear in Paranormal Activity is transmitted through Micah’s video camera. There are noises in the night. Soon there will be movement. A sober psychic will visit, but he claims what they’ve got here’s a demon, and he’s strictly a ghost man. He gives them the number of a good demonologist, but the demonologist is out of town and they have to wait, with only Micah’s camera, an occult guidebook, and a Ouija board for protection. Of course they have each other, but their nerves are getting mutually rattled and, despite Katie’s repeated protests, Micah won’t stop taunting whatever is stalking her. Micah’s cocky—he thinks he knows how the movie is going to end. You could say Paranormal Activity is a parable of martial anxiety. Micah regards his camera as a sort of erotic appendage. He asks Katie to kiss it. Micah wants to get busy on camera, but Katie isn’t willing to consummate. Micah jokes that they’re engaged to be engaged, which is another way of saying that the force of Katie’s domesticating presence may be scarier to him than any malevolent demon.

Orin Peli’s micro-budget debut, arriving in theatres ten years after The Blair Witch Project, an obvious precursor both in form and marketing strategies, is flawed in several ways but perfectly ingenious nonetheless. It succumbs, like that other Blair Witch offspring [REC], to the habit of over-explaining the persistence of the running camera. It distracts with questions as to why this nice, if troubled young woman wants to be with this idiot, whose callousness is overstated. The film would benefit immensely from shaving off the last 30 seconds or so, when the sudden intrusion of corny horror movie effects sucks the air out of the documentary verisimilitude. (This ending, shot after Peli’s original cut was completed, was reportedly suggested by Steven Spielberg, an early fan and instrumental in the film’s distribution.) But Paranormal Activity still works, at times brilliantly so.


The most inspired shot in the whole thing is the one repeated over and over, one that almost echoes Michael Haneke or David Lynch. Micah’s camera is set up to monitor their bedroom while the couple sleeps. The results are mostly static, which is the masterstroke. Our eyes dart between the people sleeping, the gloom beyond the bedroom door, and the in-camera clock, which speeds up for expediency and then slows down just when that dreaded something is going to happen. Was that a murmur? A shadow? Was that just a breeze? This anticipation is what bad dreams are made of.

It bears comparison to The Strangers, a movie with an unusually large gap between the eloquence of its premise and the inanity of its resolution. Like The Strangers, Paranormal Activity concerns a couple at a turning point in their relationship, isolated in a single location, their anxiety seeming to manifest as an intruder determined to get inside. In a sense the entire story becomes a sort of sex act, or slow rape. The intruder, the ostensible demon, penetrates the house little by little, lubricating the cavity, if you will, until it’s made its way fully inside, fusing the alliance between sex and death inherent in these stories. But unlike many stories of this kind, Paranormal Activity understands the importance of restraint. And it doesn’t climax early.

When movie stars should send screenwriters to jail: Law Abiding Citizen

Just before Clarence Darby (Christian Stolte) jabs a blade into his guts, just before Darby proceeds to rape and kill his wife and do about the same to his little girl, Clyde Shelton (Gerard Butler) hears this fat, sweaty, slovenly, drug-addled, disgusting pervert-ogre whisper in his ear, “You can’t fight fate.” Even by the standards of the overcharged Hollywood thriller this is ultra-portentous. Clyde takes it to heart. He stews over it for ten years, during which time Darby’s accomplice awaits execution while Darby himself does three years and goes free as thanks from the DA for ratting his buddy out. For ten years Clyde gets stoked on the ineffectuality of American justice and concocts a whopper of a plan to set things straight.

The central conceit of Law Abiding Citizen, that grief and frustration turns a contented family man and otherwise non-psychopathic maniac into Hannibal Lecter on steroids, could only have ever worked as utter camp. As an ostensibly serious, ostensibly engaging, ostensibly dark and brooding thriller about thorny issues of crime, punishment and bureaucracy, it’s a mind-numbingly absurd travesty of a movie. Clyde kidnaps Darby and slowly, messily tortures him to death, making imaginative use of power tools a poison isolated from the liver of a Caribbean puffer fish. Of course! It’s only his opening act. He gets thrown into maximum security and his rampage only escalates. Somehow he keeps exacting his flamboyant, baroque feats of violent revenge from captivity, gradually killing off anyone with even the most tangential connection to his case. Except for Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx), the attorney who made the deal with Darby. Nick gets to watch as the whole house of cards collapses, wondering when he or his wife and daughter will get iced. Clyde and Nick play cat and mouse.

You don’t need a degree in law, psychology or engineering to balk at the mountain of risible improbability Law Abiding Citizen hinges on. Genius serial killers are among the most tiresome tropes, but Clyde Shelton and his reign of terror go far beyond the usual level of artifice and dumbness. Yet even if the basic story, which comes courtesy of Street Kings and Ultraviolet scribe Kurt Wimmer, weren’t so stupid, the details too feel all wrong, from our glimpses of Nick’s cardboard family life to the inner chambers of play-cynical Philadelphia lawmakers. The film’s only reason for existing is to try and keep you from guessing what moronic plot twist it’ll unleash next, until you finally realize that this thriller is really a horror movie, torture porn of sorts. It wants to be tough, I guess, but it’s really just crude, very, very silly, and more than a little sick.

Butler is on some kind of a roll. Here’s a sampling: Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life, RocknRolla, The Ugly Truth. Dude’s been in some of the worst shit I’ve had to sit through over the last few years. I’m inclined to indulge a guy trying to move up in the system a little, but to what end? Does his producer’s credit mean to imply that Law Abiding Citizen is his fucking dream project? Does he secretly fantasize being confined to a prison from which he can slaughter his own career by remote control?

One last stray observation. There's an important early sequence where Darby's condemned accomplice gets executed by the state. As the sequence builds to its climax we keep cutting back and forth between the execution and a musical recital where Jamie Foxx's daughter plays the cello. Followers of this blog wonder with me: were the makers of Law Abiding Citizen studying The Walking Dead, or what?

Irreconcilable differences: Rashomon

It gushes off the edges, crashes through the holes where the roof has fallen in, stabs into the puddles and washes across the whole scene in great silvery sheets. The torrential rain at the start of Rashomon (1950) feels nearly apocalyptic, and the grandiose wreck of a city gate where it all takes place does nothing to break up the forbidding gloom. A young priest (Minoru Chiaki) and a middle-aged woodcutter (Takashi Shimura) take shelter there, seated together, not conversing, though through those thick lips encircled by an unkempt beard the woodcutter keeps muttering “I don’t understand…” A third man (Kichijiro Ueda), some guy just trying to get out of the downpour, barges in, starts a fire, gets them talking. He wants to hear a good story, and winds up with four of them, all variations on the same event, none of them matching up. That’s Rashomon, a film so persuasive in its perplexity it’s become an adjective. It won an Oscar, and the Golden Lion at Venice. It introduced Akira Kurosawa to the world—the West especially—and the world watched in fascination despite the film’s refusal to elucidate its central mysteries. It ensured us that our memories are incompatible, but through the movies at least each of them could be true for the time it takes to tell them.

Rashomon has been circulating in a newly restored print. It hits Metro Cinema this coming weekend, a place where Kurosawa’s oeuvre has always found a welcome home over the years and hopefully will for years to come. I’ve seen it more times than almost any other film, and its singular mood never fails to captivate me. An inspired amalgamation of two short stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa (‘Rashomon’ and ‘In a Grove’), the narrative is a sort of labyrinth, a web of flashbacks within flashbacks, unreliable narrators having their individual narratives re-told by other, only slightly more reliable narrators. Yet it’s terribly entertaining, even while confusing the hell out of you.

So the woodcutter journeys deep into a sun-dappled grove. Just how deep we get a strong sense of from the multitude of angles and compositions granted us by Kurosawa and cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa, who seemed to prowl through the trees and shrubs and even pointed the camera straight at the sun, a move which dazzled all his contemporaries anxious to find rules to break. Somewhere in this grove the woodcutter finds a lady’s hat, and then a dead body. There’s a trial, where a judge never seen or heard lets elicits testimonies from those connected to the incident, including the alleged killer, a known bandit (Toshiro Mifune, first seen staring into the clouds like a sick animal), the wife of the dead man (Machiko Kyo), and, in an especially chilling sequence, the dead man himself (Masayuki Mori), speaking through a medium and giving no comforting reports from the afterlife. The bandit meets the couple in the woods, tricks the husband, ties him up, and ravishes the wife. This much is basically clear. But what were the circumstances of the husband’s death? A fight? A killing? A suicide?

The performances are each compelling, varying wildly in tone—Mifune almost hysterical in his braggadocio; Kyo wounded, maybe conniving, sliding seamlessly between femme fatale and helpless victim; Mori stoic, pathetic, and in death harrowingly lonely—but united in their synchronized ambiguity. A fourth variation is given that might resolve the contradictions, but even this becomes suspect. The cry of an abandoned baby eventually brings a close to the string of irresolvable storytelling. Some find the baby’s eleventh-hour intervention sentimental, but it strikes me above all as Kurosawa’s way of imparting that life simply goes on, even when the only thing certain is infinite uncertainty. It finally doesn’t matter to us what really happened in the grove that day, and how justice is finally meted out isn’t even mentioned. Maybe the truth lies somewhere in the collective crannies of each of the stories. Everyone has their reasons for telling what they do, so it’s hard to say who to should trust. But if I had to, I’d put my money on the dead man.

Bearing witness to the inferno (by proxy): Senselessness

Horacio Castellanos Moya

An unnamed writer arrives in an unnamed Latin American country to copyedit 1,100 pages of testimony taken from the survivors of atrocities committed against indigenous communities by their own military forces. Overseen by the Catholic Church and a small legion of international human rights workers, the incendiary report awaits only this final polish from the foreign writer before being made public. The writer’s job, as he sees it, is to “make sure that the Catholic hands about to touch the balls of the military tiger were clean and had even gotten a manicure…” The writer, recently slandered in his own country for politically correct misinterpretations of critiques he made of his country’s president in a national newspaper, has taken the work for essentially cynical reasons. He’s here for the remittance and to escape an unpleasant situation, and it behooves him to approach his work dispassionately.

Yet the writer immediately finds himself marveling at the primitive poeticisms of the Cakchiquel Indians who describe their trauma in curious phrases such as “I am not complete in the mind.” The writer jots down several such phrases in his personal notebook and even commits them to memory, repeating them to everyone he meets. He also however finds himself tormented by the sheer horror of what he’s charged with reading and revising, the steady, massive and dark waves of torture, rape and mutilation remembered by witnesses, one of whom even suggests that it is only with the forgetting the names of the victims that they will finally rest in peace.

The writer turns to drinking and cultivating sexual encounters to provide a balm to his agitated mind. His crudity and crassness with regards to the women he seeks to seduce makes a striking, blackly comic contrast to the ostensible solemnity of his task. Reading about violence perpetrated against human flesh only seems to make him crave more contact with human flesh, preferably when it covers a body roughly akin to that of Demi Moore. The contrast between the unimaginable suffering of many and the festering, petty, carnal obsessions of one might cause the reader to find kinship between Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Senselessness (New Directions, $17.50) and numerous novels by Martin Amis. But Castellanos Moya’s prose in this, his first novel to be translated into English, by Katherine Silver, isn’t quite as merrily misanthropic as Amis, bless his black heart, can often seem. As the writer’s paranoia balloons to terrifying proportions over the course of his work; as he realizes that the memories he’s being exposed to can’t be shut out through fleeting and typically less than satisfying pleasures; as he begins to acknowledge the titular senselessness of the supposed identification that he, a well-fed writer, feels with the impoverished survivors of massacres, to the point of appropriating their words to express his own feelings, Castellanos Moya imbues his protagonist—who bears more than a few similarities with his creator—with a certain sympathy. Who among us is capable of fully digesting, of making any sense of, stories of abysmal slaughter?

The prose style of Senselessness is actually most in keeping with that of Thomas Bernhard, especially its long, fluid sentences, which read not as leisurely digressions or opportunities for pedantry but rather as anxiety-riddled bursts of compulsive extrapolations from a guy on the verge of totally losing his shit. Written in the warts-and-all first person, Senselessness’ rambling sentences give a vivid sense of a protagonist utterly overwhelmed, tense as a wire designed to asphyxiate, with every period punching into the page like a drowning man coming up for air. The evocation of burgeoning madness can probably be most accurately aligned to Gogol or Kafka—whom we can also trace in the novel’s dichotomy of bureaucratic abstraction and looming threat of genuine violence. The short, sharp finale has the effect of reminding us that terror cannot be confined to the frontiers of the third world.

In a sly bit of self-referral, there’s a moment in Senselessness when the writer, already beginning to feel les than complete in the mind, declares his new goal of “not wallowing in any of the testimonies that I would never turn into a novel, because nobody in his right mind would be interested in writing or publishing or reading yet another novel about murdered indigenous peoples…” Well, so much for that idea. But Castellanos Moya’s contribution this genre, if we can call it that, is hardly a work of unbridled bathos and hand wringing. It doesn’t pretend to contain in any neat fashion the atrocities the writer reads about (which are presumably modeled after similar crimes committed in Guatemala). In fact Senselessness is about our inability to do precisely this, no matter what our proximity is to the events in question.

Castellanos Moya circa 1980

Castellanos Moya’s own proximity to atrocity has fluxuated vertiginously. Born in Honduras in 1957 but raised in El Salvador, he has been a citizen of Guatemala, Canada, Costa Rica, Spain, Germany, and Mexico, where he spent 12 years as a journalist and political analyst. He now lives in Pittsburgh, living in exile as part of the City of Asylum Project. In a recent interview he stated his intense distaste with being identified as a political novelist, though he admits that his earliest memory is of a bombing that destroyed the porch of his grandparents’ house back when his grandfather was the president of a nationalist party and conspiring the oust a liberal government, so perhaps politics is something he would be incapable of excising from his work if he wanted to. In any case his is another vagabond and unsentimental voice from Latin American literature that the rest of us would do well to listen to. As we stand back and try to comprehend the chaos that continues to unfold in the rest of the Americas Castellanos Moya can help us to decipher not only the experiences of those who live there, but of us too, in our watching.

Glimpsing Christ on the mean streets of Abel Ferrara's New York: Bad Lieutenant returns

There are films—we sometimes call them character studies—we’re best advised to watch and re-watch without concern for continuity or sweep, suspense or forward-motion. We marvel at, or are at least compelled by, the individual moments that hover somewhere in the haze of the whole, suspended like some fleeting exhibit. I hadn’t seen Abel Ferrara’s cult film Bad Lieutenant (1992) in at least a decade, and I returned to it with one wave of fascinated, slightly nauseated familiarity after another. It concerns a haggard, brazenly corrupt middle aged cop (Harvey Keitel) and his tentative, confused emergence from what seems a very long tour—going back as far, perhaps, as Taxi Driver (76)—through the special internal inferno that awaits god’s lonely men when dwelling in the crowded, sordid Petri dish that is, or was, New York City. To my surprise the film resonated more with me now that when I was younger and inclined to feel impressed by anything affecting a post-Scorsese, gritty, skuzzy, rock and roll verisimilitude. Bad Lieutenant is audacious, somewhat pretentious, perhaps excessive. It’s also harrowing, genuinely crazy in its construction, slyer than it at first seems, and facilitates one of the great raw, only partially comprehensible, out-on-a-limb star performances.

Some of those moments: Keitel’s unnamed Lieutenant stumbling, stoned out of his mind, listening to Johnny Ace croon ‘Pledging My Love’ in some strange woman’s apartment, eyes shut, his bulldog torso naked, his arms extended in some Christ-like pose or perhaps an attempt to fly, emitting this weird whimpering sound like my dog used to make when he wanted something and knew he wouldn’t get it if he barked; Keitel hunched over the driver’s side window of a car, two big haired sisters from Jersey in the front seat, a misty rain rendering the three of them seemingly isolated in the night, while he gets one of them to expose her ass and the other to perform a pantomime fellatio; Keitel, already buzzing with the possibility of his own redemption, getting high with two already severely incapacitated crackhead rapists on a crack house couch. Save the last of these, you might have to work to remember where such scenes fall in the course of the narrative. But you’re unlikely to forget the scenes themselves. They stain your brain, like those traces of certain drugs that we’re told never really go away.

There are so many beautifully selected details in Bad Lieutenant: the Jesus blanket and plastic cover on the sofa of the polite Puerto Rican dealer’s apartment; the door that always gets stuck in the tiny, wallpapered apartment of Keitel’s pretty, intermittently articulate junky pal Zoë (played the film’s co-writer, the late Zoë Lund); the gum that Keitel asks the Jersey girl to spit into his hand. Yet the choice of ‘Pledging My Love’ is especially inspired. Johnny Ace killed himself back in ’54 playing Russian roulette, and such recklessness is perfectly aligned to what’s presented as the status quo for the Keitel character. Within the first 15 minutes we’ve seen him drinking, snorting, screwing, stealing, harassing and gambling himself into oblivion. Another actor might have tried to make the character ingratiating or, even worse, confused his self-destruction with diabolical glee. But Keitel makes everything he does seem more pathetic than fiendishly cruel. He somehow lets us know that this creature possesses a soul. He pours his heart into it, without judgment, and his abandon can result in bizarre black humour, which works too—take the moment where he gets so upset listening to a baseball game while driving his car that he shoots his radio. Ferrara says he originally conceived the film as a comedy anyway—lots of movies have protagonists with one vice, why not make one where the he has every vice?

I emphasize the fragmentary nature of Bad Lieutenant, but it does actually have a sort of rudimentary story, which was based on a real 1981 incident. A young, pretty nun is viciously raped by two young thugs, and the investigation is thwarted by the nun’s refusal to give police any information about her assailants. Yet Ferrara—who always was half exploitation filmmaker, half would-be Pasolini—is barely interested in the investigation’s dramatic potential. What matters to him is the nun’s Christ-like feat of forgiveness, which Keitel has such a hard time believing yet is clearly inspired by—if such utter scum can be forgiven, there may still be hope for him. This leads to some wincingly cheesy Jesus apparitions, but what’s more memorable are the actions it prompts in Keitel, ramping up to a brilliantly stark, poetic finale.

Abel Ferrara

Lion’s Gate’s new special edition of Bad Lieutenant features a rambling but frequently informative commentary track by Ferrara and cinematographer Ken Kelsch. It also features a superb half-hour documentary about the making of the film, which is something in itself: the guerilla tactics of the shooting sound truly insane; Christopher Walken, who’d just starred in Ferrara’s King of New York (90), was originally slated to play the lead, but dropped out because he didn’t think he could deliver; fellow actor Victor Argo had to convince Keitel to do the role, and Keitel was apparently going through some severe personal turmoil that fed his performance. Yet for all the chaos in both its content and genesis Bad Lieutenant survives as something sharp, focused and brutal, direct and rigorous. It deserves to be seen again, and not just by the faithful.

Sparring with the past

The extraordinary life of Mike Tyson as vividly described by Mike Tyson in James Toback’s Tyson constitutes a startling essay on American fame, race and sex. Never a well-behaved filmmaker, Toback seems too fascinated, perhaps even in love with his subject to soberly editorialize in the margins of this documentary portrait. Instead, he steers and shapes the film by way of carefully calibrated and provocative juxtapositions. Throughout Tyson the lisping, soft-spoken and now flamboyantly face-tattooed former boxer’s testimony is offered in overlapping images and soundtracks, sometimes featuring Tyson giving multiple divergent responses to the same questions. At first the technique seems like empty flash, but soon it reveals itself as an inspired method of portraiture, resulting in a Rashomon-like poem on human contradictions on a spectacular scale, moving from inspiration and thrills to horror and confusion to an evocation of the purgatorial existence of a man whose meteoric ascent and titanic career sank into the abyss around the age most of us are just getting properly started with our lives.

Great portraits typically dispel myths, yet the closer Toback gets to Tyson the more Tyson’s story feels like myth. Not myth as broad gloss but as dense tapestry of heightened experience that spans the breath of several ordinary lives. Tyson’s movement from an impoverished fatherless Brooklyn youth of raising pigeons, getting brutalized and living in fear; to the discovery of a rage so great as to knock men down and a proclivity for thuggery; to juvenile detention, self-actualization and the great fortune of finding a generous and encouraging father figure; to becoming an unbeatable human juggernaut, heavyweight champion of the world at 21, impossibly naïve about so much, yet with the world’s riches and women splayed at his feet; to rape conviction, prison, countless scenes of public humiliation, ear-biting and isolation: all of these phases are explored in a wholly first-person account illustrated through a wealth of archival footage, culminating in a story of a figure not so much larger than life as stranger than fiction.

Have you all seen Fingers? Because Toback’s 1978 startling directorial debut, which stars Harvey Keitel as a mafia collector with a deeply frustrated gift for music, holds the key to so much of what makes Toback’s work distinctive, vital and repulsive, the self-flagellating fantasy of an unabashed wigger. It also makes a dynamite double feature alongside Tyson. (Mind you, Raging Bull wouldn’t make too shabby a pairing either. Nor would The Wrestler.) What Toback offers us in these films and others—including 2000’s Black and White, which features Tyson in a scary, homophobic cameo as himself—is an excavation of male psyches stunted through punishment and empowerment, their empathy drained through brute force, plagued with an inability to reflect that leads to impotency, a sense of being involuntarily thrust into violence, a hunger to at once dominate and be dominated by women, and the inhabiting of some regressive ideal of blackness, regardless of the race of the subject in question. Films like Fingers and Tyson possess a rare transparency. Grotesque and shamelessly entertaining, they infuriate and intrigue. And of we had a few more movies like them we may just learn something of fundamental importance about how men become monsters. Or perhaps how some of us have to work against our instincts just to not become monsters.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hot Docs 2009: strange weather, slow death, violent crime, and private confessions

To say there was something electric in the air this year as North America’s largest documentary film festival commenced eleven days ago would be more than a mere platitude. Springtime is typically fraught with electrical storms in Southern Ontario, but the charge felt during the first night of Hot Docs 2009 was generated most prominently by the new film from Canadian filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal, whose Manufactured Landscapes made such a deep impression both at home and internationally after premiering at Toronto’s other major festival back in 2006.

Act of God uses stories of being struck by lightning as a foundation for meditations on our urge to invest meaning in the most seemingly random events. Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising to discover that the film feels a little random or rootless itself, but while frustrating desires for a more unified thesis and deliberately ignoring any exploration of the science, it delivers some enlightening profiles and, best of all, a duet of sorts between novelist Paul Auster, who eloquently recalls his experience of witnessing another child’s death by lightning during summer camp, and guitarist Fred Frith, who improvises a magnificent performance meant to invoke the primal drama of a tempest billowing over the landscape.

The equation of death and nature was also central to Swiss filmmaker Peter Liechti’s The Sound of Insects: Record of a Mummy, where heavily associational images accompany the story of a man who ventured into the wilderness to commit suicide by starvation. The voice-over reading of the man’s journal—the English version comes courtesy of Canadian filmmaker Peter Mettler—alternately chronicles bodily collapse in increasingly disturbing detail, offers hints of the life he left behind, and muses on the bizarre choice of method, fasting in solitude ostensibly being the best way to witness the process of one’s own death. Based on a novel inspired by the real event, yet visually realized through a bank of images that feature no actors or recreations, The Sound of Insects playfully haunts the frontiers of documentary and fiction. It’s chilling, funny, hypnotic, and totally draining.

Private confessions are similarly the driving force behind Canadian filmmaker Alison Rose’s Love at the Twilight Motel, which features interviews with various clients of a pay-by-the-hour Miami love nest, many of whom are disarmingly lucid and affecting. The repellent yet admirably frank adulterer and closet junky who wants to protect his wife’s innocence; the Cuban massage therapist who feels it’s his duty to service sexually dissatisfied married women; the prostitute and exotic dancer desperate to reclaim custody of her children: each of Rose’s subjects is able to testify at length and with dignity intact in one of the Twilight’s anonymous rooms. Yet the film leaves you with questions regarding Rose’s intentions. What was she after? Who did she think she was going to fool by only showing portions of her subject’s faces as a method of disguise?

Love at the Twilight Motel is compelling, but a vaguely similar tack is used more rigorously and satisfyingly in Canadian filmmaker Alan Zweig’s A Hard Name, which features Zweig’s more transparently interactive interviews with several middle-aged ex-convicts, many of them with violent pasts. While talking to a former crackhead, a guy who grew up sleeping in abandoned buildings in Detroit, a guy who extended his prison sentence by 20 years just for the sake of stabbing Clifford Olsen 21 times with a pair of scissors, Zweig stays off-screen but remains very present, prompting the more tight-lipped, cracking jokes to ease tension, gathering advice on prison life, and gradually revealing that every last one of his subjects suffered sexual abuse as children. A guy named Art tells a particularly harrowing confession about feeling less capable of dealing with life outside than in. My heart went out to him. Before the screening I attended Zweig declared his hope that after this film his subjects would simply “be welcomed back into the family of man and just disappear into the crowd.” Of course, this didn’t keep Zweig from bringing a number of them up on stage afterwards. Sadly, Art was not among them.

The most sensational tale of going from brutal youth to violent adulthood and prison however would easily be that of Tyson, James Toback’s gripping profile of the eponymous former heavyweight champion. Even if you remember each of its key events (ear biting, et al.) as they unfolded, when you put it all together like this Mike Tyson’s biography is truly incredible, alternately inspiring and disgusting, a living essay on some deeply precarious notions of American race and sex. And Tyson ultimately emerges as a sort of poem about human contradictions, with constantly overlapping interviews in which Tyson gives glaringly incompatible testimonies on things like his rape conviction. Toback never interjects and seems totally uninterested in guiding us toward any conclusion. This movie is too ablaze with fascination for its subject and desire to provoke its audience to settle for anything as simple as closure.