Mute, but not to be silenced

She’s introduced only at the end of the opening sequence, when her paternalistic douchebag employer dismisses her with a pat on the head. Thana (Zoë Tamerlis Lund) is a seamstress working in Manhattan’s garment district, her beauty woman-childish, her doe-eyes and pouting lips arresting but do not express confidence or wantonness or any interest in the superabundance of crudely catcalling lechers who form ogling hedgerows everywhere she goes. The epitome of a woman without a voice, Thana is mute. In no way is she “asking for it.” But she gets it. In fact, she gets it twice in the first ten minutes of Ms. 45 (1981), Abel Ferrara’s low-budget rape revenge cult classic, a definitive portrait of pre-Giuliani New York, a feminist exploitation film, if such a hybrid can be reconciled. Drafthouse has re-released the film in theatres (it plays Edmonton's Metro Cinema next Wednesday night) and on home video.

Written by Ferrara’s frequent collaborator Nicholas St. John, the well-calibrated Ms. 45 strikes a compelling balance between artifice—goopey fake blood, outlandish coincidence—with gritty realism—the brilliant location work—and bracing sociological critique—the ubiquity of rapacious males, not limited to but encapsulated by the pair who perpetrate Thana’s consecutive rapes, the first premeditated, the second performed as an afterthought when a robbery is interrupted. The narrative reason for the double-rape is utilitarian: it pushes Thana over the edge and into some fugue state. The rest is opportunity: Thana is able to stun her second rapist before spotting her hot iron—itself a gendered implement, an icon of homemaking—and beating him with it in a shot that would be quoted and grossly expanded upon in Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark (2000). Thana then appropriates her assailant’s firearm: the voiceless finds a vehicle for expression. She becomes a ventriloquist, the .45 her dummy. She quietly goes about employing it in a campaign that might initially seem guided by vigilante vision but gradually proves driven by pure misandry. Thana is only able to kill men, so even when a woman picks up a knife, wielding it conspicuously at cock-level, and moves to attack, Thana can’t fire in self-defence. Like the tragically programmed titular animal in Sam Fuller’s White Dog (1982), transformative trauma renders Thana single-minded in her deployment of violence.

As noted, Ms. 45 has been quoted, and it is itself riddled with quotes, from the obvious—Thana mirror poses with her gun recall Taxi Driver (1976)—to the curious—one shot recreates the poster tableau from Woody Allen’s Manhattan (1979)—to the provocative—scenes of dead body disposal and blood swirling down the drain recall Psycho (1960), and make us wonder if Thana isn’t to be regarded as some variation on Marion Crane, who this time around survives her attack but never recovers her wits. The film is a composite of politics, cinephilia and an almost documentary sense of place: the shit-faced panhandlers, the trash-strewn alleys and abandoned boxes butted up against aluminium fences, the bat-shit busybody landlady, the pimps shaking down their ladies for ostensibly hidden reserves. Young Ferrara—who, incidentally, has a cameo as Thana’s first rapist (!)—exhibits remarkable control over all of these resources while fully surrendering to the inherent trashy outrageousness of the material—a meat-grinder will make a memorable appearance. The striking Tamerlis Lund, meanwhile, is perfect, her fear near-palpable, her character sympathetic but not to be identified with. Tamerlis Lund had a woefully abbreviated career, one that included co-writing the script for Ferrara’s sleaze masterpiece Bad Lieutenant (1992). She died in 1999, at age 37, from heart failure prompted by cocaine use. She appeared on screen precious few times, but Thana is enough to burn her face into your memory forever. 

                       

The story of ()

In some suitably indeterminate period, in a suitably theatrical alley-crossroads, our bloodied and bruised heroine is roused from her death-like slumber by an elder Good Samaritan, offering only tea, a cosy bed, an ear. The pair retires to the Good Samaritan’s hovel. She has a story to tell and he has all the time in the world, or at the very least the next four hours. We are one foot in the realm of erotic fable, a form that invites tautology and exhaustion, objectification as route to oblivion. Our other foot? It’s stepped into a hall of mirrors, and every reflection reveals Lars von Trier.

Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg) tells Seligman (Stellan Skarsgård), “I’m just a bad human being.” But Seligman—from the German, literally, “blessed man”—doesn’t believe in sin and he doesn’t believe in bad people. This is an invitation. She’s a nymphomaniac, he’s an asexual: you could not ask for more ideal listener. And so she begins her story, the father (Christian Slater) she adored and the mother (Connie Nielsen) she didn’t, the preternatural interest in her genitals, the burgeoning sense that she is destined to live in contradiction of society’s love fixation. By adolescence, young Joe (Stacy Martin) embarks on a journey of self-actualization whose itinerary is the indiscriminate accumulation of sex partners—“lovers” would seem far too sentimental a word. She describes the loss of her virginity to a po-faced cockney mechanic named Jerôme (Shia LaBeouf) who approaches intercourse like he’s changing a spark plug. She learns the finer points of aggressive seduction while cruising on a passenger train with a girlfriend. She briefly flirts with being part of a group of like-minded girls—“Mea vulva, mea maxima vulva,” goes their motto—before resigning herself to the inherent solitude of her single-minded lifestyle choice. She has no apparent interest in women, multiples or kinks unless dictated by another, so Joe’s story has little to do with sexual exploration or any sort of joy that extends beyond the time it takes to orgasm. Which should give you fair warning that Nymphomaniac, despite its provocative title and promise of explicit sex, is not at all a sexy movie. Its titillation is of the intellectual or formal or aesthetic variety. And like nearly every such exercise from von Trier, all of Nymphomaniac’s most compelling elements—and, to be sure, they are numerous—get us hot and bothered for what is finally a most shallow sort of satisfaction, and the dumbest ending in his filmography. 

Von Trier has always been far stronger as a conceptualist or crafter of bold images than as a storyteller or filmmaker per se, but complex structures serve him well. Nymphomaniac finds its narrative models in 18th century literature, unfolding as picaresque confession, and the truth is that the film’s protracted duration just flies by.* There is no shortage of incident or novel variation. There is a truly remarkable sequence in which a character identified only as Mrs. H. (Uma Thurman) unexpectedly arrives at Joe’s apartment after learning that her husband, duped into believing that his promiscuous mistress wants him for herself, is leaving her and shacking up with Joe. There’s a curious if not entirely convincing episode in which a man named K (Jamie Bell) accepts Joe’s application to take a regular beating. There is Joe’s late vocation as a debt collector, her sexual experience giving her unusual insight into people’s repressed desires. And there is, alas, the eternal return of Jerôme, a fairly tiresome character to whom Joe is inexplicably attached—the first cut is the deepest, I guess—though that constant sense of LaBeouf being totally overwhelmed as an actor serves the character. All the while we are always returning to that hovel where Seligman listens and discusses with Joe a smattering of oddly related subjects, such as the uses of a cake fork, fly fishing, polyphonic music and Zeno’s paradox. These digressions are pretty delightful. All the while we are also treated to veiled allusions to von Trier’s greatest hits: there are plot developments or images that distinctly recall Breaking the Waves, The Kingdom, Dogville—see Joe laying in a coffin of grass—and, no doubt, other von Trier titles that I missed. Von Trier has said that he is closest to his female protagonists, and indeed, he is a bit like his nympho narrator, giving himself a vehicle through which he can relive his past glories. I read a tweet in which film historian Mark Cousins complained that Nymphomaniac should have followed Joe into old age, and I thoroughly agree, but von Trier is still in his 50s. Perhaps in the coming decades we’ll be granted a Nymphomaniac Volume III. Until then, we’re stuck with this feeble climax, and that empty feeling that follows fits of excitement.  

*Nymphomaniac Volumes I & II are being released simultaneously in Toronto as two separate tickets, which strikes me as a bit unfair since neither Volume stands on its own.

A Life like no other

Though he was by this point considered washed up by many of his fellow Japanese, the 1950s saw the flowering of director Kenji Mizoguchi’s finest—and final—period. The last four years of Mizoguchi’s life—he would die in 1956, at age 58—seemed to yield one masterpiece after another, earning him belated international acclaim and epitomizing a certain idea of late style. These last films—most notably The Life of Oharu (1952), Ugetsu (1953) and Sansho the Bailiff (1954)—were less formally severe than some of his earlier work. This shift reflected not a lack of rigour but rather the exact opposite: an artistic maturity, a master’s confidence that every moment in a film has its own special requirements that trump the author’s urge to impart a signature. Criterion has just released a deluxe edition of The Life of Oharu on DVD and Blu-ray, and this heartbreaking, unspeakably beautiful, cool yet compassionate picaresque about the life of a “fallen woman” in 17^th century Japan gives us an opportunity to observe Mizoguchi at his very best.

With the very first image, already there is movement: the camera follows Oharu (Kinuyo Tanaka) as she walks through the crepuscular outskirts of Kyoto, one of several middle-aged prostitutes attempting to procure clients. The film is based on Ihara Saikaku’s 17^th century novel The Life of an Amorous Woman, which is narrated by an unnamed protagonist. In Mizoguchi’s radically personal re-envisioning—even the title is revisionist: the protagonist has a name—there is no narrator’s voice-over, yet, even though the camera is so often at some distance from the protagonist, every moment of the film feels aligned to her perspective. In the opening scenes Oharu enters a temple—spiritual wisdom being a crucial theme in Mizoguchi’s revisionism—in which countless statues gaze down upon Oharu like spectators in bleachers. Oharu imagines that the face of one of these statues is a face from her past, and the past then comes flooding back: in her youth she was a lady at court, but a humble retainer (Toshiro Mifune) declares his love for her with disarming sincerity. Oharu can’t help but respond to this love, and this response marks the beginning of a string of tragic misfortunes that will come to define Oharu’s life, which is maimed ceaselessly by cruelty and patriarchal oppression, leading to loss, humiliation and separation from loved ones. (Lars Von Trier must surely be a fan—but Mizoguchi is so much more sympathetic to his heroines.)

With its gorgeous, often gloomy imagery and immaculate gliding camera, The Life of Oharu exudes a complex but utterly perfect fusion of form and content. Eschewing close-ups altogether, Mizoguchi’s camera observes devastating emotions from an unusual distance, but this approach doesn’t muffle emotion—it heightens it, give it space to breathe, gives us space to enter into the feeling of the scene, and allows the emotion to spill out from the characters and spread out into the landscape. I worry that readers unfamiliar with Mizoguchi may be turned off by what might sound like the film’s almost perversely insistent sadness, but that sadness is balanced by an equally insistent beauty, and because Oharu’s story is so long, because Mizoguchi follows her with such solemn devotion, there is in the film’s unforgettable final spectral scene a sense of genuine transcendence. Oharu’s life is brims with grief, but she abides, as does Mizoguchi. Someone is watching, telling her story, and the telling itself, so lyrical and embracing, brings consolation. 

         

Melancholia: bad vibes all over

Birds tumble softly from the ether; a woman gazes at her hands as they give off sparks; a horse collapses to the ground like an old barn; a woman clutching a child sinks deeper into a darkened golf course; a bride sinks into the surface of a stream or trudges through forest only to be snared by roots. All of this unfolds in extremely slow slow-motion, as though some collective will is urging time to a standstill. And you can see why. The end is nigh. Mind you, it’ll take a while to actually get there.

Had I, for whatever reason, had to exit the theatre after the prologue of Melancholia, an astonishing, kind of devastating sequence heavily indebted to more masters of contemporary photo-based art than you could squueze into a year at ICP, set to the romantic bombast of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, I would surely have thought I’d seen the first ten minutes of some rapturous masterpiece. But I stayed, or rather stuck it out, and remembered I was in Lars Land, a place where flights of genius are undermined by lengthy digressions imbued with didacticism, smugness, cynicism and sadomasochistic projections of the author’s disorders onto the opposite sex.

Lars von Trier: maker of some unforgettable images, brilliant conceptualist, shit storyteller. I think I’ve done the image bit, so let’s get to Lars the conceptualist. Melancholia has two parts, two sisters, two disasters. Justine (Kirsten Dunst) shows up two hours later for her insanely lavish wedding reception at a castle. Once she arrives things just get worse: mom (Charlotte Rampling) delivers the most withering wedding speech in history before locking herself in the bathroom and Justine slips ever deeper into debilitating depression. She can barely make it through the night, though disappearing for long spells, telling off her boss and jumping some nervous stranger’s bones seems to help. By dawn, the damage is unrepairable, the marriage still-born. The groom ultimately leaves without her.

After the wedding Claire (Charlotte Rampling) determines to take care of Justine, who’s now verging on catatonic—there’s a painful scene where Claire simply can’t get Justine to step into a hot bath... and that bath looks pretty nice! Claire becomes increasingly preoccupied with the news that a planet called Melancholia has been hiding behind the sun and now seems to be on a collision course with Earth. As apocalypse looms, Claire, quite understandably, becomes hysterical, while Claire's husband (Kiefer Sutherland) turns out to be of no help and Justine is increasingly becalmed and not nice to her at all.

As I summarize all this I realize how much I admire the raw ideas behind Melancholia, the balance of it, that juxtaposition of the individual crisis with the infinite that makes it the nihilist cousin to The Tree of Life. As I think through my experience of Melancholia I have to admit that it was definitely made by someone who really, really gets depression. The problems all come in the way we meander through the story without pace or punctuation, the way we’re meant to bask in the ostensibly clever portraits of one-dimensional or only semi-coherent characters who are mostly just assholes. Everyone, generally, is cruel, though the men tend to be weaklings while the women at least have a certain integrity—and, as with so much von Trier (see Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark, et cetera), that integrity is what ensures their doom. So we watch and we wait for von Trier to do whatever it takes to twist his plots into awkward, sometimes plain stupid knots so as to completely screw over his heroine (though Dogville, it must be said, attempted to reverse this somewhat by allowing its heroine a climatic revenge). We worry, we do indeed feel the burgeoning unease, something von Trier is indeed highly skilled at inducing, and we wait. And the waiting can be tedious.