How science made a monkey out of Dr. Jessup

Did seeing Altered States (1980) on VHS help prompt my teenage enthusiasm for drug experimentation? I’m fairly sure that Aldous Huxley, Rimbaud, myriad musicians and the Beats probably beat it to the punch, but the film’s protagonist, played by William Hurt, certainly seemed to encapsulate precisely the sort of dazzled longing for chemical-induced transcendence that wooed by hungry young consciousness. Until he goes ape, at which point things get pretty silly. But that’s nearly two-thirds into the movie, and by then it already had me. I still retain enormous affection for Altered States and am happy for whatever excuse to revisit it. 

Hurt remains central to the movie’s appeal, his baby-blues and beatific arrogance. He introduced a new, liberal ideal of Aryan beauty, ambition and intelligence. He must have been pleased that for his big screen debut he would play an irresistible genius. Eddie Jessup is a whiz-kid professor spending all his spare time in a sensory deprivation tank, studiously chronicling his head-trips to his dutiful bearded lab buddy Bob Balaban. The movie starts with Jessup just floating there in the tank in silence, the embryonic hero-shaman. His next big entrance has him surrounded by warm white light in the threshold of a party full of pot-smoking academics halfway through the organ solo of ‘Light My Fire.’ He quickly corners, or rather kitchens, Emily (Blair Brown) the second-smartest-prettiest person in attendance; within hours he beds her, the sex accompanied by religious visions; post-coitally he confesses his psychic need, the childhood realization on his father’s deathbed that death is a harrowing void, so best to break on through to the other side while still kicking; within two months Emily’s proposing marriage to him.

Flash-forward to prestige gigs for both at Harvard, two kids and a martial crisis, and Jessup’s off to the arid Mexican north to hang with Indians and swallow some bubbling brown hallucinogenic concoction that looks like mole but seems meant to resemble ayahuasca. (Wrong hemisphere, but whatever.) The stamp of director Ken Russell, maestro of overstatement, is most clearly seen in the hallucination sequences, which are largely very literal-minded and corny, though there are startling moments, such the extended sequence in which Jessup and Emily lay still on a cave floor, in fetal and sphinx poses, respectively, while a sandstorm first engulfs them and then erodes their bodies down to dust. That bit is about as inspired as Altered States gets, but let us praise the movie for its likable supporting characters, such as Charles Haid's ornery, perpetually gasket-blowing doctor-assistant, and its remarkable fleetness, the way it gallops through exposition without stopping for breath.

The script and source novel were by Paddy Chayefsky, though he would withdraw his name from the finished product, for reasons one can guess at. I haven’t read Chayefsky’s book and thus can’t comment on Russell’s treatment of it, but could anyone, even, say, David Cronenberg, have convincingly realized the story’s final third, in which weird science makes a monkey out of Jessup? Taking more and more of the Mexican brew and spending more and more time in the deprivation tank, Jessup learns the hard way that regressive states of consciousness can be externalized. The movie becomes a little like Cat People (1942/82), with Jessup morphing into a hairy, aphasic version of Iggy Pop, going to the zoo, and slaughtering a goat before waking up naked, incarcerated and temporarily amnesiac. Eventually the movie remembers that it’s actually a love story, which is sort of endearing. Yes, yes, it’s mostly ridiculous, but I can still fantasize a version co-directed by Stanley Kubrick and Henry Jaglom, and I can still let myself fall under its audacious, strangely earnest spell. The movie's title being an instruction as much as a description, it helps, of course, to get totally loaded first.   

     

"...it was always the camera and me": Stephanie Sigman on being held captive by Miss Bala

Unfolding in bracing, often unnervingly confusing scenes constructed from lengthy methodical takes, the dominant tone of Miss Bala (a bleak pun of a title, exchanging “Baja,” as in Baja, California, for “bala,” as in bullet) is one of traumatized trance. The film follows Laura Guerrero (Stephanie Sigman), a 23-year-old living somewhere above the poverty line with her father and little brother, somewhere on the outskirts of a city we presume to be Tijuana. Apparently on a whim, Laura decides to enter a beauty contest and, by sheer chance, subsequently becomes the pawn of a gang of drug traffickers, led by the very scary yet quietly charismatic Lino (Noe Hernandez). He sees something special in her, some unique utility. A moll? A hostage? A Mata Hari? It’s not entirely clear. What is clear is that Laura’s fear-fuelled helplessness and forced collaboration leave her caught in a catch-22 that’s more or less symbolic of the current plight of Mexico as a whole, in the grips of a drug war that just seems to get worse.

Shifting radically from the giddy, cutty, winkily melodramatic Godardisms of his 2008 tween-lovers-on-the-run film Voy a explotar!, director and co-scenarist Gerardo Naranjo has his camera hold very, very closely to Laura, who spends much of Miss Bala frozen in a state of shock, rarely speaking but almost always busy, running, crawling, hiding, changing clothes, following instructions. We can’t know what she’s thinking, even in the scenes that require some calculation on her part, but we often know how she’s feeling, thanks to the peculiar doggedness of the film’s MO and to Sigman’s passive yet highly nuanced performance. Miss Bala is chilling, relentless, intelligent, and, if one’s inclined to notice, quite funny in a dark, dry, acid sort of way (my favourite example: the flaming tire that rolls through one especially chaotic scene of street violence like it's fallen loose from a Mel Brooks picture). It’s absolutely a must-see for many reasons, some aesthetic, some sociological. And one of those reasons is Sigman, a skillful novice with excellent instincts, particularly when it comes to cultivating a sense of intimacy with the camera, and thus with us.

I spoke with Sigman during last year’s Toronto International Film Festival. She was very friendly, very excited, very forgiving of both my Spanish and my hangover, very tall in her blue dress and heels, and not altogether difficult to look at.

JB: How closely related are the stories of Laura Guerrero and Laura Zúñiga, the Sinaloa beauty queen whose ties to trafficking presumably inspired Miss Bala?

Stephanie Sigman: I don’t think they’re similar at all. It’s impossible for us to know what really happened to Laura Zúñiga. That’s one of the reasons why Gerardo made this a fiction. Of course, her story is symptomatic of a lot of things that are happening in Mexico, so it was useful to research. But because we went in a very different direction I didn’t want to focus too much on her.

JB: It seems to me that one of the major challenges for you would be that you’re the protagonist, you’re present in every scene, yet you’re far more reactive than you are active. Much is done to Laura, but she herself doesn’t really move the story forward.

SS: It’s funny, but I don’t think I was very conscious of that challenge while we were actually in production. When I saw the final film I was kind of shocked. I guess I couldn’t imagine how the pieces were going to fit. It’s weird to see yourself up there. There were moments when I actually forgot that it was me I was looking at. I would grab my chair, start to react like any other person in the cinema. It was exciting! [Laughs]

JB: Even though Laura spends most of Miss Bala in this state of suspended trauma, one of the great things about your performance is its gradations. There are distinct levels of panic or confusion or resignation. You’re always doing something that, for the most part, only we in the audience can pick up on. 

SS: Yeah, it was always the camera and me. It’s just the nature of this movie—there are only about 130 cuts in the whole thing, so what happens in any one shot is really important. Single moments go on for a long time. So I had to contain, contain, contain. We needed to keep Laura passive, which I think was Gerardo’s way of commenting on the passive nature of a lot of Mexicans right now—people just don’t know what to do anymore. But at the same time there’s a lot of things going on inside that needs to be expressed somehow.

JB: You grew up in Sonora. Has your life become more affected by violence, given how things have been escalating these last several years?

SS: You’re always hearing stories about a friend of a friend, but I feel like its getting closer. The degrees of separation are fewer. That’s pretty frightening. Things have definitely gotten worse since when I was there just five years ago.

JB: I remember back when Mexico City seemed kind of scary. These days it feels like the safest place in the country.

SS: [Laughs] Yes, that reversal still seems funny to me.

JB: Obviously Laura’s ambition to become a beauty queen is different than your ambition to act, but still I wonder if that was an aspect of her character that you could relate to.

SS: I feel like most girls at some point wants to be models or beauty queens, to have something to do with the idea of beauty. I never wanted to be Miss Mexico, but I did want to model. I was in a contest, and I didn’t win. I think every girl has that princess fantasy. But that might be a very Latin American thing.

JB: That’s interesting that you were trying to model, because I would think modeling skills would come in handy in a film like Miss Bala. Again, so much of what’s required of you is to convey something powerful and specific with just a look, or with body language.

SS: Maybe. Certainly models need to have a special awareness of the camera; even when many things are going on you have to have that undistracted relationship to the camera.

JB: Throughout Miss Bala, Lino calls Laura “Canelita,” or “Little Cinnamon.” Is that because of the colour of her skin, not too dark, not too pale?

SS: I think it has something to do with that, but it also has something to do with a story about Lino himself. Noe told me that it was related to something from Lino’s youth, some girl that Laura reminded him of.

JB: Was there a lot of that? Did you all bring in backstories?

SS: I would write things, but just for myself. I prefer not to share them, because the great thing about the seeing a movie is when it stimulates your imagination and lets you figure things out on your own.

JB: I can only imagine that spending so much time in Laura’s skin could leave one feeling deeply unsettled, kind of wrung out. Were you able to shake off the residual effects of the role?

SS: I was afraid of that. I kept thinking that I was spending more than 12 hours a day in this character, and that she might start to become me. There comes a point when you start to talk like the character, eat like the character, dream like the character. But by the end I was very, very ready to lose Laura, to let her go. So I did. Just like that. 

From Dusk Till Dawn: Revisiting Rodriguez's revenants 15 years on

The mayhem actually starts before we catch up with the Gecko brothers. That Richie (Quentin Tarantino) busted Seth (George Clooney) out of jail, that the pair robbed a bank, took a hostage and left a sizable body count in their wake is, rather remarkably, all back story, preceding the opening scenes depicting the infiltration of a roadside liquor retailer that results in more pointless carnage, including the roasting alive of the proprietor (very nicely played by a young John Hawkes). Richie is shot through the hand during the firefight; the bullet leaves a hole the size of a carrot stick—some sort of perverse stigmata for this sadist, serial rapist and compulsive murderer—which he bandages with duct tape. To think, all Richie wanted was a road map.


Richie and Seth eventually manage to get south of the border by smuggling themselves in an RV driven by a pastor and widower (Harvey Keitel) weathering a crisis of faith by taking a road trip with his kids (one of whom is Juliette Lewis, who’s casting in this sort of thing was pretty much de rigueur back in 1996). The whole gang winds up in a biker bar called the Titty Twister (though I prefer the name given in the DVD’s Spanish subtitles: “Fiesta de tetas”) where Selma Hayek performs a dance in a bikini with a big snake that’s almost stupefying in its hotness and everyone turns out to be Aztec vampires, a breed of revenant that’s unusually easy to dismember and impale. It takes an hour to get to the vampire stuff, but from then on, rest assured, it’s a solid 40 minutes of bang-bang, crunch, tear, stab, shred, splatter.

The movie was directed with much enthusiasm and little flair by Robert Rodriguez, but its script came courtesy of the young Tarantino, who seems to have been galvanized by the genre fusion and the opportunity to toss elements of everything from Peckinpah to Graham Greene into the blender. There’s not a lot of the sort of verbal fireworks we find in top-grade Tarantino, the ostensible portrait of Mexico could just as easily be one of West Texas, and some of the special effects are kind of lame and superfluous, but the superb cast and relentless cartoony action sequences ensure that the movie’s entertainment value remains reasonably high.

TIFF '11: Fueron con dios

The 1917 Mexican Constitution featured a number of severe restrictions against demonstrations of faith. The opening scene of The Last Cristeros, which consists of only voice-over and a black screen, gives us the rundown—one year imprisonment for ringing a church bell, for example—and efficiently provides all the context needed to comprehend or at least intuit all that follows, even if you’re unfamiliar with post-Revolutionary Mexican politics. The government’s war against the Cristeros—those who took up arms to defend their right to worship—officially ended in 1929, but the film takes us into the mid-1930s, following a small group of hold-outs as they make their way across gorgeous, arid and unforgiving northern terrains, where the occasional bullet comes seemingly out of nowhere, where nights are long and cold and food and water in short supply, and doubts blossom.

Directed by Matias Meyer and co-scripted with Israel Cárdenas, who co-directed the tender and memorable Cochochi, The Last Cristeros is a beautifully photographed and edited modern-Mexican take on the anti-western (if the term suits). Not unlike Meek’s Cutoff, it depicts an arduous journey through wilderness where danger looms quietly and everyday tasks are depicted with great accuracy and empathy. But the film also recalls Of Gods and Men, in that this is a story, peppered with many songs and prayers, about spiritual integrity and acts of bravery in a situation where such acts have arguably lost all practical purpose. Meyer’s Cristeros, their faces deeply lined under massive sombreros (some of the actors are actually descendants of Cristeros), clearly have no chance of making any difference in Mexico with regards to religious intolerance. And it’s equally clear that they will not survive. Which is why the last scene is so poignant—this isn’t The Wild Bunch; isn’t going to end in thrilling slaughter, so instead opts for a final moment of tranquility, the Cristeros in Christ-like loin cloths, in the face of looming death. The film is one of only two Mexican films at TIFF this year, and a major highlight of my Festival thus far.

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.

Monsters: Aliens versus editors: if only the latter party could have won the battle

The story goes that Gareth Edwards pitched the idea for his monster movie set in a world where the aliens have been quarantined, got green-lit without a script, went into production with a skeleton crew, shot guerilla style, worked his largely impromptu cast into a frenzy of adlibbing, went home to cobble from a hundred hours of material and insert copious CGI, and delivered the final product for under $500,000. Good, even great movies have been born of such reckless confidence, but one shouldn’t assume Edwards’ bravado was matched by any blessed combination of talent, intelligence, or luck. Though it already has its champions, not to mention six BAFTA nominations, Monsters offers a solid case study in what happens when you don’t plan much: with way more coverage than actual inspiration or purpose, your story winds up sliding into cliché at nearly every turn. There's some fun to be had here, but it's mostly drowned out by hokeyness.

A cynical US photojournalist (Scoot McNairy) is ordered to escort his wealthy publisher’s idealistic daughter (Whitney Able) out of Mexico, an enormous chunk of which is “infected” with giant prawns from outer space—presumably the same galaxy as the quarantined aliens in District 9. So Monsters might be a border-crossing parable if it had any real ideas to it, or any real surprises. Yes, the couple meet-cute, the photographer resents his mission, but the girl speaks better Spanish, which comes in handy when they encounter all that Mexican monster bait. Getting back to America proves tricky, and they come to depend on each other, maybe even fall in love, blah, blah, blah. The plot twists itself into pretzels to keep them together, even going so far as to contrive a prostitute who steals a passport from the photographer’s hotel bedroom yet somehow doesn’t think to steal his $3,000 camera, which, by the way, you’d have to be an idiot to keep dangling around your neck all the time while traversing rural Mexico anyway.

But then Edwards’ Mexico isn’t the same one familiar to most Earthlings. Apparently the northern deserts have been replaced by jungle, and somebody moved Tepoztlán up toward the US border when nobody was looking. There are numerous such cultural and geographical oddities in Monsters, all of which could be forgiven if the movie had more energy or ingenuity, instead of dopey scenes of dumb white kids looking out on (displaced) Mayan ruins, abandoned suburbs, or alien convoys and uttering what amounts to a unanimous “Wow.” Maybe it’s true what they say about Americans not traveling enough.

Lost in space, dying of spiritual thirst: Looking back at Darren Aronofsky's Fountain

On the eve of the 2010 Toronto International Film Festival, I thought it would be fun to look back at a review I wrote for Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain, a film almost unanimously dismissed upon its appearance at TIFF 2006, and which might have torpedoed the ambitious young filmmaker's career if it weren't followed by the much celebrated The Wrestler, which had its North American premiere at TIFF 2008. Aronofsky's Black Swan is among the most anticipated films playing at this year's festival.

***

Six years after Requiem for a Dream, Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain finally arrives with a hefty load of extra-filmic baggage –an infamously protracted and tumultuous production, boos at the Venice Film Festival– and a premise so dazzlingly pretentious as to guarantee responses even more polarized that those that met its predecessor. Yet if this finds the right audience –probably small, probably fans of Ken Russell films, Herman Hesse novels, CG Jung, Joseph Campbell and psychotropic substances– it will in its peculiar way be embraced as the sort of wildly flawed, improbably ambitious gem that comes along only rarely, a phenomenon akin to a comet, the sighting of some endangered beast, or a functioning health care system.

The Fountain’s structure is tripartite and intrinsically circular. In one strand we find Thomas (Hugh Jackman), a genetic scientist desperate to shrink a tumour in a monkey’s brain while his wife Izzi (Rachel Weisz) dies from some terrible illness and composes an enigmatic novel in laughably immaculate calligraphy. In the second, Tomas (again, Jackman) is a conquistador charged with finding the Mayan tree of life in the New World for the lovely Queen Isabel (Weisz). In the third, Tom (yep, Jackman) is the lone inhabitant of some hermetic ball adrift in space, haunted by voices and doing kung fu against the stars. These narratives dove-tail and are compressed into 96 minutes, an impressively taut running time that renders two of these strands, not inappropriately, into virtual cinematic haikus. Visual dynamics dominate: long-shots press up against extra-tight close-ups; gaseous portals seep through the jaundiced glow of space, recalling old sci-fi paperback covers; terrifyingly fecund jungles give way to stark wintry plains. The aesthetic is alternately seductive, chillingly lonely and somewhat oppressive.

Dialogue tends to be awkward, scenes contrived and characters more symbolic than recognizable. What’s of substance here is the fluid realization of deeply primal themes, thus Aronofsky thinks nothing of having a scene where Jackman stabs a tree and out flows the juice of immortality! Which looks suspiciously like cum. Weisz is required mostly to be beatific, yet Jackman’s unruly performance somehow ascends to operatic heights, matching Aronofsky’s lofty themes with vivid romantic fortitude. For every scene that courts ridicule there’s another that, call me crazy, is strangely, profoundly moving. In his desire for everlasting life and love, Tom sacrifices immediacy, and his is a tragedy written in glyphs, not naturalistic gestures.

Because it aspires to fuse images and music into an expression of abstract spiritual and mythical concepts, The Fountain will, for some, invite only mockery and dismissal. But against my more sober criteria, I found myself kind of swept up in it, beguiled by its preposterous beauty and over-earnest transcendentalism, its inarticulate fatalism that finally speaks to our innate sense of eternal return. I can accept or even welcome whatever jabs at its abundant silliness others might make, but I still can’t deny that I left the film feeling eerily connected to that guy sitting cross-legged in his little ball.