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.

High finance

A white-collar criminal from a blue-collar background with a monstrous appetite for red light commodities, broker/entrepreneur-turned-ex-con/motivational speaker Jordan Belfort is nothing if not colourful—he’s positively gaudy. Had he not authored two memoirs, his tabloid-epic life story would surely seem too preposterous/libellous to translate into credible based-on-a-true-story cinema. It’s only sensible that The Wolf of Wall Street opens with teasers of high-stakes dwarf tossing and an inebriated helicopter ride; we need a taste of what high-flying lowbrow transgressions the next three hours have in store.

Scripted by Boardwalk Empire creator Terence Winter, directed by Martin Scorsese, and featuring a name ensemble cast fronted by Leonardo DiCaprio, it’s difficult to think of another film combining such appalling behaviour with such A-list pedigree that’s played, above all, for grotesque, balls-out, amoral entertainment. That so much of The Wolf of Wall Street is actually entertaining is some kind of feat: its characters are hard to care about, its narrative is baggy, its star can be as tedious as he is admirably shameless, and its septuagenarian director seems both on his game and off his rocker. Riddled with continuity errors, lacking a consistently coherent chronology, and intermittently oblivious as to what constitutes the heart of a scene, Wolf is one of the generally meticulous Scorsese’s sloppiest works. Maybe he was having too much fun. The upshot is that the fun is onscreen, pulsing, like a raw nerve jacked up.

Anyone familiar with Scorsese’s large canvas rise-and-fall epics of rabid American ambition will feel perfectly oriented within Wolf’s adrenalized storytelling strategies. The disaffected voice-over, equal parts confession and braggadocio; the rock connoisseur’s soundtrack; the injection of freeze-frames or slow-motion into frenetic montages offering guided tours of the given milieu: we’ve been here before. But a pleasing thing about Wolf is that its tone echoes The King of Comedy almost as much as Goodfellas or Casino. What drives Belfort isn’t just greed, hubris or spite—he’s a showman! (Again, Belfort’s already written two memoirs—he’s only 51.) Wolf is about performance, incorporating hi-jinx with slapstick, mirth with mayhem. Once his brokerage/penny stock boiler room, Stratton Oakmont, is rocketing toward millionaire mega-success (and multiple counts of fraud), Belfort gives daily, drug-addled pep talks to his colleagues—mostly thugs he came up with in Queens—rocking the mic like a rowdy wrestler or stand-up comic. He hires show-hookers, marching bands, and, as promised, tossable dwarves. One of Wolf’s most absurd sequences finds Belfort and his business partner Donnie (Jonah Hill) ODing on Quaaludes to the point of near-catatonia and getting into a wrestling match involving a phone chord that needs to be seen to be believed. Stratton Oakmont was too much an outlier to serve as a stand-in for finance sector fraudulence in general, so don’t think of Wolf as social commentary except in the broadest sense. This is, above all, busy, teeth-grindingly giddy high wire comedy.

On that note, I have to single out Hill, Wolf’s own king of comedy. A paragon of the supporting actor, Hill deftly gauges DiCaprio’s gradations of hysteria at every turn and devises the best possible manner of matching it. There’s a brilliant early scene where he explains how he came to marry his cousin, and another where he introduces Belfort to crack cocaine. Only 30 (as of today, in fact), Hill is only gradually revealing his range and abilities. Between this and Moneyball, you start to wonder if the kid can do anything. Of course, over the course of Wolf’s taboo-thrashing carnival show, you’ll see him and DiCaprio do just about everything. That might be worth the ticket price and protracted run-time alone. 

                  

Barry Hannah's Ray: A country doctor's self-examination slides into chaos and reverie

Does anybody here remember Barry Hannah? I’m sad to say I was not even aware of this celebrated Mississippi author until I’d heard of his death at age 67 this past March. They ran an archival interview with him on Fresh Air, and I was enchanted by Hannah’s voice, his vaguely ornery pauses, and his conversation with Terry Gross about guns and religion and the habits of bad men. Wikipedia offers this quote from the author, which seems to tell us a lot about Barry Hannah: “Sometimes you don’t want to arrange your memory. I love the pure chaos of it and just the reverie of it for its own sake.” I’ve just read Hannah’s slim but utterly arresting and often appalling 1980 novel Ray (Grove, $15.50). The chaos and reverie breathes on the page.

As with Daniel Clowes' Wilson (see the preceding post), Ray’s eponymous protagonist slides back and forth between ecstasy and despair and seems to have trouble adapting to the modern world, to avoid becoming another “casualty of the American confusion.” He sees his country as fundamentally ambivalent, representing “rage and gentleness together.” Perhaps this is part of the reason why Ray sometimes fantasizes that he’s a veteran of the windswept battlefields of the Civil War, where he delivered many men unto death, as well as of Vietnam, where he, for real it seems, flew a Phantom. Ray is a resident of Tuscaloosa. Ray is both a doctor and a sick man, conducting on these pages a precarious and wildly deluded self-assessment that bleeds into self-re-invention via Hannah’s eloquent and rigorously subjective first-person prose. Ray’s a drunk and foot-fetishizing womanizer of insatiable lust. Hannah tracks Ray’s most recent stab at marriage to a blue-eyed woman with a “small friendly vagina,” and his observances of his similarly unhinged and even murderous friends’ misadventures. Ray is a frequently disgusting man and just as frequently charming and hysterically funny and audacious—at least within the confines of his fragmentary self-portrait.

Hannah endows Ray with a poet’s linguistic facilities: “I have seen the moon make an opaque ghost of the backyard, and I have seen the Hooch animals roam out into it, smelling the life of themselves. They enter the border of visibility and pass through it into the uncanny.” Hannah takes equal care to render Ray a probably hopeless misanthrope-asshole on the verge of total mental collapse: “I don’t feel that good about women anyway, nor gooks, nor sand-niggers, nor doctors, nor anything human that moves, with its zealous raving habits.” Already a published author of scholarly medical studies, Ray has threatened to write a paper on women, who, he muses, “enjoy revenge more than the worst Apache.” Yet Ray has his moments of surrender to all those less offensive things he most deeply cherishes: “To live in delight of healing, flying, fucking.” Ray is the music of a terrifying id, and Hannah neither glorifies nor condemns his subject. Rather, he recognizes something ugly and fascinating in Ray’s DNA that is common to more of us than we might care to admit, and not just racist sexist sociopaths from below the Mason-Dixon line.

Father, son, and holy terror: Nick Cave's The Death of Bunny Munro

Nick Cave, with friend

It begins with a sudden, shuddering, wholly irrational yet undeniable awareness of encroaching doom, Nick Cave’s chronicle of a death foretold letting us in on its ending from the title on down, so we can better appreciate the particular strange, sordid path it takes to get there. The Death of Bunny Munro is Cave’s second novel, his first in the 20 years that have passed since the publication of his debut And the Ass Saw the Angel. This one could be titled And the Asshole Saw the Angel of Death. Bunny’s uncharacteristic vision of oblivion—he’s normally the optimistic type—arrives not in the midst of some serene moment of contemplation but rather in a rented room at the Grenville Hotel, where he lingers in his underwear, drunk, with a prostitute standing by as he tries to placate his wife over the phone, who’s upset because among other things a madman’s running loose somewhere in England, wearing devil’s horns, and savagely attacking women. As his wife airs her fears, Bunny can see CCTV footage of the maniac on the telly. He’s not sure what to make of the guy, but as his story unfolds, we’ll come to see the horned killer as the flamboyant manifestation of Bunny’s Id, his even darker double, deprived of the most basic social skills that even Bunny can boast of, running rampant. The men represent two different kinds of ladykiller. “Some part of Bunny takes all this personally, but he is not sure why.”

Bunny is a salesman of high-end beauty products. His favourite radio program is Woman’s Hour, which he regularly, stupidly quotes when addressing his uniformly female clientele. Virtually everything in Bunny’s life is calibrated to yield more sex. His way with the ladies is perhaps hard for some of us to understand, “but there’s a pull, even in his booze-blasted face, a magnetic drag that has something to do with the pockets of compassion that form at the corners of his eyes when he smiles, a mischievous arch to his eyebrows and the little hymen-popping dimples in his cheeks when he laughs.” In short he is a devoted sexual predator, probably a genuine sex addict—rather unusually for a middle-aged man, he seems to have a hard-on all the time—and he uses whatever tools lay at his disposal to satisfy his need, which creepily enough is not so much for women per se as for their reproductive organs. Some of his buddies describe themselves as tit-men or leg-men, but Bunny is a dyed-in-the-wool vagina man. He fantasizes about vaginas, or even just clitorises, free-floating in space or collected in a little matchbox. He’s especially interested in celebrity vaginas, and has a special thing for Kylie Minogue and Avril Lavigne (who both receive special apologies in the postscript). In waves of inspired perversion and grotesquerie, Cave has accessed the murkiest, most reptilian depths of the male psyche to create this idiot monster. Not as monstrous as, say, the eponymous protagonist of ‘Stagger Lee,’ one of the most irresistibly sick songs in the mighty canon of Cave’s recording career with the Bad Seeds, but you can see how the two might get on together.

Cave, working at his day job

The novel follows Bunny from the discovery of his desperately unhappy and neglected wife’s suicide through his resolution to get right back to work selling and screwing, taking his young, helplessly dad-adoring son, little Bunny Junior, out of school and along for the road trip. What makes The Death of Bunny Munro palatable, even transcendent in its way, is firstly the brilliant, frequently hilarious wit, on par with the best early novels of Martin Amis, who’s crafted a few truly despicable protagonists of his own in his time; secondly its willingness to really sink into an explore Bunny’s sad little soul and seek out the parts of it that eerily reflect something in virtually all men; thirdly, the presence of Bunny Junior, genuinely innocent and wracked with a mixture of wonderment and grief; and fourthly, Cave’s already legendary facility with language. He’s often said that prose, as well as screenplays—he scripted John Hillcoat’s superb 2005 outback western The Proposition—are actually far easier for him to write than song lyrics, which demand a compaction that challenges Cave’s natural inclination toward storytelling, baroque description, and elaboration. His songs are littered with a dizzying array of characters immersed in private worlds of violence, madness and heartache. All three of these feature prominently in his new novel, even the latter, since, while he can hardly make any sense of it, Bunny does seem to miss his dead wife, is literally haunted by her. To say the very least, it’s tough to like Bunny, but it’s tougher not to become engrossed in his tale.

The novel was prompted by Hillcoat’s suggestion that Cave write him a new screenplay. The screenplay quickly became something else, but its origins are detectable in its engaging use of present-tense, and its forward motion. (Oddly enough, there are some fundamental similarities between this story and that of Hillcoat's new film The Road.) It’s also consumed with visuals, Bunny’s attention to minute physical details, even nail polish; Bunny Junior’s attention to all the strange things he encounters on his journey that need interpreting, usually with the aid of his trusty child’s encyclopedia; and Cave’s attention to the spoils of popular culture cluttering contemporary England. It all winds up to a bizarre, entertainingly hallucinatory finish, which also bears a certain cinematic flourish, though it reminded me most readily of the flipped-out ending of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s epic television series Berlin Alexanderplatz, which Cave is a confessed fan of. (There's even an appearance from a moustahced musician character that could be a Cave stand-in, aligning things even further to Fassbinder's hilarious cameo in the last episode of Alexanderplatz.) Cave has also said he’d like to see The Death of Bunny Munro made into a television series, something that would allow for more expansive character development. But in the meantime the novel has already spread beyond the confines of the page and can also be found as an audiobook, read by Cave, with music by Cave and Bad Seed/Dirty Three violinist Warren Ellis, and an iPhone application, in which you’re supposed to be able to actually see Cave read you the book. “Which all sounds like fucking nightmare to me,” Cave quipped at a recent bookstore appearance I managed to catch in Toronto. But that’s hardly a dissuasive sales tactic. Cave’s been serving up his nightmares for public consumption for 30 years now, and there’s a great many of us who still can’t get enough of them.

Sanguine properties: The Last Mistress

It says a lot about the almost singular subversion of The Last Mistress, not to mention the progress of Catherine Breillat as a filmmaker honing very particular themes, that for no less than half of the movie’s duration, we have the young, delicately handsome Ryno de Marigny (Fu’ad Ait Aattou) divulging the breadth of his impressive sexual biography to the Marquise de Flers (Claude Sarraute), an elderly woman and protective grandmother of Hermangarde (Roxanne Mesquida), the virginal and rather unhappy looking young beauty who’s to be Ryno’s bride. Alternating between Ryno’s measured recount and flashbacks to his tempestuous ten-year affair with La Vellini (Asia Argento), a sort of verbal seduction unfolds in precisely the context that would seem to forbid it most. But the Marquise assures us that she is still a woman of the 18th century, which is to say, a woman of the Age of Reason, now biding the end of her life in the Age of Romance. She’s worldly, and she’s game. She listens exquisitely. The year is 1835, the city Paris.

This also says something about how much the movies can still learn from the novel. Based on Jules-Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly’s 1851 novel Une vieille maîtresse, or The Old Mistress—the English-language title being a dopey compromise that deletes the dreaded term “old” from the promotional materials—Breillat’s eleventh and by far most expensive and glamorous feature possesses an unusual, bisecting structural elegance that compliments the intricacy of its narrative, one rife with erotic struggle, surrender and self-realization. It begins with Ryno entering Vellini’s boudoir for one last premarital fuck, which of course will not be the last by far. As we’re ushered back into the development of their affair, we see how deeply it’s rooted in the ecstasy of antagonism, with Ryno only winning the venomous Vellini’s affections after he’s been shot by her elderly husband in a duel. Once the bullet is extracted from his chest, Vellini rushes to his weakened figure to suckle the fresh blood. She feeds upon Ryno, as he, in his way, will upon her in turn. Her erupted lust is, you know, kinda repulsive. And totally hot.

The illegitimate daughter of a Spanish matador and an Italian princess, la Vellini is a social outlaw, undeterred by the local consensus that a 36-year-old, ostensibly homely woman leading a life of sexual abandon is deeply unseemly. As mapped out by Breillat and Argento, arguably the two most notorious bad girls of contemporary European cinema, Vellini’s trajectory is marked by aggression and orgasms—and, let me tell you, Argento makes the movie orgasm into some sort of new art form here. Vellini, with her defiant, devastatingly hard stares—the way she licks an ice cream cone makes the promise of fellatio at once enticing and scary—is the devouring one and thus, in a sense, the masculine half of the pairing, while Ryno, with his full lips and pale features, pursues more gently, playing the feminine. The overturning of traditional gender roles is itself a part of what makes their collision dynamic, and, as the Romantics would have it, destined for misadventure and courting peril.

Breillat’s shrewdest tactic comes in her balancing of formalities with recklessness, containment with the carnal. The production design is immaculate and softly hued, the costumes artful but largely understated, with the few flourishes counting for a lot in terms of character, and the camerawork, courtesy of Giorgios Arvanitis, who also photographed Breillat’s Anatomy of Hell and her masterful Fat Girl, is painterly—the painter, mind you, would have to be Goya—and presentational, with speakers frequently gazing squarely toward us as though posing for a portrait—which, of course, they are. The brazen qualities, the rawness of the movie, is kept largely within the confines of the narrative itself, while the directorial style is largely clean and only coolly confrontational. It’s a marriage made in the heaven preserved for shameless provocateurs, some sublimely seedy place where Breillat and Argento can recline with their feet on the table, while the rest of us watch, in shock, here and there, but in this case, more often in awe. The Last Mistress is pretty delicious.

Sex and the pity: Sam Rockwell gets too much action, not enough love, just enough lactose, in mostly impotent Choke

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Counter Intelligence: Burn After Reading probes deep into dumbness

Book-ended with zooms in and out of Washington from outer space and scenes in windowless rooms and hallways somewhere deep within CIA headquarters full of essentially hapless, incoherent, bumbling government employees casually making life and death decisions, Burn After Reading isn’t exactly what you might call satire. The ostentatious placement of the nest of American intelligence in what’s made to feel here like the centre of the universe might give us reason to panic if writer/directors Joel and Ethan Coen were very interested in learning something about how the CIA works, or even had anything to say about it, however broadly critical. But this isn’t that sort of movie, which may be all for the best. What we get instead is the Coens at their most disposable and slaphappy, a characteristic jumble of wacky characters, reversals, and milieus as you’d likely find in any feature film.

Like so much of what we encounter in Burn After Reading, Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand) feels like a creature of urban myth, the embodiment of a tabloid headline: LONELY SUBURBAN TRAINER SELL GOV’T SECRETS TO FUND NEW BODY, FACE. The lynchpin of this gleefully labyrinthine narrative, Linda’s failed attempts to cover her multi-tiered cosmetic surgery by credit card overdraft alone promises to be redeemed when her co-worker Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt) takes it upon himself to blackmail a recently fired CIA Balkans expert named Ozzie Cox (John Malkovich) after a disc containing what’s either Cox’s memoirs or financial data or both is accidentally left behind in Hardboides, the gym where Linda and Chad work and work out, a locale doubtlessly named in honour of the 1984 “sexy comedy.”

There’s actually some sexy comedy, or at least sex-related comedy, to be found in Burn After Reading as well, what with the twitchy, ever-smiling US Marshall and semi-discreet pussyhound Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney) banging both Cox’s humourless doctor wife (Tilda Swinton) and, eventually, Linda. Though he’s shooting his load left and right, he proudly declares more than once in the film that he’s never had to fire his weapon even once in over 20 years of service, an ominous detail made more ominous by other little details fussed over by the Coens, like the painting of a rifle hanging from the bathroom wall beside Harry as he fusses over his beard in the mirror. We are, naturally, just waiting for that gun to go off, and when it does things quickly turn—as they often do in Coen Brothers movie—from silly and perplexing to morbid and perverse.

You could say that Clooney’s gotten a bit of a raw deal with the Coens, starring in O Brother Where Art Thou?, Intolerable Cruelty and now this, not a one of them being amongst the finest films in the brothers’ prolific body of work. But Clooney’s uncanny knack for stylized comedy isn’t often utilized elsewhere, and hey, at least Burn After Reading is better than The Ladykillers. And as shallow as Harry is, at least he gives Clooney some diverting business to attend to—not a claim you could make about Ozzie, who only lets Malkovich, looking eerily rubbery and gray, blow a major gasket in scene after scene, or Chad, a character that’s largely about synthetic mock-necks, frosted tips and forwarding the plot in any way possible and probably not very well cast, though Pitt for all his limitations looks like he’s having some fun, especially when rocking the treadmill. McDormand, for her part, seems to always come closest to striking the best balance between emotional realism and utter mania.

But perhaps the bigger concern here is whether or not the Coens were even sure they were making a comedy. You could argue that several of the Coens’ movies are genre hybrids—though not as many as you’d think—but the problem isn’t whether or not we can identify the genre but whether or not we feel as though we should bother investing any feelings in the characters. For all the hi-jinx, the air of paranoia and intrigue peppered throughout the film—and soaking Carter Burwell’s deliberately boilerplate score—compels us to try and generate some deeper interest in Linda, Chad, Ozzie and Harry, or at least their high-stake plights, as does the numerous subplots of romance and longing, such as that between Linda and her lovestruck boss (Richard Jenkins). But whatever emotions are built up in the film’s first two-thirds make the abrupt, goof-off ending feel that much more like a slap in face for even caring. My advice would be not to bother caring, but still see the movie. It’s pretty slight, adds up to very little, but nonetheless features enough inspired non-sequiters to entertain.