Radiation addiction

Ever wondered what happened to that radioactive Pandora’s box that suddenly transformed Kiss Me Deadly (1955) from a terse, sordid, ultra-stylized little noir into batshit sci-fi apocalypse in the film’s final, unforgettable moments? Turns out it wound up in the trunk of a 1964 Chevy Malibu, driven by a rather peculiar scientist (Fox Harris) with only half a pair of sunglasses, some three decades later. Only now the hell-fiery whatsit has turned into a cache of alien corpses—or do I have it wrong? We first spot its/their emerald glow when said scientist is stopped by a ill-fated highway patrolman somewhere in Southern California, perhaps not too far from Kiss Me Deadly’s exploded beach, in the opening scenes of Repo Man (1984), British writer/director Alex Cox’s truly inspired, tonally singular, frequently hilarious, genre-gobbling feature debut.

What the hell is wrong with me that I hadn’t seen Repo Man before now? I was a little kid when it came out, but its cult status burgeoned rapidly in the months and years following its initial theatrical release. I remember it so often being showcased in the suburban Calgary video stores I would frequent. I somehow missed the appeal. Go figure. It’s now available on DVD and Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection.

A film riddled with elaborate conspiracies, boggling cosmologies, rarely seen Los Angeles geographies, old cars and a trove of So-Cal hardcore soon-to-be classics, it follows one Otto (Emilio Estevez), a blank slate of a punk rocker from Huntington Beach who can’t get laid and can’t hold a stupid job long enough to save up any money, while his baby boomer burnout parents give all the family savings to some caffeinated televangelist who insists that God wants their money. Otto impulsively quits his gig stocking generic food items at the local grocery, making a show of shoving a fellow clerk into a pyramid of cans with the same oddball air of faux-aggression he applies to dumping a can of beer all over the floor of the Helping Hand Acceptance Corporation, the small automobile repossession agency where he will soon find gainful employment legally stealing people’s cars, and getting chased and attacked by angry drivers who neglect to make their payments. Otto likes the money and he likes the thrills. He even seems to like his mentor, Bud (Harry Dean Stanton), the senior agent who manages to recruit Otto without Otto’s knowing. The job lives up to Bud’s promise, which happens to be one of this imminently quotable film’s many quotable—if often misquoted—lines: “Repo Man’s always intense.”

But is Repo Man intense? More like audacious, spastically inventive and wildly entertaining, an underground comic come to life, with an absurdly economical final act in which our hero is captured and escapes, is captured and escapes and is captured and escapes in short shrift. The film’s parade of memorable supporting characters help streamline what might otherwise seem a narrative derailed by detours: Sy Richardson’s Lite, Dick Rude’s Duke, Del Zamora and Eddie Velez’s Rodrqiguez brothers, and most especially Tracey Walter’s Miller, who outrages the other repo men with claims of John Wayne’s homosexuality and blows Otto’s mind with a philosophy centered around the universe’s “lattice of coincidence.” But Stanton is the film’s enigmatic and weary center and key emblem, a figure of bizarre resilience in Regan-era America. It remains one of this great character actor’s small handful of larger roles. It’s also probably still the most interesting use of Estevez, who is often seen in his bright white underpants. And it remains the best and most successful thing Cox has yet managed in an industry that’s never given him as big a break. 

          

Exit stage left, then keep dancing

The first space is just a stage, a place we expect dance to happen, but that stage soon feels like a world, one made of some coffee-like soil, one whose inhabitants were long ago condemned to wear only beige, where a fearsome collective anxiety accumulates with the appearance of a red slip. The inhabitants’ gestures read as self-flagellation, their bodies move in a manner that’s captivatingly neurotic, addled, electrified, as though possessed by some great and mysterious force. This is a world that German choreographer Pina Bausch built.

I’ve never seen Bausch’s work performed live, so her death in 2009 came with the extra sting of knowing that I’d truly missed something. But Bausch lives on, not only through ongoing revivals but also through this remarkable film from her compatriot Wim Wenders, whose undisguised reverence infuses this, his best work in more than a dozen years. That he made it in 3D, a format traditionally reserved for the biggest and often dumbest sort of genre pictures, is itself remarkable. Photographed by Hélène Louvart, Pina is both the most straightforwardly conceived and best employment of 3D I’ve seen—if you’re going to film something normally experienced in three dimensions, why not shoot it so that it looks three-dimensional? The bottom line is that, however variable his later films may be, Wenders has always possessed an unfailing eye for texture, shadow, colour, and sweeping cinematic splendour, and he’s one of very few filmmakers who has thus far managed to incorporate 3D without sacrificing beauty.

Beauty—a mischievous, obsessive, intelligent, enigmatic beauty—could be said to be one of the subjects of Pina, which is neither biographical documentary nor a performance film in the strictest sense. It’s an homage, by Wenders, his collaborators, and also Bausch’s collaborators, who appear in the film not as talking heads but in silent portraits over which their spoken memories of Bausch float. “Meeting Pina was like finding a language,” says one of her wildly diverse dancers, and Wenders ensures that we understand what’s meant by language in this context: Bausch developed an essentially immutable, bodily vocabulary that swayed playfully between the primal and the sophisticated. Pina shows us dancers dancing with veal chops in ballet slippers outside a factory, having strange encounters on elevated trams, or marching with expressionistic smiles across fields in formal wear. Perhaps best of all, Wenders includes a generous except from Bausch’s famous Café Müller—a work some filmgoers will recognize from Almodóvar’s Talk to Her, which used the dance both as its opening scene and perhaps its source material—in which women scurry blind through a room crowded with tables and chairs while men yank the furniture out of their trajectories. It is, among other things, a testament to the balance of trance-like surrender and devotional support that combine to make art this dynamic, alluring and haunting.