1973: The year of awkward sex, permissive parenting and tentative transgression

Early in the commentary track he shares with writer/ producer James Schamus featured on Criterion’s new two-disc special edition, director Ang Lee describes The Ice Storm (1997) as a “disaster film.” While it might seem laughable to apply this genre to a movie concerned with upper-middle class domestic conflict in 1973 suburban Connecticut, it proves an inspired way of contextualizing the movie’s cycle of events. Based on Rick Moody’s novel, The Ice Storm does in fact contain a pair of disasters, the larger being that of the Watergate scandal, the more immediate being the weather event of the title. Neither disaster promises pyrotechnics or rampant death, yet both have some sort of transformative effect on the characters. This effect works best when functioning on the level of atmosphere, but there’s also a tangible, irreversible effect that ultimately drapes an overwhelming shadow over the entire story.

It’s about two families. Ben and Elena Hood (Kevin Kline and Joan Allen) struggle amiably through marital disharmony, placating themselves with a casual affair and kleptomania respectively. Their teenage children Paul and Wendy (Tobey Maguire and Christina Ricci) use the freedom granted to them by their desperate to be hip parents to explore pharmaceuticals and sex with a precocious inquiry. Jim and Janey Carver (Jamey Sheridan and Sigourney Weaver) by comparison seem more mutually remote and programmatic in their mid-life crises. Their sons Mikey and Sandy (Elijah Wood and Adam Hann-Byrd), the former an already dreamy kid precariously enamored with weed, the latter sensitive to the point of paralysis, his only outlet for expression coming from a predilection for blowing shit up (okay, so actually there are a few pyrotechnics), are the willing playmates of the pro-active Wendy, who engages each in separate games of show-me-yours-and-I’ll-show-you-mine. Building tensions up toward the night of the storm, where the parents abandon the kids to attend a key party drenched in pathos, the story operates around this generational role reversal: what happens when the parents act like kids and vice versa.

In the same sense that Brokeback Mountain (2005) –Lee’s other most fundamentally American film– can be regarded as being about the failure of love to overcome outspoken social antipathies toward homosexuality, The Ice Storm can be said to be about the failure of The Sexual Revolution to overcome the repressive apparatus of the American family/community. This sense of failure emerges from a series of interesting conditions: virtually every character is either too old or too young to have come of age during the radical cultural shifts of the late 1960s; the characters exist largely within a community cut off from the unruly influence of cosmopolitan life by geography and affluence; and crucially, the film climaxes with a fatal tragedy that reverberates hugely through the final sequence, feeling unavoidably like some cosmic punishment for half-hearted experiments in permissive parenting. This ending still feels to me like this terrifically rich film’s one major misfire, reducing the complex relationships by way of what feels like the act of a forsaken and vengeful God. (It bears mentioning that Lee’s only previous appearance on a Criterion disc was his introduction to The Virgin Spring (1960), a film with a weirdly similar finale.)

Of course it would be even more reductive to judge The Ice Storm solely on such a reading of its last reel. Inherent in the film’s unusual multitude of central characters, with their ongoing, measured transgressions, their flashes of fleeting insight and their general lack of decisiveness, is the idea of the movie as a multifaceted portrait rather than a traditional linear narrative anchored by some overt moral lesson or resolution. Lee himself felt attracted to a Cubist method of directing, wanting to show varying sides of a situation, an idea or an emotion all at once –and indeed, without employing any overly conspicuous formal device, he achieves this effect quite well, through the careful placement of figures in a frame, the mirroring of gestures and images from one scene to the next, and, most of all, the tremendously detailed performances from his extraordinary cast.

A lot of attention was paid to Weaver when the film came out. Her subtle balancing of Janey’s exterior frigidity with an inner vulnerability is genuinely impressive, but her character remains marginal. Allen’s character by contrast feels more central and certainly more desperate, yet Elena nonetheless feels a bit too sketched out. Kline, who Moody himself credits with deepening his character, stands out from all the other adults because his weaknesses are so acute, his humiliation so squirm-inducing, and his deficiencies so tenderly undercut by the actor’s ingratiating persona. But the fact is The Ice Storm belongs to the kids: moony-eyed Wood conveys such innocent rapture; Maguire’s wavering voice and goofily cavalier way with literary references imbues his every attempt at confident delivery with a near-palpable ache; Hann-Byrd’s unbreakable astonishment with everything around him is both heart-breaking and totally hilarious; and Ricci, more than anyone, embodies the film’s tender hesitancy and desire for some elusive self-realization and sensual fulfillment. She’s just amazing.

Besides the commentary track, Criterion’s typically superlative extras include some very good new cast interviews (which reveal Weaver in particular to be an actor who admirably takes little for granted), some reflections from Moody, plenty of fun, candid material from the duo of Lee and Schamus, some interesting deleted scenes, and some fascinating making-of stuff from costume designer Carol Oditz, cinematographer Frederick Elmes (Blue Velvet, Night on Earth) and production designer Mark Friedberg, all of whom provide enlightening testimony on their detailed work and make an impressive case for the liberal use of biodegradable hair gel when wanting to evoke an ice storm in the middle of spring.

Rough trade, distant trains and sumptuous darkness: Gus Van Sant's beguiling debut

Now is a pretty-much perfect moment to celebrate Gus Van Sant. Van Sant’s films entered the cultural consciousness when I was still in my teens, and I for one can trace my response to his work from my complete marvel at the winsome singular stylings and melancholy infatuation with marginalized young hipsters and hustlers that marked Drugstore Cowboy (1989) and My Own Private Idaho (91), to my increasing disappointment over Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (93) and To Die For (95), my exclusively abstract admiration for his Xerox of Psycho (98), and my sense of outright betrayal over the unapologetically commercial Good Will Hunting (97) and Finding Forrester (2000), to my ongoing fascination with his return to form(alism) with Gerry (02), Elephant (03) and Last Days (05). This leads us finally to Paranoid Park, his latest and in many ways finest film, which gleans a revitalized sense of humour and dreaminess from his earliest work and weds it to the time-curling narrative schemes of the recent preceding “death” trilogy, capping a diverse and adventuresome two decades of making movies in and out of the Hollywood system.

The movie that started it all however is one I’ve only just seen after many years of hearing about it. Mala Noche (85) was Van Sant’s feature debut and the film that put him on the map. Though based on the autobiographical novella by Portland, Oregon street poet Walt Curtis, Mala Noche feels distinctly indebted to Jack Kerouac –not to mention Robert Frank– in its youthful tale of longing, aimlessness, wry Americana and skid row communion. It’s seductively oneiric, flat-out gorgeous to gaze at, decidedly loose with narrative but utterly assured with tone, a jewel in the crown of 80s indie cinema, impressively resourceful in its imaginative use of a miniscule budget (personally financed by Van Sant) and non-existent gear. And its now available in a lovely new package from The Criterion Collection.

Shot by John Campbell like some primitive noir, with hard white spots illuminating faces and objects amidst pools of sumptuous darkness, Mala Noche imparts mood from the get-go, with fetching, stubbly liquor store clerk Walt (Tim Streeter) telling us through elegant voice-over of his overwhelming crush for a Mexican drifter named Johnny (Doug Cooeyate). Johnny speaks no English but he gets the gist of Walt’s cheerful advances with little trouble. Walt quickly surmises that his chances of beguiling Johnny into any sort of sexual union are way slim, and opts for offering up a straight money for sex exchange. Johnny still doesn’t bite (maybe because Walt only offered $15), but he does go along for numerous rides through the country in Walt’s beat-to-shit sedan, so long as his traveling companion Roberto (Ray Monge) is in tow. They also share a gleeful night of drinking, eating and dancing in the kitchen of Walt’s apartment before Johnny disappears as casually as he arrived.

In the end, bedding Roberto –a one-night stand of sweaty, coarse man love, conveyed in tight close-ups of fields of dimly-lit flesh and one filthy-looking jar of Vaseline, unfolding to the strangely soothing sounds of distant trains and church bells– is about as close as Walt ever gets to the object of his affection. But in truth Johnny is a remote if ferally charismatic figure, more a type than a fully realized person. Even Walt himself admits his awareness to being drawn to Johnny at least partly through sheer exoticism and racial fetish: this shaggy-haired wetback makes for a certain cliché of dark-skinned rough trade and easy exploitation, yet there’s no denying the romantic sense of connection Walt, the self-confessed (comparatively) rich gringo, aspires toward. His story, however slight with regard to events, is as thoughtful as it is coolly audacious, and a sheer pleasure to sink into for its 77-minute running time.

Criterion’s disc comes with a good, hour-long doc on Curtis as well as terrific interview with Van Sant, who regales with stories about the winding road that led him to filmmaking, his relationship with Curtis and the Portland poetry scene, his enthrallment over reading weirdly formatted Stanley Kubrick screenplays at the American Film Institute, and the unique conditions under which Mala Noche was made. There’s also a very good essay on the film by Dennis Lim, who does a remarkable job of contextualizing Van Sant’s impact on gay cinema and the almost singular universality of his approach to gay themes.

The forgotten ones: the gradual emergence of Buñuel's Mexican films on DVD

It’s long frustrated me that Luis Buñuel, one of history’s greatest filmmakers, is often considered so solely on the basis of his spectacularly scandalous early shorts Un chien andalou (1929) and L’Âge d’or (30) and late-career European co-productions like Belle de jour (67) and the Oscar-wining The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (72). The vast bulk of Buñuel’s filmography is actually comprised of films made in Mexico between these periods, but, due to a number of issues –distribution, rights, the absence of international stars, the stylistic range and of the material, and, one suspects, a dismissive attitude toward the Mexican film industry– most of these films have failed to reach their rightful audience.

The uniformed consensus on Buñuel’s Mexican films usually insists that, often produced quickly, often melodramas, and sometimes employing Buñuel more as a gun for hire than canonized auteur, they’re compromised works ill-representative of the director’s mischievous disposition and Surrealist roots. Such assumptions ring false for several reasons, not the least being that melodrama is in fact a genre highly conducive to exercising Surrealist philosophy. The period has its lesser titles to be sure, but it’s nonetheless a body of work characterized by invention, provocation, sensuality and economy.

The good news is that in recent months these films have started cropping up on DVD shelves, including two very different titles paired together by Lionsgate in a set imaginatively titled Luis Buñuel 2-Disc Collector’s Edition.

Gran Casino (47), his first Mexican film, admittedly comes closest to being “Luis light”: frivolous, generic, with few traces of anything especially “Buñuelian.” Yet it’s entertaining and far from without interest, concerning a couple of likeable charros who venture to Tampico to find lucrative work in the oil fields. They find more than they bargained for after befriending an Argentine oilman who represents the last holdout in a region otherwise monopolized by a German-owned company using any means necessary to eliminate competition.

The film lucidly evokes its rowdy, anarchic setting, dominated by elitist corruption and riggers eager to relinquish their earnings in the local casino with its luscious female entertainers. The plot features murder, masquerade and plenty of music, and while Buñuel’s contributions are largely workmanlike, he does enhance the proceedings with his distinctive attention to objects –a face reflected in an ice bucket, a stick dragged suggestively through crude oil in the midst of an otherwise tepid love scene– as well as to Mercedes Barba’s impressive thighs jiggling beneath a curtain of sheer fabric in her initial dance number.

More deeply satisfying, The Young One (60), an English-language, US/Mexico co-production, is an unfaithful, utterly inspired adaptation of Peter Matthiessen’s story ‘Travelin Man,’ a chamber piece set on an island off the Carolina coast, a fecund locale that serves as a confluence of contentious attitudes toward race, sexuality and identification. It begins with black clarinetist Traver (Bernie Hamilton) arriving alone and desperate in a small boat. Cries of rape jarringly explode over the soundtrack just before we’re treated to an exhilarating series of jump cuts that flashback to the events that brought Traver to his current state. This is followed by the introduction of Miller (Zachary Scott) the island’s white gamekeeper, seen killing a rabbit, who, like Traver’s boat, will enjoy the distinction of actually being shot up twice before the film’s through.

Death and transformation abound in The Young One: animals are hunted and consumed, an old man expires, and the pubescent Evalyn (the remarkably unguarded Key Meersman), at least in the eyes of Miller, her guardian, goes from being a girl to a woman. Amidst these transitional states, the story’s central irony is writ large: while the charismatic Traver must run from lynch-hungry whites happy to assume he’s guilty of a rape he probably didn’t commit, a forced sexual relationship erupts between the middle-aged Miller and the disarmingly innocent Evalyn.

All the signifiers of socially conscientious middlebrow pap are in place –one can imagine the material resting cozily in the hands of say, Stanley Kramer. But Buñuel, who developed the script with Hugo Butler, creates something far more complicated and full of juice. The Young One implicates the viewer fully into the process of Evalyn’s loss of sexual innocence, playfully juxtaposing the trappings of her ostensible newfound adulthood with her girlish manners, as in her final scene that finds her hopping childishly along a boardwalk in oversized heels.
Likewise, the film constantly draws overt parallels between the two men, even while exposing the grotesque aspects of Miller. And in the memorable last scenes, it is in fact Miller who undergoes the greatest, strangest changes. The whole process is conveyed through elegant, fluid camerawork by Gabriel Figueroa and Buñuel’s compelling habit of lingering on images of people at work, of food and, of course, of Evalyn’s legs, which he neither grossly fetishizes nor denies their immaculate beauty.

Lionsgate’s release is in some ways rather clumsy –the two discs are mislabeled, the songs have no subtitles– but the transfers look great, the audio commentaries accompanying both films have their distinct merits, and above all they got the material back on the market in a very affordable package.

Blood in the woods, occult geometries across the Atlantic: New American novels about 20th century catastrophe

Books time travel with a freedom and ease not granted to other mediums. Not having to physically show us the past, save what it plucks from its imaginary landscape to evoke in our minds, the novel need not concern itself with tracking down a dozen Model Ts or 3000 extras in togas to convince its audience that we’re in another time. The novel conveys the past with such immediacy because it does so through the consciousness of individual characters –though this is perhaps the greatest challenge posed to any artist. The new year has thus far deposited two striking new American novels into my hands that transport us to another time, one from a long-established master, one from a formidable emerging writer making a hell of an impression with his second work. Both concern distinctive moments in the 20th century and summon up scenes of iconic violence to punctuate intimate stories.

It’s tough to know what exactly to make of Russell Banks’ The Reserve (Knopf, $32). Set in the 1930s, it begins with the first meeting between Vanessa Cole, a man-eating, mentally unstable heiress and divorcée, and Jordan Groves, a married-with-children painter and pilot known as much for his scarlet politics, Hemingwayesque travels and extramarital adventures as his painting. That these two might collide in some unruly erotic entanglement seems a no-brainer, but Banks has set a course for an altogether more sanguine melodrama, making the intermittent chapters alternately describing the flight of the doomed Hindenburg and an air strike on a Franco military stronghold more than mere historical context. There will be blood, indeed.

I’ve long admired Banks’ work. In the case of Affliction, I was awestruck by the way in which Banks seemed to stake out some territory within the nightmare world of Jim Thompson –whose brilliantly chilling crime novels The Killer Inside Me and Pop. 1280 set the mould for stories of small town lawmen with deep roots in their local communities and even deeper troubles in their fragile psyches– and making it all his own, bringing a certain expansion of character background, subjective psychological tension and finely detailed atmosphere than was typical of Thompson’s concise, more genre-bound prose. Yet with The Reserve, which is also set in an isolated community, that of wealthy vacationers and poor townees in the Adirondacks, Banks is not just exploiting select elements of a thriller for literary ends. He’s diving right in and just whipping up an unabashed thriller of his own.

There’s an unmistakable trashiness to Vanessa and Jordan’s tale of lurid transgression, replete with an aiding and abetting local yokel named Hubert St. Germain, a guy who could have easily narrated any number of Thompson novels, a lonely widower who’s sweetly natured but just too soft in the head to prevent catastrophe when presented with the opportunity. And there’s a singular strangeness in reading something of this sort realized by the likes of Banks. The result is, as you might expect, a bit uneven, but once you get an idea of what you’re in for, The Reserve does offer its share of salty thrills and moments of elegant, subtle, insightful imagery and emotional depth –and all in the same 287 page novel.

Zachary Lazar’s Sway (Little, Brown, $27.99) sweeps us forward into the 1960s and focuses from page one on the overtly sinister currents that ran through that decade that finally choked on its own rhetoric of peace and love. Its cast of characters will be familiar to anyone with an interest in the popular culture of the period: Brian Jones, founding member and first casualty of The Rolling Stones, Kenneth Anger, the occultist and underground filmmaker behind ‘Scorpio Rising’ and ‘Invocation of My Demon Brother,’ and Bobby Beausoleil, the would-be rock star who featured prominently in ‘Demon Brother,’ became a member of Charles Manson’s “family,” and was convicted in 1970 for the murder of Gary Hinman. How these three connect, in the flesh and otherwise, seems in its own way the manifestation of some occult geometry, but what’s at the base of each individual story is some magnetic attraction to the mystery and power of darkness.

The very first scene in Sway is loaded with a potent air of hazy menace, with Beausoleil taking a quiet little ride with Charlie into town, where some anonymous middle class residence waits to be penetrated in the mid-afternoon suburban stillness. Lazar then takes through a tour of cold water flats in London where skinny English boys try to channel a certain demonic spirit out of their guitars and, soon after, to a blur of nightclubs where these same boys discover that this spirit can make girls go crazy and boys charge the stage. They’re playing music from America, and that music contains a key to intoxicating violence. Finally, Lazar chronicles Anger’s cultivation of his long, arduous career in the international fringe, his films forging alliances with Jean Cocteau and later on Mick Jagger, who gradually usurps Jones as the guiding hand of the Stones. And Lazar writes a haunting, if decidedly unsentimental elegy to Jones as he shrinks away from stage and studio, from his weirdly symbiotic relationship with Anita Pallenberg –who winds up in the arms of the rather fun, amiably portrayed Keith Richards– and finally into that swimming pool, the unlikely site of his unexplainable death at the age of 27, just one of many sour notes that brought that revolutionary decade to a morbid, exhausted close –and brings Sway to its fascinatingly shadowy conclusion.

Know what? Not that funny...

Peter and Paul, the young antagonists in Funny Games, Aryan, clad in stark white, exuding a sort of studied, robotic idea of politeness, seem to spread through the isolated world of the film like some chillingly disaffected infectious disease. These boys move from one country house, one family, to another, each time seeking to exact a more or less identical program of horrifically violent disaster. They begin by penetrating the home through feigning innocence and asking an innocuous favour. They then disarm the resident patriarch and engage the entire clan in a game of terror whose rules are childishly simple yet hopelessly fixed in the assailants' favour. Watching their campaign unfold is like bearing witness to a nightmare of such deadening inevitability as to be, above all, wearying.

For those who’ve followed the work of Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke, watching Funny Games will also provoke considerable, perhaps undesirable, déjà vu. Haneke is not only remaking his own 1997 Austrian film of the same name, but delivering a shot-by-shot duplication: the story, characters, even the lighting, props and layout of the house and surroundings where it all takes place, everything has been lovingly recreated, only this time in English and with English-language actors. The duplication is so precise that while watching the new film the viewer can’t help but become distracted by the most incidental shift in detail. (Hey, there’s soymilk in the fridge this time!)

With regard to the performances, as someone who doesn’t speak German it’s hard to gauge what’s largely a matter of linguistic familiarity. While the characters are virtually unrecognizable as human beings, even sociopathic human beings, Peter and Paul, here played by Brady Corbet and Michael Pitt, do seem slightly more textured. Their victims, Ann, George and little Georgie, likewise have one or two moments that caught me off guard. Executive producer Naomi Watts, who seems to possess a special interest in horror/fantasy remakes (see The Ring, The Ring 2, King Kong and, coming soon, The Birds) is certainly committed, and begins the film with a bit more vulnerability than Susanne Lothar, her 1997 counterpart. Tim Roth, in a role previously played by the late Ulrich Mühe, creates what for me is by far the film’s most affecting moment, the scene in which George, suffering unimaginable shock, barely able to stand, asks his wife to forgive him for not being able to somehow prevent the catastrophe that’s beset their family. Overall however, both versions prompted exactly the same response in me: intrigue, followed by a period of extreme anxiety and repulsion, followed by utter, exasperating boredom, and, once the film was through, a degree of grudging intellectual appreciation.

The ostensible point of Funny Games, in both versions, is to function as a critique of the commodification of violence in movies. The critique filters into the film through numerous, highly calculated attempts at subverting audience expectations. We might expect to see exciting, dynamic violence; we might expect suspense; we might expect to see the antagonists undone by some mixture of ingenuity on the part of their adversaries and unpredictable forces from the world beyond this house under siege: Haneke denies us all of these things. The problem is that what he’s put in their place are the sort of winky alienation techniques you might expect from some annoyingly smarty-pants film student, such as having the antagonists condescendingly talk directly to the camera or, in the film’s most tiresome scene, pick up a remote control and rewind back a few minutes so they can correct events in a way that suits them better. There are simply no identifiable rules, no interior logic, to Funny Games, a fact which no doubt upsets our bourgeois notions of cathartic drama, but nonetheless does little to implicate us any further in what’s unfolding, because to implicate us we’d need to care a lot more.

Let me be clear: I greatly admire the films Haneke’s made since the first Funny Games. Code Unknown, The Piano Teacher, Time of the Wolf and Caché all seem to succeed where both versions of Funny Games fail: they make a deeply troubling spectacle of violence and withhold certain pieces of what would normally be crucial information as a way to coerce our more active participation with the narrative and the many layers of significance inherent in it. In his Cineaste review of the film, Robert Koehler suggests that Funny Games “is best addressed not in terms of whether it actually works on screen, but as an object that spews out ideas.” I agree that you do indeed need to actually see Funny Games to be able to appreciate the ideas it has to offer. But do you need to see it in two languages? Do you even need to see it twice? And furthermore, does a thriller or horror film need to be so loftily schematic and relentlessly cold in order to engage us in questioning how we consume and/or become disaffected by violence? If viewers are required to be self-reflexive anyway, could they not be just as provoked by a smart genre film, say one by Hitchcock, Verhoven or Cronenberg, that’s infused with ideas, auto-critiques and still delivers the goods with regards to emotional investment in story and characters?

Caché: The murderers are among us

Making good on one of the enigmatic triggers that gradually evaporated in the mirror-miasma of David Lynch’s Lost Highway, Austrian writer/director Michael Haneke’s Caché begins with a VHS tape left on a doorstep, a little act of psychological terrorism perfectly blurring the innocuous and the sinister. The tape reveals only hours of the same fixed shot of the exterior of the recipients’ Parisian home. They come and go, unknowing while nothing happens, their walls remaining uncompromised—at least, physically.

Yet the tape-maker has more than succeeded in his act of invasion: the camera may never move into the house but the tape does (and more soon follow), along with some crude cryptic drawings, penetrating not only personal boundaries but psychic ones buried in the troubled memories of Georges (Daniel Auteuil). Like the tape-maker, Georges prefers to keep his thoughts and motivations hidden, even from his wife Anne (Juliette Binoche, superb) and pre-teen son Pierrot (Lester Makedonsky). And the tape becomes a catalyst for mistrust, which spreads like a contagion through the family.

In his chillingly clean, understated exploitation of the thriller genre, Haneke manipulates our frames of perception from the film’s opening moment, offering us suspense but no privileged information, no sudden close-ups constructed to clarify intent, no transitions that might guide us toward an easier contextualizing of what we’re watching, whether it be surveillance, dramatic action, memory or fragment of a dream. Everything in Caché is presented in the same directorial deadpan, which functions all the better toward implicating us in the very deep murk lying just outside the film’s periphery.

By accident or design, Georges is being led back 40 years to unpleasant childhood experiences shared with Majid (Maurice Bénichou), the son of an Algerian couple once briefly employed by Georges’s family. Georges’s guilt is, in fact, the true engine of the story, and Auteuil’s heavily guarded panic inspires both our identification and our dread. This is a remarkable performance that draws no attention to itself—indeed, rather than play for the camera, Auteuil’s Georges becomes so fearful of hidden viewers as to be afflicted with pretend calm that he can’t let go of no matter where he is.

But where we in the audience are being led as witnesses of Georges’s fruitless search for resolution is toward equally confrontational if unspoken questions of long-term responsibility that reach far beyond a single character’s psychological closets and into the collective consciousness: the failures of the integrationist model of French citizenship, France’s ghastly mistreatment of Algerians, and, broadening the historical scope, global paranoia about terror and Islam. For all the ambiguity, perhaps the one certainty we share with Georges is the knowledge that our sense of home comes at a terrible cost to others.

The evocation of home is as questionable on a literal level as it is on the figurative: the neatly arranged walls of books that envelope Georges and Anne’s place, while signifying educated, rationalist, middle-class comfort, are eerily echoed by the representational walls of fake books that envelope the set of the literary chat show Georges hosts. The tension between reality and theatre is left suspended in Caché; there is a deliberate lack of release (though you’re advised to sit through the closing credits if you want every chance at closure). This tension then hovers disconcertingly in our consciousness as we leave the theatre and try to make sense of the film, its final triumph being the way it finally denies a solid form to its bogeyman, knowing full well that he’s lurking inside the formless fluids of our minds.

Viridiana: the follies of desire

A quick survey of Entertainment Weekly’s recent “25 Most Controversial Movies Ever” proves that even terms like “controversial” can be baldly co-opted by commercial interests. How else can we account for the presence of Ron Howard’s New Agey, theologically egalitarian, soft-on-the-Vatican adaptation of The Da Vinci Code scoring Number 13? Was anybody actually offended by that movie? Did anyone take it seriously enough to be offended? Did Howard even take it seriously?

I’m not proposing that anyone actually take Entertainment Weekly seriously, but it says something about the narrow range of the mainstream media’s cultural radar when Da Vinci ranks so prominently while Luis Buñuel’s Viridiana doesn’t even make EW’s final cut. Deliciously provocative, caustically insightful, hounded by censors and legal troubles, Viridiana was controversial in the richest sense. It’s the work a seasoned master, playfully confronting the deep-rooted socio-religious ideology that shaped his own life.

After making such an early splash with the scandalous Un chien andalou (1928) and L’age d’or (30), Buñuel underwent years of sporadic activity before reinventing himself in Mexico, where he made numerous films in quick succession, some of which (like 1950’s Los Olvidados) are among his masterworks. He’d garnered an international reputation and proved that, with age, even the most maverick artists earn grudging acceptance by the establishment.

A quarter century after the end of The Civil War, Spanish authorities decided to thaw their previously icy relations with their most notorious filmmaking progeny. Invited home under the auspices of the Franco regime he once fled from, Buñuel, a few restrictions aside, was given free reign. Viridiana was completed just in time for the 1961 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Palme d’Or and was declared blasphemous by the Vatican’s newspaper. The director of the Spanish Film Institute who approved the production was dismissed, the film was disowned by Spain and all prints were ordered destroyed. It was never shown there until 1977.

Picking up thematically where Nazarín (58) left off, Viridiana concerns a young nun (Silvia Pinal) who accepts an invitation from her Uncle Jaime (the marvellously melancholy Fernando Rey) to pay him a final visit before entering the convent. Jaime reveals his fetishistic obsession with his dead wife, whom Viridiana closely resembles, convincing Viridiana to dress as her before pleading with her to maintain the role permanently and live on his estate as his spouse. Viridiana leaves in disgust.

Jaime eventually finds a perverse way of making Viridiana stay, but once settled she endeavours to transform his home into a house of Christian charity, inviting vagabonds to work on the estate in return for food and shelter. The benefactors inevitably abuse Viridiana’s charity, making a wild party in her absence, climaxing in a portrait where the drunken bums are positioned at the banquet table in imitation of Da Vinci’s ‘Last Supper.’

With characteristic cool, Buñuel claimed he never set out to blaspheme, and to a degree this seems genuine. Many of Viridiana’s controversial details (the crucifix switch-blade, the tortured dogs) are taken directly from Buñuel’s experiences of Spanish life. His characterization of Viridiana isn’t mocking but sympathetic. Characters aren’t judged morally, but rendered as complex and deeply human in all their weaknesses and strengths, their acts of malice or altruism. Guided by Buñuel’s increasingly elegant, quietly strange camerawork (highlighted by his jarring, erotic isolation of legs), Viridiana is unsparingly, blackly comic, but a keenly observed portrait of the follies of desire.

A French documentary on Buñuel found on Criterion's DVD of Viridiana, features comments by a Jesuit priest from the seminary where Buñuel studied. “Even in his most irreligious films,” the priest says, “some traces of religion can always be found.” This testimony is in keeping with Buñuel's famous anti-declaration "I'm still an atheist, thank God."  If Buñuel could truly offend, it’s only because his films are founded in belief and wonder. And that’s something you’d never say about Ron Howard.

Bring us your huddled masses: Emanuele Crialese ushers us toward the Golden Door

The original Italian title for writer/ director Emanuele Crialese’s most recent work was Nuovo- mondo, but the film began circulating festivals in 2006, only months after the release of Terrence Malick’s The New World. Presumably re-titled so as to avoid being confused with Malick’s atmospheric masterwork, Nuovomondo was ultimately released, in English-speaking countries at least, as Golden Door. The shift, however frustrating it may have been for the filmmakers, was ultimately fortuitous: Crialese’s follow-up to Respiro is a work at once grounded in carefully detailed history and strangely elevated by a sense of grand mystery. Its characters, most of them Italian peasants, embark on a journey to early 20th century America as pilgrims undertaking a journey of mystical significance. The New World they move toward, which is rumoured to yield vegetables the size of horses and trees that grow money, indeed beacons them like some utopian portal made of precious materials. And Crialese’s simultaneously beguiling and terrifying vision of their movement is suitably poetic, intoxicated with the immigrant’s persistent optimism.

With the exception of westerns and their later counterpart, the road movie, travel, the actual movement from one geographical space to another, has traditionally been compressed in movies, forsaken in favour of depicting the destination. But what was once conveyed through a fleeting image of a broken line working its way across a map is itself the very subject of much of Golden Door. Like millions of others, journeying to the New World for poor Sicilian farmer Salvatore Mancuso (Vincenzo Amato, nearly unrecognizable from his memorable turn in Respiro) and his family represents an act of faith and will ultimately result in their being basically torn apart. From the opening images of Salvatore and his eldest son climbing a rocky hillside with stones in their mouths, hoping to receive answers from God as to what to do with their frustrated lives, there’s an immediate sense that adventure and necessity collaborate in this realm, however uneasily. To dream of a new life in a new place requires tremendous sacrifice as well as tremendous imagination.

The themes of Golden Door might sound severe, even miserable, but Crialese’s approach to Salvatore’s story is in fact graceful, enigmatic, often warmly humorous and frequently spectacular. There’s a magnificent moment when we see masses of Italians huddled tightly from overhead before a great metallic groan begins to pull them apart, a widening stretch of sea water opening between them like an abyss. Once the ship Salvatore and his family boards sets sail, Crialese’s imagery becomes strikingly divided into smooth lateral pans aboveboard, where passengers in their finest suits attempt to maintain a civilized comportment, and unstable hand-held camerawork below, where the passengers are divided by gender and sleep in claustrophobic proximity to one and other. At the film’s mid-point, all of these passengers will be tossed about like fish in the belly of a giant steel whale and Crialese’s camera stays there with them, their cries of panic the only sounds to rise above the crashing of waves beyond.

Whatever mortal havoc the emigrants survive (and, sadly, some don’t) can hardly prepare them for what awaits once they reach the fog-enshrouded Ellis Island. US Immigration officials, considering themselves enlightened by the pseudo-science of Eugenics, run their applicants through countless inane tests to make sure that their citizenry will not suffer contamination from any sub-standard foreign genes. Single women meanwhile must undergo the sometimes humiliating, often surprising ritual of accepting marriage proposals from complete strangers hoping to purchase a wife. Some of these encounters are absolutely heartbreaking, yet others, like the contract agreed upon between Salvatore and the bewitchingly modern Englishwoman with the mysterious past he met onboard (Charlotte Gainsbourg, sporting a red mane that makes her look like an exotic bird), are utterly charming. Rife with anxiety, but charming nonetheless.

I won’t try to fool you into thinking Golden Door is action-packed. It moves with an almost hypnotic rhythm, its tone largely observational and unassuming, marked by occasional impressionistic spells characterized by the use of slow-motion and anachronistic but thematically appropriate music. (Curiously, it used for its finale Nina Simone’s driving rendition of ‘Sinnerman’ the same year that David Lynch used the song to back up the rousing closing credit sequence of Inland Empire.) There are also detours into complete fantasy, dreams where the Promised Land’s rivers of milk truly flow free and Salvatore must swim to reach some parcel of earth along with so man others. And it’s intriguing to me that Golden Door fuses planes of both grim realism and dreamy reverie. Perhaps Crialese really was channeling the same spirit as Malick when he came up with his own Nuovomondo –there’s a lot to be said for summoning up the past through such a rich lens of imagination.

3 Women: Altman's puzzling, oneiric, flawed masterpiece

Sometime in 1977, while his wife was frighteningly ill and in hospital, Robert Altman went home to get some much-needed sleep and literally dreamed of his next movie. All he knew was that it would be set in a desert, have something to do with identity theft, star Shelley Duvall and Sissy Spacek, and be called 3 Women. Those were the days before Altman’s commercial cred was lost, M*A*S*H and Nashville were still fresh victories, and all Altman had to do was stop by the 20th Century Fox studios on his way to the airport, throw his skeleton of a pitch at Alan Ladd Jr. and within minutes he had a picture deal. He didn’t even miss his flight.

3 Women is an enigmatic jewel from that magic period of freedom for Altman. His dream infused the film not only with raw materials of cast, theme and setting, but with a strange atmosphere of aquatic veils, exaggerated colours, a weird dialogue of opacity and transparency through steam, reflections, shadows and rising heat. Yet it also delved into a small, isolated pocket of the US swathed with a loneliness and frailty amidst dusty kitsch Americana (mini-golf, shooting ranges and dirt bikes) and superficiality. It’s perplexing as all hell, and I’m not certain it ever quite reaches the full circle it strives for, but it makes as crystalline and lasting an impression as anything Altman’s ever done.

The first moments are transporting: A woman painting a mural is seen through a tumbling aquarium. And then we see an indoor pool, following elephantine legs which intermingle with more aged torsos walking and wading. Gerald Busby’s atonal score heightens the slightly alien aura. The pool is a spa for the elderly and infirm, a place where young women gently guide patients through simple exercises. The spa’s model employee is Millie (Duvall), an oddly beautiful and utterly by-the-book young woman possessing a certain women’s magazine glamour. We meet Millie as she trains Pinky (Spacek), a new employee who seems even younger, eager though mischievous. “You’re a little like me, aren’t you?” Millie says to Pinky at one point, and Pinky takes the comment to heart: what immediately begins between the two women is hard to put your finger on, but it’s as though Pinky initially exists devoid of some essence of personality, and her hero worship of Millie becomes something both more profound and sinister.

For all its emphasis on theme, ambiguity and aesthetic, refined performances are crucial to 3 Women. Duvall is simultaneously beguiling and pathetic as Millie, nurturing her attractiveness yet living in a virtual vacuum of human affection, and the magic of her performance is partially attributable to the fact that she practically invented her character, writing the diaries we hear her read, the shopping lists and recipes (Duvall even bought the groceries to make Millie’s ridiculous cheese spray hors d’oeurves). And Spacek transforms so seamlessly in the film’s second half of metaphysics and narrative leaps, going from child to temperamental seductress and back to child again. As well, both are funny, wearing their characters’ abundant eccentricities as though they were totally normal.

3 Women clearly owes something to Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, but it lives in its own separate world with its own psychic implications. Everything in 3 Women conspires to some larger, unspoken event: the Bohdi Wind murals of sexual monsters painted in empty swimming pools by Willie (Janice Rule), the third woman of the title; the snobbish twins at the spa who seem content to communicate only with each other; the appearance of an elderly couple who may or may not be Pinky’s parents but who haunt Millie with their otherness and repellent age. What does it all mean? The good news is that the audio commentary Altman provided for Criterion's DVD release a few years back is often illuminating without ever trying to explain it all. The rest is up to us.

Vivre le peau nouveau: Eyes Without a Face

Firstly, it’s a movie consumed with surfaces: a woman in a shiny black leather raincoat stalks Paris in an equally slick, black, beetle-like Citroën; black water at night swirling like an abyss; trees along a roadside at night awash in an x-ray glow of headlights; a carefully-placed pearl choker of milky white; stainless steel medical equipment that reflects hard light in its immaculate cleanliness; a satin gown that renders the wearer a perfect little doll, one whose face is encased in a smooth, immobile mask devoid of human flaw; and in that mask a sight so tragic and gruesome that the frozen camera can’t turn away, can only mercifully fade to black.

Originally released to much outrage and disgust in 1960, George Franju’s Eyes Without a Face (Les Yeux sans visage) was too well crafted to be dismissed as just another exploitation horror flick. Nobody seemed to know what to do with it, and so it was destined to achieve its classic status only gradually. It's still absolutely chilling and quite singular, a skin-crawling tale of obsession, arrogance and murder both lyrical and clinical. As Carlos Clarens wrote in his 1967 Illustrated History of the Horror Film, with only his second feature (after numerous shorts and documentaries), Franju had lit upon “the elusive alliance of poetry and terror.”

Doctor Génessier (Pierre Brasseur) works in a clinic near his sprawling estate outside Paris. Though highly regarded for his advances in plastic surgery, Génessier has withdrawn from social life following the disappearance of his daughter Christiane (Edith Scob), who literally lost her face in an accident in which Génessier was the driver. Everyone, her fiancé included, assumes Christiane has suicided; she’s in fact secretly confined in her father’s mansion, awaiting the experimental surgery that her father has promised will give her back her face, surgery requiring the face of another, unwilling, donor.

Synopses don’t suit Eyes Without a Face. The story, simple as a fairy tale, builds at a deliberate pace, offering information in short doses and building suspense with little exposition. Early scenes in which Génessier’s devoted assistant Louise (Alida Valli of The Third Man) prowls the Latin Quarter, smoking cigarettes and sizing up young women are presented ambiguously, and Franju gives an ominous degree of attention to simple movements through doors, down corridors, up stairs, as though our sense of architecture were essential to our understanding of the drama silently unfolding. It’s weird, and through its unsettling weirdness works very well.

I mentioned surfaces: the cold brilliance of this story, cleanly adapted by the team of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac (Les Diaboliques, Vertigo) from Jean Redon’s novel, lies in our peculiar attachment to our faces, that body part most closely associated with our sense of identity, thus the surface reflects unseen depths. But ironically, though Franju lingers on many faces throughout, its probably Christiane’s mask that, while unspeakably creepy, is also the most affecting face in the movie. Animated only by voice and gestures made by her thin limbs, the mask becomes a haunted and haunting thing, with Scob constituting the movie’s closest thing to a truly sympathetic person.

Uncontrollable and uncooperative, flesh itself is an independent force in Eyes Without a Face, a sort of precedent for David Cronenberg’s flesh-driven films. But by the wondrous, beautiful final images, aflutter with newly released doves, dogs and leaves caressed by evening breeze, we see that Eyes Without a Face is also about the spirit, adrift in a world full only of imperfect houses in which in can dwell.