Change Your Image
propast
Reviews
Den-en ni shisu (1974)
Terayama's memories and mythologies
Terayama's mastery of the image is inarguable. His compositions - kaleidoscopic, supersaturated, overpowering - are an integral part of his films' unique emotional landscape. He could almost be described as a director of Japanese kink, were his films not so deeply philosophical, cerebral and achingly emotional.
Here, Terayama paints his childhood in broad strokes, then proceeds to shake his head as if disappointed at the results; his images are an embellishment, he concedes, and the rest of the film delves more deeply into the metaphysical as he literally steps foot into his childhood to try to understand it and, if possible, change it, if only to find out what will happen if he does.
The film is charged with budding eroticism, a portrait of an adolescent's confusion juxtaposed with a man's midlife existentialism. Terayama was a fascinating man and he's putting his soul on display in this film, his own poetry woven through it as his memories ring with the surreal and come across more coherently as feelings than as literal moments. The figures of his childhood walk larger than life until, finally, the thin walls of memory come crashing down and the past is forsaken in favour of an urban present.
Proini peripolos (1987)
A moving and intelligent look at the end of the world
That this masterpiece is so unknown - undistributed throughout all the world, as far as I know, besides Greece - is nothing short of criminal. In terms of tone, it's most comparable to a slower, more elegiac Blade Runner - there's the same pervading sense of despair, of a deep, dark curtain coming down on the world. Exit stage right.
It follows an unnamed woman wandering through a postapocalyptic wasteland. The people she comes across generally try to kill her, if she doesn't try to kill them first. Communication seems to fallen by the wayside and all the dialogue we get is the woman's internal monologue, a haze of sentimental memories and a longing for a better time.
She works her way into a city, where food, shelter, and water are comparatively plentiful. It's every bit as much a wasteland as the outside world, but of a very different kind - abandoned technology makes its presence known constantly, including a memorable scene where the woman sits alone in a movie theatre, but for the unseen assailants slowly climbing and crawling over seats, working their way toward her.
She meets a guard of the morning patrol, a kind of taskforce that has taken it upon itself to kill everyone it becomes aware of. Their job is more a mercy in this kind of world, and although their technological, inhuman precision marks them as the bad guys, they're practically saviours when life itself becomes an enemy.
I won't go farther that on the off-chance that you're given a chance to see it - but either way, the plot is far from the point and doesn't unfold much differently than you'd expect it to. What does matter is a connection established between two nameless, faceless people floating in a void of memory and space, a timeless land where life and death blur together and the hope for a new horizon outweighs the need to exist. Alive or dead, it hardly matters.
Dong (1998)
A little gem of an absurdist film
"You cannot survive on rainwater alone."
So intones an unnamed government official at the beginning of The Hole, addressing the obstinate residents of an unnamed apartment building, who refuse to move out of their homes even though their area has become overrun by a mysterious plague that causes people to behave like cockroaches (and then die off, of course). The words take on an irony when we see that, in this apocalyptic world, rain never stops falling and the apartments' residents struggle to keep leaks from destroying their remaining possessions.
There's not much to be said about plot here - a plumber visits a man because the woman below is complaining about leaks, and leaves a hole in the floor behind. The man above and the woman below take turns blocking up the hole and tearing away the other person's efforts to do the same - both of them seem loath to give up this one human connection.
It IS their only human connection. The woman below lives in utter seclusion, mopping up the floor and stopping up leaks in a pale imitation of a life. For all intents and purposes, she's a cockroach already, hiding in a dark, dank hole. The man above goes to his store every day, although his only customers are a starving cat and a confused old man whose favourite brands no longer exist. They go about their lives as though nothing were amiss, living quite apart. The rest of the apartment seems inhabited, but nobody stirs. Doubtless they're all also sitting in their little holes and trying to live their little lives.
Here, Tsai is brutally satirizing the increasing lack of communication between human beings; even in the face of the end of the world, people remain isolated in their own little bubbles. This message was clearly prophetic, because the 2000s have come and people are living more apart than ever before; The Hole aims to unveil the absurdity of day-to-day life.
It's also worth noting that there are four musical numbers that begin at unexpected moments. A woman dances and sings in gaudy clothes and with loud instrumentals playing in the background. In one such scene, she and the man she pursues dance around and around as the traces of a fumigation rise up from the stairs and envelop them. These moments alone in the film do not resemble human behaviour; ironically, they're the only ones that make sense. The roaches' compulsion to hide, too, makes sense. It's human nature that's the absurdity.
The Vicious Kind (2009)
A redemptive sojourn over potentially familiar ground
The indies about dysfunctional families are many in number but tend to be low in quality. It's a subgenre that lends itself to tired cliché, poor comedy, and over-the-top preciosity. The Vicious Kind throws all that bunk out the window and commits 100% to its tropes – this is not a family where everybody gets along at the end of the day and we're just there to laugh and feel good about ourselves. The father is not a goofy slacker, but a deeply troubled, unfaithful man. The older brother doesn't resent his younger sibling, he actively betrays him. He's not on uneasy terms with his father, he's altogether estranged. The mother isn't the passive observer trying to keep it together; she died many years ago. This is still a comedy, but a very dark one.
On a more specific level, the film is about Caleb, an embittered misogynist with a fervent belief that "all women are whores". While giving his brother and his new girlfriend a drive home for Thanksgiving, he develops a peculiar set of feelings for her – she so resembles his ex, who two-timed him
twice. On the one hand, he repeatedly warns her not to cheat on his brother. On the other, he can't quite leave her alone. Only after seeing her can he get some sleep; an insomniac, he seems to be hurtling toward self-destruction, his actions erratic. He says awful things and then apologizes for them sincerely. He gets into fights and treats people like dirt. He's the archetypal anti-hero, a chain-smoking, unhappy construction worker. One wonders why he ended up where he is, because he's clearly an intelligent man.
The other segment of the film deals with his relationship with his father, long ago foiled when a rift formed between him and his wife. The first time Donald sees Caleb in eight years, he threatens to shoot him. Their arc, however, much like every one in this film, is ultimately cathartic.
Caleb is so certain of every woman's innate unfaithfulness, he assumes it of Emma as soon as he meets her. It's only after the deed is done and he gives in to his baser urges that he realizes that he himself is the facilitator, the cause. His theories on women are certainly reinforced by her actions, but only because of him. He is the cause of everything he hates, and it forces him to reevaluate his perspective and maybe, finally, lay his past to rest.
It's a humble plot, but Krieger's confident direction and zipline editing that never allows for us to lose sight of Caleb's desperation keeps the story from ever growing stale. Of course, the true reason it works so well is the acting; this is one of the year's finest ensembles.
Brittany Snow plays the kind of character who can easily become forgettable or two-dimensional, but keeps a kind of earthy realism to her characterization. It's a subtle performance, one easily passed over, but her image of repression and conflicting desire sticks in the memory after the film is long over.
Now, J.K. Simmons – here is an actor who needs a big, juicy role in a big, juicy film, because he so clearly has the potential to win an Oscar. He's played the father figure before, but here, sporting a light New York drawl (or some similar accent, so subtle I can't quite place it), he paints the portrait of a sad, regretful old man trying to cling to scraps of his youth and keep his sons on his side along the way. Caleb's betrayal hit him hard.
Adam Scott's is a performance that was not what I was expecting. Caleb is the role many would kill for, a mess of a man, bitter, angry, miserable in turn, jaded with the world. He wears a shell of cynicism and brusque rudeness five inches thick, and then suddenly lets it melt and shows something of the wounded creature he hides within. He has a few scenes that are devastating in their honesty – and then turns around and delivers the clever barbs the script gives him with easy aplomb.
With that whip-smart dialogue never impeding the film's sincerity and a wonderful ensemble, The Vicious Kind packs an emotional punch that most films of its sort lack.