The Marvels of Filmmakers Unhinged: S&M, Stalkers, and Seatbelt Hangings
The Duke of Burgundy (2014) 3/4
Sumptuously claustrophobic, visually ravishing, emotionally wise, wryly subversive, and peculiarly haunting, The Duke of Burgundy is a deeply eccentric filigree of a film; a louche, auteurist hothouse contemporary gothic; and a daring, atmosphere-soaked piece of hypnotherapy. It’s a perversely sincere (and sincerely perverse) labour of love.
Every day, Cynthia (Sidse Babett Knudsen, After the Wedding) and Evelyn (Chiara D’Anna), two lesbian entomologists, act out a simple, provocative ritual that ends with Evelyn’s punishment and pleasure. As Cynthia yearns for a more conventional relationship, Evelyn’s obsession with erotica becomes an addiction that pushes the relationship to a breaking point.
Writer-director Peter Strickland follows up his chilly giallo-horror Berberian Sound Studio with something warmer and sweeter –though no less strange—and affirms himself as the preeminent champion of notoriously disreputable genres. Projecting a saucy theme and its minor variations, Strickland generates a discomfiting quality that taps into the intangible elements of sexual attraction by bathing them in ambiguities.
Showcasing that Cynthia and Evelyn are as trapped as the insects they collect and catalogue, Strickland evokes mystery and eroticism, all without nudity, bad dialogue, or the wooden acting that plagues Razzie-worthy bombs such as Fifty Shades of Grey. In so doing, Strickland builds The Duke of Burgundy into a complex, densely layered essay on the privileges of victimhood and the nuances of what it means to suffer for love.
Strickland spins the seminal S&M sendup Secretary with threads from Peter Greenaway’s Angels and Insects, Jacques Rivette’s Celine and Julie Go Boating, and the Belgian-French thriller Amer. He also inhales the lost aroma of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona and charges full-tilt into the objectifying whims of his fantasies to reach the other end of perception. The Duke of Burgundy looks like an agile homage to the arthouse eroticism of Walerian Borowczyk—albeit at his most preposterous—and tips its hats to such masters of costumed erotica as Jess Franco, Jean Rollin, and Tinto Brass, without ever cheapening its love story.
Primarily, The Duke of Burgundy is meticulously composed and extraordinarily beautiful, basking viewers in almost unhealthy visual, aural, and sensual stimulation. Though it’s no slavish homage or mere style exercise, the film is an aesthete’s dream, as refined and delicate as a fritillary’s wing. Cinematographer Nicholas Knowland has crafted a keen pastiche of Euro-sleaze and high art, with results that are precise, hallucinatory, calmly florid, and bristling with detail. Along with the reverberating, exceptional score by Cat’s Eye, The Duke of Burgundy has more going on than cinematic mind games. (There’s a credit for perfume in the opening titles.)
The Duke of Burgundy doubles down on the genre conventions. There’s voyeurism, bondage, lingerie, fetishism, and high-flown naughtiness galore. Yet it exposes the crippling anxiety behind the leather and lasciviousness, and for all its S&M specificity, it holds a beveled mirror up to the role-play and compromise in all romantic couplings. At its core, it’s an account of a relationship on the ropes, suspended by probing intelligence, a beating heart, and a catalogue of cinematic references, and tempered with surprising wit.
Heavy with feeling and kinky as a coiled cord, The Duke of Burgundy is a deliciously deviant romp into sexual adventure grounded in the universal struggle for enduring intimacy and audaciously disguised as salacious midnight-movie fare. But you must meet the Duke halfway. If you’re willing to enter its world, it’s one of the most incisive, penetrating, and empathetic films in years about what it truly means to love another person, a rewarding, amusing, involving experience that lingers in the mind, and a searching investigation of how to ask for what you want—and what it means to get it.
Full of soft-focus nudity, driven by two tremendous central performances and a bone-deep understanding of cinema’s magic and mechanisms, The Duke of Burgundy is an affectionate, straight-faced fable of women in love, a salute to the continental soft-core pornos of the 1970s, and a work of intense emotional vigour and intellectual prowess. Burgundy is rich, dark, and could well lead to intoxication. It shatters boundaries and may just do for erotic Euro-lesbian thrillers what Under the Skin did for sci-fi. It’s the stuff dreams are made of.
It Follows (2014) 3/4
Determinedly awkward, dizzyingly tense, and scalp-prickingly scary, It Follows is a gender-blind demonic delivery vehicle; a spine-tingling variation on the teen horror formula; and a hair-raising, spectacularly unnerving film that will haunt your waking hours for weeks. Every minute is stamped with nameless dread.
After a strange sexual encounter involving chloroform and a wheelchair, Jay (Maika Monroe) is haunted by nightmarish visions and the inescapable sense that something is after her. Less a conventional horror film than a fitful, disturbing dream, It Follows is a triumph of atmosphere. There’s a 1980s vibe to everything, down to the princess landline phones and clunky picture tube televisions. Fans of John Carpenter will immediately recognize the master’s fingerprints: the voyeuristic slink of the camera, the pulse of the throwback score, the transformation of warmly-lit residential environments into landscapes of trepidation.
Writer-director David Robert Mitchell (The Myth of the American Sleepover) employs techniques cribbed from the avant-garde, including dislocating widescreen cinematography and an unsettling soundscape, which ratchet up the tension in creative ways. Michael Gioulakis’crisp composition and eerie pools of light at night bring an arrestingly static, tableau-like quality that echoes the staged scenarios of Gregory Crewdson’s photos, as if a boogeyman has walked into a Norman Rockwell painting. The nuanced, synth-heavy score by Disasterpeace provides a screaming punctuation mark.
Mitchell slyly inverts the conventions of dead-meat teenager flicks: It Follows spits in the eyes of the wink-wink comedy of Scream or the wacky fun of Drag Me to Hell. No matter its conceptual intentions, It Follows never ventures far from visceral horror. Mitchell pulls off some sensational moments of fear and suspense, populating a number of scenes with well-timed jump scares as the Stalker bursts out of the shadows or appears in unexpected forms. Mitchell is serious about creeping out viewers, and just artistic enough to create a minor masterpiece.
The crash-bang-wallop set pieces are efficiently edited and economically choreographed, but their real weight comes from the gripping face-value earnestness and the sense of brooding menace established in interim sequences where not much is happening. With grave performances, wide shots, long takes, and a carefully cultivated mood of foreboding, It Follows has an sustained sense of usurping unease. It doesn’t generate gore to jangle our nerves; it preys on our imagination.
Refreshingly unironic in its retro vibe, It Follows recycles familiar horror tropes and borrows cleverly from the best –the laneway camera zoom-ins of The Evil Dead, the inevitable terror of A Nightmare on Elm Street, the “chain-of-responsibility”curse of The Ring, the pool confrontation of Let the Right One In, the screeching soundtrack of Psycho. The malignity of the morphing, remorseless antagonist is seemingly motiveless. Not since Freddy Krueger stalked teenagers in their sleep have the young targets on screen had nowhere to run, and nowhere to hide.
Yet It Follows also eschews the genre’s common tricks and manages to feel like no other example in recent years. There’s no obligatory scene in which the characters gather in a library and discover an old book that tells the background of Jay’s tormentor, just enough detail to the mythology to make it hold together, and enough left unexplained to make things creepy as hell. There are no computers or mention of social media (though one of Jay’s friends reads The Idiot on a handheld compact device). Literary quotes are tossed in out of nowhere and adults are rarely present.
Where the majority of teen horror movies revel in splintering the peer group, It Follows is interested in how people gather around a friend and shield her from harm. Filled with alarming imagery and a paranoiac tenor, it has a wicked slant on the horror genre’s obsession with burgeoning sexuality and evokes the attacks on lust that have flourished in since Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds and the “have sex and die”maniac movies from the early 1980s. The unpretentious, meaningful subtext doesn’t undercut the spookiness: it’s both scary enough to please horror fans and deep enough to inspire term papers.
With a ferociously single-minded rightness that keeps the nerves in a state of high, perpetual thrum, It Follows turns its viewers into paranoid spectators, scanning the frame for signs of trouble. Its thematic textures run deep, but the picture retains real visceral force. Low-budget, well-engineered, and sure of itself, It Follows makes a virtue of silence, living in the shadows between the splattery kill scenes that pepper the average slasher.
It’s difficult not to share Jay’s mounting panic as she watches the Stalker walking slowly and steadily toward her wherever she may be, invisible to everyone else, intent on destroying her. You may prefer (as I do) the extreme unslackness of Halloween and resourceful pluck of Jamie Curtis to the dreamier panic of Monroe. But give Mitchell due credit: It Follows sticks to you with a grim unshakability that is at once stylish, smart, and deadly serious.
Based on the simplest scare of all – don’t look now, but something’s behind you—It Follows needs nothing to trail in its wake. Be careful It doesn’t follow you home from the theatre.
Wild Tales (2014) 3/4
Loose-limbed, rowdy, outrageous, and unsettling, Wild Tales is a mad, madly hysterical banquet of bad behaviour; a rude, scabrous, and welcome shot of mischief; and a feral, cathartic exorcism of the frustrations of contemporary life. Spring-loaded with ironic twist endings, it’s enormous fun.
The violence woven into everyday encounters drive people to cede to the undeniable pleasure of losing control. Harmless, if virile, road rage leads to vehicular destruction and a seatbelt hanging. A fatal hit-and-run turns into a multimillion-dollar conspiracy. A restaurant visit results in an assassination attempt. A series of parking tickets prompts an explosion. A lover’s betrayal causes wedding reception breakdown. Vulnerable in the face of a reality that dissolves and becomes unpredictable, the characters of Wild Tales cross and recross the thin line that divides civilization and barbarism.
Literally translated from the original Spanish as “Savage Stories,”Wild Tales is a quite brilliant black comedy will make you laugh and drive you crazy. Of the six standalone shorts on offer, three are excellent and two are decent, but every one lives up to that title. Grudges, minor insults, and found-out flirtations lead to chaos and murder on a cataclysmic scale. Delightfully deranged and wickedly hilarious, Wild Tales is a subversive, satirical collection of vignettes that coalesce around the central theme of revenge, wielding humour and horror in equal measure.
With Wild Tales, Argentinian writer-director Damián Szifron (Bottom of the Sea, On Probation) announces himself as a talented molecular mix of Tarantino, Rodriguez, and Almodóvar (a producer here). Szifron opens a window onto other people’s worst impulses rather than providing a mirror reflecting our own. Sugarcoating gratuitous violence with lethal doses of humour, he graphically illustrates what happens when the stress of 21st-century living causes regular citizens to “go postal.”
The anthology rarely feels mechanical, adhering to an internal logic that makes each punchline land with a satisfying burst of glee. Szifron has cannily structured the six stories using running time and general quality as his organizational criteria: the best segments serve as bookends. But despite the significant range of success, Wild Tales is an exemplary example of how to combine multiple tales in a coherent, complementary, and exhilarating manner. They are variations on the theme of outrage, the world’s most fashionable and contagious emotion.
Wild Tales has a surly attitude, a scathing wit, and a fresh directing voice in Szifron. Because he locks into the weirdness of the moment, stacking coincidences and playing puzzles in the background, the ratio of laughter to mayhem remains high despite the mounting pile of corpses. For something so mostly believable, Wild Tales is also surreal, bearing a resemblance to the likes of British sketch show The League of Gentleman. Indeed, it’s a unique storytelling endeavour that attempts to be laughably absurd and profoundly tragic. Even the music choices are pulpishly diverting and unexpectedly left-field.
The point of Wild Tales is blunt and reductive, and not an original thesis: Rational humans can transform, in an instant, into blindingly destructive forces of nature. The themes of corruption and distrust and disgust with bureaucracy are well-tread ground, but as sources of cinematic fodder, they’re scarily and friskily entertaining. And no matter how conventional, watching how much people are willing to spite themselves in order to take down perceived enemies has a perverse appeal.
Dignity and propriety shut down automatically in the face of anger, exasperation, or the lure of a quick buck (or a fortune). Wild Tales is interested in the methods of calculated mass dehumanization that are hidden beneath the practices of social institutions, the kind that explode in spectacular fashion after a put-upon soul is screwed over too many times. Tinged with class consciousness and shadowed by the fallacy that revenge is ultimately empowering, Wild Tales isn’t healthy or edifying, but like Kill Bill or Oldboy, it feels damn good.
Over-the-top and anxiety-producing, Wild Tales is ferocious, funny, and insanely electrifying, rocketing along with sleek, amoral charm. While revenge is a dish best served cold, Szifron argues that payback is more satisfying when it’s doled out in fiery, bloody, and outlandish doses. If you’re a citizen of the world, your jaw will drop, your head will shake, and you’ll marvel at the fertility of such imagination. It’s the very definition of a crowd-pleaser that’s out for blood.
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