hey, nosferatu

after reading an article about a new version of the play ‘woyzeck’ featuring music by nick cave, I decided that maybe it was time to watch the 1976 herzog film, based on the georg büchner play left unfinished at the time of his death in 1837(which itself was loosely based on a true story).

klaus kinski is a difficult actor to watch, both because his off-screen persona was so incredible, and because once you’ve seen ‘nosferatu’, it’s difficult to see him as anything else. but he is well suited to the role of franz woyzeck, a poor, ignorant, downtrodden, much-maligned soldier who seems to have no other choice but to lose his mind. we first see an exhausted woyzeck being brutalized by a military superior. he is then subjected to some routine insults by the captain (looking remarkably like a bloated klaus maria brandauer) whose beard he is shaving. “woyzeck,” he says, ”you always have a hunted look in your eye”, and then proceeds to link his immorality(he has fathered an illegitimate child) and stupidity with the fact that he is poor. a visit to the town doctor fares no better in that he is merely performing bizarre experiments on the poor soldier, whom he has kept on a diet of peas for an entire year. on top of all this, the mother of wozeck’s child can barely disguise her disgust with him, and is actively pursuing a bigger, stronger, saner soldier with a much nicer uniform. woyzeck has one friend, andres, who constantly sings and is honestly not an awful lot of help. it’s apparent quite early that woyzeck’s sanity is in danger, as he runs around in the forest trying to figure out what the voices no one else can hear are saying.

woyzeck is weird, wizened, and pathetic. You can’t really like him, but he’s certainly deserving of pity. with the exception of andres, the entire town treats him as little more than a circus animal. in fact, the circus animals in an early scene are probably treated a little better. his fate seems sealed in a remarkable scene that has him running through a field of what appears to be gray tulips, finally putting his ear to the ground to hear the voice that are saying to him “stab dead”. the climactic, slow-motion murder scene ends with woyzeck, knife in his hand and tears in his eyes, maybe grasping the importance of what he has done, but maybe not.

it’s not what you’d call an enjoyable film, exactly, but it does make me feel like watching a lot of other non-enjoyable kinski films.

oh dear

i figured out the reason why i waited so long to see ‘beyond the clouds’, and that is because, lurking somewhere inside of me was the conviction – i don’t really like antonioni. admittedly, i’ve only seen a few of his films, and i suppose i should really leave the jury out until i’ve at least seen ‘blow-up’. but this film didn’t make me feel too hopeful.

released in 1995 with an impressive cast, ‘beyond the clouds’ tells four stories loosely linked by the fact that the narrator is hanging around the edges of all of them, the narrator being john malkovich. and you can tell after about five minutes of this narration that you are not going to like the narrator. he’s annoying, egotistical, and obtuse, and on top of that, he quotes joyce. it’s pretty pretentious.

the stories are as follows – 1. gorgeous yet bland italian pair meet, don’t sleep together, meet again, almost sleep together, part ways. and that’s about it for the first story. 2. malkovich follows sophie marceau to her place of work. she looks angry, tells him that she stabbed her father twelve times. moving on. 3. skeevy, tan american guy meets weird, nubile italian girl in café. they sleep together for three years, oops, he’s married to fanny ardant. he cheerfully lies to them both. fanny moves out and wants to buy an apartment that jean reno (with an unfortunate mustache) is unaware that his wife is selling. 4. jeanne moreau and marcello mastroianni make brief appearances, as if they are aware that they belong in a better picture than this. then vincent perez falls immediately for irene jacob, a pious catholic he happens to bump into. the fourth story is really the only one that i found interesting at all, maybe because the events going on actually had reasons behind them.

the whole thing is just far too impressed with itself and its artsiness. it’s very pretty, i’ll give it that. italy usually is. but the prettiness can’t make up for the vapidity and eventual boredom that this film causes. i found myself wishing that antonioni had let wim wenders contribute a little more, as he apparently was intending too before antonioni rejected all of his scenes. which seems like something malkovich’s character would do. just a very thin piece of filmmaking.

“the can opener/ where could you have hidden it/ enlighten me please”

since i watched a guillaume depardieu film shortly after his untimely death, and worked in a paul newman movie shortly before he died, i thought it only fair to do the same for ken ogata, who died last week. so yesterday was the 1979 film “vengeance is mine”, directed by shohei imamura, who also directed ‘the eel’, which i liked very much.

the film is the story of a serial killer, ehokizu, who, for no discernible reasons, sets off on a 78 day killing spree, managing to elude police through a series of frauds. the film alternates between scenes of police trying to extract a confession after ehikozu’s capture and scenes of his time on the run.

one of the first things that you notice about ehikozu is that he is a very strange guy, to put it mildly. at first adamant that the police will never get a word of confession from him, he turns out not that hard to trick into it. he exhibits problems with violence dating back to his childhood, and grew up to be a generally rotten person who treated his wife abhorrently, although this could be inherited from his father, who comes very close to an affair with ehikozu’s wife on numerous occasions, while ehikozu’s ailing mother can do nothing but look on. (he also at one time buries a dog up to it’s neck in dirt and pours boiling water on his head, which seems like overdoing it.) but ehikozu’s father offers the only real analysis of his son’s behavior near the end of the film “you could only kill those who would never harm you.” it’s possible that the father’s warped christian values (god doesn’t approve of divorce, but he’s okay with you doing your daughter-in-law?) have skewed ehikozu irreparably, but ehikozu clearly has some elements to him that are all his, and completely out of control. what makes the film so scary is the fact that there really is no reason for him to have killed any of his five victims. ogata is wonderful, whether rolling around on the floor for fun or making up impromptu haiku, and the character works because he feels no need to justify any of his actions. the other standout character is the one-time murdereress mother of an innkeeper that enihkozu takes up with, a bad-tempered little woman with a penchant for peeping on guests of the inn.

the music was a bit bizarre, better when they used a peter gunn-type jazz theme than near the end when it morphs into some sort of synthesizer nonsense better suited to ‘sans soleil’ or some such. the flashbacks could have used a bit more clarity, and the final scene is just nonsensical, honestly, and I felt it detracted a bit from the rest of the film.

r.i.p. girlhood

guillaume depardieu, love of my sixteen-year-old life, has passed away. oddly, i seem to have a startling knack of picking favorite foreign actors who die in tragic circumstances. several years back, just days after my brother gave me a poster of sergei bodrov jr., he died in an ice slide in georgia. i still put the poster up though, with purple ribbon draped around it (i didn’t have any black crepe).

so i went through my netflix and bumped up ‘pola x’. i did love ‘the lovers on the bridge’, also by carax. the film is based (quite loosely, i assume) on a story by melville. pierre has just written a hit novel, anonymously, and has a very creepy relationship with his mother, played by catherine deneuve, largely wasted in such a dreary, uninteresting part, in that they refer to each other as brother and sister, and spend a lot of time lounging around inappropriately and smoking. pierre has a pretty fiancée, lucie, who has absolutely no personality. everyone is wealthy and wears beige. pierre has been having some unsettling dreams about a strange dark haired woman, and has an unsettling cousin named thibault, and it is suggested that inappropriate things have happened between him, pierre, and lucie. the family gets even kookier when the dark-haired woman actually shows up, a russian woman calling herself isabelle, and claiming to be the bastard child of pierre’s dead father. things go downhill fairly swiftly from here.

one thing that certainly doesn’t help is the fact that katerina golubeva as isabelle is a painfully bad actress. i suppose she’s mainly just there to look at, although she does bring to mind a compilation of the nightclub pair in ‘brideshead revisited’, that is, death’s head and the sickly child. she looks like a recently exhumed corpse. her french is very bad, and it’s never clear exactly how she and a few fellow refugees (fleeing a genocide?) turned up at pierre’s mother’s house. since incest seems to be the norm in the entire family, neither pierre nor isabelle give their technical relationship a second thought, never even questioning pierre’s mother on the subject, and, once they have made a new home in a warehouse also inhabited by what is either a relentlessly bad experimental orchestra, a paramilitary organization, or both, they embark upon one of the most explicit, icky sex scenes that i have ever had the pleasure to fast-forward through. through the whole thing are various tragedies, some awfully prescient, like pierre in several scrapes on his motorcycle, which is how depardieu came to lose a leg not long after. like all good french films, things go to hell with surprising swiftness. i did like an odd moment early on, when thibault drops a quote from james’s ‘the wings of the dove’ (‘we shall never again be as we were’), but the moment is spoiled when the line is later used as lyrics in a painfully bad french hip-hop song.

i wish that i’d picked a depardieu film that was just a tad more enjoyable, but as he did appear in a number of stinkers, i think i’ll just wait for ‘the duchess of langeais’ to come out.

gloomy is right.

if you’re just reading a synopsis of the 1999 film ‘gloomy sunday’, you would be forgiven for thinking it was a horror movie, as it is the story of a song written in budapest on the cusp of world war ii that inexplicably causes a great many people to commit suicide. i turned it off before the end because i didn’t want to do the same. it was pretty boring.

from the start i was wary, as the framed flashback was fairly heavy-handed, and more than a touch obvious. the story plunges in way too fast, and the characters are one-dimensional. the waitress is pretty, the pianist is melancholy, the restaurant owner is jewish, and the nazi is bad. the main conflict is a ridiculously polite love triangle, until the war thankfully steps in and takes the focus off. there is some laughable dialogue, such as when one nazi says to another “forget the final solution, tonight’s about the beef rolls.” for the waitress’ birthday, the pianist composes a song, which incidentally is the same ‘gloomy sunday’ recorded by ella fitzgerald. apparently when it was actually composed, there was an urban legend running around claiming that it caused a few suicides, but as the nazis were steamrolling across europe, it’s hard to believe that it was just the song. although, the composer did throw himself out of his apartment window in 1968. there are a few scenes of half-hearted passion and a picnic that predictably turns into a ménage a trois, and then, immediately after the waitress has sung the words to the song for the first time, the pianist shoots himself with a nazi gun. and frankly, that’s when i threw in the towel myself.

my final thought is this – it could have been strange and interesting and eerie, but it just didn’t make the effort. maybe there was an explanation at the end, but I didn’t care enough to wait around and find out.