"The Tall Man"

When I first saw The Tall Man, my reaction was one of scorn, ridicule and dismissal. I turned my nose up at its rural small-town America stereotypes, gaped in disbelief at its mind-boggling plot twists and by the time the end credits rolled and the entire societal vision behind these twists had fully unraveled, I sat flabbergasted, incredulous that a horror thriller could display such abysmal stupidity with such barefaced pretention.

Admittedly, the fact that I watched it in its French dub may have predisposed me to a negative reception; though I understand the necessity to keep French voice actors employed, I am a firm opponent of the practice. When you hear a foreign voice coming out of an actor’s mouth and speaking lines that are mere translated copies of their original words, you are effectively witnessing usurpation. Outside forces take possession of the dialogue and actors to replace half of each with somebody else’s words and performance, and the entire filmmaking process’s artifice is revealed for all to see.

Perhaps it is a petty reason to be biased against a movie, but its negative influence on my viewing experience has been fairly consistent. So watching The Tall Man again, in its original English, proved a doubly rewarding experience: It made me appreciate both writer/director Pascal Laugier’s games with his audience’s unconscious base assumptions in the film’s first act, as well as Jessica Biel’s genuinely committed central performance. Its dramatic twists and genre swerves, rather than the gratuitous rug-pulling that they initially seemed to be, emerge on second viewing as conscientiously-planned, diabolical calculations that make us re-evaluate previous scenes. And yet, while their structure and raison d’être is clearer to me, they still do not quite gel together.

At first, it seems to be a straightforward mystery chiller, with the titular boogeyman figure being blamed for a wave of child abductions in a small town that’s been in depression ever since the main source of its economy – its mine – shut down. Widowed nurse Julia Denning (Jessica Biel) – introduced as the town’s maternal figure by her delivery of a young woman’s baby – seems, like most horror protagonists, initially skeptical until her own son is suddenly kidnapped by a hooded black figure, leading to extended chase and exploration scenes that look directly Xeroxed from Silent Hill games and only stop to reveal the first of many unexpected twists.

This is one of the primary flaws that prevent The Tall Man from being the engrossing, thought-provoking Fincheresque thriller it aspires to be. While it sets up later revelations with subtle dexterity, the first half of the film does not build its world and characters sufficiently enough to make these revelations truly matter. The townspeople remain mostly one-dimensional stereotypes and, with the notable exception of seemingly insane grieving mother Mrs. Johnson (Colleen Wheeler), not enough time is spent with them to make them seem anything more than puppets used to advance the plot at Laugier’s convenience. The protracted sequence in which Julia runs after the Tall Man, fights him, escapes him and runs after him again lacks any real tension or fear (for all the hushed whispers and drawings he inspires, a guy wearing a black hood, jacket and trousers looks no scarier than your average burglar) and the earlier mother-son bonding moments are too saccharine to be genuinely convincing. Perhaps Laugier deliberately wrote and directed these scenes to be trite and artificial as an early indicator that the boy is not in fact Julia’s son, but their failure to invite surreptitious questioning or involve us in their relationship nips any such intent in the bud.

Once the first twist unmasks its characters’ true identities, the change in tone and plot is so jarring that the aforementioned earlier fight-and-flight scenes during which Jessica Biel repeatedly falls over and picks herself up, rather than gain rewatch value, are exposed as misleading padding. Rather than marvel at how well Laugier has fooled us, we feel annoyance at having had our time wasted.

The new developments revealing Julia as the true mastermind behind the wave of kidnappings and the hooded figure as the boy’s true biological mother are similarly botched by Laugier’s misjudged reuse of a storytelling technique from his polarizing 2008 shocker Martyrs. Not content with shedding a whole new light on what he has shown the viewer up to this point, he needs to make it the result of a large-scale conspiracy working for a supposedly grand and noble cause, and then spend the entire third act demonstrating how and why it operates. In the case of Martyrs, the torture endured by one of the film’s heroines was overseen by a secret cult convinced that women pushed to the very limits of pain could achieve a state of “martyrdom” that would grant them a window into what happens after death. Like Whiplash, Martyrs walked a thin line between understanding and outright endorsing the idea of achieving greatness through pain and debasement, and its morally ambiguous ending – helped by the unexpected compassion that permeated the entire film – kept it from the precipice of pretension.

This narrative translates very poorly here: Unlike Martyrs, whose impeccably-structured pacing and dual protagonists – one damaged, the other ostensibly sane – offered alternating points of view and interpretations from the get-go, The Tall Man spends the vast majority of its running time fully endorsing Julia’s perspective and never allowing any doubt as to its validity. So when, in what is admittedly Jessica Biel’s acting highlight, she justifies her actions by blaming the global economic system for creating conditions that make poor children’s happiness impossible unless they are whisked away to “happier” (i. e. wealthier, higher-class) family units, everything we have seen up until this point backs her up and encourages us to agree with her.

In effect, the film paints poor lower-class country folk at best as helpless souls who can’t provide their children with basic needs, at worst as ignorant abusive yokels who don’t deserve kids. Either way, Julia is telling us, kids should grow up in comfortable urban households rather than in the sticks. This spectacularly idiotic classism is fully supported by the townsfolk’s paper-thin characterization and only feebly challenged at the end, where mute teenager Jenny (Jodelle Ferland), having discovered Julia’s secret before her arrest, runs away from her abusive household into the arms of the Tall Man (who turns out to be Julia’s not-dead-after-all husband) and eventually a new, wealthy city family, only to turn directly to the audience at the last minute for reassurance that her decision was the right one. But it’s a weak, fallacious attempt at nuance that comes far too late to mean anything. Unlike the other children, none of whom seemed older than ten, Jenny made her own choice.

Inevitably, this twist will recall Ben Affleck’s far superior 2007 feature-length debut Gone Baby Gone – still his best film to date – in which a little girl’s kidnapping turned out to have been orchestrated by elements within the local police department out of concern for her welfare, as her alcoholic, irresponsible single mother was deemed unfit to care for her. While Gone Baby Gone raised similarly uncomfortable class issues, it took more time to flesh out its characters and balance its perspective, so as to make its conclusion truly resonate within the audience.

It’s a crying shame because Pascal Laugier’s command of atmosphere and actors is unquestionable, as is his ability to craft Russian Dolls-like screenplays whose twists have a greater purpose beyond shock and awe. What he seems to lack is a sense of proportion between his lofty philosophical ambitions and his ability to weave them seamlessly in his story. One might recommend that his next film preoccupy itself more with shared human experience – the real source of Martyrs’ poignancy – than with Big Ideas.

"Cannibal Holocaust"

35 years ago, Ruggero Deodato became the first professional filmmaker to be officially taken to court on suspicion of creating a snuff film. In a makeshift behind-the-scenes presentation more surreal than anything he had caught on camera, Deodato did not content himself with producing the main cast before the magistrates in order to confirm that they were still very much alive; he went as far as revealing how he achieved the trick of making a woman seem impaled on a spike, something that no creator in modern history had been compelled to do by court order until then.

The film in question, one that continues to divide critics and audiences even as its cultural and aesthetic impact on horror cinema remains undisputed, is Cannibal Holocaust. What was originally conceived as just another in a series of schlocky cannibal movies churned out by the booming Italian exploitation film industry became an overnight cinematic legend in a very literal sense, the kind of film many people simply could not believe had actually been made. Banned in many countries – including, until 2001, the UK, where it proudly headed the infamous “video nasties” decried by Mary Whitehouse and her moral crusaders – and cited as a major influence by filmmakers as respected as Quentin Tarantino, Oliver Stone and Nicolas Winding Refn, Cannibal Holocaust didn’t just push the boundaries of what was considered acceptable violence within the horror genre; for many viewers and critics, it blew up previously well-established conventions on where the border between art and exploitation stood, and scattered their remains across the entire blood-soaked landscape. For its defenders, this was additional proof – alongside Wes Craven’s 1972 landmark rape-and-revenge story The Last House On The Left¹ – that grimy, low-budget exploitation horror’s contribution to cinema as an art form could go far beyond practical gore effects. Cannibal Holocaust, they insisted, was more than just a cheap exploitation of westerners’ neocolonial fantasies of cannibalistic tribes for shock value – it was a bold, unflinching critique of audiences’ insatiable lust for screen violence, as well as a meditation on humanity’s innately brutal nature regardless of one’s “civilized” or “savage” surroundings and upbringing.

It would be easy to dismiss such praise as fanciful intellectual gymnastics performed by people afraid that their consumption of trash might harm their respectability, but the truth is that Cannibal Holocaust, in spite of Deodato’s later claims that he never sought to make anything else but a cannibal movie, seems genuinely sincere in its efforts to question its own audience’s presumed bloodlust and at times comes dangerously close to making insightful points, which makes its overall hypocrisy more of a frustrating disappointment than something worthy of righteous indignation.

One of Cannibal Holocaust’s strongest points is its structure: Metatextual from its opening scenes, which use television as the medium through which the missing documentary film crew and anthropologist Harold Monroe’s efforts to discover their fate are introduced to the viewer, it alternates from self-reflexive diegetic storytelling (initially in the form of TV interviews) to what seems like a straightforward journey to the “green inferno” where the crew’s remains and footage are found, then back to self-reflexivity as we make the same journey again, this time from the recorded perspective of those who undertook it, discovering new and progressively more inhuman acts with each new screening.

This structure keeps the viewer’s attention by regularly making them re-assess previous information based on new contextual elements. This is widely considered to be the first instance of the “found footage” gimmick in the horror genre, and if it is not the best overall film of its kind, its narrative usage of this device is certainly one of the most ingenious: as we identify with Professor Monroe, rather than the footage’s odious protagonists, the feeling of progressive discovery is greater than if their actions and fates had been revealed through conventional flashbacks, and the consequent detachment brings an additional eeriness to Riz Ortolani’s gorgeous accompanying score (unnecessarily hand-waved in the film as stock music inserted by the editors).

Here, however, end the compliments, as the “found footage” gimmick and resulting detachment are here used as a license to display exceptionally pornographic violence perpetrated by both the cannibals and the documentary crew. The idea is that because we are viewing both recorded and “live” events from the point of view of a moral, enlightened character who repeatedly vocalizes the intended “who’s the real savage?” theme, we are able to see them as the senseless evil that they are. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. Inserting the hero’s sickened reaction shots in-between images of a woman being brutally raped with a stone and a nail-ridden mudball is not enough to elevate such a scene above crude exploitation. The fact that most of the worst crimes are recorded by an in-universe camera whose complicity is evident throughout does not make their depiction inherently critical.

For there to be criticism or self-criticism, the camera and its filmed subjects – be they the characters or the events – need to work together, not necessarily in a conscious alliance, but rather as complementary players in the same game. In this case, the many recorded instances of rape – native-on-native, native-on-crewmember and crewmember-on-native – are barren of any narrative contextualization that would justify their depiction, aside from being the easiest, laziest imaginable shorthand for common human depravity. They are entirely gratuitous and carry no political or moral resonance. Unlike the harrowing scene in which the crew threatens an entire tribe at gunpoint to assemble inside a hut they then proceed to burn down – a crime they plan to edit in order to make it look like the work of an enemy tribe – there is no thought, internal logic or greater point to these rape scenes other than the shocking nature of the act itself; in the case of the sole female crewmember’s later gang-rape by cannibals following her comrades’ own gang-rape of one of the tribe’s women, the act is framed as karmic eye-for-an-eye retribution, making its visual recording a tacit affirmation of approval rather than a revelation of any sort.

And then of course, there’s the real, unsimulated killing of animals, carried out by both the natives (whose non-human meal of choice appears to be freshly-picked monkey brains) and the film crew. In one of the film’s most nauseating sequences, the camera follows them in a single take as they capture, behead and disembowel a turtle for later consumption. Because we know this is a real turtle being slaughtered and the camera lovingly lingers on its carcass, severed head and guts, any intended commentary – be it a critique of media glorification of real-life violence or an asinine parallel between animal slaughter and cannibalism – falls flat on its face. Its barbaric and completely unnecessary nature is made all the more blatant by the fact that it was entirely Deodato’s idea; it’s not as if he was accompanying hunters and filming their activities or had accidentally stumbled across these animals being killed. He forced his actors to kill animals live on camera for a film that purports to ask what savagery really is and didn’t see the contradiction until decades later when he expressed regret for these scenes. By emulating his characters’ bloodlust without a hint of self-awareness, Deodato forfeits any claim to a moral high ground.

Compare this lack of thoughtfulness to dark Belgian mockumentary Man Bites Dog² – in which a film crew follows a sociopathic hitman around on his day-to-day jobs, making themselves complicit in his increasingly violent crimes to the point of later participating in a gang-rape. Unlike Cannibal Holocaust, Man Bites Dog uses black comedy to bring attention to the sordid feelings and fantasies that viewers sublimate when watching such material; the physical and sexual violence, which escalates in a distinct yet carefully-paced manner, are never indulged in for their own sake.

And yet, although inarguably superior, Man Bites Dog might not have been conceived without Cannibal Holocaust’s cultural influence. Rémy Belvaux, Benoît Poelvoorde and André Bonzel never cited it as an influence, yet their thematic and narrative similarities cannot be ignored. As shockingly misogynistic and indefensibly hypocritical as Cannibal Holocaust may be, its existence has enriched cinema for the better. Such is the kind of moral paradox art lovers must live with.

¹Itself inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s 1960 film The Virgin Spring, which likely served as an additional bridge between “highbrow” art and entertainment generally considered just one step above industrial pornography.

²Known to Francophone audiences as C’Est Arrivé Près De Chez Vous – It Happened Near Your Home in French.

"The Lonely Passion Of Judith Hearne"

The British appear to have a special gift for romantic melodrama that is not often discussed. Perhaps it’s this image we and other cultures have of us as the country of eloquent yet courteous love, where emotions are either contained or sublimated into something grand and beautiful. The base passions, grandiloquent heartstring-tugging and baroque style so strongly associated with melodramas tends to be viewed, perhaps unconsciously, as something too vulgar to be “properly British”.

And yet, joining such illustrious classics as Black Narcissus, Brief Encounter and Room At The Top, The Lonely Passion Of Judith Hearne brings further evidence that this famous British prim-and-properness is precisely one of the reasons why our melodramas tend to be so good. Jack Clayton, whose aforementioned feature-length début Room At The Top had defied British censors with its uncommonly frank exploration of male lust for sex and power, flips the tables here by telling us a tale of female powerlessness, solitude and self-loathing. If one believes in full circles, it is fitting that this would turn out to be his last film.

Throughout her life Judith Hearne has been a model of Irish Catholicism to a fault, sacrificing her own needs and desires for the sake of her aunt’s – a way of paying her back the kindness she showed her by taking her in after her parents’ untimely deaths. Flashbacks of this past life usually come to her following a moment of weakness or transgression, like a lesson learned to the point of reflex. The very first scene is a reversal of that configuration: 7 year-old Judith attending Mass with her dignified old Aunt D’Arcy. After receiving a sip of Jesus’s blood, she lets out a hiccup that evolves into a contagious giggle. As its transmission to other girls threatens to perturb the ceremony, Aunt D’Arcy grabs her hand and squeezes it tight, cutting off the brief spontaneous connection she formed with those nameless comrades. By the time young Judith’s face has dissolved into that of her older self, the film’s main themes and ideas have all been subversively introduced.

Her eyes and posture seem to pre-emptively apologize on her behalf for any inconvenience she may cause, a stark contrast to her too-sweet landlady Mrs. Rice and her overweight, fair-haired “poet” of a son Bernard, whose silky red gown and high-pitched smarm make him a grotesque caricature of effeteness. Yet we do not yet consciously suspect that there may be more to her meek demeanour than simple good manners and Christian humility. When she first locks eyes with her landlady’s brash, American-accented brother James (the ever magnificent and increasingly missed Bob Hoskins) and listens rapturously as he waxes poetic on the wonders of New York, we are led to believe that this will be a gentle tale of belated love and second chances, told with characteristic British delicacy.

We have no idea.

It starts with a coldly polite allusion to “things that happened”, made by the disapproving mother of one of Judith’s piano students. James violently berating Bernard and the maid after catching them mid-tryst. Then, there’s a pub conversation between James and a drunk “business partner” during which they fantasize about owning a business in Haiti and fetishize native women. Finally, after three dates during which the two seem to grow increasingly close, Mrs. Rice’s cruel dressing-down of James’s New York activities – an insurance scam artist rather than the successful businessman he presented himself as – exposes the would-be couple’s hidden natures through their respective methods of coping with the disaster: Judith succumbs to temptation and relapses into alcoholism. James acts on his lust and rapes the maid in her bed.

From then on, Peter Nelson’s screenplay zeroes in on Judith’s isolation – not only from a household that looks down on her drinking with scorn and from a God that never seems to reward her faith, but also and especially from a society that neither conforms to the upbringing it provided her nor delivers on its promises. “A woman never gives up her hope! “There’s always a Mr. Right” they say!” she sobs after what looked like a last chance at marriage turns out to be a business proposal in disguise.

It’s a seemingly inescapable trap where communication seems all but impossible, and Maggie Smith conveys that struggle with extraordinary precision, making every loss of dignity, every moment Judith dares to hope that she might find happiness for herself, a shocking and heartrending event. As it is with so many melodramas, her strong, compassionate performance is half the reason for the film’s success. One of the more striking examples comes at the climax of Judith’s crisis of faith: An overhead shot of a drunk Judith screaming “I hate you!” at a church altar, followed by medium eye-level shots of her clawing at Heaven’s gates before pulling the altar cloth and candles down in a montage combining both angles, as her cries of “Let me in!” are echoed and repeated. By all rights, it should come across as camp, heavy-handed and overblown. Instead, it’s one of the film’s saddest and most shocking moments. Melodrama at its finest.

Modern viewers may find it difficult not to compare Judith’s crisis of faith – something that, incidentally, seems to only ever be portrayed in fiction as a Catholic thing – to Maurice Bendrix’s “diary of hate” towards God from Neil Jordan’s underrated adaptation of Graham Greene’s The End Of The Affair¹. Indeed, Greene had famously referred to Judith Hearne’s author Brian Moore as his “favourite living novelist”. Both film adaptations work well, but The Lonely Passion Of Judith Hearne is made especially affecting by the permanent emotional displacement of its protagonist; there seems to be no place for Judith unless she resigns herself to her fate and does not stray from the habits she has accustomed herself to for most of her life. The film’s last shots, in which she makes a sacrificial decision, thus lend themselves to multiple interpretations: Has she finally made a step towards a better life, or is she simply repeating the same pattern until another false hope comes up? Has she truly made peace, or is it mere obedience to societal conditioning? Whatever the answer, the questions linger in our minds long after the credits have ended.

 

¹Previously adapted by Edward Dmytryk in a 1955 film version, unseen by me as of this writing.

"Songs My Brothers Taught Me"

In the Lakota reserve of Pine Ridge, a man burns to death in his house. His memorial service gathers what seems like half the community; according to an old friend, he fathered 25 children, all of them teenagers or young adults. They discuss the local Indigenous Christian temperance movement at a bonfire, over beer and joints. Among them, a boy and his 11 year-old sister stay on the sidelines and watch quietly – their father’s death affects them just as much as everybody else, they just don’t realize how much yet.

There’s something almost mythological about Karl Winters; unseen but spoken of with wistful reverence, he’s like a deity whose death by fire lays bare the curses and sins suffered by his children. Certainly, Chloé Zhao gives their games and escapades in the badlands an almost biblical sense of majesty. Call it bucolic neorealism; where tight, handheld shots of a largely non-professional cast blend in seamlessly with imagery that wouldn’t look out of place in a Terrence Malick film – medium shots following characters walking in fields with occasional lens flares provided by the sun intruding at the top of the frame, camera swirls around an embracing couple with nothing but music on the soundtrack… And then there are the establishing shots, with their permanently overcast skies overlooking the land like a meteorological embodiment of the characters’ hopes and fears.

It would be tempting to see Zhao’s style as a means to make the pain and frustration experienced by Johnny, Jashaun and their mother Lisa that of all American Indian peoples. Indeed, Pine Ridge’s bloody history, from the Wounded Knee Massacre to the 1973 siege, almost reads like a catalogue of oppression and hardship faced by Indigenous populations of the American continent. Yet to interpret Songs My Brothers Taught Me as an exposé on the American Indian experience would be to miss the forest for the trees; the historical genesis of its characters’ condition is important, but it does not define them.

Over the course of the story, two paths unfold: That of aspiring boxer Johnny, who makes money smuggling alcohol back and forth from Whiteclay to Pine Ridge in service of his Springsteenian dream to leave for Los Angeles with his girlfriend Aurelia, and that of his 11 year-old sister Jashaun, who strikes a friendship with recently released ex-con Travis, agreeing to help him sell his handmade & second-hand clothes in exchange for a pow wow dress. As Johnny’s bootlegging activities attract the wrong people’s attention and Jashaun’s friend gradually falls back into his old ways, the two siblings’ respective paths collide in a subtly impressive editing sequence that combines Johnny’s fateful encounter with thuggish competitors with Jashaun’s ride home from a nightmarish rave accompanied by the same cop that found her father’s body.

As enunciated above, the plot seems like a pretty clear-cut tale of trying to escape one’s roots vs. reconnecting with them, but the impeccable attention Zhao pays to her actors’ every unconscious look and gesture reveals something more profound beneath: An urgent need to define oneself by our connections to others. Whether it’s Johnny usurping Aurelia’s family conversation over her departure by announcing his intent to accompany her or Jashaun witnessing Travis drunkenly rapping about his own inability to escape his condition, both siblings are trying to form connections in order to keep on existing and evolving. Jashaun listens where Johnny imposes or resists.

This understated impulse for communication and connection spans the entire film, linking Johnny’s distribution of liquor in precarious houses full of crying children and morbidly obese adults to anti-alcoholism sermons attended by his mother, and in doing so transcending any TV documentary miserabilism such scenes might evoke to reach the kind of matter-of-fact poignancy that eludes many films made by more seasoned directors.

With respectful distance – even in the closest shots – and discreet compassion, Zhao unmasks that impulse and associates it with the larger need to preserve cohesion as a family, as a community and as a people. Giving further spiritual meaning to her scenes of pastoral respite, Zhao places God – and the search thereof – as a driving and unpredictable force behind that struggle, vividly illustrated in the scene of Karl’s funeral, where traditional songs sung by Lakota nation representatives accompany mourners coming out of a lily-white Christian church; like the reeds from Johnny’s closing narration, his people bend to the wind so as not to get blown away. Rather than submission to white western cultural supremacy, Zhao suggests this conciliation of Christianity with Indigenous traditions to be a powerful system of endurance and resistance.

That isn’t to say Songs My Brothers Taught Me presents a rose-tinted vision of religion or spirituality. Further exploring the link between family and community, Zhao acknowledges the manner in which they come into conflict through Jashaun’s reaction to her brother’s plan to leave, the discovery of which (point-of-view shots of Johnny and Aurelia) curiously evokes someone spying on their unfaithful lover. But nowhere is this conflict more succinctly expressed than when, in the film’s most harshly poignant line, Lisa’s imprisoned eldest son warns her not to “make God another man you abandoned your children for”. While perhaps not exactly feminist, that single line offers a more devastating denunciation of the idea of God as a patriarch than all the trendy New Atheist slogans in the world, and Irene Bedard’s wordless reaction to it provides one of the film’s acting highlights.

One of the story’s subplots involves Johnny’s budding friendship with his aging partner-in-crime’s white girlfriend Angie. The half-repressed sexual tension lays ground for subtle callbacks to western romanticism of American Indians; when Johnny helps Angie with her dart-throwing skills by adjusting her aim while standing close behind her, their body language and positions echo and gender-flip the Avatar image of the native woman helping the white man shoot an arrow. In a later scene, Johnny removes a gutted game’s heart and jokingly offers it to Angie for eating. As she has everything he wants from her here and now, Johnny feels no need to impose his will on her. Yet when she acts by attempting to kiss him, his response is one of passive resistance. Although there may arguably be more ingredients for a fulfilling relationship with her than with Aurelia, Johnny remains faithful. Whether it is because he is genuinely in love with Aurelia or because he cannot separate her from the escape she offers remains ambiguous. It certainly supplies one of the film’s most politically evocative shots: A young American Indian man apologizing for not returning a white woman’s kiss while both stand in front of a bloody gutted animal.

Songs My Brothers Taught Me is thoroughly involving from start to finish, humble yet confident, carried by raw, magnificently unaffected performances – particularly from Jashaun St. John as her eponymous character. Like Karl Winters, the absentee father who abruptly returns into his children’s lives by dying, it affects us surreptitiously, leaves an impression that doesn’t instantly register but instead grows over time until it our connection to the world is revitalized.

"Elevator To The Gallows"

“A 24-hour Racinian tragedy:  The crime was committed at night, the murderer was identified in the morning, and he shall be captured this evening at the latest.” Such are the words used by a pompous substitute magistrate to describe the criminal case he thinks he has all figured out. The tragic irony comes of course from the fact that the man he has pegged as the murderer is in fact innocent of this particular crime but guilty of another one nobody knows took place, but there’s also an unwitting dose of truth to his words that makes them doubly ironic: Elevator To The Gallows is indeed, like so many noir films revolving around murder and forbidden passion, a 24-hour tragedy; one whose plot’s reliance on its characters making the worst possible decisions at the worst possible moments turns it into a tragicomedy.

None of these decisions are forced or arbitrary, they are all consistent with the traits of those responsible: The meticulous murderer who forgot to take the grappling hook off the balcony panicked at the unexpected phone call and naturally thought taking the elevator would be faster and more discreet; every mistake the impulsive teenage delinquent makes is an attempt to emulate adult behaviour most likely learned from the movies; as for the murderer’s lover, well, how was she to know they’d used his camera? It’s the kind of moments of credible stupidity that the Coen brothers thrive on.

On paper, Elevator To The Gallows looks like a collection of noir situations: A murder plot committed by the victim’s coworker who is also his wife’s lover; two teenage outlaw lovers driving a stolen car and stopping at a motel; a man trapped in an enclosed space and powerless to stop the unfolding of tragic events…  But from the very first shot, a memorable extreme close-up of Jeanne Moreau’s lost and anguished face as she repeatedly declares her love for her husband’s future murderer over the telephone, Louis Malle makes his intent clear: To look at familiar scenarios from unfamiliar perspectives.

Such unfamiliar perspectives include subverting the expectations of suspense generated by the murderer’s predicament (trapped in an elevator after hours while his car is stolen and his lover is looking for him all over Paris) by concentrating relatively little attention on his attempts to get out, which end halfway through the film. The consequently greater amount of time spent on his lover’s fruitless search for him and the teenagers misusing his property brings to surface the social critiques that so often lurk at the surface of classic noirs: The respectable CEO’s wife spends the night walking the streets while her inner monologue melodramatically rationalizes his “betrayal” and “cowardice” into something noble and romantic, so lost in thought and so confident about her power that ending in the police station with drunks and prostitutes seems like a mere inconvenience.

Meanwhile, the kids’ use of the wealthy war vet’s identity and possessions to make friends with a couple of aging German tourists before carelessly killing them, aside from recalling the adolescent roleplaying from Nicholas Ray’s classics They Live By Night and Rebel Without a Cause, functions as a critique of post-WWII youth entitlement and privilege that, in light of the May 68 movement that would occur ten years later, feel eerily prescient from a reactionary point of view¹. Indeed modern French Gaullist viewers doubtlessly find the toast to Europe shared by all parties but the boy as well as the German man’s evident delight in playing along with his pretense at being an Indochina veteran respectively chilling and cathartic.

In either case, the characters’ status is temporarily and, up to a point, voluntarily hidden. They hide from their crimes in plain sight, taking on the guise of a different social status; it is paper-thin and does not stand up to scrutiny, but in the brief amount of time that passes between transformation and return to reality, it’s a kind of relief for them.

An adaptation of Noël Calef’s novel of the same name, Elevator To The Gallows was Louis Malle’s first feature-length work of fiction. He had previously worked as an assistant to Robert Bresson for A Man Escaped and the influence is quite distinct, if not overt: Scenes that most other filmmakers would shoot in order to generate suspense are downplayed just enough that tension remains without distracting from the curious beauty of the gestures and emotions contained within. The murderer’s infiltration of his victim’s floor via grappling hook, in particular, reads like a reversal of A Man Escaped’s climactic escape scene. It’s one of the many little touches through which Malle made Elevator To The Gallows a stepping stone on a new path for French crime dramas (or “polars” as we call them in France), perhaps the country’s most popular genre at the time and one that was threatening to grow stale from formula. Sadly, after decades of progress, the genre appears to have stalled once again. More’s the pity considering France’s increased social, political and religious fractures provide an abundance of material for films like Elevator To The Gallows.

¹A point of view that I do not entirely share, even if I do acknowledge its excesses – support for genocidal authoritarian regimes such as Mao’s and Pol Pot’s being the most prominent.

"Ali: Fear Eats The Soul"

If Ali: Fear Eats The Soul were simply about racism and the challenges faced by interracial couples, it would already be a superb accomplishment in and of itself. Indeed, the virtue with which Rainer Werner Fassbinder takes seemingly simple situations and characters and strips them down to expose the bare human emotions behind them puts most mainstream anti-racist cinema to shame. But the true subject of Ali: Fear Eats The Soul is really loneliness and the unbearable pressure of groups over identity, and it’s Fassbinder’s crucial understanding of the forces that shape human behaviour that makes it an unassumingly revelatory experience.

Consider the film’s opening scene, which lays out all of the film’s themes with uncommon precision and subtlety: An aging widow walks into a bar to seek shelter from the rain. The sound of Arabic music fills the soundtrack. Dominated by the line of tables that stretches all the way to the foreground on her left and the door frame above her, she appears small and isolated. In the following shot, we see the patrons, all gathered at the other end of the counter, silently looking at the new arrival with cold interest. Among them, four Arab men. Opposite axes, opposite worlds. Emmi (an astounding Brigitte Mira) is neither welcome nor rejected, just an unsolicited intruder disrupting an ordered society.

After the shapely young bartender explains her clientele’s taste in music – “They prefer the stuff from back home” – as well as her choice of drinks, we see one of the Arab men, Ali (El Hedi Ben Salem, dubbed by Wolfgang Hess), reject a white female patron’s offer to take him home – “Schwanz kaput” he explains in broken German. Jilted, the woman changes the Raï music to a slow Bohemian folk song and playfully dares Ali to dance with the old lady. Nonchalantly, he accepts. So far, the bar has been diegetically divided into two spaces: Emmi’s table and the patrons at the counter. Only in the subsequent shot, after Emmi accepts Ali’s proposal and follows him to the dance floor, are these two spaces united by the camera’s synchronized movement with the characters.

Through diegetic music, sparse dialogue, still shots and composition choices that emphasize vertical lines and thus static positions, Rainer Werner Fassbinder subtly conveys the discomfort and sense of defamiliarization felt by many white Europeans – particularly older folk – when faced with otherness in their surroundings. More importantly, his choices also put a different light on his characters’ words and actions, which would appear fairly straightforward in mainstream films: Ali’s rebuffed would-be lover’s act of provocation (replacing “his” music with “hers”, daring him to dance with the little old lady) has a tinge of genuine curiosity that she herself may not fully acknowledge; Ali and Emmi’s dance, during which they exchange personal information, comes across both as romantic table-turning so much as an experience in re-acquainting oneself with familiar customs – Emmi notes she hasn’t danced in 20 years – in strange and unfamiliar circumstances. Throughout the entire film, these two individuals struggle, resist and negotiate with various groups over their identities, habits and desires in an endless psychological maze that separates, reunites and blocks them from each other depending upon circumstances.

This struggle is visualized through various scenarios in which Emmi’s relationship with the much younger Arab man makes them the subject of racist comments from her friends, neighbours and children, and others in which their relationship finds itself challenged by their own feelings of alien-ness. But Fassbinder isn’t content with merely illustrating the grade-school humanist platitude of everybody being somebody’s stranger; he explores it in intimate detail that belies initial impressions of broad strokes.

Like in his previous theatrical film The Bitter Tears Of Petra Von Kant, Fassbinder makes considerable use of deep-focus shots to create meaning. Shots in which one or both of the main characters are isolated by the décor, framing and positioning of other actors are legion, as are shots in which all or part of the important actions are seen through an opening, a filter or a reflecting surface. Even when the camera’s point of new is neither subjective nor semi-subjective, our attention is drawn to both our own gaze and those of the people we are watching. Consequently, we empathize even with those whose words and actions make out to be either one-dimensional bigots or, in the case of Ali, a seemingly patronizing “noble long-suffering immigrant” stereotype.

That is what makes Ali: Fear Eats The Soul so miraculous: With purely visual means, it reveals complex human mechanisms behind commonplace attitudes and aggressions that most movies would either treat as self-evidently evil or dissect via thorough examinations of individual characters. Through Ali and Emmi’s relationship, all the obstacles and compromises people impose upon each other and themselves for the sake of happiness are gradually unveiled to us. Racism is thus dissected to appear not as the abstract evil that most of us would prefer to imagine, but more as a frighteningly natural expression of the human instinct to feel safe and validated by being part of a unit of similar people, whether they share the same skin colour, the same ancestry or the same drinking establishment.

"Ricki And The Flash"

I often find that an actor/actress’s lead performance represents a film at least as much as it carries it. While the overall quality of the performance and that of the film are neither necessarily proportional to nor dependent on each other, the former will often be a kind of distillation of the latter’s traits; not just the film’s themes and tone, but rather the little things, good and/or bad, that give it a specific identity.

Meryl Streep’s portrayal of a divorcee whose rock star dreams never left the bar in Ricki And The Flash is one such performance. Its occasional flourishes, semi-fulfilled promises and questionable notes mirror the film’s uneasy tonal changes and narrative compromises, but the earnestness that motivates them is such that they also prevent both from being disappointments.

Directed by Jonathan Demme and written by Diablo Cody, Ricki And The Flash bears both creator’s hallmarks for better and for worse. Its plot and structure resemble those of Young Adult with a touch of Rachel Getting Married: A female protagonist with multiple unresolved personal issues returns to a hometown that has moved on without her and finds that she is no longer wanted. But whereas Young Adult was a cynical tale of successful upward social mobility, whose dark comedic value rested mainly on the dissonance between its anti-heroine’s delusions and the plain reality, Ricki And The Flash is a more traditional bittersweet crowd-pleaser: Unlike Mavis’s desperate attempt at stealing her happily married ex-boyfriend back, which viewers knew as a lost cause from the get-go, there are hints of lingering attraction between Ricki/Linda and her ex-husband Pete (Kevin Kline) but Cody and Demme explore that idea just far enough to reveal a modicum of pain without making too many people in the audience uncomfortable. The character who really cares for the anti-heroine and serves as a voice of reason – brilliantly played in Young Adult by Patton Oswalt as a mirror image of its protagonist – actually manages to help her get back on track and be her boyfriend. By the film’s conclusion, Linda has managed to reintegrate her family unit and it all ends with a dance party.

In summary, Ricki And The Flash attempts to cross the kind of snarky domestic dramedy typically aimed at teenagers and young adults with a feel-good redemption story adult families can enjoy, and for the most part it succeeds. Diablo Cody’s customary biting repartee and semi-orthodox social observations (the Linda/Ricki contradiction is personified by her right-leaning libertarian politics contrasting with the abandonment of her Midwestern American nuclear family) bring cathartic laughter while defusing any discomfort caused by the topics at hand. Tension is relieved through familiar techniques that include catty maternal insults to the man who broke her daughter’s heart and the requisite “In Marijuana Veritas” scene so typical of modern middle-class-set comedies.

All fairly well-marked territory, but saved from the clutches of triteness and overt sentimentalism by a balanced screenplay and Meryl Streep’s aforementioned lead performance. Streep has received criticism in recent years for what some perceive to be calculated, over-mannered performances, and it’s not entirely without merit. Like many actors of her generation, her performances are rarely bad but it has become equally rare to see her do something new and unexpected with a role. As Linda, a person who is only in her element when performing on stage as Ricki, she occasionally exaggerates a movement or infection more than she should and sometimes gives the impression of holding back from exposing too much of herself, yet there is not a second where her commitment is in doubt. Correcting Mamma Mia’s false notes, Streep makes Linda’s arrested development look as much a disguise as her lad-ette persona, lending an undercurrent of pathos in her more histrionic moments that feel more genuine than they might have otherwise. Like Cody’s script, she may not be as much herself as a more daring project would have allowed her to be, but she manages to make the necessary concessions without losing herself in the process.

The other real star of the film, of course, is Streep’s real-life daughter Mamie Gummer as Linda’s suicidal freshly-dumped daughter. The role of the sarcastic sick person is one that has been pummeled to death by countless hipster pseudo-indie impostures like Garden State and The Fault In Our Stars, but Gummer carries out each snappy one-liner with imploded pain that makes the early pre-conclusion of her character arc all the more underwhelming.

Indeed, the film’s second half, with its inspirational pep talk, happy musical sequences and bourgeois-bohemian wedding (vegan food, seed paper cards) that recalls the titular multicultural wedding of Rachel Getting Married brings on the happy feelings with an industrial efficiency that, at times, make it look like Jonathan Demme seamlessly edited two short films starring the same protagonist together. While not jarring, the shift in tone cannot help but remind the viewer of how relatively little time he has spent getting to know this family and its baggage.

While not as honest as Rachel Getting Married nor as astute as Young Adult, Ricki And The Flash is a heartfelt little film that settles for above-average likeability with adroitness. It would have benefitted from further exploration of its secondary characters’ perspective on the situation – as well as fewer zooms/forward tracking shots of a character’s face/torso when faced with an important/dramatic moment – but like Meryl Streep, it dares just enough to let the viewer leave with the satisfaction of not having wasted their time.