The Debt

When one first begins to watch John Madden’s film The Debt, there is one obvious influence hanging over it: Steven Spielberg’s Munich. Indeed, I suspect that Munich was the enabling condition in how the Israeli thriller, of which Madden’s film is a remake, originally got made. The two year time gap between 2005 and 2007 seems to fit perfectly…

There is no way for this film – about a team of a team of crack Mossad agents heading to Europe undercover to avenge an atrocity committed against the Jewish people – to even pretend that it isn’t standing in a very large shadow, and so one suspects Madden and his DP Ben Davis just went with it. A lot of the unglamorous, dimly-lit scenes in the streets of East Berlin seem uncannily like the look that Spielberg and Janusz Kaminski achieved in Munich. Both sought to emphasize how much the look and feel of Europe has changed between the mid-20^th century and the late 20^th/early 21^st century – how there used to be so much less glass, plastic, and stainless steel, and so much more brick, stone, and grim iron. Unlike today’s gleaming neo-liberal world which seems to consider last week ancient history, this world phlegmatically evokes the centuries of history that lie in virtually everything in Europe, and the subjectivity that comes with this knowledge. Likewise, the film’s violence is much more close and intensely visceral than one expects from a film of this sort. But I’ll get to that in due course…

Even more telling than all this, however, is the fact that Ciaran Hinds is cast as essentially the same character as in Munich, albeit older and sadder. There is also an Australian beefcake as another of the Mossad heroes, but whereas Munich had Eric Bana, The Debt has Sam Worthington, and it was here that my troubles with the film began. After Terminator Salvation, Avatar, and Clash of the Titans, Worthington’s presence carries certain connotations, and I was expecting The Debt to be far brisker and pulpier than it eventually was. Whereas I went in thinking only of Munich, by the time the credits rolled I was in a very different place, thinking of a totally different roster of influences. These include films such as Atonement, The Reader, and Sarah’s Key – films of our time which are still fascinated by World War II and the Holocaust as the defining events of the twentieth-century, but are nonetheless grimly aware that we are now heading into the second decade of the twenty-first century. By 2010, we are fully three generations removed from this era – four for the younger generation that watches the most movies today – and it is becoming progressively more difficult to come up with plots that make it viscerally and immediately relevant. Far more often, these films are about memory and closure at the end of one’s life, or in relation to an older relative’s. Atonement is about an author trying to honour her sister’s memory, but only once she’s on the cusp of retirement and senility; The Reader is about an established and disillusioned lawyer revisiting a boyhood love long after it has ceased to mean anything; and Sarah’s Key is about a mature woman who becomes determined to learn the truth about a wartime story which involves her in-laws’ apartment, even though all concerned are by now dead or geriatric.

Probably the most vivid instance of this sort of thing in the culture today has been the phenomenon of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The catalyst to the story is the oldest in the book – a reclusive millionaire hires our investigator-hero to learn what happened to his granddaughter – but again, it’s initially not about living results but about closure. Even the investigator, Blomkvist, is by now middle-aged enough and established enough to be more worried about salvaging his reputation and keeping his apartment than blowing the lid off anything. The real interest to the story, however, is Lisbeth Salander, who is in her mid-20s and whose life is still very much a volatile live wire. Her youth and backstory -- as we learn it in the next two books -- mean that the events at issue took place decades before she was even born, and in a totally different world from the digital age of which she is a child. Her intensity is such that she's able to give a jolt of new energy to a case which has gone old along with those concerned in it. Even its resolution, when the 50-something Harriet is finally found alive and well, feels rather flat and perfunctory in Lisbeth's absence.

In light of all this, The Debt hinges above all on Helen Mirren’s performance as the “30 years later” iteration of Jessica Chastain’s character, and her evocation of weariness with life – of having lived with baggage and issues for so long that one would be uncomfortable changing things, even for the better. By the time one is pushing 60, after all, one has already been through marriage and divorce, one’s career is for better or worse set, and you have grown kids just starting upon theirs. Even if one does re-enter the fray, one does so relying on experience rather than vigour, and the prospect of being killed in action is less horrific than merely sad and ignominious. The climactic fight scene, for instance, is deliberately the stiffest and most by-the-motions one I’ve ever seen, both participants not having nearly the passion for this they once did.

The aesthetic of these films, in turn, very much determines their audience and their reception. These are obviously films for mature cinephiles – either adults who directly identify with their protagonists, or younger viewers who are educated enough to appreciate what is at issue – and as such their basically middle-brow mentality is unsurprising. The fast, loud, and unrelenting tones one finds in films openly pitched at the teenage market today are so vulgarly presentist that these films seem even smarter than they are by comparison. And yet somehow there is still a sense of cop-out; a pathetic declaration that once one has passed a certain age one should simply surrender to the burden of history and no longer even think of taking part in it. This is then legitimized by the impression such films give that all the bumptious, brutal, horrors of the mid-twentieth-century are safely back there, and totally over with now, in our tranquil twenty-first century world of neo-liberal consumerism. This is, we all know, utter rubbish, and it was here that a third point of comparison struck me.

The Debt is particularly telling when you compare it to Paul Verhoeven’s Black Book. The connection first struck me at the film’s mid-point, in its sole outrageous and provocative moment. Because the Mossad agents’ target is working as a gynecologist now, the only way to get to him is for Jessica Chastian’s character to pose as a patient, which thus entails putting her feet in stirrups and letting him minutely examine her vulva region. Watching him try to engage her in friendly small talk under these conditions, knowing of her mission as we do, is frankly hilarious in a warped way, and receives a brilliant punch line when he observes that “you had intercourse last night! That’s good. I think we’ll see results.” She has, you see, half-heartedly had sex with her other teammate, Sam Worthington having taken too long to make a move. It’s the sort of thing you don’t usually see is such staid, middle-brow films as this, and it reminds one that Black Book is also about an Isreali woman who has a husband, a couple of kids, a job as a schoolteacher, and whose wartime experiences in occupied Holland would seem totally remote from her current life. Diabolically brilliant cynic that he is, though, Verhoeven would never let it rest thus. The film’s opening subtitle – establishing that it’s 1957 – seems innocuous enough, and after more than two gripping hours of the movie’s flashback narrative, likely nobody would remember it.

Only in the last minute of the film, however, when our heroine ceases her recollection and heads off with her family, do we see that they are heading towards the kibbutz which she’s founded with the Holocaust loot she recovered twelve years ago, and which is now surrounded by a barbed wire fence and bristling with sandbags and gun emplacements. Suddenly it comes back to one that since this is 1957, the Suez war is still going on, and Israel will be on high alert for the Palestinian troops augmenting Nasser’s army. This in turn cues one to think of Israel’s obnoxious habit of continuing, to this day, to provocatively build settlements inside the West Bank, just as a general fuck-you to Palestine, and forestall any peace that might require concessions. The contrast with The Debt is total. Even with the best intentions, Verhoeven seems to be saying, you can never really escape from history, and in trying to retire peaceably to home and family after the buffetings of one war, you may in fact do your humble part toward starting the next.

Women's Horror

 I recently watched two very different horror films, one of which made me curious enough about the other to seek it out. Martha Marcy May Marlene was recommended to be me by a dear friend, and upon hearing about the plot, I somehow formed a vague impression that it was made by a woman. This turned out not to be the case – it was the feature debut of a young man named Sean Durkin – but the thought having been planted in my mind of a horror film articulated from a feminist perspective led me to seek out Jennifer’s Body, directed Karyn Kusama and written by Diablo Cody, the latter fresh from her Oscar-winning success with Juno. In the event, the two films could not be more different, and confirmed for me again the dangers of pigeonholing by gender. The few people who heard of or saw Martha Marcy May Marlene tended to praise it rapturously, declaring Durkin to have masterfully caught a woman's nightmare, whereas the higher-profile Jennifer’s Body received excoriatingly bad reviews and basically fizzled commercially.

Martha Marcy May Marlene has all the flaws and all the virtues of a first film. One of the most vivid things I noticed is the degree to which Durkin is in love with the image for its own sake. He shows an affinity with old Dietrich and Garbo melodramas in the way he often simply lets the camera linger on heroine Elizabeth Olsen’s face, revelling in the spectacle of her sheer physical presence, and only allowing us to guess at the roiling emotions inside. In general I’m all for the digital simulation of actors via performance capture, but I’m still not convinced it can ever capture the experience of watching shots like this.

Durkin likewise shows an almost preternatural gift for atmosphere and implication, and establishing a dialectic between them. During the sequences set on cult’s commune farm, the atmosphere sometimes seems almost as utopian as it’s supposed to be. The white-painted wood of the house and barn, the green of the grass and surrounding treeline, the unaffected naturalness of the people there – it seems to confirm that here is a place where you can be simple, natural, and virtuous, away from a life in the modern world which has allowed you none of these things. Durkin wisely abstains from any one melodramatic scene which contradicts all this and reveals a horrific nightmare beneath the surface – it’s only in the gradual accumulation of small details, intercut among the seemingly positive atmospherics, that we grasp what a nightmare this cult really is. One of the first images in the film establishes how meals are separated, with the men eating first; we later see how they slip drugs into the food of the new arrivals; and then the truly chilling line about how all the babies on the commune are boys. It’s the oldest and most fundamental axiom of horror: what you imply but don’t show will always be scarier in the viewer’s imagination.

And it’s on this point that Jennifer’s Body is pinned down. It implies nothing, but just lets everything hang out as blatantly as possible. Unlike many critics, I genuinely enjoyed the film, but I acknowledge it’s not a sure-fire sell. Whereas Durkin with Martha Marcy May Marlene was crafting a truly original movie that only incidentally lent itself to the horror genre, Cody and Kusama were very much having fun tweaking and punking the conventions of the teen gore-fest horror film. The film casts Megan Fox as a vain, slutty, high-school cheerleader who becomes demonically possessed and begins gruesomely devouring all the boys she can beguile, leaving it to her bookish, bespectacled, and perpetually-put-upon best friend (played by Amanda Seyfried) to stop her. This plot is so obviously run-of-the-mill genre fare that it’s perfectly excusable to have some feminist fun subverting expectations, but by the end one suspects Cody and Kusama have had a bit too much fun, and in the process neglected to make sure that it all hangs together coherently.

The casting is key to both films, and for better or for worse, Jennifer’s Body is defined by the fact that it stars Megan Fox in her first non-Transformers leading role. It does not settle the question of whether she is a real actress. What it does do, however, is prove indubitably that she has star power. Kusama is only slightly more restrained than Durkin in devoting long, spectacular takes to the sheer spectacle of her, and she dominates them totally. Amanda Seyfried may be a far better actress (witness her turn in Atom Egoyan’s Chloe the same year), but very few human beings can upstage hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of CGI robots just by leaning over a car engine...

Martha Marcy May Marlene, in turn, is defined by providing an organic follow-up to John Hawkes’s Oscar-nominated performance in Winter’s Bone. This latter was a revelation from a man who had been a working actor in Hollywood for twenty-five years – often in blockbusters like The Perfect Storm or critically-lauded films like Me and You and Everyone We Know – but had yet to become more than a vaguely-recognizable face. Teardrop in Winter’s Bone changed that, bringing an air of lethally-focused danger to a character who, on paper, might seem like a disposable piece of white trash. The depraved power in his eyes of that role transfers somewhat to Martha Marcy May Marlene, and you have no difficulty accepting Patrick as a modern-day Charles Manson who can bend a whole community of followers to his will. Even more worrying, however, is his chief subordinate Watts. Whereas Patrick exudes a certain detachment and wisdom to go with his menace, Watts is a sheer enforcer – viewing women as mere animals to be wrangled and feeling an unqualified sense of his right to do so. The very first sequence in the film, with him putting animalistic speed and intensity into chasing down a stumbling and irresolute Martha, made it crystal-clear to me that this film had very much been made by a man.

Jennifer’s Body’s virtues lie in its not mere inversion, but ridicule of this kind of thing. Coming from a Canadian cinema studies context, where the cringe-inducingly misogynistic Ginger Snaps is often touted as a national success, it’s refreshing to see a comparable story be so breezy and insouciant about its gruesomeness, and how the two girls react to it. The film is deliciously ambivalent, rather than expecting us to go with our “good girl” hero and moralistically spurn her friend once her monstrosity manifests itself. Likewise, it doesn’t end on an all-is-well note once the “good girl” has killed her best-friend-turned-monster, but rather has the demonic power pass to her, leaving her free to do some slaughtering of her own. Also, the monster-catalyst is not mystified as some pseudo-Christian condemnation of female sexuality, but as an obnoxiously pretentious yuppie “indie band” who have learned the Satanic arts so they can hurry up and get the point of being so famous that they can drink, smoke, fuck, snort coke and trash hotel rooms to their heart’s content. There’s no subtlety, but it works on a certain exhibitionist level.

The chink in Martha Marcy May Marlene’s armour, likewise, comes from the fact that Durkin’s command of subtle implication mysteriously deserts him during the scenes where Martha is back in the “real world,” with her sister and brother-in-law. Possibly displaying his neophyte status, Durkin takes no chances on us not seeing these people as inhumanly hateful and narrow-minded, totally oblivious to anything beyond their careers, house prices, pharmaceutical treatment, or safety in conformity. Sarah Paulson is too archetypally cast as Martha’s sister, forever given to crying out “what’s wrong with you?!” or slapping her in the face for nibbling while cooking; and Hugh Dancy is used to reflect the lazy American sense that British yuppies signify even more hatefully than American ones, because they bring spiteful class condescension into the equation. The sledgehammer effect of these scenes shakes, but mercifully does not sink, the film.

Overall, in spite of its missteps, Martha Marcy May Marlene fully deserves all the accolades that it has received, and one fervently hopes it marks the beginning of fruitful careers for Durkin and Olsen. It’s a virtually original work that seems unbeholden to any clichés or conventions. Jennifer’s Body, in contrast, works in the same sense as does Amanda Seyfreid’s next critically-reviled horror film, Red Riding Hood. The sheer pleasure lies in watching its joyous vulgarizing, nee vandalizing, of well-worn conventions, rather than its achievements in narrative, acting or mise-en-scene. This is the sort of Hollywood product, however, that critics chronically refuse to extend the benefit of the doubt to. It was the same with Kusama’s film Æeon Flux in 2005, which was critically excoriated but which I appreciated in a certain arch, symbolist, sense. After all, if one is going to start a movie with the premise that it’s the year 2415, and that the surviving 1% of the world’s population inhabits one hyper-controlled walled city called "Bregna," then you’d be a fool to go with a conventional visual aesthetic. Kusama’s next film is apparently called The Rut, and will star Chloë Grace Moretz as a young girl compelled, apparently for want of paternal affection, to venture into the woods to experience the kill-or-be-killed lifestyle of nature. I’m willing to bet that the “father’s love” aspect will be a pure MacGuffin, and that we’ll see more bizarre, critic-baiting, treatment of our stylistic and narrative expectations. I’ll certainly watch for it with interest.

Cradle Will Rock

Cradle Will Rock was Tim Robbin’s third and last film to date, and it turned out, paradoxically, to be both his best and his worst effort. It was his best because it broke fascinating new ground, which I’ll get to in due course. It was his worst, however, because he simply did not learn the lesson he should have from Dead Man Walking: that he could only improve as a filmmaker by scaling up into more iconic and archetypal human emotions, and abandoning the hysterical attempts at political urgency which had marred Bob Roberts.

If anything, Bob Roberts was more excusable on political grounds. It was, after all, 1992, and with the Reagan/Bush dark ages having dragged on for twelve years, it was perfectly understandable for Leftists, liberals, and anyone with a conscience to be on the verge of snapping. Also, the film’s crudity was substantially leavened by the sheer evil brilliance of Robbin’s own performance as the titlular character. The stupidly manipulative, oh-it’s-all-hopeless-the-system-is-against-us bits were the same sort of thing one always finds in liberal dramaturgies, from The Ox-Bow Incident to The China Syndrome to Redacted. It’s the facilely optimistic belief that things should always turn out happily/peacefully/amicably/etc. in the world, and if they don’t then humanity/society/polity/etc. has grown so depraved as to be beyond redemption and all we can do is cry in anguish. The segments of Bob Roberts that simply savour the spectacle of Robbins, however, implicitly concede just how limited and anti-aesthetic all that is. The sheer nuanced detail of Robbins/Roberts allows us the sardonic pleasure of watching the human comedy play out in all its grimness, as the total cynicism of the evil neo-con yuppie wins out over the doddering, well-meaning, Gore Vidal liberal. It’s depressing, but paradoxically, depressing in an electrifying way, rather than in the simply infantile, whiny way of Ox-Bow/China Syndrome/Redacted-type films.

With Cradle Will Rock, however, the context was different. Clinton had now been in office for seven years, and Hollywood’s treatment of political themes had become identical to his: disingenuously inveighing against liberalism and big government in a cynical play for Middle American votes, or box office dollars as the case may be. This sort of thing reached its apotheosis with Robert Zemeckis’s Contact, in which actual news footage was manipulated to make Clinton a character in the film, James Woods turned in another cartoon villain performance as the evil big-government bureaucrat, and one buffoonish Republican congressman frets over whether the aliens believe in God. These were not propitious times in which to undertake a reappraisal of the Leftist politics of the Federal Theatre, and the only wonder is that the film wasn’t more of a train wreck than it was.

Cradle Will Rock is marred from the very first by the Montaigne-ian aspect of liberalism: the dogmatic refusal to be dogmatic. In this spirit, the relative justice of a totalizing ideology like Communism is not really of concern to Tim Robbins, so much of the fact that it is an all-totalizing ideology, and thus must be critiqued, however much you may agree with its ideas. To actually bring the course of the film into alignment with its ideological sympathy would be too shocking a notion – one might actually have a solid, uplifting work that left viewers feeling galvanized and confident, and that would of course be unacceptably dogmatic. One must, this doggerel goes, leave them feeling frustrated and unsatisfied if a work of art is to have fulfilled its purpose. Cradle Will Rock actually contains a running gag where Hank Azaria’s playwright character is lectured about his work by the ghost of Bertolt Brecht, but Brecht himself would likely be turning in his grave if he could see the point to which Hollywood liberals have mongrelized his ideas.

The result of all this in practice is that one is forced to sit through scene after inept scene in which sympathetic Left-leaning figures are needled and browbeaten, and not allowed by the script to stand up for themselves; ambivalent figures are introduced solely for the purpose of defaming Leftism; and hysterical anti-Leftist figures are coddled by the narrative due to the naïve liberal shibboleth that you have to “show both sides.” This stubborn refusal to distinguish the dynamics of art from those of real-world politics leads to a remarkable cast – including Vanessa Redgrave, Emily Watson, Joan Cusack, Bill Murray, Susan Sarandon, John Turturro, and more – fumbling about with crude dialogue and contributing nothing to the proceedings. If Robbins’s goal had been to make a My Son John-style anti-communist film, these scenes would require only minimal rewrites.

There are two plot strands, however, which intertwine to form the film’s real DNA, and these not only redeem the film from the stupidities outlined above, but elevate it above Robbins’s achievement with Dead Man Walking. It is, after all, no great conceptual challenge to be sombre and serious about such a sombre and serious subject as capital punishment, however much genius is required to actually make the film. To be raucous and anarchic in the face of sombre and serious things, however, is a far greater test of an artist’s skill, and that’s what Robbins achieves in the segments of Cradle Will Rock which deal with Orson Welles and Hallie Flanagan, played by Angus Macfadyen and Cherry Jones, respectively. As played by Macfadyen, this Welles is a thundering, megalomaniacal, drunken, and rapacious iconoclast who nonetheless has the genius to back it all up. In a vacuum, this could render him just another object of sententious “critique,” but is saved from that fate by the way he’s given a comic foil in Cary Elwes’s John Houseman. Between them they generate enough loud, fast-talking, broadly gesticulating comic energy to keep Robbins’s politics at bay, and create a real life of their own for their characters. On paper, a scene of them questioning the seemliness of eating at such an expensive and upscale place as 21 Club could have been as lame as so much else in the film, but is redeemed by some business with Welles’s flask. And a childish ego-contest, shouting “Isn’t!” “Is!” “Isn’t!” “Is!” at each other, manages to be more articulate than anything else in the film.

 

Cherry Jones’s Hallie Flanagan is the opposite extreme to this. She represents the film’s one sublime stroke of political genius: to simply reverse the usual moralistic denial of politics which one gets from the Right, and award it to the Left. Anyone who has ever read the Chronicles of Narnia stories will have a feel for how appallingly simple it is for arch-Right-wing Tories and born-again evangelicals to deny that there is anything political to them, and declare that they are simply morally innocuous stories for children. They're really about being “nice” and “good,” and all the monstrous misogyny, racism and chauvinism is simply in the minds of Left-wing spoilsports and churls. With brilliant perversity, Cradle Will Rock simply reverses this, and has Flanagan blithely deflecting questions about a children’s play Revolt of the Beavers, declaring that it’s all about a mean and unkind beaver getting his comeuppance, and the themes of insurrection and redistribution of wealth are just illusory projections by Right-wingers. Jones’s performance in these scenes is amazing. She keeps her head very steady and rarely blinks, so that one can’t tell if she is very determinedly sticking to a script, or if she has such wonderful gifts of self-persuasion and tunnel vision that she actually believes what she’s saying.

The film which these segments bring most vividly to mind is Robert Altman’s MASH, which is in itself pretty illustrious company for any film to keep. Cradle Will Rock, however, actually surpasses MASH in the sense that Altman’s film was subversive purely due to its adolescent, insouciant, anarchist sensibility. One could not imagine Pierce, McIntyre, and Forrest having a real discussion of ideas any more than one could imagine them donning uniforms and saluting. It’s this, however, that Robbins more or less accomplishes in Cradle Will Rock. The Welles/Houseman segments match MASH for anarchic glee, but have a real, coherent political line to them rather than just a vague anti-everything absurdism. Moreover, Flanagan compounds this by creating an almost exact Henry Blake analogue. The sort of benignly blank-eyed authority figure, whose verbiage may outweigh their acumen but who thankfully is in your corner, is exactly the sort of character that Roger Bowen (and McLean Stevenson on TV) created, and is always a treat to watch when done right.

Ultimately, Cradle Will Rock can’t be called a success because the central helix of Macfadyen/Elwes/Jones takes up too little of the film’s running time. Too much is wasted on digressions that either don’t work or aren’t followed through. Writing William Randolph Hearst and Marion Davies into a film about Orson Welles sounds like a no-brainer, but to introduce them and then make nothing at all of it is just absurd. A scene near the end has Hearst and a steel tycoon Gray Mathers discussing how they can set the course of art in the future by patronage. The scene would function perfectly as a set-up for an allusion to how Welles’s first foray into cinema would humiliatingly deflate Hearst’s pretensions, rising inexorably to the top of the canon in spite of the fact that its signature line, “Rosebud,” was Hearst’s pet name for Marion Davies’s yoni. As it is for this bit, so it is for Cradle Will Rock as a whole – moments of genius, but ultimately a missed opportunity.

Shiri

I just watched a Korean film from 1999 called Shiri, and was touched by how it was of an era supposedly pretty recent, but that now seems so long ago. Back around the turn of the millennium, there still seemed to be optimism in the world that the Korean peninsula would be reunited sooner rather than later. There was activism and goodwill towards such a thing, as intermediary economic zones were being proposed and there had been real progress on the reuniting of family members separated for forty years. Presidents Kim Dae-Jung and Kim Jong-Il were soon to have a public summit in 2000, at which real matters of cross-border travel would be floated. All this may have just been cynical baiting by Kim Jong-Il’s regime that would never really have gone anywhere, but alas we’ll never know for sure. All too soon 9/11 happened, North Korea found itself on George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil,” and the Kim regime went into the crazed survivalist mode we’ve all been hearing about for the last decade-plus, with the testing of nuclear weapons, the test-firing of huge ballistic missiles, the shelling of Baengnyeong and Yeonpyeong Islands, and the sinking of the ROKS Cheonan with the loss of 46 lives. There is absolutely no way you’d ever see a movie like Shiri get made in this climate.

Viewed today, then, Shiri is a rather touching souvenir of that remote-seeming time of optimism. The movie is very cunning in how it plays on the gnawing spiritual guilt that many people in the modern, developed, consumerist world feel about their lives. The fast-food-and-neon-lights affluence that we live in has supposedly severed us from the connection with nature and tradition that all human beings back through the millennia of our species have felt, and thus we tend to idealize tribal and agrarian societies beyond all reason (James Cameron makes billions playing to this sentiment with his Avatar franchise). I don’t wish to be curmudgeonly and say that this idealization is totally wrongheaded, but the limits of it are clearly pointed out by the fact that many South Koreans feel their Northern neighbour – in whose society they could not survive a single day – to be somehow more authentically Korean. Shiri plays interestingly on this, with its beefcake Northern Special Forces villain froth-fleckingly ranting about the fat complacency of the South. It’s easy to preach slow, cautious and gradual reunification when you have cheese, Coke and hamburgers, he says; in the North, however, starvation is so dire that cannibalism has become common. Our beefcake Southern hero isn’t given any lines which refute this and blame the Northern regime's Stalinist policies for all this – he only wafflingly declares that blowing up Seoul and starting a Second Korean War is the wrong solution to this lamentable state of affairs. This is the same sort of socio-cultural masochism that one often saw in Hollywood movies of the late 60s and early 70s, when no denunciation of America as monstrous seemed to be too strident.

All this, however, is tangential to Shiri’s real appeal, which is that it is one of the most intense and gruesome action movies you will ever see. The opening five minutes are more intense than most Hollywood action movies in toto, as our anti-heroine Hee goes through the most inhumanly brutal assassin-training programs I have ever seen, to emerge as one of the most lethal hard-asses ever put onscreen. Exercises include knife-training on live targets, last-man-standing tae-kwon-do melees, and handgun exercises where failure means death by headshot. I adored how this is all done with no words, just vividly-composed images and music which tell the story on their own. “Training montage” sequences are an obvious device, yes, but they work. Trey Parker and Matt Stone display their own snotty childishness by presuming to satirize them while nonetheless using them.

The fact that our protagonist throughout all this is a woman is also interesting. As with Chinese drama and Hong Kong action, it’s intriguing that in so many East Asian films – the products of societies still more patriarchal than many Western ones – you have such compelling, nee commanding, heroines. Perhaps it has something to do with most of the filmmakers at issue being men, and thus feeling women to possess an innate spectacle of pathos and mystery which your average beefcake male action hero does not. We all know how many male directors – both Eastern and Western – seem to find their muse in one certain actress, from Joesph von Sternberg with Marlene Dietrich to Zhang Yimou with Gong Li. It seems Jung was really onto something universal with his idea of the anima – the inner female persona of the male psyche – and that male artists often seem to have privileged access to theirs.

Finally, Shiri is interesting in terms of the gendering of the conflict between nations. The fact that the plot eventually hinges on a romantically-charged standoff between Hee and our beefcake South Korean hero -- her aiming to assassinate the South Korean president, him aiming at her to stop her -- had me cringing in dread. The movie seemed poised to take the old Henry V route of “he battles and kills beefcake North Korean soldier, then woos Hee; she swoons into his arms, and thus all is right with our nation’s valorous manhood.” To my immense gratification, however, the film doesn’t so betray its kick-ass opening sequence, and Hee takes the shot and forces him to kill her. Not quite as uplifting as The Last Seduction last week, but still pretty decent.

The Last Seduction

My absolute favourite thing that I’ve seen over the last two weeks has been John Dahl’s 1994 film The Last Seduction. Apparently it was scandalously passed over by distributors initially, and doomed to languish on TV broadcasting – a cruel fate for so vividly cinematic a work. Gratifyingly, justice was eventually served, and it still managed to make a big enough splash on TV to be picked up again and given a theatrical release. And now all these years later I see it for the first time on TV, via the DVD. Go figure.

The absolute defining feature of The Last Seduction is Linda Fiorentino’s brilliantly amoral anti-heroine “Bridget Gregory.” This is the only case I can think of where the femme fatale of 1940s and 50s film noir is triumphantly updated for the 90s, with no softening or cop-outs (I haven’t seen Brian de Palma’s film yet, but I’m even more curious now). Bridget is really one of those characters who puts your ideas about what constitutes movie misogyny to the test, and beyond that what relation, if any, morality bears to art. Bridget is first introduced running a telemarketing scam selling worthless “vintage coins” to gullible suckers. It is then revealed that this is just a sideline, and that she has induced her doctor husband “Clay” into doing a $700,000 drug deal with hospital pharmaceuticals. When he returns with the money, she then steals it and leaves him in the lurch with the heavy loan-shark debt they’ve incurred setting up their dream New York apartment. Ostensibly she did it on the spur of the moment because he hit her, but everything else we see of her character indicates that this is just a convenient excuse he was boorish enough to give her, and that she would soon enough have done it anyway.

Arriving in a small town called Beston where she can hide inconspicuously for a while, Bridget proceeds to seduce a young hayseed boy named “Mike Swale,” who will in short order become her pawn to deflect  Clay’s vengeance. By the end Clay is dead, Mike is in jail for the murder, and Bridget has the cash all to herself, no worse for the wear. On paper, this might seem like a nihilistic movie, in which a conscienceless bitch decides this is her world and we just live in it, and is never contradicted in this belief. And yet I found this one brilliantly humanistic and principled, in that it zeroed in on the real lasting appeal of film noir and the femme fatale: namely that plenty of men don’t like repressive patriarchy any more than women do. When presented with a female character who decides to vindictively undermine this order, we’re ready to root for her unreservedly, and that is exactly what The Last Seduction does, with no compromise or cop-outs.

From the very first, this movie frames itself in terms that play on our expectations about gender. When Clay hits her, he is immediately so convincingly apologetic that we’re wearily resigned to the movie having her forgive him, and this just being a foretaste of volatile things to come. This not only turns out to be not the case, but she actually humiliates him in the most sadistically phallic terms by leaving a cruel farewell note with an emptied box of condoms! With this symbolic castration, we’re cued that the film is not going to privilege Mike’s down-home hayseed persona the way so exasperatingly many Hollywood movies do.

Many movies from the old Hollywood studio days had that class of character called the “designated hero.” The designated hero was usually the most blandly consensual figure of masculinity possible, put there to orient and centre the movie in the midst of whatever fascinatingly esoteric subject matter, supporting players, or of course women might be its real interest. These characters were generally boring at best, and outright hateful at worst, and thus it’s enormously gratifying to see The Last Seduction explicitly subvert the term and have Bridget declare Mike her “designated fuck,” turning him into essentially a living dildo for her casual sexual needs, and absolutely no more than that. In scene after delicious scene he attempts to assert his supposed patriarchal right to become the ordering centre of her life, and is summarily shot down. Even the choreography of the sex scenes is bizarrely different from what we’re used to in Hollywood movies, with her riding him reverse cowgirl inside a car, and one position involving hanging on a chain-link fence that defies description.

The film would still have been pretty one-note if Linda Fiorentino were all there was to it, however, and it’s here that J.T. Walsh is so invaluable. I always enjoyed the sort of reptilian scumbags that Walsh played, if only for the texture they added to a film. And, indeed, in The Big Picture I actually sympathized and identified with his openly cynical producer far more than Kevin Bacon’s insufferable Young Republican persona – a lot like Mike’s, incidentally. Thus, his equally cynical lawyer character “Frank Griffith” in The Last Seduction was a joy to watch. Almost all of Frank’s scenes consist of him picking up the phone to talk to Bridget from his dark oak-panelled office, wearing a deep navy-blue suit, deep in the most respectable enclaves of Lower Manhattan – complete with the American flag nobly billowing outside the window. It’s in this visual setting that Frank delivers lines such as “I’m sorry the law doesn’t make it easier for you to deal drugs and steal” and “Most fugitives are caught on the run Bridget, so stay put” with all the twisted geniality of a good lawyer-client relationship.

The ultimate effect of all this is to take us beyond even film noir – right back to Hollywood’s Pre-Code era of the early 1930s, when women were allowed to be individuals in movies and the Catholic Church’s beloved Production Code hadn’t yet enforced its anti-Wildean ethos of “really, if women don’t set us a good example, what on earth is the use of them?” The idea that women were only to be given the roles of moral guardians, repressing the natural sensual and asocial impulses of male characters – and that thus the idea of the “fallen women” was material of the highest tragedy – is what a depressingly large number of people still see as the salutary “innocence” of old Hollywood movies. Once one reaches a certain point of cinephilia, though, one starts to see this old innocence as in fact a repressive evil, and thus a film like The Last Seduction as an upliftingly moral rejoinder.

Turkish Delight

Dutch filmmaker Paul Verhoeven’s Turkish Delight is one of those films that really challenges your ingrained assumptions about socialized behaviour. We hear all about “40 being the new 20” nowadays, and parents being more like friends or older siblings to their kids. Modern consumer capitalism is such an essentially hedonistic and selfish creed that one can grow up in it indefinitely postponing any real adulthood. Old-school bourgeois notions of “propriety,” “deportment,” “comportment” etc. have either been devalued or abandoned completely, as adults wish more and more to still seem cool and with it. And with Turkish Delight, Verhoeven has grasped the ultimate tragedy of this passing. There was so much energetic fun to be had from shocking and offending bourgeois sensibilities that without them, art is going to be a lot more lifeless. Grasping, in 1973, that Holland’s pre-war bourgeois standards of conduct had not long left to live, Verhoeven seems to have set about making a film that would stand as a final affront to them before they were gone.

Turkish Delight is a film wholly given over to the human body at its most frankly biological, and the human mentality at its most unapologetically lustful and self-interested. The film is basically about a bohemian, wild-living artist named Rolf who finds a kindred spirit in an acting-out middle-class girl named Olga. They both have voracious sex drives, and seemingly no inhibitions about the rest of life either. They marry, but soon real life begins to deflate things, as Rolf’s extreme personality brings him into open warfare with Olga’s venally horrible bourgeois family. Sick of being caught in the middle, Olga seemingly dumps him for a more “normal” guy.

Thus far, the story may sound predictable enough. The idiom in which it’s told, however, is utterly mind-expanding. Turkish Delight is totally fluent in how it manages to relate almost every plot development to the excretions of the human body. We are first introduced to Rolf some months after Olga’s split, as he juicily licks the back of a photo of her, stamps it to the wall with his saliva, then masturbates to it, grunting about “licking the shit from her ass.” After this, the backstory is established in flashbacks. When he first meets Olga he mounts her with barely a by-your-leave, only to get his cock manglingly caught in his zipper. In their first time in a proper bed, he goes down on her, says that she tastes like oysters, and invites her to piss in his mouth. Their wedding is interrupted when one of the many pregnant brides goes into labour and wets herself – a dog swiftly moving in to lap it up. Their first time as man and wife is punctuated by a close-up of Olga slurping champagne out of his belly-button. It’s during a moment of domestic bliss that Rolf first offers to lick the shit from her ass, but the playful mood is broken when Olga goes into hysterics at seeing blood in her stool, signalling the ominous third act to come (in the event, though, it was only beet juice, as Rolf discovers by minutely examining her turds). His feud with Olga’s family moves into endgame when her father dies – in a sufficiently incontinent fashion that family members have to breath into perfumed handkerchiefs to pay their parting regards. Upon humiliatingly discovering Olga’s new lover at a raucously drunken family gathering, Rolf reacts by vomiting on everyone in range.

The above litany is not close to exhaustive – there’s much more business about maggots, horse’s eyeballs, thumb-sucking, doggie doo, junkyards, etc. – but you no doubt get the point. Anyone who possesses a fully-formed bourgeois moralizing side will either write off the film as “filthy,” “horrible,” “depraved,” etc., and think no further about it. Other, slightly more “liberated” or “free-thinking” types might go with the film to a certain extent, before a saturation point is reached and they cry “no more!” And some aficionados of gross-out humour might embrace the film because and only because of its parade of outrageous behaviour, and look no deeper at the film’s meaning.

For meaning there is. The intriguing thing is that, in spite of everything, Verhoeven is not just producing his answer to Pink Flamingos. The film is not anti-everything or nihilistic, but rather still has a cunning agenda of sorts. First off, it is almost strangely patriotic in the number of gorgeous shots of Amsterdam’s canals, landscapes, and historic architecture that it contains – the kind that could have come from some sentimental “national heritage” TV spot. Moreover, the final resolution to the plot is likewise a lot more romantic and sentimental than we’d expect. As it turns out, Olga was suffering an incipient brain tumour, which kills her at the end. She may, it’s implied, not have been in her right mind leaving Rolf, or if she was then she simply wanted to spare him the horrors to come. From this angle it almost seems like an earthier version of Love Story three years before.

The final spirit in which to approach the film, however, is to remind oneself that bourgeois society has always been canny enough to fence off a certain reserved domain for the romantic-rebel-artist type, and as long as he stays within that perimeter, he can in fact be feted and adulated by the very society he seeks to scorn and repudiate. With Rolf’s character in Turkish Delight, however, Verhoeven seems really determined to test the absolute limits of this idea while any vestiges of such “bourgeois society” still remain. Nowadays, when we seem positively to expect outrageous behaviour from any kind of public figure, and your average Hollywood comedy is almost as biological as Turkish Delight, the film seems much less transgressive and a lot more prescient.

The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover

Where to start with a film like The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover? With the titular cook presiding over a kitchen staff seemingly composed of circus freaks, urban Bedouins, and escaped lunatics, with a Dickensian chimneysweep-cum-choir boy for their mascot? With Michael Gambon’s “thief” thundering out a litany of French delicacies as he smears dog feces across a helpless, naked victim’s face? With his blasé wife Helen Mirren daintily biting at a sprig of asparagus in spite of being surrounded by a tableful his slovenly, unshaven thugs? Or with her lover Alan Howard’s crisply responding to the intimidating blustering of Gambon’s mobster-kingpin by pointing out “I’m not Jewish”? Or how to continue, for that matter, with a soulful romance that nonetheless hinges on silent, desperate, needful sex – complete with full frontal nudity – in bathroom stalls and kitchen enclaves? Or where to conclude, when you’ve reached a point where forcing a man at gunpoint to eat a broiled human carcass – covered in glaze and laid out a platter of cauliflower and lemon – seems fairly par for the course?

Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover is one of those films that test your most basic ideas – not merely about cinema, but about art in general. It’s virtually custom-made to flush out the prudes and the poseurs who think that art’s job is to be basically “nice” and reassuring, or who think that the merest hint of “naughtiness” (Ooh, she’s having an affair – how daring of the writers! Ooh, they’re showing the genital areas – how sophisticated this film is!) is somehow transgressive. Greenaway allows his viewers none of this, however. Throughout the first act, especially, he consistently uses long shots and long takes to keep emotional manipulation to an absolute minimum, and thus normalize as far as possible this remorselessly Freudian mirror-world he’s created. Absolutely everything is ultimately linked back to humanity’s most elemental drives. Sex and food aren’t so much contrasted as synchronized here, as with the sublime theme of testicle-eating. Tim Roth’s hireling is first informed about “prairie oysters,” then begs off chewing Michael’s balls off out of respect for Albert – they’ve probably still got Georgina’s juices on them, after all.

The great travesty about this film is that many critics have tried to genteelly bypass all this and bestow on the film the false dignity of being a grand anti-Thatcher metaphor, with Cook=Old Family Firms, Thief=80s Corporate  Raiders, Wife=Basic British Decency, and Lover=Supine Labour Opposition. The film needs no such interpretation to constitute a shattering rebuke to Thatcherism; its very nature makes it totally antithetical to such. The sort of dreamy Tory who can watch Chariots of Fire and go moist in the eyes at its portrayal of an idyllically all-white and pastoral Britain – one where the working classes know their place and young couples are sweetly tentative at the very thought of intimacy – will be haunted at night to know that a film like The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover even exists. Its spatial orientation is urban and cosmopolitan, its characters are jaded and decadent, and it locates the seat of human wisdom not in the head or in the heart but in the groin. It is a sublime work for violently dispelling the sort of childishly conservative illusions that too many of us still harbour nowadays.