Rubber's Lover (1996)

From http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/4/4e/Rubber's_Lover_FilmPoster.jpeg/220px-Rubber's_Lover_FilmPoster.jpeg

Dir. Shozin Fukui

With the sense of having to blink, slumped back at the end credits, trying to get my senses back together, a secondary viewing doesn't detract from the sensitory barrage of Rubber's Lover, only add to it. Is it all brute sound and violent content only? Probably, but you can become very complacent if one merely goes about believing any art that is lurid and outright hostile is unacceptable. Sometimes you need to shoot up the experimental drug rectally, get the rubber gimp suit on and let your mind be expanded by the pulsating, audible noise being played through the speakers, as crafted as the sound torture a character in the film creates on magnetic tape for a project to expand human consciousness. To actually have an effect on a viewer, it's better to go to the extent Shozin Fukui does in audio assault then be sedate. And what a film, cyberpunk cinema, based on stories around dehumanising industry, slum based fiction whose name evokes punk rock and its D.I.Y ethics. Here, Fukui wanted to depict a theme of his of catharsis through physical pain, and it appears here in the submerged underground laboratory the film is mostly set in, depicted in stark ink black and burnt-out white monochrome photography.

From http://horrorhappyhour.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/1538997732_d2a1ac3e96.jpg

This is a prequel of sorts to his previous film 964 Pinocchio (1991), his debut, not in the same subject, but of the same vibe of psychic power and transgressions with bodily and sexual undercurrents. I would like to imagine too, if one attempted to make a giant narrative encompassing both, that film started some time before its narrative when someone found out about the aftermath of this film and cut their losses by going into the living sex cyborg business that makes part of 964 Pinocchio's story. Better to try and salvage the remnants of the scientific experiment that failed messily here and try a different area with more chance of financial reward. Here, two scientists, and a comely nurse (Mika Kunihiro) in Lolita Goth costume who molests the human guinea pigs, are attempting to bring mankind to psychic abilities like many films before it, but with two potential options for doing so of their own design, the Digital Direct Drive, a piece of technology for monitor and enhance one's mind, and a drug called Ether. The two scientists, Motomiya (Sosuke Saito) and Hitosubashi (Norimizu Ameya),  are butting heads about which is the superior method for doing so. One thing they can agree upon is that, in the final stages, their test subjects are wrapped up in an all-rubber body suit, and not just because everyone is exceptionally kinky, but for a practical reason. The rubber suffocates the skin, preventing it from breathing, causing an insulating affect that, with noise blasting your mind away and the Ether drug in your system, will make your everyday senses mindless allowing psychic powers to come to the surface. Thus the title is explained and the S&M aspect of the film is shown. And its based on real research by Fukui before preparing this film, including contacting S&M practitioners, that is explained in a filmed interview that was included with the film's US DVD release. I don't recommend the reader try any of this in an attempt at expanding the mind. The amount of finance and underground space required is steep, and as this film suggests, it would lead to someone being a mess of organs on the floor by the end.

From http://www.honekoubou.jp/en/filmo/rubbers_2.gif

The psychic project is a failure. They're wasting money and killing human test subjects, and not producing the results their benefactors want. And they're clearly going insane, Motomiya, spearheading it, is a "muscle monster", as their nurse calls him, with the muscles of a body builder, who mostly wears only a thong and a see-through raincoat, so on edge and psychopathic I'm not surprised any one would like to close his projects. That or his tendency to rape people which rightly would prevent anyone wanting to assist him in continue said project. Members have gotten addicted to the Ether drug, and the last test subject unfortunately disintegrates on the operating table in splatter fashion when their nurse puts too much Ether into their veins. A female employee of the higher ups Kiku (Nao) is sent to tell them the project is to be closed within a week, but the three remaining members of the staff refuse to finish. The fourth Shimika (Yôta Kawase), an addict to Ether, is planned to be the next test subject in a last ditch attempt to prove to themselves they can succeed, and if Kiku tries to intervene, or accidentally cause the power to go off briefly trying to use an elevator during their experiment, Motomiya has no issues with sticking her between two speakers as a test subject too and blasting her ears with mind shredding noises.

From http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y121/
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Rubber's Lover is a claustrophobic film. You are grateful it eventually gets out into the real world, to see some neon signs of Japanese streets of the time, or inside a supermarket briefly, trapped in the stark and choked world of the test labs for the most part. The actors were told not to talk to each other during takes, which would've added to the tension onscreen. Unlike the expansive, delirious tone of 964 Pinocchio, with its Andrzej Zulawski inspired moving cameras and hyper active acting, this is a complete 180 degree turn. A refined, subtler form of the hyper violent, assaulting content as Shimika ,during the experiment, does develop psychic powers but still has the will to take his revenge on his former co-workers. Not through the conventions though, blowing someone's head off Scanners-like, but with Kiku the catalyst he is linked to now, through destroying someone's brain, disintegrating their body, or flat-out cannibalism whilst in an entire different body. Add to this a moment of blistering strobe effect that distorts your retinas, and it's an intense experience, but the quietness of most of the film baring the electronic trance score that occasionally is heard creates an interesting mix. Its oppressive even before the fake gore effects are seen, or the sexual aspects seep into front of your eyes, already unnerving in its rundown, industrial locations.

Don't worry, nothing bad happens to the bunny.
(From http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-JIUmad51doo/UoGNg-lekVI/AAAAAAAAdcg/
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The director's theme in both films is that transition and transformation is possible through agony, the film structured around effecting the viewer where you feel like you've gone through the same procedures until a waking sensation by the ending. The monochrome images. The sound design and disturbing content, including prolonged repetition of dialogue samples in scenes of pronounced psychokinetic events taking place. It's not surprising Fukui worked on Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989), the most significant film in the Japanese cyberpunk subgenre. In fact, of immense interest, you can see three trajectories' come out from that film. That of its director Shinja Tsukamoto, who would continue with the theme of the body and then develop more and more emotion to his work. Co-cinematographer and main actress Kei Fujiwara would unfortunately only make two features as a director herself, the most well known one Organ (1996) I've also reviewed online before [Viewable here], but developed her own unique spin on body horror that would baffle and alarm anyone who went into them expecting a Sushi Typhoon fest of cheesy gore. Fukui decided to concentrate on the mind and the transformation of it. Of course the three of them would have themes that would blur into each other's work, but they took their own inspirations alongside what happened in Tetsuo: The Iron Man.

From http://s3.amazonaws.com/quietus_production/images
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In contrast to the first film, Rubber's Lover has a darker conclusion as the dependency on the Ether drug and lost memories leads to an end. The climax involving a discovery of a dark past continually referenced to including a film, on celluloid, in Motomiya's collection. It also involves the sudden appearance of snow falling inside a room, a moment of elegant grace before the closest moment to a Scanners scene taking place. The end is tragic but continues with someone sat against a pillar inside a subway. They have been through torture, until becoming more then they were, leaving them drastically changed. Fukui would not make another feature film for over ten years after Rubber's Lover, returning back with films and shorts that look impossible to see. If it was the last time he made a film, it certainly ends with the right statement, leaving this viewer fried mentally gripping with the content again. The beginning of something new, back to the idea of catharsis through physical violence.

From http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-5KMMfm12ybQ/UoGNlplyXyI/
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Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None) - High

There's an entire wing of this site that's going to be devoted to Japanese cinema let alone their cyberpunk movies, such imaginative but also stark work. The borderline between alternative, underground art - theatre, punk and experimental music etc. - matched by giant drill penises, pig people and in this film's case leather frog man suit fetish and a prolonged scene of the two actresses writhing in a white lit elevator being pleasured by a pocket machine that blatantly stimulates your orgamically. A person's torso being ripped open while they're still awake and a very muscled man, able to make sound with them just through flexing, wearing only a transparent raincoat, repeated again in this review by how bizarre that particular image is to me. In fact you can add the almost nude muscle men in Tsukamoto's Tetsuo II: Body Hammer (1992) and paint this image of large biceped men in underground lairs involved in evolving mankind that's impossible to shake out of your head. But Rubber's Lover isn't pointlessly lurid. Disturbing, yes, and definitely a film that has divided people, but one that at least contains a distinct and provocative point of view. Rubber's Lover is merciless in its abrasive content but for the means for what is felt rather than direct ideas. It is worth mentioning Fukui's background in noise rock about now, the sense of the embracing of the messiness and oppressiveness of noise fitting the style of the content in this film. The result, like a Tetsuo: The Iron Man is completely unique and unrelenting.

Personal Opinion:

It's difficult to choose between this and 964 Pinocchio in which is the best film. Fukui's other work, barring two shorts that came with each film on US DVD, are to my knowledge unavailable to see. Here you get a very idiosyncratic style of filmmaking that feels like putting your head in a vice, not necessarily a horrible situation to be in when the calm final shot is shown and the whole viewing was worth it. They are part of a filmmaking style, like Tsukamoto's work or Organ, which is unconventional even for the extremes of all the violent Japanese cinema I've viewed, and not just because their created worked together, but also in an area of underground filmmaking which is willing to step outside of good taste but also have a clear idea for something a lot deeper. Maybe represented in brutality and fake gore being splattered about, but still an idea or mood. Like a pressure cooker, Rubber's Lover keeps going from one extreme to the next one, tightening and becoming more disturbing as it goes along. The result is impossible not to feel a reaction to.

Sexy Killer (2008)

From http://lytherus.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/35097.jpg

Dir. Miguel Martí

Meet Bárbara (Macarena Gómez). She's sexy as the title suggest, glamorous, likes both the cute and pink alongside the dark and macabre, desires to be famous as a celebrity, likes fashion, and just happens to be the mysterious Campus Killer at her university, bumping off anyone she despises or irritates her in gruesome ways. Directly talking to us the viewer, or an invisible camera to be the bafflement of one of her lecturers in one of her anatomy classes, she is perfectly content to enjoy the hottest trends while keeping a man's severed head she's claimed in the fridge. With the police investigators on the Campus Killer's trail, she also falls madly in love with morgue coroner/student Álex (Alejo Sauras), who she mistakes as a serial killer like her and is the one whose performing autopsies on her victims. Add his work in his spare time, a machine that can see into one's mind and can show the last images before a person died, and it's going to be hectic for her. Sexy Killer is definitely a film of the 2000s or so. You can see - when it uses flashy editing, bright candy colours, a parody of an infomercial demonstrating the tools required to suffocate someone with graphics onscreen - that this is a type of film that was birthed to in the late nineties onwards and is frequent now in genre cinema. It runs into sub-genres like grindhouse throwbacks and parodies, and can be said to be the zeitgeist of most cinema now baring the art house branch. It can be seen in blockbusters too. The influences can vary - music videos, Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas (1990), (although its Taxi Driver (1976) that is referenced in this film), Quentin Tarantino and many more. It's a peculiar concoction of self referential, movie geek zaniness. We follow Bárbara in her days, starting at the end of the film with her telling her tale to a man stupid enough to run over her dog, with his fingers broken and a knife in his hand already as she does. It's an oversaturated, hyperactive film. It starts off referencing slasher films, with naked female co-eds in the locker room, than immediately goes to Scream (1996), one of the first films to be a box office hit for its self-referential narcissism, then goes on to quote anything from the 'You're talkin' to me?' speech of Taxi Driver to the Teletubbies. It's bouncing off the walls from the beginning with its lurid and intentionally ridiculous gore that can yet be brutal, constant dropping of plot points and broad humour.

From https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixQGI5vqIRSSGYIAEoI7GXxjDcZW4PMetVUCzbrlPDB0GAInlbAmU9YOJgsTZHKObeKm0MdxWxEmwMx8cAOo6V5Yr1oJwwA7oUvcgfBJetLP7_VhEhTWBy3jo-D93KnS60skP1Ugl4Npo/s1600/Sexy.Killer.2008.DVDRip.XviD.AC3-ViSiON.avi_snapshot_00.05.15_%5B2013.11.13_22.05.39%5D.jpg

Like the other films of this ilk, the problems immediately raise their heads, more so when I immediately thought of three films I've seen over the years like this one - in chronological order, Gen Sekiguchi's Survive Style +5 (2004), Greg Arak's Kaboom (2010) and Joseph Kahn's Detention (2011). They may reference other works but they sustain themselves on their own energies and weird plots, as candy coloured, hyperactive and zany as a Sexy Killer or a Manborg (2011) but superior. With the exception of Araki, the other directors worked in commercials and/or music videos previously, another trend with these films. All are gaudy, at times glib and as manic as a film like Sexy Killer. But Kaboom has a heart and a controlled, knowing sense of humour in its pastiche. The humour in Sexy Killer is merely broad, and really has no emotions for its characters baring generic drama and romance between Bárbara and Álex. Detention intentionally pushes the use of onscreen graphics, pop culture references and genre mash up pastiches to an extreme, which Sexy Killer is too timid to do, willing to have someone crucified on a cave ceiling, a Christian worship shrine, in blasphemous fashion at one point but never letting such twisted images sink in. Survive Style 5+ has the background that surrealism and pop art was embraced fully in Japanese popular culture, its tendrils even reaching their pop music and adverts. Sexy Killer, a Spanish entry to these sorts of films, could've been interesting. A female killer as the protagonist, who at one point bemoans the sexism of presuming all film killers are male, a goofball horror comedy made in a pan-gender era, post meta-horror and after the existence of Pedro Almodovar's brand of camp black comedies like Kika (1993). The problems becomes obvious when the only real laugh is realising a cover of Aqua's Barbie Dolls is played over one of Bárbara fantasies, of a fake 50s Technicolor gloss of idyllic life, raised to want to be always pretty by her vain mother, not because it adds a point to the scene even out of amusement, but just because a song I was young enough to hear on the radio when it was first released is being covered.

From http://www.cultreviews.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/sexy-killer-bathcr.jpg

Most of these films are vacuous. Horror cinema now is atrocious in a smugness especially that is transparent. Happy to merely be gory and make an Evil Dead reference, little else after that. Constant film references, but always the same type of films, and with a Taxi Driver, referencing it without any real reason too or learning the craft of such a film, content with the apparent coolness of Robert De Niro talking to himself in front of the mirror but not interested why his character is doing that. Far from being a miserable sourpuss, I find myself with films that cannot string together a barest of narrative threads let alone a charm and charisma, discombobulating quickly into self-fellatio of fandom that's a detriment to the creativity and inspiration you find in fandom too. The virtue of a Greg Araki's Kaboom is that, even if that film ends on an intentional anti-climax, is a consistency to be able to wrap any random, strange ideas into a distinct form that can make them work together, an inventiveness with a real humanity even if it's weird. A Detention was a mess of plot strands but it went so far that it becomes a parody that cannot be loved by the crowd its mocking, like most parodies now, smug with themselves, its extreme hyperactivity divisive to many who see it. Sexy Killer, strung together by random kills, vapid glossy scenes, and plot strands that don't go anywhere and are not random on purpose, is just dull. Moments do stand out with some good things - Álex convincing a person to borrow his suit by having a bonding moment of how they were nerds in college who were virgins, Star Trek fans and awkward with the opposite sex - but most of it fails.

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It becomes obnoxious. A potential subplot of someone else who is killing people quickly mentioned and quickly after dropped, and the film devolves into the most conventional of stories. Inexplicably it turns into a zombie film by the end. Yes, it turns into a zombie film. I'm not kidding, suddenly the undead are introduced for the climax. Why? Probably because the director likes George A. Romero films but with no consistent reason to make the switch work at all, or to be so out-there, like Takashi Miike's The Happiness of the Katakuris (2004) that it flummoxes you in its tonal shift. It's vapid in its tributes to films it likes and never becomes its own distinct creation with a real depth of black humour or dares to truly piss off the viewer. The promise for a film here to take an interesting spin on the tropes, a fun one, is lost as soon as it starts. It's not really going to be subversive in its celebration of this female killer, slowly becoming trite as it introduces the Scorpion and the Frog story and suddenly becomes serious in the final moment. Neither is it camp enough or really feminist. The latter is complicated - Bárbara is charismatic, and the actress Gómez is absolutely game for her role, but the character is vapid and only obsessed with shopping and fashion magazines; not inherently a negative, as it's clear in real life glamour and goth/alternative culture are bedfellows for both genders, but her character development is miniscule.

From http://1.bp.blogspot.com/
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The zombies break out and randomly attack the party Bárbara is at in a poor script contrivance. Her lover Álex and her are ready to have the cliché dramatic scene about her real self that kills the film further, as a home invasion takes place that reminds me why I'd rather be watching Peter Jackson's Brain Dead (1992) again then it. This is worse when, baring a few film references, that film is not close to this smug horror comedy cinema of now, more concerned with the horror being horror, the comedy being real jokes, characters being actually likable, and ripping into fifties New Zealand culture to give itself its own unique personality separate from other horror films like it, things all these genres really need and many lack as if it's a badge of honour.  When a blatant CGI explosion burns down the house, the film is completely dead for me. Nothing is really good and it's part of a long line of these films, from Casa di mi Padre (2012) to Die You Zombie Bastards! (2005), the mainstream to the obscure, from the 2000s onward to now, that are as empty as each other. Films thatmerely pat themselves on the back as they believe that they are affectionate tributes to the love of movies and things that are fun. And it's more of an issue since their influences are rarely to blame because they've avoided making the same mistakes. Some - like George Lucas and Troma films - need to be viewed before I can make a judgement, but the others aren't guilty. Steven Spielberg and the movie brat generation vary between the serious and Indiana Jones films. Music videos, and music in general, is varied, and commercials perish quickly. Videogames, before now when they all look the same, are more idiosyncratic to each other then people credit them for. Video and video rental stores could lead to the discovery of truly unique films as well as your per usual schlock.  Scorsese varies his work beyond Goodfellas, and Tarantino has actually grown up, won't you believe it, making very peculiar and bold experiments even if he's still obsessed with grindhouse films. So why do films like Sexy Killer exist that fail this badly from their influence? Simply a horrible tendency that surface coolness is enough, which is why most of these similar films of now are as bad.

From http://3.bp.blogspot.com/
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Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

This is one of those 'zany' films I mentioned in the guidelines for this blog - shown here - those that throw everything they  think is weird onscreen but aren't actually weird, not abstract and just tiring. It's a conventional, if shambolic, narrative and isn't brave enough to do something actually strange or daring.

Personal Opinion:

Most cinema that I grew up with, from the early 2000s to now, is rubbish to be honest, because films like this delude themselves into thinking that a fan attitude can make aesthetically sound judgements on art. That's dangerous ground for me, he who only writes amateur reviews, to pose, but with my little inexperienced soapbox out, there is a pronounced difference between someone, regardless if they're a movie fan or started filming music videos etc., who can make fleshed out, engaging art even if its wacky and silly. See Greg Araki. Michel Gondry. Look at what place Quentin Tarantino has gone to now from before, and see why people are getting very tired of the grindhouse revival very quickly. No matter how many pop culture references they have, glib violence and farcical attitudes to meaning, the good artists have more on their mind and have read at least read one book in their lives. They do, for the risk of failure, try to be serious and earnest, or at least give their fan base a kick in the nuts when required. Something like Sexy Killer is middling, a retroactive work that makes the notion of being film fan very uninspired and easy to distract, excess without meaning to it. The result, willing to watch as many films like it as I can even though I should've learnt by now, is painfully drab. 

The Immortal One (1963)

From http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Nz39U4iRLqs
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Dir. Alain Robbe-Grillet

It's always an exciting movement, intentional choice of words, when a film director is resurrected or given their first introduction in this age of DVD and Blu-ray. The potential of a new landscape connected to cinema's vast Chinese puzzle box form. Even if the director has had DVD releases before, a grand scale celebration and restoration could have volcanic impact on film viewers - we await Walerian Borowczyk's day in the sun, not that far from when I'm writing this, in Britain. You come to a film like The Immortal One, the debut cinematic work of an acclaimed author and writer of Last Year In Marienbad (1961), and the already rich symbolism, such as our lost protagonist N (Jacques Doniol-Valcroze) finding discarded calendar pages in the woods, no transition between picking them up, just cut to different dates in his hands, and an entirely new room in what cinema means is kicked open for me.

From http://filmint.nu/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Two.jpg

N, a foreigner to Istanbul, encountering the beautiful woman L (Françoise Brion), sparking an intimate relationship. When she seemingly vanishes however, everything is up to question, he knowing little about her. Her name she gives him may be fake, she may be married, may be part of a white slavery practice, a total mystery woman elusive to him. The recent release of six of Robbe-Grillet's films for the first time in Britain, including The Immortal One, allows not only for the films to be viewable, but also as a box set for the UK releases, for the themes and ideas to intertwine, an introduction to the director. A person who the greater concern is for the enigmatic nature of his films, the truths held by his characters vaguer and questionable as they go further along. His characters travel in worlds that multiply and distort themselves as they go. When it doesn't, as in the case of Successive Slidings of Pleasure (1974), the last film in the set, it's because the protagonist is the one undermining the truth to every other character with their words. N in Robbe-Grillet's first film is left wandering the city of Istanbul, viewed by the mystery woman as a fake city of his dreams, eventually the fabric of reality against dreams being pierced. To those who have never seen one of Robbe-Grillet's films, this one is comparable to David Lynch. In a paradox worthy of his ideals, the director's work can be compared to various other films - Jean-Luc Godard with Trans-Europ-Express (1966), Czeck cinema (shot in Czechoslovakia) with The Man Who Lies (1968), pop art and the French New Wave with Eden and After (1970), and Jess Franco and softcore with Successive Slidings of Pleasure. Yet he is uniquely his own voice in that what undercuts the realities - lies, conspiracies, himself and a producer and a continuity girl scrapping plot points in favour of others film-within-a-film for Trans-Europ-Express - between intellectual deconstruction and a obsession with the fetishishtic that connects to his well know proclivities for bondage and S&M.

From http://i59.fastpic.ru/big/2014/0330/06/f132002ac8b2954cc8ee477944ef0b06.png

In his debut its clearly established where he would go and that, having gone backwards in viewing the released box set chronologically, this film and Successive Slidings Of Pleasure inherit the same mind behind them even if their tones are different. Bold use of cinematography from a man known for his letters and words in novels, rich black-and-white cinematography depicting the Turkish environments. Time is disrupted continually, scenes in the past, future or never having happened spliced between a moment taking place. The disorientating ability of dreams to be able to look at all these sides, inwards and outwards, of a reality, interlocking scenes taking place. A funeral procession is on a white stone courtyard, at the bottom of the screen going upwards, and not an edit later, creating an almost empty space baring one vague figure at the top. Human statues, like Last Year of  Marienbad, of people, stuck in time, strangely reminiscent of the graveyard, frequented onscreen, of the pillar shaped gravestones, a place long gone from practical use, as the supernatural nature of the film's title is emphasised from a car accident that takes place onward.

From http://theleastpictureshow.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/alain-robbe-grillet-16.jpg

A conspiracy is seemingly taking place around N as he becomes more and more at a loss as he moves along. A fisherman outside his hotel is continually nearby, maybe the mystery woman's husband. Maybe it's the blind man with two Doberman pinchers who develop into nocturnal creatures of fate. Are they involved in a conspiracy in another way or is it mere illusion? More so as the film keeps cutting back to a woman lying on a beach, waking up and saying to someone stood over her she has been dreaming. Like Last Year At Marienbad, the sense of reality is suspect, the chique aesthetics of exotic Turkey, of glamorous women in states of undress and suave men in suits, is undercut as more people look at N suspiciously and the facts are for question. The desire for the mystery woman leads to him even having a scene of self reflection as time seemingly stands still, as he can reflect on his own reflection in front of an antique store window in that moment. By the end, the film repeats itself, sending him into a fate beyond him.

From http://i59.fastpic.ru/big/2014/0330/43/9b9e3ff23227765122b9bbdc40840143.png

Aesthetically bold - ancient Byzantium ruins against modern ruins of a ship in the harbour, carpets hanging everywhere and bustle of city streets rife - it doesn't feel like Robbe-Grillet made any amateur mistakes here with his debut, but already knew where to go. The use of environments, as Robbe-Grillet would continue five movies on, adds to the layers that multiply as you watch along. Underground tunnels, mosques but also ordinary places fleshed out into new dimensions, such as the metaphor for the isolation of a hotel room being ran with as N is complete alien within it to the rest of the world, something returned to for The Man Who Lies. It would continue further from this with the other films - Trans-Europ-Express with the titular train and cityscapes, The Man Who Lies with its rooms and woodland, Eden And After with its mazes of industrial land, Tunisian village squares and a cafe crossed with a pop art installation, and Successive Slidings of Pleasure with its extremely restriction aesthetic and its fetishisation of bare walls and cramped underpass stairs, literal with the former with body paint printed onto it. Again this can be compared to other directors, but this is from the perspective of a cerebral writer who likes mysteries, and realises the power of  using the environments for this with the assistances of the cinematographers, camera operators and set designers who worked with him.

From http://i2.imageban.ru/out/2014/03/27/c3de446df0d9660b9427c7a8711fe791.png

And it's a mystery that entices. His more abstract work onwards from this has a playful, even lurid, quality to them that can help a viewer not used to going through meta and self commentating deconstructions. This is why, interestingly, Robbe-Grillet can be placed with the aforementioned Jess Franco, and got y DVD/Blu-Ray combo releases in the United States from the same company that did the same for Franco's work. Robbe-Grillet, the man of letters who is clearly obsessed with pulp as you get to films like Trans-Europ-Express, would've been pleased to  be housed with both such a genre luminary unfairly dismissed and also be released by the British Film Institute alongside Akira Kurosawa and Carl Theodor Dreyer in a different country. The protagonist is sent through a mystery as seen in many films, the same question asked - who is this woman? - but Robbe-Grillet is much more precise in the telling of the question than others. The film, no matter how further it reaches the abstract, is always going to an event or moment that has a reason to be included, just to displace the viewer to a momentous shift in tone. Utterances about people, individuals going silent and cautious, brief glimpses if someone out in the corner of the eye, all is precise even if the first viewing for me is a dream that baffled trying to absorb it all in. And it turns into a displacement of the scenario as it wraps up. The protagonist N who, bearing in mind Robbe-Grillet's continual obsession with archetypes, is vague himself, a little weak and displaced as a figure. His mystery woman, made of smoke, a belly dancer to only his (and our gaze) at one point, first scene in snap shots divided by blinds of his hotel window, as  if he's made her up, has more complexity than him. The scenario that Istanbul is a place of seedy conspiracy, common in pulp about foreign countries, the exotic as the other, is also undercut by how much it's mentioned N's view of the city is a mere illusion. The locals could be staring at him because he's weird to them, continually asking odd questions about a woman to the shopkeepers and maids he had never even learnt to name of. From there - his own delusions, real conspiracy, or a siren beckoning him to doom - a tiny Möbius strip takes places in the film, time repeating but with significant changes. A Doberman, black fur, peering out in the illuminated darkness of a car lights on a road. It's what one would wish debut to be, more so when learning how difficult it was to get this film made, Robbe-Grillet able to work much, much (for emphasis) quicker as he went on. The obvious questions to ask now is how his novels as an acclaimed writer in French literature, out there for me to find and read, set this film up and was a continuation of it, and how he went on after the last disc of my acquired box set as the filmmaker, almost all of which needing its own box set some day. It is a cinema that can link to others I can recognise already, but is clearly its own, unique one. Vibrant while being very intellectual, possibly in dangers of pretensions in the later works, which become more sexually explicit and divisive in their deconstructive games, but with so much to provide still. Apparently The Immortal One is a weak Robbe-Grillet film, at least according to the booklet in the DVD set; directors would kill for this as a debut considering how colourless, forgive the pun on the film's monochrome look, or compromised some can be.

From https://celluloidwickerman.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/imm_banner02.jpg

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None) - Medium

It would be Low if Robbe-Grillet never made another film or went on to be more conventional. It's a mystery with leanings towards rearranging your protagonist's perceptions encountered in many films of the sixties. It's a Medium having fed myself on five other films by him, and how noticeably more unconventional it is having seen what came after. He was one step away from Jorge Luis Borges' The Garden of Forking Paths, a character dying in one chapter, alive in the next, as what happens in The Man Who Lies. For all I know, that does happen in The Immortal One too.

Personal Opinion

It's a great moment when films, or any work, are finally allowed to be seen by the general public, not as a retrospective, but on a purchasable material, even data file. True, this is likely a niche only people like me knew of being made available, but it's now possible to have six films, one a reinterpretation of Eden and After called N. Took The Dice (1971), a fitting connection, in circulation. It's adding a new colour to the spectrum when it's films by an idiosyncratic voice, no matter how divisive they are. New games to use what Robbe-Grillet was playing watching these films. An entire new wing of my cinema, with five films that can be added to the blog later down the line, and others just out of reach.