CO/MA (2004)

 

Director: Mike Figgis (with Steve Hudson, Johnny O'Reilly, Hanna Slak and Jovan Arsenic)

Screenplay: Jovan Arsenic, Mike Figgis, Steve Hudson, Fabian Joest Passamonte, Johnny O'Reilly and Hanna Slak

Cast: Aleksandra Balmazovic as Susi, Aljosa Kovacic as Mickey Dortville, Thekla Reuten as Isabella, Fabian Joest Passamonte as Prof.Kurt, Jesper Christensen as Weissman, Lana Baric as Edwina, Isabella Parkinson as Joanna, Feo Aladag as Ellen, Vladimir Bouchier as Shukov, Doris Schretzmayer as Dorothy

An Abstract Candidate

 

CO/MA is the kind of film which skitters between genres. For starters, it may be credulous, frankly questionable, to call this a "horror" film as I had intended to. For most, there is only the scene of one of the actress in this communal filming project being haunted by a ghost girl, and that is not enough to qualify for the genre. I would argue there are plenty of moments which do fit the tone even if this would be the most disappointing film to watch on Halloween. The rest of CO/MA is just as difficult to pin down, as for a work most would call a "documentary", even that is questionable. What we have instead is a curious tonally shifting chimera that is CO/MA, something truly peculiar and worthy of making excuses of, as tentative for a "horror" review or at any context, for me to get away with covering this during any season.

This belongs to an era I slowly crept into my cineaste hobby, which is growing up in the 2000s as a teenager and, by the time of 2008 when I became a young adult and had fully started to develop into this. This era, from when they were first released in the late nineties but especially the 2000s, is an entire "DVD era" of cinema which will hopefully get its own cult assessment. Despite the calls of its demise, in the streaming era and the existence of better formats for high definition images, DVDs are still being released, but I am creating a term for one specific era. One, even if they got very limited cinema runs, had many titles released on the format along straight-to-video titles which are forgotten and/or represent some of the era's greatest obsessions in terms of pop culture in general. In the case of CO/MA, I can completely understand this being viewed as pretentious if anyone has ever remembered this production exists. I did because, even before I was able to catch up with films like this, I was subscribing to a DVD review magazine. The review was pretty damning from memory, but this still lingered in my mind for decades before I could finally watch it and get rid of it from my mind palace To Get To List. Made in mind to reality television's popularity at the time, the vibes of horror are strong enough to also nod to as its genre, but there is also the comedy segments, the attempts to blur reality and fiction, the soap opera pastiche set in a hospital the commune in the centre which the central project of the production we follow, and other bits and pieces. In the end, CO/MA is neither and all of these.

It is also a Mike Figgis production, which adds a stranger air to all this, an English filmmaker who made films like Internal Affairs (1990) with Richard Gere, and Leaving Las Vegas (1995) where Nicolas Cage won the best acting Oscar. By 2000 however, he slowly started to move entirely away from larger budget films and increasingly experimental productions, both working with more digital filmmaking and also bold experiments like Timecode (2000) and Hotel (2001). Those two mark a turning point, effectively running with the four screen concept Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey developed in Chelsea Girls (1966), having four separate screens showing different films at the same time, with Timecode telling the same film from four different cameras, Hotel entirely different stories running at the same time. With the exception of Cold Creek Manor (2003), Figgis ditched "conventional" filmmaking, openly embracing his interest in digital camera filmmaking and experimentation, and the comment I made earlier about the "DVD era" of cinema has Figgis' name in the unwritten encyclopaedia on the subject. Films like Love Live Long (2008), where he took advantage of filming at a Gumball Rally racing competition to make an improvised erotic drama, are productions most people have no idea of the existence of, lost to time unless an old DVD is found second hand or on streaming. CO/MA is among these, needing this comically long prologue to set off the review because it is the only way to properly explain where CO/MA came to be. It is a project told to us to start in November 2004 at a film studio in Slovakia, where Mike Figgis and a group of actors have started a filmmaking master class with him leading, one where everyone is to collaborate on this project we the viewer are watching.

Already it is confusing things when, in the first conversations we see recorded, Figgis raises concerns that he will be marked as the director legally on the film credits, but that is subject in the collaborative production as a truth. He says it might "be crap", and one of the collaborators considers if they might say it is not legal to screen this master class if they ever decide to once they have spent finishing the production. Making explicit reference to The Blair Witch Project (1999), and with reality television in its mind, you can time stamp this to the early 2000s. These extensive conversations are continuous through the film, where people in this collaborative effort are already staying outside in disagreement to the project's trajectory before they have even considered what to make, and it is all playing to the idea of whether this is all real or not. Figgis states onscreen that he wants to blur the lines between what is real and when an actor might be lying, but as the tone and genres start to blur in general, what even the significant point of CO/MA is becomes of debate. You can make the justifiable argument this was not a successful project. For me, fascinated by these out-pourings of human creativity and their emotions, faked or real, it was a compelling piece even if "indulgent" is apt too.

Considering the likes of Timecode, this was inevitable. That and, with the black and white scenes, including those of actors talking the screen to the viewers, Big Brother's influence alongside the reality television shows that came at this time are seen imprinted on this film, what was on the tip of everyone's tongue whether they wanted to admit it or not. A year before this, New Line Cinema took a risk on The Real Cancun (2003), a theatrical reality film which was shot at spring break in Cancún, Mexico. It was a box office bomb, and not a film I remember with fondness beyond just curiosity of its existence, but again "DVD-core", if I am to plague the world with a term to describe this era of filmmaking, is a compelling set of films for a variety of reasons. Their use of digital film cameras, with their aged aesthetics, and their attempts to redefine what a "film" meant are worth prodding, with CO/MA clearly looking for a possible outcome that was not the titillation of The Real Cancun, but a more intellectually based experiment.

It definitely breaks reality from the get-go, not really a documentary, and the first nods to horror are found when we have one of the actresses in a toilet cubicle feeling at ill ease of an unknown presence, beginning the hints of the building being haunted or at least the disconnect to the location even if this plot thread is one of many which feel unfinished. They all decide, in the main drive, as a collective to make a soap opera, in mind to strip anything interesting away on purpose. Alongside the strangeness of this, when one of the actresses complains later about the hollowness of her "soap opera performance" and that they apparently agreed to this project in the first place, the tangled web we get suggests otherwise, like a no-horror version of Lars von Trier's The Kingdom franchise if more absurd and less about the horror of that franchise. There are a couple of scenes in a film-within-a-film, with an actual audience, bored by the likes of cooking shows such as Jamie Oliver's, switching over to "The Clinic", with absurd touches coming in with its plot whiplashes, and over-dramatic music. It is one of the better aspects to CO/MA that most of what we get of this pastiche is just the introductions to each new episode, skipping ahead of entire plot cycles with drastic character shifts. Abrupt amnesia, lovers cheating on doctor to take his job and let the cleaner, studying to be one too, become the head of the hospital, secret half-sisters, fake twins for ones supposed to be dead and unknown leukaemia, all of which is deliberately silly. Add to this that there are two bystanders, a male older alcoholic and a British actress who is playing a pathological liar, watching on as the Greek chorus, and The Clinic as a project could have been something from this era of cinema that might have been a proper film you might find released from this era. This is less strange to consider when Lars von Trier once shot an office set comedy, with the digital camera instructed with artificial intelligence to shot however it wanted, called The Boss of It All (2006).

It feels hypocritical as a result, admittedly, to have a critique of soap operas yet playing one out whose strange presentation is actually interesting, but when the actors are flummoxed why they are doing a "bad soap opera", it is clearly another plot strand that is at play, with Mike Figgis playing his role at times as an odd puppet master. He is never cruel or manipulative, choosing soap operas as it is a genre and the most popular one globally in his words, but it is clearer he is trolling the cast. One of the biggest critiques I can make is that, for how long they had to produce the film, which feels like a short production of pure improvisation, it feels like a more fleshed out series of arches were lost in this and we could have gotten a much more complex yet precise work if it had been longer. It is aiming for something more complex but can merely add hints to these plot strands, such as when we get to one of the actresses being honest that she was comfortable filming Figgis' "porno". Truthfully, when the film uses the term "porn" the use is in mind to the fully improvised production with little script and minimal production crew instead, but there is a nod to the potential issues of lack of professional morals to get the right stories, such as a tale from a crew member who says, to cut costs on a failing soap opera, the script created a plague to bump off actors only for that to get high ratings. Nothing is explicit in CO/MA in terms of sexual content, but it is nodded to, with this actress' character in a relationship with a former patient of hers in The Clinic among other implications of the relationships between characters in the hospital setting. The sole explicit scene is a retake of a phone call between this actress and her former patient where, with only hints, she starts heavily breathing her invitation to the woman to go to a cafe whilst rubbing the mobile phone against herself, which with the ominous music used in the scene feels like they were suddenly trying to be like David Lynch.

Those music cues, and the more overt moments where the cast feel at ill-ease in the studio, are enough to justify the fleck of horror as a genre on this film before we get an actual ghost girl with her multicolour basketball in the costume department scaring one of the actresses. This is a movie with really not clear genre but shades of them in a spectrum. In truth, it is a film which does not really clear trajectory to itself, somewhat befitting the narrative it has where there is growing unrest from the group with Figgis as this goes. Some aspects of its trajectory are missing to fully emphasis the point - that there is a sense of discontent and a sense Figgis is antagonising some of them which should have had more scenes of, especially if CO/MA is playing with the idea of what is "real" and "reel". Even if that could be something difficult to capture in b-roll practically or morally, this especially becomes the case when the film starts talking about a conspiracy about who is who eventually, with paranoia growing, which could have added a greater weight to the production if more time was spend on this.

The sense the film drifts off is when it cuts into other tangents in the last half. The horror tangents feel like they are baked into the tone, set up from the start, but eventually we are looking into the production shooting a take on The Exorcist (1973) having managed to get Max von Sydow for one day, or the Jackass crew of the cult MTV series and Johnny Knoxville are brought up as about to appear in The Clinic. Obviously, these are joke moments, with none of these people about to appear, and instead it is all with a sense that as the production for real went on, the commune started to horse about and became less concerned about a serious meaning to the work. This is felt when we get another of the memorable pieces, a three plus minute comedy sketch where a man conjures up a woman in an abandoned film set, wanting to seduce her but with their collected ability to imagine anything they wish leading to legitimately fun comedic beats in a few perfect minutes. Is it enough to justify the whole film though? I think it is telling, when the ending epilogue text comes up, there is a reference (clearly for some humour) that some Slovakia filmmakers walked out the first ever screening, with the pervading sense that CO/MA was never meant to win over a large crowd, but Mike Figgis with these collaborators experimenting for the sake of it. He would become obscurer as a result of these projects, barring one music documentary or occasional TV episode in a whole, entirely focused in these lower budget productions where he would eventually become the editor and the cinematographer.  In this case, it feels less like a tragedy but more that he willing choose this direction, and to be brutally honest, barring my love for Nicolas Cage and some of the older films with enticing premises, these more obscure titles like CO/MA feel far more compelling to consider from him for their complete lack of compromise regardless if they are successful or not.

Abstract Spectrum: Avant-Garde/Metatextual/Stream-of-Consciousness

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