Venus in Eros (2012)

 

Watched Saturday 15th March

Director: Takako Imai

Screenplay: Takako Imai

Cast: Miyavi Matsunoi as Venus (as Saori Hara), Alan Vincent as David, Martin Collins as Eros, Michael Barnes as Forest Lover Michael, Kavana Crossley as Angel Kakabel, Darren Ellis as the Sculptor, Daniel Fontannaz as Angel Gabriel, Carl Harrison as Forest Lover Carl, Freddie Ingles as Angel Michael, Alex Kovas as Venus Maniac Alex, Stefan Leadbeater as Angel Sariel

 

"A hundred years ago, in a deep forest" opens a film about a status of Venus, which is also one of the obscurest films I've wanted to track down and see at least once, being a nightmare to do so despite being a British-Japanese co-production which would have made it least have a slither of availability somewhere. Honestly, probably the thing that didn't help the film is that it feels like a low budget artistically minded production which is fully committed to its niche concept, something which contrary to suggestions in image of a softcore film is very artistically minded instead.

The story begins with its director, Takako Imai, which immediately presents a layer to the production as the vision of a female artist, born in Japan and moving to London, who worked as a music journalist but would go on to make a couple of films. This theatrical length film is the last of two, the shorter production Recordare: Days of Remembrance (2009) the first, which is a prelude to Venus in Eros as a collaboration with dancers in acting roles, depicting a romance between two men involving dancers from the Matthew Bourne Company¹. Hers is absolutely a set of films belonging to this era, especially in the 2000s, of fascinating melding of cinema and other art forms, installation artists to dancer choreographers who took advantage of both the film making industry of the 2000s and, in other cases, the DVD medium when that was a popular way to make these projects available. Venus in Eros, far from an erotic film, is closest to the films on DVD I was lucky enough to see through my university library, be it the sole official release of Mathew Barney's Cremaster films, a segment of the 2003 Cremaster III dubbed The Order - Cremaster 3, and the work of Wim Vandekeybus. For the later I'm pulling from a really obscure figure from my memory, and old notes of what I've watched over the decades I've no shame I collect, especially he's the perfect comparison for Venus in Eros.

Vandekeybus, a Belgium choreographer, director and photographer made a series of dance based films over the years my university kept in a luxurious box set they acquired, and the difficulty with tracking down Venus in Eros comes with the realisation this belongs to that era of cinema, the art gallery and art installation area of moving images which, particularly in the 2000s and continuing in the early 2010s, was taking advantage of limited edition runs of DVD-only releases. The British Film Institute, even releasing a few in their early years of the DVD boom only to be more picky in the later years, have had these as well in their stores too, and whilst Venus in Eros is more sexually explicit, it fully fits into this type of artistically minded lower budget production if more likely to be lost in the cracks of cinema for the worst. Considering its initial tone, driven by its opening classical piano music over country woodlands in winter, the production from its poster and some screenshots online will jar for those expecting (or wanting) something salacious.

The most explicit thing comes from its central premise of living statues, particular a depiction of what will become the Venus de Milo, a legendary statue created in Hellenistic period which is iconic in having lost its arms in time. Because of the obscurity of this film, this review will be full spoilers to give you at least an abridged form of what Takako Imai's film is, a fantasy romance using dance to tell its tale, where Venus has her statue erected in the woodlands, there through all the seasons back to the next winter. Soon into the story having a statue of David one side to her, likely inspired by Michelangelo's legendary creation, the other of Eros the other side, the Roman counterpart of Cupid, both played by male actors body painted and erected as statues played by real people. The most explicit aspect, which makes the female titular lead a braver role, is that like many statues, their depictions of the likes of Goddesses to nymphs to leaders never shied away from natural nudity, and having seen statues in their real marble form, they are an incredible art form even from sculptors who are unknowns in their painstaking craft of human anatomy, something which this also plays too in turning real people into these living statues, blurring these lines.

The more lurid aspect of what this done, a casual eroticism but like a form of naturalism for the female lead, is the actress comfortable enough to take this lead, even if meaning being nude in full stone-grey body paint and standing still on a podium, being German-Japanese actress Miyavi Matsunoi. That is neither a criticism of her, nor her career choices in her career before this production, but central to images you find online, the immediate thing you would learn of her career before this makes this film a fascinating contrast to her previous work, when you learn of her career and that this became effectively a retirement from said turn in her early career. Miyavi Matsunoi, real name Saori Hara, whilst she would expand her career out into the live action tokusatsu, like the film Garo the Movie: Red Requiem (2010) as a villainess, and a later Garo franchise television series, started her career as a pornographic actress and model before moving into more mainstream films with the likes of Yuriko's Aroma (2010). Probably the most widely known film of this era would be Hara's role in 3D Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy (2011), a remake of the notorious 1991 film Sex and Zen but now in 3D, which marks the moment where she fully leaves the adult industry in Japan entirely for the rest of her acting career. She is the central figure of this, and this marks a fascinating conclusion as an adult film actress and erotic model. With a film that premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in its market² and, through a female director's camera, her natural sensuality is used in a very humane and matter-of-fact way for its love story. Certainly, considering there are points where she has to stand still in the full statue makeup in real snow and very cold temperatures, I have to admire Saori Hara going through this shoot before leaving anything erotic in her career for good for more mainstream productions for the rest of her career.

The film, bilingual in least the form I saw it, with written English text onscreen initially for Venus' thoughts, English dialogue and Japanese text onscreen to translate said dialogue, is a simple depiction of a romance that suffers through angst before it can reach a happy ending. It involves as well a male and female caretaker for the statues as, from winter to the next one, Venus and David out of their statue forms in scenes in their own reality start to fall in love, whilst Eros the archer looks on lovesick for Venus himself but not of interesting for her at all. The film, which has some of the performances struggle a little, and long moments of contemplation of these statues and the natural landscape, got a particularly damning review back when it premiered at the 2011 Cannes festival, from Hollywood Reporter's Duane Byrge, who described that the "best venues might be side rooms in under-funded museums" and that the natural shots could be "cut and re-marketed as screensavers"². Those who could actually see the film may admittedly think the same thing, if his comments come off with cheap snark in that review, particularly as the cheap jab at museums does admittedly evoke what the film's tone clearly was as well as feels like an elitism against an area of moving images, whether good or bad, which is badly maligned in access or reporting.

The contemplative attitude of a few museum and art film DVD productions from that era I've seen if felt with this, those shot on the cameras of the era, with simple stories which are tent poles to place their contemplative moods, as it builds over the romance between Venus and David as Eros the archer looks on with a broken heart. The statues themselves are interacted with as if living people - there's a playful humour, especially in the spring section, where you've a young boy trying to get the statue of Venus to eat a vanilla ice cream cone, played off as a living statue without any sleaze involved whatsoever. There are also scenes outside of time which turn the statues in living people, alongside the caretakers, where the dance sequences come in. They are not elaborate musical number dances but symbolic choreography for the emotions of the moment, the most prominent in the summer section. Showing a more explicit version of Venus, Saori Hara plays a version closer to Sandro Botticelli's The Birth of Venus, without the giant clam and having veils instead of the longer hair in the painting. The scene involves her being dressed and helped to become human by the rest of the cast, from having make up applied to her face to being helped in learning to walk in high heels, all with the others on a white stage dressed in period costumes.

The film depicts most of the romance in choreographed dance, like the performance on a black stage between Venus and David, and applies to the conflicts too. Eros, eventually snapping unable to have Venus as she falls for another, eventually takes it out on the male caretaker, and this is the one sequence which requires a trigger warning, as this caretaker with an arrow in his back takes it out on Venus herself. The removal of her arms, with intercuts of her struggling under him as a person, in a dance choreography as a person, explicitly nods to the act as a sexual assault. The film could be criticised for how this concludes - the caretaker's cruelty, including drawing a blue tear on her cheek out of pure spite afterwards, becoming immediate remorse - but in knowledge of its female creator - Takako Imai, who is entirely on Venus' side, the depiction of her transformation into the Venus de Milo is entirely depicted with the weight of a horrible transgression of her as a being, which is treated as seriously as that should.

Some of the performances, as said, waver in quality in the line readings but suspecting the focus on casting actual dancers in these roles, it feels less meaningful to criticise and appreciate what the point was behind the choices. For me, Venus in Eros does succeed by its end, which makes Takako Imai's vanishing from filmmaking a disappointment. She had a project BBoy in a Dream, which was meant to be a documentary about breakdancing, a fascinating turn in her clear interest in dance as an art if it had ever come out. The film started shooting in 2014, but there's hope, doing an interview in closer or within 2024 about her career so far¹, one where she talks of how breakdance was added to the Paris Olympics for 2024¹, giving hope that this ten plus year project finally comes to light and Imai herself wasn't put off as a creator in the moving images field. By the time winter to winter passes in Venus in Eros, where we even get a Christmas tree, Venus in a Santa top, and a boys choir in the snow saying Merry Christmas to her, we get a small story of love, conflict around love, and its eventual success which in its scrappiness as an unconventional art piece won me over. Lightning and a downed burning tree may knock over and leave Venus a lifeless statue, but as her male lover takes her somewhere safe in the woods as spirits, a happy ending is found in the end as the credits (in Japanese) are over the tranquil landscape.

 

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1) The Very Personal Reason Behind Takako Imai’s Breakdancing Documentary BBOY IN A DREAM, written for The Fan Carpet.com, and marks itself as posted in 2024 was references to the 2024 Paris Olympics.

2) Venus in Eros: Cannes 2011 Review, written by Diane Byrge for the Hollywood Reporter, and published May 31st 2011.

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

The Lion Has Seven Heads (1970)

Director: Glauber Rocha

Screenplay: Glauber Rocha and Gianni Amico

Cast: Rada Rassimov as Marlene, Giulio Brogi as Pablo, Gabriele Tinti as the American Agent, Jean-Pierre Léaud as the Preacher, Reinhard Kolldehoff as the Governor, Aldo Bixio as the Mercenary

Canon Fodder

 

Shot in the Congo during a turbulent history, liberated in 1960 from Belgium, and in 1971 about to enter a dictatorship, renamed Zaire, until 1997, Lion has enough material to deal with the issues of colonialism and abused power. I will admit I was disappointed, as someone who saw Glauber Rocha's acclaimed trilogy of films in his home country of Brazil which blew me away at a younger age - Black God, White Devil (1964), Entranced Earth (1967) and Antonio das Mortes (1969). I still have admiration for a deeply flawed experiment with a noble heart, but it is flawed. Lion, originally called Der Leone Have Sept Cabeças, with the title an amalgamation of languages, is a director whose country was going through a dictatorship at the time, going to an African country which suffered through colonialism from the West, and visibly seeing the parallels from two different Third World nations of the turbulence of power and control.

This is a stream of consciousness from Rocha, which feels appropriate as, with the Republic of Congo formally a colonial country, you can dissect all the history with greater ease than trying to use a regular story framework. Though the emphasis on non-local foreign actors poses one of the biggest issues with Lion, it certainly feels apt to begin with Jean-Pierre Léaud as a mad priest, first introduced in a shredded and dirtied white robe, losing his mind with a wooden mallet in hand and talking of the whore of Babylon from the Book of Revelations to a befuddled group of local women. Alongside imaging how fascinating his career has been, able to go from this to Jacque Rivette's Out 1 (1971) just from a couple of films in a rich decades long career, Léaud is the one figure I would have kept even if I would entire rewrite the film's structure. As the literal import of Christianity to the country and continent, he is both captivating in how he commits to the role but apt, alongside cynically being a bankable actor for a very avant-garde film, appropriate as a character to have, dealing with those who joined the colonisation of Africa as a whole continent under the belief of noble causes, only to be left deranged by the truth. There is a lot you could unpack if playing to a series of sketches as this at times, and in mind to all the themes to unpack, it feels apt to see such sketches and the liberation of this fictionalised version of Congo as a sudden cloud burst of emotions.

Rocha stages the film like series of theatrically performed images and emphasises this point - the anti-colonial protestors carrying their own that have been slain, to the white soldiers wandering to-and-fro in choreograph in a scene with guns. This is clearly inspired by Jean-Luc Godard as well, with the Dziga-Vertov Group era felt here the most, all part of movements who found narrative a way to lie and not able to carry themes of great political weight to viewers, a symbolic essay form used within them even if this one still retains plot beats to thread them. Ironically, this style is far more difficult than stories, or even surrealist subversions of narratives which still flesh out the depth of characters and/or the scenarios.  

One of the biggest issues, which Godard's Dziga-Vertov films had, were how naive and simplistic they came off being without the sense the simplicity being on purpose. With Lion set around a revolution, its leader trying to amass locals and tribes to free themselves, alongside the evil white colonialists, none of the film does not try for the complicated and difficult issues of a revolution. Central to this is instead the comically broad villains who without moustaches to twirl instead of just maniacal. They, as I will get into, still work for me as pure evil, whilst a lot of the bigger concerns is the lack of priority in the figures meant to overthrow them, including the wife of one of them Marlene (Rada Rassimov), who is there to have Rassimov be nude for large portions of the film as the whore of Babylon stand-in. There is also the Latin Revolutionary, in capitals for emphasis, which raises the issues with Lion being set in Congo but not really telling the tale of its people, as this figure becomes integral for multiple scenes, including Léaud dragging him around with the mallet, when they should have been given to other characters.

As this is directly telling you what the meaning is, you really get a very simplistic work at heart, the earnestness of Glauber Rocha accidentally using his setting as a mere pretence for a film which could have been shot anywhere. Slithers do work, and open up the idea if this had focused on the local casting, as Rocha is not a fan of peaceful revolution, a jaded man in terms of where his country of birth originally was. The closest thing to peaceful here involves making a puppet first president, which becomes one of the strongest sequences. Though he has a wonderful saxophone trio with him for speeches, this black local presidential figure is tellingly depicted having bought a new suit like an 18th century French dandy, including the white wig, as a satirical nod to the idea that anyone can be bought by the colonial invaders. The revolutionary, the local leader and not the Latin exile, has some of the more interesting filmed theatre scenes, and should have been the central focus of the whole film and scenes which are instead given to the Latin figure. Be it being circled by dissenters, or his speech to a local chief explaining his string of miseries being unfair and unnecessary, and you see here what Rocha could get into, an equivalent to the raw energy Antonio das Mortes beautifully hit in using Western tropes, but here using more theatrical avant-garde pacing instead for a change of pace. This could have been the more experimental take on revolution, but the character who should have been the hero is a minor figure in his own film, which causes immediate issues.

What this accidentally becomes is Rocha the tourist, and whilst it does involve the least expected nude crucifixion transpiring in the final scene, I think the best moments of The Lion Has Seven Heads reflect its comically evil white colonialists for what they represent, mining all the resources and eating fruit off a dead local, contrasted against the actual country and citizens. Contrasting these broad, ridiculous monsters with their over-the-top acting and exaggerations from the Western nations against the real people of the country the film was shot in, seeing the real scenes of the local tribal dance rituals, and the local women looking on in amusement at Jean-Pierre Léaud screaming at the sky performance, is some of the more striking images. They show the figures that should have been central but were marginalized, whose scenes are all serious and thoughtful in contrast to the manic lunacy of the non-Congo figures that would have made a perfect contrast. I am glad to still see Lion, and as time goes on, I hope to grow a fondness for its virtues to admire here, but it is with having to accept this felt like a production compromised by how it was put together.

Brand Upon the Brain! (2006)

 

Director: Guy Maddin

Screenplay: Guy Maddin and George Toles

Cast: Gretchen Krich as Mother; Cathleen O'Malley as Young Mother; Susan Corzatte as Old Mother; Sullivan Brown as Young Guy Maddin; Erik Steffen Maahs as Older Guy Maddin; Maya Lawson as Sis; Jake Morgan-Scharhon as Chance Hale/Wendy Hale; Todd Moore as Father; Clayton Corzatte as Old Father; Andrew Loviska as Savage Tom; Kellan Larson as Neddie

An Abstract Candidate

 

A womb opening up like a window!

Arguably this, a remembrance in twelve chapters, was a holy grail to finally reach for me, able to finally witness what was originally a Guy Maddin production screened with on stage narrators and live to the images on the silver screen, and became available in its Criterion Collection release form with numerous narrators to choose from. The opening already sets up what to expect by linking the erotic to stabbing knives and violence, and you can tell this is a Guy Maddin film eventually, if it did not click before, when an older mother figure is chewing the side off a boy in the finale. This is notwithstanding his trademark of naming leads after himself, this Guy Maddin (Erik Steffen Maahs in the bookends, Sullivan Brown through his childhood memories) with his own neurosis to unpack as he returns to the family lighthouse after thirty years. He returns to Black Notch to repaint to the home for his ailing mother, only for “spurts of memories” to return to Guy of his childhood, one which is a calamity of neurosis to unpick for countless reasons.

At a lighthouse which was an orphanage and Dad was a scientist always working, when this childhood involves the orphan boys’ leader Savage Tom conducting black masses you see how Guy's life was one full of said neurosis, especially as there is a mother complex from one who is overprotective, traumatizing her children with guilt, threatening to sell the lighthouse to keep Guy in line, and badgers her eldest daughter for being an older sister, interesting in the opposite sex and secretly smoking. It is clear Guy had enough neurosis to unpack already, but as with other Maddin films, this cannot be enough, as it turns out however his parents are up to no good experiments using the orphans, which brings Wendy Hale (Jake Morgan-Scharhon), the celebrity sister of a brother-and-sister team of teen detectives to the island to investigate this.

To those with no prior knowledge on Guy Maddin, his career has taken various influences from older cinema technique, but a key period post The Heart of the World (2000), a short which won him acclaim, was silent cinema in its various guises, from Soviet montage to Gothic German Expressionism. His career is more diverse than this, and he still can have sound here, but his fascination at this point with monochrome films, with using visuals and intertitles for emphasis, and creating intertitles you would never get in older films from the twenties, was his own distinct take on them. With the addition of the narrator, who (depending on what version you watch) varies from Isabelle Rossellini to even Crispin Glover, the tapestry of his filmmaking style is just as eclectic as the strange melodramas he makes, here the corrupt lighthouse orphanage, and the mother and father’s obsession with collecting “nectar” even from their own children, rivaled by the amount of queer and heterosexual sexual tension in the midst of this. This is especially as Wendy Hale decides to pose as her own brother to investigate this case, falling in love with Guy’s older sister (Maya Lawson) after a secret game of spin the bottle, and Guy having a crush with Wendy Hale in her normal clothes which will become complicated in terms of his and others’ sexuality.

As with all Guy Maddin films, this is not the end of this. The unconventional rituals are here, with the "kissing gloves" that allow one's wearer to kiss and touch someone, alongside the fact that the nectar conspiracy involves the mother's desire to use it to become young again, even down to a baby, with further contentious psychosexual content involved. Sexual anxiety is rife, and as with other Guy Maddin films, this is within its own distinct logic and tone. The style is entirely of his own and, using the silent cinema techniques to add an energy to the proceedings one minute, using it to add to the ghosts literally haunting the lighthouse in the present the next, Brand Upon the Brain shows his skill at this point, a style he would eventually move from into new ones with digital technology into the 2010s. Again, to see a key piece of his cinema, missing for me, was rewarded with a film that is as deliciously weird and yet still imaginative as this.

Abstract Spectrum: Avant-Garde/Weird

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

Successive Slidings of Pleasure (1974)

 

Director: Alain Robbe-Grillet

Screenplay: Alain Robbe-Grillet

Cast: Anicée Alvina as The Prisoner; Olga Georges-Picot as Nora; Michael Lonsdale as The Judge; Jean Martin as The Priest; Marianne Eggerickx as Claudia; Claude Marcault as Soeur Julia; Maxence Mailfort as Client / Customer; Nathalie Zeiger as Sister Maria; Bob Wade as Fossoyeur / Gravedigger; Jean-Louis Trintignant as The police Lieutenant

An Abstract Candidate

 

Maybe you ate some glass.

Broken egg yolks, a red liquid visibly evoking blood and broken glass intermingle amidst the opening sots of Successive Slidings of Pleasure. Said opening is a barrage o non-linear images and sounds - centred on a young female prisoner (Anicée Alvina) in jail, with machine gun fire, broken glass and drones among the sounds - whilst the cast is introduced one-by-one. It was a film sold for its erotic content, but just from this opening, the sound design alone, Alain Robbe-Grillet's film keeps one unsettled, not a conventional film the slightest.

It is, to an outsider, a confrontational and alien film, a tale of a young woman who may have killed an older woman Nora (Olga Georges-Picot), likely her lover. After Jean-Louis Trintignant has questioned her, this prisoner finds herself in incarceration in a place ran by nuns for all criminal young women like her. With its numerous scenes of white walls, even the composition of scenes in this lower budget film is disarming, in humorous details like a bicycle strategically in shot in the all-white bedroom she and Nora lived in, and Nora dies within, to Robbe-Grillet never having the colour green ever appear onscreen. Repeating motifs - red paint (and the painting of bodies like one of Yves Klein's compositions), eggs, broken glass - cause one to feel off-centre to the material. We will see Alvina's lead wrap men and women around her fingers, or more aptly with her aura, either a wide eyed innocent teen or a seductress to whoever it is that dares enter her prescience. Sometimes both and she even has a vampire symbolism around her.

The film is going to be an uncomfortable transgressive experience for some, as a very sexually explicit work with deliberate taboos, just alone from Anicée Alvina being seventeen at the time of the film. This is the only aspect which is of its era, the transgression beyond this more deliberate, as she is seen nude and in scenes of a (softcore) sexual nature; beyond this, alongside Alvina being a compelling lead, with a magnetic charisma, her character is also a character beyond just being an object to lust over. The film is about this proudly devious figure, a true anti-heroine in the sense that, between nymphet and woman, she takes controls always over the rest of the gullable cast. Robbe-Grillet's trademark that his films are openly artificial is also here, even in the English title Successive Slidings of Pleasures having an unsettling nature as much as it wants you to cheer the lead on, even if her taste of music, of screams of a woman being tortured, are a very acquired taste. The subversion of Catholicism in the film is its own taboo as well.

Our lead, who is liable to fabricate tales to bend people to her, is an extreme, one that when a female student during a field trip died, falling off a seaside cliff, she begins to star molesting the body of as a young Isabelle Huppert looks on disgustedly. With a film around her that is not conventional at all, the vampiric/witch metaphors are apt as those who try to tame her either are bedridden at death's door from her constant badgering, as what happens to Michael Lonsdale's judge, or is turned into someone like her, as what happens to her female lawyer, the recasting of Olga Georges-Picot in the same role a doppelganger motif in itself, becoming a vampiric figure in her own right lusting over another young woman in the nun ran jail. As with all Alain Robbe-Grillet films, he plays to the artificiality of his films even in deliberate alienation effects Bertolt Brecht used, even for one of his films closest to a lurid genre film from this time, Euro-horror and erotica. One such example, when not accidentally catching on film the sound of a real guillotine being erected at the location they were filming within off-screen, is the casting of Georges-Picot herself, her dual casting also contrasted by the fact that she has very early plastic surgery for breast enhancement. Far from a crass thing to point out, it means that her body has artificiality, her figure not changing laid down, which Robbe-Grillet deliberately contrasts in duplication, matching Nora anatomically against a mannequin she and the lead have, disturbing one that they ritually break to pieces and stab with scissors.

The film is absolutely perverse on purpose, even in recreating the work of Yves Klein. Klein, who developed his own type of blue paint, International Klein Blue (IKB), created the work Anthropometry of the Blue Period, in which he would have women strip and paint their bodies in this colour blue to imprint on canvases, recreated here with Anicée Alvina using red paint, alongside the motif of body painting with body painting between her character and Nora. It is a film which in terms of plot too is going to challenge as it is around a series of scenarios where a lead who does not even have a name provided to her finds herself in control, where the trial will never happen and even an ouroboros transpires for the final scene, repeating everything again in the film we never see after. It stands out, probably one of the strongest if you can accept its transgressions of these Alain Robbe-Grillet films in how much its motifs and tone burn into the mind, such as the bed frame washed up on the beach encountered repeatedly. Undeniably, it is challenging yet in itself, its style is paradoxically easier to sell, but it befits the term "cult" perfectly as much as it is too uncompromising to be placed in any genre tag.

Abstract Spectrum: Avant-Garde/Transgressive

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

The Atrocity Exhibition (1998)

 

Director: Jonathan Weiss

Screenplay: Jonathan Weiss and Michael Kirby

Adapted from the novel by J.G. Ballard

Cast: Victor Slezak as Travis Talbert; Anna Juvander as Karen Novotny; Michael Kirby as Dr. Nathan; Mariko Takai as Nurse Nagamatsu; Robert Patrick Brink as Vaughn Koester; Diane Grotke as Catherine; Caroline McGee as Margaret

An Abstract Candidate

 

J.G. Ballard’s source text, if a choice of word which lacks nuisance, feels confrontational. Part verse text, part reflection of the period, in context it is still a transgressive text even if of its time period. For the film and text, the structure is how Travis Talbert (Victor Slezak), a doctor at a mental hospital, has reached a breakdown, his own mania having pushed his students to work on projects based on his obsessions, such as World War III, documenting the wounds that could happen in such a conflict for one of the earliest examples in the film. The resulting adaptation is a curious film, one which did not succeed for me but is nonetheless fascinating, a 2000s film of a lower budget yet explicitly tied to the early seventies from a 1970 novel built around smaller pieces written over the sixties. The malaise of the 1960s going through to the Vietnam War, the production goes over multiples themes like the fear (and secret pleasure) in outer space NASA disasters or sexual wounds from car accidents, this novel also the prototype of Crash, Ballard’s later novel and the 1996 David Cronenberg film adaptation.

Its entire world, of Marilyn Monroe, James Dean and nuclear bombs, does have content I admire, as reflecting a source text I also admire and yet is a peculiar piece as well. It was a novel for its seriousness, and in mind that it was built from a serious context that we will get into later on, that can be viewed as having an unintentionally funny edge, or at least that which does not get the desired reaction, even baring in mind that the film adaptation does have interpretations of the source which clearly meant to be intentional if sickly funny.  The film’s transgressions, among themes, can go from using real life footage of face lift surgery, graphic but clinical as the grimness is in seeing something usually a taboo, the reconstruction of the body, or its continuing of Ballard’s clinical take of sexuality from his writing, be it the one hardcore shot of footage used here or matching the erotic, even the legitimately sexual and beautiful in the human body, against perverse fixations. There is even a recreation of a controversial piece, which was published separately beforehand, Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan, written in the style of a scientific paper trying to measure the psychosexual appeal of Ronald Reagan, when he was still the Governor of California.

The source text's structure means that this is less a plot onwards in the adaptation, and more of of events separated into chapters, as Talbert's mania continues and other doctors collect his research materials and creations to explain his psychosis. The tone of this entire production can be summed up with the “Imaginary Sex Death of Che Guevara” being an actual line of dialogue used in the film; it does come off as a parody, and I reflect that Ballard had a dry humour to his writing, with one of the reoccurring aspects from the novel being the surveys of sexual fantasies of famous people, collected from normal people off the streets, his attempt to tackle the cult of personality and celebrity culture growing at the time something I would not be surprised had as much a satirical edge as his serious reflections on this, as much as with tackling his fascination with sexual desire mutating from the malaise of the 20^th century.

The Jonathan Weiss co-written and directed work does feel matter-of-factly serious, which was what disconnected me from it, as this is attempting to tackle the kind of novel, from the era of Ballard’s more extreme work or William S. Burroughs’ cut-and-paste experiments, which could truly be “un-filmable”. Not because they cannot, but because you have to factor in tone, presentation and how the novels did not need to reflect having a beginning to a middle to an ending, something cinema is absolutely capable of, but in a different way due to have the projection of information has to be done with the confines of the moving picture form. The proto Crash segments, in staging automobile accidents, have not aged at all in how they have been adapted here, its conceptual auto disasters what Cronenberg managed to make timeless and transgressive in his adaptation. With dialogue feeling like Cronenberg here, Weiss' adaptation here has the strange air of referring to a work entirely of its time, of the seventies, and reflecting on the fifties and sixties beforehand, but caught in the late nineties into the Millennium as a production in look and resources. The fact that the themes and fetishistic details are obvious at times if weird is a factor to trying to digest this film, as it does not lead one by the hand or explain itself deliberately, like the operating room as the new modeling photo shoot location, but there are salient lines which feel more relevant as the time went on and the internet became more prevalent, when a doctor says of imaging new perversions to keep the act of sex alive. Some images like the case designed to personify a woman – a suitcase including vaginal smears, latex face mask moulds of her etc. – and to portrait her is something absurdist but also legitimately disturbing. 

There is a lot to admire in The Atrocity Exhibition but it reveals how much of the source text requires to be dissected and looked at in context to why Ballard wrote it. The novel is a peculiar one, which can be in legitimate danger as time passes of having been an indulgent piece meant to just shock. This is especially the case as there is no real plot that could be used to bring the viewer easily into this, the closest to a narrative progression in the film how eventually, after Travis' trajectory is shown and people try to examine his subconscious, he disappears and they take after him. The source material, openly influenced by Burroughs, was written with legitimate tragedy at its heart, the death of Ballard’s first wife Mary in 1964, the novel admitted as a coping measure for this sudden loss¹, and in mind it reflects even in its transgressions on the fear of nuclear winter, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and other concerns from the era all woven together in an attempt to find meaning within all of them. The novel, alongside being a series of smaller texts altogether, has touches like Talbert having different names per chapter, undercutting the sense of this all following a cohesive trajectory of cause leading to event. Ballard even structured this book with the idea that, if anyone wanted to pick a random chapter to read first and read the whole book in order, that was perfectly acceptable¹, and there is the sense that this film, whilst experimental and out there, does pull back from the extreme of a list based or segmented structure, still semblance of a theming rather than the lucid extremes of a surrealist film from the past decades before.

Some of it is having to work around the transgressions that the mind can conjure up perverse images of but a film cannot without obscenity laws being brought, such as that infamous Ronald Regan chapter, which is not the scientific research paper of before, even if the image of having sex with a woman, nude and hanging out of a car, with a picture of Ronald Regan on her face is bizarre and funny in its own way. Having to work around the cultural baggage which requires context, even something like this not being the Regan most known, the future president, brings up the issue of context being required, such as with the use of the footage from the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster of 28th January 1986, where the shuttle when attempting to lift off into space tragically exploded during the launch process. That footage as well, and images of Japanese citizens who have suffered radiation disfigurement, do raise justifiable questions of whether this filmic adaptation comes off as the pretentious man’s shock compilation by accident, as those images, without absorbing their meaning and history context, can be exploitation in a very negative way.

Even seemingly benign images, to the film's credit, have more weight to them, such as adverts for a line of Crash Test Dummy toys, a red car among them one I had as a kid, which connected to the real life ones used to research car crashes; able to be crashed and broken into pieces when ran into table legs and sideboards of walls, these adverts for toys for children gain sinister connotations with what they are linked to. The thing is, needing to be faithful to the source text means The Atrocity Exhibition can be a barrage of images for a viewer, one I admire and could easily come to love, but with the ambivalence due to how The Atrocity Exhibition is a film to admire but one whose form even causes one to ponder what the source novel’s original intentions were. Especially as it exists as a work from a different era one attempts to see the relevance of decades on, this is absolutely a case of a film, now of a time before in historical context, attempting to evaluate a work from an earlier time before, which does feel a lot of questions surrounding its form fully.

 

Abstract Spectrum: Avant-Garde/Perverse

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

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1) An analysis of The Atrocity Exhibition from A Useful Fiction, published on February 14th 2018.

Eden and After (1970)

 

Including a review of N. Took The Dice... (1971)

Director: Alain Robbe-Grillet

Screenplay: Alain Robbe-Grillet

Cast: Catherine Jourdan as Violette; Pierre Zimmer as Duchemin; Richard Leduc as Marc-Antoine; Lorraine Rainer as Marie-Eve; Sylvain Corthay as Jean-Pierre; Juraj Kukura as Boris; Jarmila Kolenicová as Sonia; Ludovít Króner as Franc

An Abstract Candidate

 

We are already into the unconventional when the opening credits invoke a late sixties Jean-Luc Godard production, spoken aloud with arrangements of words in-between staff/cast credits like a psychosexual word association game. “Game” is apt, as acclaimed novelist and later filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet came to filmmaking as making openly artificial works. His film here is a game, an abstract one with the tropes of a genre thriller played by its characters as a game.

In the centre of this is Violette (Catherine Jourdan) and a group of disillusioned university students who hang out at a café called Eden, acting out scenarios as Franc (Ludovít Króner), the waiter, is their fabled sinister butler who may have been involved in white trafficking and drugs smuggling (or not) in a previous life. They play out mock games of violence, male and female members, such as an act of rape or Russian roulette with the twist of one person wearing a blind fold with the gun, and a die being rolled to choose the target with added randomness. Though I will view Robbe-Grillet's work as being artificial on purpose, I cannot help to see a post May 1968 haze seep over this. There is a cynical sense that these misanthropic students belong to a group who, after the May 1968 protests in France where across the country and in different forms the left wing challenged the right wing, were left in a permanent ennui when they were not able to change the world. With no sense of meaning or ability to change the world, these students at Eden now stage poisonings steeped in boredom. The world around them is abstract by itself, with this marking Robbe-Grillet's first colour film too, the world as precisely put together and contrasted even when, as a Tunisian co-production, he filmed in the real Tunisian landscape.

It stands out fully in mind to this, even in terms of his obsession and hatred of the colour green, jettisoned entirely on camera here next to other primary and secondary colours. Aptly the staged deaths in Eden are within a café which is an avant-garde installation in itself, with erotic photography on the walls contrasted by pop art squares of pure primary colour as the tables to seating cubes followed the same aesthetic choices. Even when the film, as mentioned, moves to Tunisia, filming in real locations as part of its conspiracy plot involving a man known as Duchemin/the Dutchman (Pierre Zimmer) and a picture in Violette’s possession, the locations are still striking especially in the buildings and their interiors, designed with pure white with blue prominently used for the likes of the doors. As a result, a vast amount of scenes in movement and still shots are eye-catching, the cast figures made by the director to position and pose in the midst of all this, as they themselves play out choreographed games even with real death involved.

Eden and After, in all honesty, is a work of pure style, knowingly an abstract collage of Alain Robbe-Grillet's obsessions turned into genre tropes as an artificial construct. Duchemin, as a mystery man, first shakes the film towards a plot, the catalyst when he enters the café and shows the learnt knowledge of esoteric abilities to the students from living in Africa, such as powders which induce one’s worse fears. His existence, and possible faked death, pushes Violette to travel to Tunisia and a conspiracy, involving her fellow students and Franc who are after a picture she inherited from her late uncle. The plot itself is a machination, mere context, a structure for the characters and Robbe-Grillet's obsessions, contrasted as much as Duchemin’s erotic masochistic-sadist art, posing his mistress and other women completely naked against white background, against harsh props such as inside steel cages or against doorways. Ultimately this is a mood piece, prominently evoking Robbe-Grillet's real life practices in BDSM among the fascination with games and the structure of games. This could provide some viewers with great discomfort, as he contrasts the full eroticization of women, lusted over in their nudity, against their apparent pain in chains, tied to wheels and being bound. Bear in mind, whether your position on these images, his own life included the importance of Catherine Robbe-Grillet, his widow who worked on this film in the cast and whose career has included being a writer of sadomasochistic writing. With a marriage to the end of his life which included sadomasochistic practices and an open relationship on both sides, she also would become a dominatrix who work continued into even her eighties onwards¹; details like this, of someone important in the director-writer's life, does need to be factored in, his legitimate desires in sado-masochism in real life and his films to be contrasted by the woman who together shared a loving relationship and this obsession with. It at least complicates this even if, truthfully, these scenes are the ones in Eden and After which may prove the most discomforting even if they are entirely artificial even in how the characters are depicted.

Even in mind to this, his general fascination (and clear fantasies) of beautiful women in forms of restraint, usually naked here, is an acquired taste and one that become more prominent in his films when they found colour, the erotic becoming more a factor as he went with his film career. The artifice is still there in the actresses (as people and their bodies) posed and contrasted against pure white and manmade objects, and even the male actors are figures he places onscreen. The use of blood, obviously fake but profuse and in vast quantities in deep poster red, is more lurid and shocking in its artifice, such as a suicide in a pure white Tunisian bathtub of stone, the transgression found in something so strikingly simple as using colour itself in purely fictional and un-realistic form. The irony is not lost knowing Alain Robbe-Grillet was an author, using words first, using the visuals themselves here to great effect, which is why too Igor Luther as the cinematographer and Anton Krajcovic for art direction deserve a huge amount of praise for what the pair brought to the film with Robbe-Grillet.

The second half of Eden and After, in Tunisia, still progresses the template of a plot, but is also more of a non-linear piece with Violette experiencing the web of deceit and conspiracy in her relationship with Duchemin and those trying to find the picture. It is, even for Robbe-Grillet's films I have seen, a work which is explicitly more of a conceptual piece, an avant garde production just as liable to have turned into a later era Jean-Luc Godard film as it is undoubtedly a lurid genre piece from this era of sexploitation. The content of the film, more extreme than before, is of a type Alain Robbe-Grillet would fit more in with his later films if still out of synch with them, too avant-garde and too idiosyncratic for even that sexploitation tag to fully work for them. Certainly it is as compelling as it is incredibly idiosyncratic, the equivalent for a famous author penning a pastiche of a genre story, dissecting it entirely to contrast its tropes into striking images, legitimately in this case for the images onscreen.

This was not the end of the film as, creating its mirror sibling, an alternative cut called N. Took the Dice (1971) was produced. Deserving to be included in this review side-by-side, Robbe-Grillet created a remix of Eden and After, which included existing footage with outtakes and materials from the shot itself. The narrator, with dice, talks at the beginning directly to the viewers on TV having to be in an order, with shows that need to be explained, with a complete lack of enigma; the irony is that, whilst this deliberately obfuscates this later eventually to question this concept, Robbe-Grillet here is playing a perverse game of taking a work, originally meant to deconstruct a story, and turning into a work of telling a new story, through reused footage and that not used in the original version.

Tonally it does feel different, right in the beginning with significant greater use of footage of the locals in the Tunisia shot before.  Violette is now the nameless figure to be christened Eve, a figure N. is aware of from his past as he gives her this name and gives us this tale she is within. Duchemin is now a nefarious older man with connections to female slavery with an interest with Eve, the painting of the first film still important but the context changed. This does not feel like a pointless reinterpretation as, whilst the use of older footage is prominent, the context is radically changed, and the previously unseen footage adds a lot. There is even humour, like the fake advertisement (using scenes in the Eden cafe) of a personal anti-pick pocket/theft device for women that can fit in their pocket. Now a story of Duchemin being a trafficker in kidnapped women, Eve his newest target, and other characters trying to rescue her, Robbe-Grillet not only changes the story completely, showing how stories can be told with the same footage, but this even brings in realities within realities, where alternative realities between Tunisia and the Eden cafe can be entered between each other, becoming as abstract as the original as a result in its own distinct way. The only aspect which is unexpected to Alain Robbe-Grillet himself is that far less, if almost none, of the BDSM themes are here, and whilst sensuality is referred to, it is never explicitly depicted either even in nudity, which also changes the tone. The more expected aspect, considering its sister film, is when this ends with the joke that our lead has won a washing machine, least a post card says so. It is not really a spoiler to a production which, whilst taking a subversive route by actually telling a story, is still an Alain Robbe-Grillet film which is going to undercut this game itself. N. Took the Dice does work as its own film, but honestly, it needs to co-exist with Eden and After; together they make a compelling pair, Eden and After the superior film but N. Took the Dice as rewarding when the two can reinterpret the other.

Abstract Spectrum: Atmospheric/Avant-Garde

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

======

1) The Thin End of the Whip, written by Toni Bentley, published for Vanity Fair on February 2014.