Swordfish (2001)

 

Director: Dominic Sena

Screenplay: Skip Woods

Cast: John Travolta as Gabriel Shear; Hugh Jackman as Stanley Jobson; Halle Berry as Ginger Knowles; Don Cheadle as Agent J.T. Roberts; Sam Shepard as Senator James Reisman; Vinnie Jones as Marco; Drea de Matteo as Melissa; Rudolf Martin as Axl Torvalds

Ephemeral Waves

 

Swordfish takes a huge risk from the first scene, one willingly waving a red flag at the film critics of the time of its release, with John Travolta speaking to the camera about how unrealistic crime films are over an espresso. He even speaks about how even Dog Day Afternoon (1975) is unrealistic despite being an acclaimed film in the genre, [Huge Spoiler for that film] all because Sidney Lumet did not let the bank robbers get away with it [Spoilers End]. Swordfish as I will get into is a ridiculous film, so the brass balls of presumption to have this opening is hilarious, probably with full knowledge of the ridiculous gubbins the film gets into. Swordfish is an absurd film, and if I had to put a finger on why I hated this film once, as one of the worst films I ever saw, it is likely that I once held a stigma against "boring" Hollywood films. This was an era, the golden era of DVD rental stores, where I saw too many when my parents used to rent everything from a Global Video here in my English town. With the one or two weird titles that came through the exceptions to many of the big promoted titles of the 2000s, such as the low budget films which were able to slip in between the big budget films and be rented by accident, I saw a glut of the 2000 to 2005, to 2003 at least in terms of Hollywood. These are the titles, the pre-HD versus Blu-Ray war era of 2006, which lead to me having an allergy to big CGI explosions and remotely any sign the score was dictating the emotional cues in a film.

Swordfish is now an old film, and it presents a transitional period in Hollywood cinema, beginning with its co-producer Joel Silver. Silver would work throughout the 2000s and 2010s onwards, but his golden era is that of the golden age of American action films, from producing Lethal Weapon (1987) to Die Hard (1988), someone who expanded the types of films he was producing in the nineties with titles like The Matrix (1999) earning him success. He was however still returning to the bread-and-butter of his earlier career with action films, the changes to how they were presented how he continued from the eighties with films like the one covered in this review. Swordfish also presents us with a director, Dominic Sena, who came from the lineage of music video directors who were especially making their voices known in the nineties, working with the likes of Janet Jackson. Then there is a screenwriter with a tiny writer career altogether, Skip Woods, who was early within his work here but with the likes of The A-Team (2010), attempting to reboot the legendary eighties TV series, to X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009), a divisive spin-off in the X-Men superhero series, I can now see where the cartoonish nature of Swordfish comes from. This is not detraction to this film, as the flaws are a greater problem than the tonal choices, but the later films showing where this one was coming from in terms of its screenwriter’s voice. Swordfish has the mentality to throw anything at the wall, even if nonsensical, and it is to the point this can be held responsible for an urban myth of a man being personally executed by U.S. President Thomas Jefferson for treason, which just added a ridiculous cherry on top of this deeply flawed film. In many ways, tame in places but attempting edginess in others, this is a grindhouse exploitation film but on a Hollywood budget, if one with many issues that show blockbusters and exploitation films can share similar issues.

It has a plot, and that I had wrote that with tongue-in-cheek comes from this feeling like a pastiche of crime films, and not a detriment either. Hugh Jackman does find himself in a schism as someone who can played the washed and embittered figure of Stanley Jobson, old enough here to look like an aged renegade who went to prison, and crashed-and-burned after being a cool hot shot, but not as a hacker. It does not capsize his performance, but he feels like the Golden Age of Hollywood star who could never be this person in real life. If he as this character was anyone but a computer hacker, the image and style of performance would work in terms of verisimilitude. As a computer hacker, due to how it is portrayed here, it is up to Jackman's natural charisma to suspend disbelief. He has the virtue of the classical matinee idol, even when his big breakthrough was a 2000s plus phenomenon, the superhero becoming a more respectable casting choices as the films were making money, whose character in any other circumstances would not work if a similar actor like him was cast. Anyone else would have stuck out like a sore thumb, but he can make this matinee take on a hacker work in the same way Cary Grant would have stuck out, as we would have not minded, if dieselpunk was a concept in thirties Hollywood cinema.

The lynchpin that helps with the film to improve it, Jackson's character is a hero willing to commit a major hacking crime to steal millions from the US government, but he does so to earn the money needed to get legal custody of his daughter. In what could be an odd conservative slant, but I think is more a weird quirk of a film that is PG-13 for most of its tone, but prods at the older Joel Silver films which had more R-rated content, the ex-wife has connections in the adult film industry. The ex-wife is a troupe of action cinema anyway from John McClane, here a porn actress with her porn mogul boyfriend with a possible drama in a more complex melodrama even in a blockbuster action film left on the table. One where she is unhappy regardless of her career being porn or not, drinking all the time, in which no matter how she tries to connect to her daughter, her hatred for the husband pushes the adolescent away. Like some Hollywood films, i.e. many, that is not the case and she is an archetype that does cause one to wonder how many screenwriters accidentally showed axes to grind, and in the case of Skip Woods here, may have just taken a troop from films he had seen before. The demonization of porn was an idiosyncratic spin but is so slight it is a weird quirk among many.

More so as, whilst this has moments of adult risqué, factoring the one infamous moment of the film involving the lead actress Halle Berry, playing the femme fatale who brings Jackman into John Travolta's plan, this is a film a world away from a gristly reality. This makes the sudden moments of adult tone more surprising with hindsight, considering Jackman's test for the job is literally attempting to hack the US government's secret website whilst former soccer/football player Vinnie Jones has a gun to his head, and a woman is giving him oral under the work table, flickering of an old R-rated film here and there abrupt when it happens. Most of the film however is a broad over-the-top story; even if there are casualties, including one hostage in the opening at the heist blown up by a contraption she has on, one foot is in the nineties Hollywood mould and one in the new era means that everything is broad, of archetypes and lack of causality. Considering as well hacking is the title premise too, expect none of it to be realistic at all, with actors talking jargon and all meant to look cool in a "cinematic way". It is also less a concern than being a bank heist film, which presents in itself the sense of this film trying to match a new era, where the internet would become more prominent, only to still feel awkward.

The prominence of John Travolta is notable for the tone, and another factor affecting your ability to enjoy this or not is how you gauge his character and performance, the villain Gabriel Shear already idiosyncratic before you have later era Travolta acting interpreting him. I do not mind him here, and actually found him one of the more entertaining aspects, if with a caveat that the performance does expose too much. Travolta, already by this point having played Nicolas Cage, who played him, in John Woo's Face/Off (1997), an example of strange Hollywood cinema when it is done right, can have good scenery chewing. He really was knee capped, even if you do not factor in the controversies of the Church of Scientology, when Battlefield Earth (2000) was released, an adaptation of L. Ron Hubbard's science fiction novel which a) had the controversies of Scientology, from its founder's voice in the text, as an albatross, b) had a drubbing that lasted to the modern day, and c) presented John Travolta as the lead evil alien in dreadlocks, giant platforms and leather costume hamming the performance so much it could turn some vegetarian. The Face/Off reference is appropriate as Travolta could have done a Nicolas Cage, who managed to ride financial debt and mockery to be an unsung hero in terms of committing himself to acting both well and/or so far up to eleven he transcended the mockery. Travolta here, since he is the most prominent aspect of Swordfish, struggles with a sense of self seriousness here, trying to be "cool" in his suits, slicked back hair, taste in expensive coffee and high lofty musings provided by Skip Woods' script. He is meant to be the awesome real anti-hero, but if Nicolas Cage had played this role, it would have worked despite the other problems with the film, whilst there is a sense of artificiality with the performance with Travolta that does undercut this. Despite being one of the memorable aspects for the better with the film, it does accidentally expose something beyond the film to consider with any other performance of his when I encounter it.

The biggest problem with a film like this for all its mad turns, a film about hacking that eventually however leads to a bus of hostages being carried along in the air by a helicopter, entirely in the fantastical more over the top than most fantasy, is one that lead to me being ambivalent to blockbusters from youth. So many, as here, we would dismiss as "mindless" to munch popcorn to, but in truth, for all of us saying we want to have serious profound dramas all the time, most of us just want to have a fun time but with the issue always instead finding something wanting. So many of these films as here you could pluck out cast members and plot points entirely underutilized and see the problem was always that the films skimmed over their most interesting aspects. With the aspects you begin the count being underutilized, the real folly of many blockbusters I dismissed in my youth were where you had weirder, more tantalising premises never fulfilled.

Whatever you think of the acting potential of Vinnie Jones, the notorious Wimbledon F.C. soccer player who was as known for his aggressive on-pitch style as much as for the work he did as a player in a variety of team, he gets little here it is strange he was even cast. Considering the only time you see him stand out, threatening to use rocker launcher ammunition as a suppository on one of the hostages, is just near his end of a role as a generic thug, all the real issues with blockbusters was always the lesser sum of all the parts of their high budgets and casts. The example which stands out is with Halle Berry. It is tasteless to say this, but Swordfish became the film where she as an actress was comfortable going a topless nude scene sunbathing. It only becomes sleazy when reduced to the images of a celebrity as a sexualised object, rather than the actress comfortable committing to the image of eroticism, something you get from the "Mr. Skin" attitude of reducing an actress' entire career to a compilation of her nude scenes out of context, a reference to a real life website that specializes in locating, posting, and rating instances of female nudity in television and film¹. In context, the scene is not tasteless, but plays as a sex comedy bit where Berry, who did the scene to become more confident in her own body onscreen², becomes the figure in control, whilst it is Hugh Jackman who becomes the punch line to the empowered and comfortable woman, even blushing in his character in the moment. Far more insulting with time having past is simply how little Berry actually has to do. It is more egregious your sole female lead has nothing to do, a femme fatale who may be playing both sides but is a blank slate. Even a "dumb" action film could have benefited from what film noir did, the ability to give actresses in these potentially dubious roles meaty performances as compelling figures, something you could see Halle Berry do in what little she has here, but never gets.

Swordfish is okay, where really the issue is of how so many of these films have everything but feel like disparate parts. This is more so the case as, for a film released a few months before the 9/11 Twin Towers tragedy and the start of the second Gulf War, one of the more compelling loose ends is the knowledge that Travolta's character is actually a black ops agent, a thief who is stealing his own country's money to fund protecting the country from terrorist threats. This kind of subversive touch, lost in the ballyhoo, could have been something to let breathe and allow this a knowing air of subversion and weirdness. This is more so now, as mentioned in the review, it is likely due to this film, from one glib comment in this film from Travolta about U.S. President Thomas Jefferson personally seeing to a treasonous person, that people thought this actually happened despite the fact the screenwriter clearly added that into the dialogue as a fictitious flourish^{3a & 3b}. This perverse afterlife to the film is weirder than fiction, making one wonder what this series of fragments, proudly as over-the-top as possible, could have been if playing more to these crime tropes fully committed to a mad edge. Far from the worst film ever made nowadays, Swordfish however from my teen years, like many of those films, could have been lodged fully into the memory if it had the courage to go up to eleven than just come off as silly. Face/Off, brought up earlier in this review, was a silly film I first saw in my teenage years, but it is remembered for good reasons, which is not surprising as director John Woo, able to fully unleash his style from his eighties Hong Kong films, came from a style of filmmaking that never let the stranger or even kitsch aspects undercut taking their dramas seriously nor not making the action scenes as inventive as possible. If this got sillier and Travolta got to pontificate more on movies over espressos, Swordfish could have been something more even if it had become a favourite “so-bad-it’s-good” movie for people to talk of on podcasts, but instead what it is cautious as too many of these films are.

 

============

1) The nadir of this, which I am amazed was allowed to go forth, is of course when Seth MacFarlane hosted the 2013 Oscars and performed the song We Saw Your Boobs, which came off as a demeaning when, to be honest, a song called "We Saw Your Butt" about male nude scenes might have avoided this by playing to a jovial glee without the gender bias.

2) Halle Berry bares her soul, written by Bruce Kirkland for Canoe.ca, archived from the original published July 11^th 2012, originally published July 20^th 2009.

3a) Execution on the White House Lawn, taken from Monticell.org.

3b) Jefferson still survives, unlike the other guy, written by Anna Berkes for Jefferson Library.wordpress, published November 5th 2008.

Mad Dog Time (1996)

 

Director: Larry Bishop

Screenplay: Larry Bishop

Cast: Jeff Goldblum as Mickey Holliday, Richard Dreyfuss as Vic, Gabriel Byrne as Ben London, Ellen Barkin as Rita Everly, Diane Lane as Grace Everly, Gregory Hines as Jules Flamingo, Kyle MacLachlan as Jake Parker, Burt Reynolds as Jackie Jackson, Larry Bishop as Falco, Henry Silva as Sleepy Joe, Michael J. Pollard as Red, Christopher Jones as Falco, Billy Idol as Lee Turner, Angie Everhart as Gabriella, Billy Drago as Wells, Paul Anka as Danny, Rob Reiner as Albert, Joey Bishop as Gottlieb, Richard Pryor as Jimmy the Gravedigger

An Abstract Candidate

 

Mad Dog Time was one of those films flashed up into my attention at one point, in a context long vanished from my memory but occupying the space now given it, one which did initial come with a negative baggage whether it deserved it or not with how it was talked about. My first encounter with Larry Bishop, son of Joey Bishop, one of the members of the "Rat Pack" with Frank Sinatra, was negative when my younger self was not a fan of Hell Ride (2008), a Quentin Tarantino co-produced biker film, which I will have to return to with so much time having past that the old opinion has been forgotten let alone my memories of that film. That film was not helped as I was getting into cinema at the time of the "neo-grindhouse" wave of genre films, in the shadow of Tarantino's own 2007 project Grindhouse with Robert Rodriquez, which I was not a fan of back then. Ironically, Mad Dog Time found itself caught up in the shadow of Tarantino as it was lumped into the films post-Pulp Fiction, when it blew up in 1994, which led to a lot of self-reflective and dialogue heavy crime films come in from its wake. Mad Dog Time was cursed by a zero star review from Roger Ebert¹, one I am going to commit a blasphemy in saying is actually a pretty terrible review. It really does not get into anything about what the film is barring its obsession with dialogue eccentricities, such as the leads having similar sounding names, which is definitely absurd, but spends most of its time trying to think of absurd ways to describe something being pointless without actually needing a film to critique involved. This is something, as time goes on, and as I came to cinema in the time of the greater weight of amateur voices and the internet in opinion, where I find myself realising the film critics who became huge, usually the American ones like Ebert or Pauline Kael, were still figures with their own personal opinions even if they are still worth reading the reflections of.

That may seem insanely blasphemous to start this review with, but Mad Dog Time is definitely one of those subjective films you think is being too smart for its own good to the point of pretention, or you vibe with, and the Ebert review really does not get into what exactly Larry Bishop's film is, especially as it really sticks out next to other self reflective crime films I have seen from the nineties. For me, built with the help of Larry Bishop being friends with some of the cast and others willing to work on this lower budget film, Mad Dog Time from the get-go has an absurdist artificiality to the proceedings which was immediately interesting. This premise has been seen before and that is clearly the point as the film goes through with deconstructing this premise, in which a mob boss Vic (Richard Dreyfuss) is going to be let out the mental health hospital, and everyone is going to be dragged in and then likely dragged into a body bag, such as Mickey Holliday (Jeff Goldblum) for being with Vic's estranged girlfriend Grace (Diane Lane). From the get-go, there is a voice-over set against the cosmos itself explaining this is an alternative dimension, starting with an illustration of a nightclub only to turn into the real set, mostly locked into artificial world based on locations and sets. The best comparison points here, for the set up, is that for a film which Larry Bishop openly admits was inspired by the likes of Samuel Beckett²  this brings to mind too Tough Guys Don't Dance (1987), author Norman Mailer's infamous adaptation of his own novel which is a bizarre, sick humoured subversion of crime film tropes, and Jean-Luc Godard's Detective (1985), which does also fit into Ebert's criticism of Mad Dog Time, of being a film about "two or three characters [starting] out in a scene and [reciting] some dry, hard-boiled dialogue, and then one or two of them will get shot"². Godard's film, which was made as much to be able to make his controversial take on the Virgin Birth in Hail Mary (1985), has more of his introspective musings on art, and significantly less people being shot, but is as much an artificial dissection of the crime films he grew up with as much as Tough Guys... is a fresh take from a veteran author who would have started his literary career at their boom in pulp literature, and Larry Bishop’s film which comes from hindsight to them too.

This Godard comparison is apt, likely as for the late Swiss director’s film, the crime genre were always artificial for me. They are films I have seen from my youth, and they exist outside the reality of crime as artificial stories of morality, unless you see the films like his or even these pulpier versions which undercut and dissect these stories. Vic is going to finally leave the asylum but already chaos is brewing. By the first minutes, actor Michael J. Pollard of Bonnie and Clyde (1967) has been shot dead, and this beings the absurdity clearly here, that this is a world of mindless violence and power games where the sole outside world is a mortician, frequently mentioned, who clearly gets enough clients to work on in the crime world he can afford on-bench advertising. Roger Ebert's criticism of Mad Dog Time was that this was about characters just standing around and pontificating, which would sound pretentious if this was just meant to be cool. Despite some of these characters giving their opinion on the philosophy of life, this dialogue usually leads to funny one liners or the character coming off as ridiculous on purpose. So much is clearly written by Larry Bishop as a joke, everything clearly unhinged and pointlessly violent, beginning with whatever Gabriel Byrne managed to channel as “Brass Balls” Ben London. His is a deeply odd performance just in the accented cadence he chooses, but as the film goes, this becomes one of the best performances, as a rare comedy performance from the actor, and a sign of how artificial the film is.

It can be too "clever" with the naming of certain characters and its symbolism, which seem too obvious when you realise what is hinted in them, but with the eccentric wordplay, such as imagining all of Vic's personalities visiting his nightclub, you see Bishop was never interested in making these characters "cool". They are instead amalgamations of eccentric figures inspired by crime cinema and the Rat Pack, the group his father was part of and the music throughout nodded to. You could figure out a way to stage this in a theatre performance, which is a virtue, but the production design by Dina Lipton does add a lot to its playful eccentricities. Attempting to be the Iago to this Shakespearian tale, but coming off as a lame sleaze weasel, Kyle MacLachlan's base is literally a warehouse barring the abrupt cameo by his own personal aircraft, which is a hilarious non-sequitur alongside being introduced to his cronies, even Billy Drago, eating sushi. Throughout, the fact many scenes stay within warehouse spaces or Vic’s nightclub does not attempt to hide, as much as Godard’s Detective did in a hotel, these plot clichés being forced through this world and puncturing them inherently in the locations used.

The least expected people popping up adds on a first viewing, but to this film's credit, everyone gets something to work with which would grow on other viewings. Yes, that is musician Billy Idol of all people in a small role to challenge Jeff Goldblum to a duel, first revolver to kill the opponent to win, and he stands out, looking like he wandered off another crime pastiche, Alan Rudolph's Trouble in Mind (1985), just for telling Goldblum to fuck himself. This also presents the most cinematic part of the film, that all pistol duels are done sat down, usually behind desks, which is the type of thing I could see Seijun Suzuki having done, with the Hachiro Guryu team who worked on his films^a, when he dissected yakuza cinema out of boredom of the templates demanded of him by Nikkatsu studios. That is part of the reason why this grew on me as I was watching it, a film trying to be cleaver but undercutting its pretensions by both the quality of the performances and that it is deliberately exaggerated on purpose. All the films, many more well regarded, I have mentioned may be viewed as an excuse to defend Mad Dog Time with comparison, it is, but because this shares so many of their traits and their quirks, a few even maligned themselves, sharing a collected DNA between them all in doing different things to undercut this genre.

This also includes the fact Mad Dog Time is incredibly funny, with the fact that ninety percent of the cast dies by the end becoming part of its sick sense of humour, more so because the cast is full of diverse names who all get idiosyncratic touches, like cult legend Henry Silva as a narcoleptic heavy to the least expected Burt Reynolds cameo possible. That your two female leads are figures above this lunacy - Diane Lane standing as calm and collected, Ellen Barkin captivating as someone whose irritable energy is nonetheless contrasted by her character's love for Mick - does emphasis this too. The two figures who keep this world sane among the men are, ironically, Richard Dreyfuss despite being the character meant to be the ticking time bomb, playing the role in a calm of a man after having stripped everything away, and Jeff Goldblum, who radiates film noir charm that makes this, even if you hate the film, one of his best performances. Goldblum is trademarked for his nervous energy, but until he is caught off-guard and forced to try to outsmart his enemies by talking his way out of the situation, his character of Mick is cool and absolutely in control. Even if he has cheated on two sisters, in Grace, who they both know are not meant for each other, and her sister Rita, who is meant to be together with Mick in their love-hate chemistry, the character is still likable and it is because Goldblum plays the role so well.

Even that he can be rattled as a character works, because of Goldblum’s performance. Like a character from many older film noirs, he does play it like the underdog leads in that he is always precariously doomed, but always has the one liner to stick it into someone. Even one of the more abrupt turns, a fake copy of a hit man eventually played by Larry Bishop himself, feels like a pastiche from old pulp radio stories, emphasising how with all the back stabbings and shootings here, nothing is for certain and Mick has to figure out how to survive it. Considering someone pretends to have a heart condition, using Tic Tacs as a fake medication, for as long as they can for the right moment to kill someone shows the absurd lengths for nothing this deals with, the film playing to the idea of the pointless machinations of these gangsters striving for power only leading to chaos. Mad Dog Time was kneecapped itself when it was realised, one where the film won me over in the prolonged joke of Vic threatening Ben London to leave town, only to shoot him in the kneecap when he refuses and telling him to hop off from town. The pointless amount of death is the joke, and it is telling the sanest act is to decide to not draw the trigger on oneself and save another even if one last person is shot to accomplish this. Even that this ends with a sentimental finale, whilst part of the many aspects that may make this an acquired taste, made this a film that vibed for me perfectly. Film opinion is subjective, but with Mad Dog Time, it is weird now seeing this elusive film, dismissed back in the day, only to find myself looking at its negative reactions with surprise. Not necessarily because the film would appeal to everyone, truly an “acquired taste” in how much of it plays against conventions, but because whilst I absolutely see the imperfect moments and all that would put those off in its choices, I have seen a lot of films undermine the tropes of crime cinema like this even before Quentin Tarantino, the supposed reason for this film existing, and see this share all the virtues I have found in those films as here, winning me over as a result as an underrated production.

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric

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

 

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1) Roger Ebert's Mad Dog Time review, originally published on November 29th 1996.

2) Larry Bishop's interview as part of the Projection Booth podcast's review on Mad Dog Time, released August 20th 2021.

a) The collective pen name for Seijun Suzuki himself, Takeo Kimura, Atsushi Yamatoya, Yōzō Tanaka, Chūsei Sone, Yutaka Okada, Seiichirō Yamaguchi and Yasuaki Hangai.

Trans-Europ-Express (1966)

 

Director: Alain Robbe-Grillet

Screenplay: Alain Robbe-Grillet

Cast: Jean-Louis Trintignant as Elias; Marie-France Pisier as Eva; Christian Barbier as Lorentz; Charles Millot as Franck; Daniel Emilfork as policeman; Henri Lambert as police inspector; Alain Robbe-Grillet as Jean, the film director; Catherine Robbe-Grillet as Lucette

An Abstract Candidate

 

Assassins can be funny too.

Trans-Europ-Express is a meta-film, introducing three individuals - including director-writer Alain Robbe-Grillet himself and his life partner Catherine Robbe-Grillet - on the titular train line in France, imaging a film about drug smuggling which is the film we will be seeing playing out. Immediately a lark is had in imagining first a cartoonish version of this tale, with fake beards and a cartoon smoking bomb on board, but the production breaks the fourth wall constantly, alongside introducing Jean-Louis Trintignant as Elias, already in the midst of a drug smuggling plot when he briefly enters their car. Around him a story is set up, beginning with Elias getting on board with cocaine in a secret compartment in his suitcase and a book cut out to hold a pistol.

The film, more so than others from Alain Robbe-Grillet, is a flex in storytelling as a concept itself, a pulpy crime story which just happens to makes its artificiality know to the viewer throughout. Revisions to the story, trying to figure out what the tale is, happen and are usually caused by Catherine Robbe-Grillet's character making sure, as the secretary keeping audio recorded notes, that plot continuity is kept alongside the three questioning new ideas, such as considering (and rejecting) the idea to change to diamond smuggling. Plot holes are explained and they remove the cocaine on Elias' person, even completely ditching a plot thread and whole character by asking between each other why a young woman introduced onscreen would steal his suitcase in the first case for one considered twist.

It plays this narrative straight, but this game-within-a-game is compelling in itself. There is also how Elias has a fetish for bondage, seen when he hides a magazine, between a more respectable one, of female models posing tied up or wrapped in chains. This connects to Robbe-Grillet's own taste for this, but it is also part of the simulacra here too, the faking and constructing of scenarios, as he is introduced to a prominent character of Eva (Marie-France Pisier), a sex worker who he pays for a staged scenario of forced restraint and rape. That scene is going to make some viewers understandably uncomfortable, but it is all acted out as a consenting act by her and Elias, part of the games of the film as fiction as he will return to her to play out this bondage scenario.

She will play out a potential femme fatale role, as her connection to the criminal group Elias is trying to ingratiate himself within becomes more noticeable. The gang itself, playing to Alain Robbe-Grillet's films being about their stories being games or shifting in how they are staged, set out constant tests for Elias to react to, from the entire fake like of Father Petitjean the mythical drunk priest used for coding messages, to even staging fake cops apprehending him. Trans-Europ-Express is arguably one of the more accessible works for Alain Robbe-Grillet because it is a genre pastiche, which unlike Eden and After (1970) is more focused on the plot it is still undercutting. Elias' journey in the game, as it is being connected and made sense of by its creators, still becomes a crime story at heart even if the film knows it is all staged and plays to this. Even its style, the sleek cinematography by Willy Kurant, befits a pastiche of films like this from this era. Only its BDSM content really takes this to another tone, in mind to Robbe-Grillet's real life obsessions, but even this within the movie plays to the whole constructed nature. Even when this gets serious in the end, with everything closing in on Elias after he actually kills someone, the film openly undercuts this with a wink and a happy ending, reminding everyone viewing this elaborate and perfectly made film it is still a story.

 

Abstract Spectrum: Metatextual

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

Made in U.S.A (1966)

 

Director: Jean-Luc Godard

Screenplay: Jean-Luc Godard

Cast: Anna Karina as Paula Nelson; Jean-Pierre Léaud as Donald Siegel; László Szabó as Richard Widmark; Ernest Menzer as Edgar Typhus; Kyôko Kosaka as Doris Mizoguchi; Yves Afonso as David Goodis; Sylvain Godet as Robert MacNamara; Jean-Claude Bouillon as Inspector Aldrich

An Abstract List Candidate

 

It’s like being in a Disney film starring Humphrey Bogart

The last Jean-Luc Godard film starring Anna Karina is a bright pop art crime pastiche, making this known just from the outset. Karina is in a checkered primary colored knit dress, taking out a diminutive man in her hotel room with a shoe; his unconscious form is left with his younger male relative and his girlfriend, the prone form laid in the middle of the bed as a typical Godardian conversation transpires around him. Looking for the murderer of Richard P…, the man Karina’s Paula was close to, Made in U.S.A. is however also stepped in melancholia. It was made on request of a friend of Godard’s, long-term producer Georges de Beauregard¹, but for me from the context of all films having a point eventually in the end, Made in U.S.A. was always a significant film, not the one which never got even a USA premiere until 2009², in how this would mark how the marriage of Godard and Karina would end, this would be her last film with him, and politics are unavoidable. In among its bright colours and the closing aesthetic of the later sixties is however around the auteur’s world absorbing the political world around them, even seen in how, in a fake out against Paula in a doctor’s office, she uncovers a fake skeleton wrapped in bandages and fake blood which befits the motifs of war and violence referred to over and over, including people being tortured off screen for information.

It marks a goodbye to two collaborators who were intertwined at the time, but in 1967 we would also see Week End, Godard proclaiming his career dead, and marking the end of his most well known era of cinema for more “difficult” films. Watching Made in U.S.A., marked as well by Jean-Luc Godard’s passing in 2022, his films even when he was “popular” in the French New Wave make that fame a weird lightning in a bottle moment for a director, at the right time, which always was unconventional. The title Made in U.S.A. is clearly fed on old American pulp with Karina as the sleuth figure, as much as pastiche French crime films, but most of this film is a series of sketches, wrapped around a narrative, with a lot of Godardian monologues. Many are clearly from him speaking through his characters, on the climate of politics as much as the past and future, the socialist left wing and the authoritarian right wing central here. His relationship with other cinema – the pastiches to Quentin Tarantino referencing Bande à part (1964) even for the name of a VHS publishing arm – really becomes curious when, digging into his career, Godard was from day one was undercutting his work. Passages here are close to the kind of non-narrative tangents of independent dramas and comedies, such following a male patron viewing the world in a bar as the counter kicking Katrina than visa-versa. Where this becomes marks his later “difficult” films is how more and more the political and sociological concerns are impossible to ignore.

The actual plot, splice and obfuscated here, is explicitly referring to Mehdi Ben Barka, the bright colours hiding a really dark and very real incident in its pastiche form. A left-wing Moroccan politician, Barka vanished in Paris in October 1965³, in which it was learnt the French police force were involved in helping Mossad, the national intelligence agency of Israel,  by making Barka “disappear”¹. Whilst it could be seen in bad taste to have this in context as the film’s template, especially as this was made only a year later from the disappearance, the film is not avoiding the real life politics it is made within, as Godard’s cinema could not avoid them by this point. The film, without any context of this, is a film noir tale re-imagined – the Walt Disney film with Humphrey Bogart and politics to smash together two different pieces of Paula’s narration – through a mess of intrigue and backstabbing, still political in how it deals corruption, how Richard P…., heard in voiceover only, is a victim of a conspiracy to silence him. Stills from American film noir representing his death, and it befits a film touching on a real conspiracy that this is how cinema and reality intermingle.

Whilst he praised Monogram Pictures in Breathless (1960), Godard also name checks literature and classical music in his work, and the cocktail here contrasting the encroaching political strife of the world ahead, reference to war throughout, against the luster of pinball machines befits this complete disregard between what is low and high brow subjects. The film, not withstanding one “Chinese” eye movement which has not aged well, does feel ageless elsewhere, a snapshot of the era where Godard was using his experimental style beyond just narrative to outside stories. This is also at the time when Godard got colour film in his hands and, undeniably, this alongside Pierrot le Fou (1965) and Week End emblazoned it in an incredible glow even for one of his more melancholic works. With how well composed this film is even among strong colour films from Godard in just this tiny window of his career, red as a colour looks entirely of Godard’s here with cinematographer Raoul Coutard, and that it is contrasted with the banal “real” France, of urban gas stations and apartments, does emphasis this aesthetic beautifully. Even here in the film’s melancholia, right down to Katrina’s blue eye shadow, the film can still have elegance to it, openly playing to comic book and pulp tropes, even stylistic ticks in a Batman-like sound effect onscreen for someone being knocked out at one point. Even when it stops for an extended Marianne Faithful cameo where the sense of sadness starts to rear its head, this film is thinking with its style and composition to a level that is unparallel, no longer the freeness of Breathless’s energy but thinking of how to look with meaning, something really important when Godard, even alienating his audiences, came to his later films.

When a character says Dickens and Melville were better than the search for truth, that rings as Godard himself speaking as he yet still embraced the trends of the time, something you realize when other members of the French New Wave were as much interested in pop culture as they were high minded, such as when Alain Resnais nearly collaborated with Marvel Comic’s Stan Lee⁴, or when decades later Chris Marker embraced Second Life⁵, an online multiplayer platform, for a virtual identity and to do interviews with the public from⁵. Whilst politics came to many of these directors from this movement, Godard was heavily affected by them, far from out of place here as a mere joke about having goons named Richard Nixon and Robert McNamara is contrasted by how, in its narrative about trying to find out what caused Richard P…’s death, and the political conspiracy behind it, Paula will still be affected by the emotional journey of the answer even if played as a jaunt at times. It feels, though she stands tall in the end, Paula feels desensitized, as with the sense Godard became. Despite a sweet final monologue between her and a male character that fascism will have to fade out as surfing and rock music does, it comes in mind that this would lead into the notorious Dziga-Vertov Group era of Godard’s career, where whether he succeeded or not, and at times even crossed the line by documenting how to create bombs in one of the films, it came apparent for him that more was required for him as a creator politically than he ever did before.

Made in U.S.A still has a lot of playful to it – the character of Richard with his unfinished novel, or Jean-Pierre Léaud playing a buffoonish goon revealed to deserve a gunshot for his troubles – but as the central plot involves past political campaigns, even the final monologue states how the old versions of left and right wing politics were not enough. As you see as Godard and Karina departed, so would Godard begin to change. The 1968 Cannes Film Festival, where he and François Truffaut led protests to shut the festival down in mind to protests transpiring at the same time in France⁶, would come as would Week End, and Godard would shift styles. The film, if marking close to the end of this period with other films up to Week End, does still have its frolicking experimentation, this passage where Godard was allowed to be experimental and playful all whilst seen as a huge figure at the period. Again, it is strange in a great way he was able to make films like this, and was seen as a sellable figure, but that was for the better. It also means that this does not feel like a “small” film despite the circumstances of its creation, as important and idiosyncratic as the others from the period, and full of its own creative virtues.

Abstract Spectrum: Avant-Garde/Whimsical

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

 

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1) For Nick, Sam, Nixon and Karina: Jean-Luc Godard’s Made In U.S.A, written by Adam Bat for Medium.com and published on November 13th 2012.

2) Made in U.S.A. – Godard spilt the beans on politics and atrocity, written by Peter Hulm and published by Global Geneva on December 3rd 2019.

3) France accused 44 years on over Moroccan's vanishing, written by Lizzy Davies for The Guardian and published on October 29th 2009.

4) Marvel mon amour: Stan Lee and Alain Resnais’s Unmade Monster Movie, from Criterion Channel, released February 26th 2018.

5) Chris Marker’s Second Life, published for The Criterion Collection on May 13th 2009.

6) Cannes 1968: The Year Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut Led Protests That Shut Down The Festival, written by Damon Wise and published by Deadline on May 18th 2018.

Yellow Cat (2020)

 

Director: Adilkhan Yerzhanov

Screenplay: Inna Smailova and Adilkhan Yerzhanov

Cast: Azamat Nigmanov as Kermek; Kamila Nugmanova as Eva; Sanjar Madi as Zhambas; Yerzhan Zhamankulov as Bozoy; Yerken Gubashev as Baldyr; Arslan Akubaev as Kubych

Ephemeral Waves

 

Buy the balloon. You have money.

In the middle of nowhere, in Kazakhstan's countryside, so silent there is not even non-diegetic music, Kermek (Azamat Nigmanov ) tries to get a job at a diner by the road. His only credentials for the work is being part of the construction battalion in the army, and being able to act out whole scenes from Le Samourai (1967), with the claim he looks like Alain Delon. Even when he becomes a security guard, he is also an ex-con whose cop relation challenges the choice on those grounds, forcing from his hands a safe life. In the middle of modern Kazakhstan, where there are phones, Wi-Fi and Bruce Lee t-shirts, this environment is still isolated to the point, as in any country, you would go strange from living within it long enough, and the cop is clearly crooked, working with a crime boss in this place and effectively forcing Kermek to join their goon squad in collecting money from people.

Yellow Cat, until more seriousness comes it as the plot goes on, is very deadpan, set in a multi-cultural world even in the middle of nowhere, of arguments that German tiles are superior to Czeck ones for house building, and the Le Samourai references, apparently shown on television in this world when Kermek grew up, which makes me personally glad I was finally able to see that Jean-Pierre Melville film when Criterion finally made it available in the United Kingdom at some point and be able to appreciate the references here. Whilst a lot of the humour is openly dead pan, Yellow Cat has these idiosyncratic cinema references as a French co-production. This does indeed, from director /co-writer Adilkhan Yerzhanov, feel like a pastiche of crime films from abroad, the plot line, and even that Kermek is very much a simplistic man in his own world, seen many times before. The story is timeless too however, able to be told in many different ways, which is why we retell these stories, especially here as for a film which ends bittersweet, Yellow Cat also embraces the absurd, as goons cannot stop a man with a shotgun and a trampoline he can leap on, as high as a storage container, able to keep them off for a short while.

The story told many times before is also that Kermek will find love with another lost soul, even if theirs will be a tragic one, in this case meeting Eva (Kamila Nugmanova), a young woman forced in sex work by a madam, but off in her own clouds, with vibrant red hair, blue dress and vibrant smile. She has also seen Le Samourai, if like Kermek snippets as neither may have seen the whole film. Truthfully, even if one of the henchmen on his side includes a man obsessed with Robert De Niro, quoting Casino (1995) and Taxi Driver (1976), Kermek really wants to build a movie theatre in the mountains like an amateur Fitzcarraldo (1982), with Eva an assistant when she is not travelling the world, a match made in heaven. Love, humanity and asking what Alain Delon would do, in the middle of trying to get money from someone who has not paid, leads to Kermek popping the cop in both hands, taking half of the money from the person they were meant to collect from, and fleeing.

This is a world where an evil crime boss appears on an electric scooter, in the middle of the countryside freeway, for a dispute, but Yellow Cat's narrative does becomes more tragic, as the cracks of a sadder reality intermingle with the humour and brightness, a brightness so clear between Kermek and Eva even non-diegetic music starts to appear in their lives. This is mind to a story, as it goes, we learn Eva was raped by her step father when a child, and forced into sex work, and that like many crime stories, stealing from the criminals to get a happy life does not usually end well at all. Even in this deadpan comedy, it is about people in the middle of nowhere, forced into these scenarios, trying to survive, and Adilkhan Yerzhanov manages with this to succeed, as it is clear Yerzhanov is referring to cinema's history as much in mind to them as a medium of escape which also reflect reality, both in films themselves and we viewing them as viewers. This is both in the references to crime films of the past, and in how the ending also includes an abrupt performance of content from Singing in the Rain (1952) in the middle of deserted landscape. I hope as much, when there is a scene of the leads buying a red balloon from a man trying to sell it for money, it is a reference to Albert Lamorisse's legendary 1956 short film The Red Balloon, considering the film references throughout.

The fleeting moments of playfulness, the cops accidentally shooting each other, or the robot monkey toy laid by two people dead/injured on the floor, eventually contrast the bleak reality of the situation, but contrasted by its vibrant colour, of the Kazakhstan landscape or details like the poster yellow car --- and Eva use for their fleeing, Yellow Cat manages to have a perfect balance which makes it work perfectly. Sadly, a film like this, among many world cinema productions, will be lost in the shuffle without greater attention, a shame as this, for a true compliment, feels like the type of films I saw from the 2000s era getting into world cinema. That era of films from Tartan Film and Artificial Eye, whose unpredictability and whose use of tropes as here led a sense of creativeness to cinema for the better, can be felt throughout Yellow Cat, and it comes with recommendation as a result for this.

Out of Time (1988)

 

Director: Robert Butler

Screenplay: Brian Alan Lane, John J. Sakmar and Kerry Lenhart

Cast: Bruce Abbott as Channing Taylor; Bill Maher as Maxwell Taylor; Rebecca Schaeffer as Pam Wallace; Kristian Alfonso as Cassandra Barber; Leo Rossi as Ed Hawkins; Ray Girardin as Capt. Krones; Adam Ant as Richard Marcus

Ephemeral Waves

 

One among many feature length television pilots to shows that never came to be, Out of Time instead exists just as an NBC TV movie, one which never became the series it intended to be, and opens up with matte shots of a cyberpunk state in 2088. Thermo vision/night vision glasses are standard for police, looking like a pair of 3D paper glasses, in a world where there was a nuclear ban in 2012 and police work has changed radically to using technology and cerebral methods of stopping crime. Unfortunately, the great grandfather of Channing Taylor (Bruce Abbott), the man who innovated this new policing system and is held as a divine figure in police work named Maxwell Taylor (Bill Maher), is a shadow whose weight it too heavy for Channing. Channing is also a classic cop who shots first and asks questions later, now as a result in this different world a a "departmental hemorrhoid" suspended for not living up to a grandfather who was more careful in his police work. When trying to catch Richard Marcus, who in the many curious casting choices here is played by Adam Ant of all people, he first is suspended, then when Marcus is found having tried to acquire experimental time travel technology, Channing tracks him down and ends up back in 1988 as a result trying to find his man.

The cast is one of the most prominent aspects of the entire production. Born Stuart Goddard, Adam Ant's music went over in the USA, but here in Britain, a certain age group will have to think of songs like Prince Charming and Stand and Deliver, will know him as a musical icon at one point, and may not known Ant went into acting. Channing as our lead, who will be transported from 2088 to 1988 by a time machine Adam Ant wants to use for nefarious leads, is Bruce Abbott, who most know in cult circles for Re-Animator (1985), and his grandfather Maxwell is Bill Maher, an actor-comedian who would go on to be a political pundit, in hindsight a strange choice for a geeky put-upon cop his own colleagues laugh at, also played like a frankly sexist man who will use the sci-fi x-ray glasses on a woman's clothes, and is meant to be the underdog promoting non-violent and cerebal policing techniques.

Leaving behind a girlfriend, an NBC news reporter, for the past, Channing is going to effectively play out Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986) of a future person being befuddled by the then modern world. That when there was the Big Library Fire in his timeline, with books a rare possession, and 107 Stephen King books having been written, suddenly he returns to 1988 where a library exists. Plutonium batteries from the future are naturally unavailable and even pre-marital sex and cigarettes baffle Channing. Honestly, barring the sombre finale, where it becomes clear he will not see his girlfriend far in the future, Out of Time does pad its length with a light comedy tone which for some will not be that interesting, unless you look at this as another curiosity of weird television premises. There was an obsession with cop shows in particular, over decades, in having cops' souls transmogrify into British bulldogs, cops who can grow toys with their dead son's souls in them really big, or serious cop shows which are also musicals, all examples of real premises and pilots which came to be, coming off as attempts to refresh a genre which on television was recycled greatly. Watching more of these, I wish a new program existed that remade all these premises within it in the same world. The grandson from the future is apt among the same police division, even if in its original context of Out of Time, some will find it a sluggish production.

It is a work whose sci-fi tropes are also clearly worked around by setting it in 1988, jettisoning most of all the opening quarter barring the sci-fi guns. The one aspect which tries to fit its sci-fi premise are some of its odder techniques in editing, especially with the time travel, where the screen distorts and shakes for long periods at a time as if, having to view this from a VHS rip, the version a viewer may see effected the content unintentionally. It is trippy, and it is the one aspect to a conventional narrative, in the end, of a nerd cop and a future cop left partially dim-witted in the past which plays out very conventionally. Even that Adam Ant is here, a flamboyant factor as an English musician dressed as if he should be in Alan Rudolph's Trouble in Mind (1985) does not really stand out, and only a sombre ending, involving a copy of Shakespeare's' Sonnets with a torn page which will travel through time, which does have a surprising level of tragedy to it, has anything which stands out as strong or distinct here. The TV movie exists as a fascinating curiosity, but as that, one which managed to get even a British VHS release, but is an obscurity nowadays.

Whether it could have lead to a good series or not is up-in-the-air, though there is sadly a grim reality at hand that the romantic female lead, Rebecca Schaeffer, would be killed by a stalker a year after this premiered in 1989, which adds an uncomfortable "what if" to history that is to be discretely ignored.  As it stands, there was the true likelihood, in one reality, Out of Time would have still been cancelled after one season, as unless more science fiction tropes were brought in, the time travel machine is erased as a quantity by the end of this pilot, with only the idea of Maxwell beginning to design the technology his great-grandson Channel would use, as well as find his true brave self, the last semblance of the prologue. Again, so many of these types of productions exist, were never successful, and end up fished off of YouTube and VHS rips, and with only speculation to consider, just from this one entry, it is watchable but a production which is, to use one word, "okay" with all the average connotations that suggest.

A Stoker (2010)

 

a.k.a. The Stoker

Director: Aleksey Balabanov

Screenplay: Aleksey Balabanov

Cast: Mikhail Skryabin as Kochegar; Yuriy Matveev as Vassily 'Bizon'; Aleksandr Mosin as the Sergeant; Aida Tumutova as Sasha; Anna Korotayeva as Masha; Varvara Belokurova as Vera

Canon Fodder

 

[Some Major Spoilers]

There is in the centre of this film a stoker (Mikhail Skryabin) who sets up the fires for Russian mafia to dispose of unwanted bodies into at a furnace. Writing a novel on a typewriter in-between working at the furnaces, the stoker continues his days working between his real job, with the burning of coal, and intermittent visits from the mafia. Out of the later Aleksey Balabanov films, A/The Stoker became for me one of the strongest as, even if a pessimistic film at heart, the humanity it still there intermingled with the nihilism of Balabanov.

A Stoker's entire plot is a petty dispute, a romantic triangle between his daughter Sasha (Aida Tumutova) and the daughter of a mobster, Masha (Anna Korotayeva), over one of the latter's goons, leading a disposal within the furnaces that the stoker himself will react to. Though complicit in helping to dispose bodies, he is still arguably an innocent living in his own world until that moment and the path he goes onto in response. Notably, without being directly part of the narrative, the stoker and his daughter Sasha are of Yakut descent, continuing Balabanov's fascinating and admirable trait from The River (2002) of working with Yakut actors as the leads, not presented as different from anyone else but with their own stories and only keeping this in mind to that back story, in this case following an older man who was a former soldier. He has not been paid over two months at his work when we first encounter him, and the mafia using the furnaces at his workplace for other illegal purposes is more of a way to support himself, living there with a bed nearby, in mind to this. This does not even have the exaggeration of Dead Man's Bluff (2005) here when dealing with its crime plot threads, as the banality and ultimately pointless nature of hiring hit men to kill people, and the required disposal of bodies in the stoker's furnaces, is a system we witness throughout this shorter film's novella-like narrative.

A Stoker, steeped in pessimism, is humane nonetheless in reducing all these gangster tropes into pettiness. The banality is found in one hit man having to get his sum for the work from a dingy safe, watched by a man watching porn, in the room near a downstairs bar. The mafia boss who uses our lead knows him and served under him as a sniper when the stoker was part of the military during the Afghan-Soviet War of the eighties, friendly with him only to transgress this when his daughter, out of selfishness, makes an ill-fated decision with a real tragedy. The mafia boss himself is a man comfortable in his own life with an adult daughter, living in his middle age in a well off middle class home, only with this side of working in the criminal underground nowadays, his involvement entirely from an adult daughter whose lack of moral consequences will be traumatising for her and doomed for him.  Marsha, before she betrays Sasha, have a business in a fur store with her, financed by her own father, and even the man they are unwittingly sharing is one of her father's own contract killers, Vassily 'Bizon' (Yuriy Matveev), a mostly mute and silent figure who feels less like a figure cheating behind each of their backs but casually drifting between their arms.

Nothing is over-the-top or passionate. Only the stoker's finale decision has a weight beyond the banal world, one willing to self sacrifice as he dons his old military uniform again. Beyond this, set in the brown and grey industrial and urban world of Russia, the only things of passion here are the rock songs on the soundtrack, a trademark of Aleksey Balabanov that have a profound influence, and how compared to the other films how explicitly sexual the film is. With the two female leads Aida Tumutova and Anna Korotayeva comfortable in doing full nudity, the presence of such casual eroticism, amidst the bland wallpapered rooms and snow covered exteriors, feels less lurid softcore but the eroticism of paintings in how they are depicted. Rather than destructive, they are scenes and interactions with Vassily, the male and female bodies eroticised, with emotions beyond the world even if corporal physical interactions. Sadly, even this is undercut by the fact, once one realises Vassily is being shared between them, the passions they unwittingly share with the same man separately will crush and traumatise many when a body count is created.

As jealously, a petty one with an additional layer for greed, causes pointless death, eventually the stoker himself will act differently, a revenge that is as casually done as it is also unexpected, including by precise use of a ski pole's tip from someone who uses it like a soldier able to use anything would. A Stoker is a bleak farce within its heart, one where you can however still see Aleksey Balabanov possess some semblance of hope even if he dashes it in his characters' fates here. It is hopeful in that there is moments of lightness amidst all this. One legitimate innocent is here, Vera the child (Varvara Belokurova) who visits the stoker continually, even to the point her father visits to see if he is on the level, and admires him from their one interaction. She is the one who will preserve the stoker's unfinished novel, a folktale of an outsider being welcomes into a Yakut home, in an unknown past, only to commit transgressions including raping the wife which will not be left unpunished.

Alongside the ending having this child tell the story, which is clearly done as a jarring choice, Balabanov reflecting his past work, including his use of early cinema, tells this story-within-a-story as a monochrome narrative too. This tale-within-a-tale's moral complexity in itself, the discomforting morality of the director's own films, does not with other films of his come perilously close to being tasteless, even if it involves the wife being punished too by the husband and wishing for it like a pleasure in itself, but becomes elusive and adds a strange discomfort to the entire work we have witnessed. A lot can be gained from Aleksey Balabanov's films in general, even if you do find yourself in uncomfortable territory, and in this case, A Stoker in both its simplicity and when it does not go forth in a clearly meant way are all compelling. In terms of character studies, it is one of the most empathetic even in terms of characters whose deeds are not defendable, all within a tale where everyone, painfully, makes decisions which they let themselves fall into. As a result, as already mentioned, this was one of the strongest of the director-writer's career for me in general because of this attitude.