Mekong Hotel (2012)

Rewatched 28th March 2025

Director: Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Screenplay: Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Cast: Jenjira Pongpas, Sakda Kaewbuadee, Chai Bhatana and Maiyatan Techaparn

 

Damn, I forgot my own tune.

A film I've wanted to see for a long time, and not readily available, Mekong Hotel had a disadvantage of being less than an hour long, and that this was the follow up to Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010). The hype after Uncle Boonmee... won at the Cannes Film Festival its most prestigious award, the Palme D'or, may have been a disadvantage when this premiered at the festival in 2012, a work less structured on plot.

There's a weight knowing how the Mekong River in the north-east of Thailand, where this is set, has a lot of meaning for its director-writer. Set at a hotel by a river that is the border between Thailand and Laos, in real life his father's ashes were scattered there, gaining a greater significance for him¹. You could argue Mekong Hotel is a very opaque film even for its creator, as with everything by Weerasethakul, defying expectations even for those who would've grasped his style previously. It starts from the get-go, opening with a conversation between two men without the first images seen, one a classical guitarist, Chai Bhatana, who provides the score. The first images seen are the titular hotel on the Mekong River, with the lush acoustic guitar music setting up the tropical atmosphere, guiding us through a series of conversations with the local denizens occupying the hotel.

Among them is the other idiosyncratic touch, with regular collaborators Jenjira Pongpas and Sakda Kaewbuadee involved in the cast, where there are phi pop spirits from Thai folklore. The first is introduced undercutting the tranquillity of a debate by one man of what clothes to wear, a woman just outside the rooms consuming bloodied raw meat. Mekong Hotel has been dubbed a drama and a documentary, but as with all of Weerasethakul's films, genre tags are a vague concept especially as the phi pop spirits are very important to the content here. The first is seen having killed and eaten the viscera of someone's beloved dog, but they are also cannibalistic. The touch here that you would only get from Weerasethakul, whose take on the supernatural has always been one of his most compelling touches, is that we get to see from their side too. We are able to hear from the pop's side of things especially when one is revealed to be someone's mother, having intimate conversations, knitting and apologising to her adult daughter for who she now is. In legend, they are said to possess their victims and, when they have made them hunt for raw meat, eventually eat their own intestines before moving on; we see in this one of the male cast being possessed by the phi pop at one point only to be exorcised. They are still in the consciousness in their homeland, with adaptations of the legends in the likes of Pob Pee Fa (2009), a TV series, and it is befitting that Weerasethakul would take these figures for Mekong Hotel and deal with them in a more humane banality.

They still kill people, but we also see from their sides their regrets of their immortality mixed with the hunger. Naturally, as with Uncle Boonmee... its matter of fact as that film dealt with someone's reincarnations returning to his memory, of the moment in Tropical Malady (2004) that stayed with me of a cow accidentally being shot but its ghost happily wandering off immediately in peace. Weerasethakul views the supernatural if it exists with this casualness of the ghosts merely intermingling with the daily lives of those also at this hotel, from the lovers, the friends, those with pasts involving the history of military action in the country of Thailand, and the pervading fear of flooding. Ghosts devouring peoples' guts is one thing, which happens here, but more ominous in tone is when the characters talk of how they need to be prepared for potential flooding in the area, reflecting how as we see in the distance excavators doing their work, the landscape by human and accidental influence in modernisation may influence the natural landscape too.   

A big factor to Mekong Hotel, making it a shame it is not readily available, is that this is quite important for Apichatpong Weerasethakul as a film maker. He made a film in digital also dying for a proper available release - the co-directed comedy-spy farce The Adventure of Iron Pussy (2003) made with Michael Shaowanasai I've always wanted to see. Here however marks the point he entirely moved to digital between 16mm celluloid in Uncle Boonmee to digital cinematography in Cemetery of Splendour (2015). This is a film which Weerasethakul shot, edited, directed and produced by himself to save costs, alongside a small budget financed by UK-based production company Illuminations Films¹. Also among the producers is Keith Griffiths, one of the most important British producers to exist for me, for how much he has contributed in helping some of the most interesting filmmakers to exist. He is arguably someone I should lionise as he has helped figures I adore - stop motion animators Jan Švankmajer and the Quay Brothers, Apichatpong Weerasethakul - alongside his collaborations with the likes of Christopher Petit and Patrick Keiller, two really idiosyncratic British filmmakers, and his one-offs like Tsai Ming-liang's I Don't Want to Sleep Alone (2006) and Peter Strickland's Berberian Sound Studio (2012). He deserves so much credit for making cinema far more interesting just for these examples.

The intimacy this small budget and production explains, and adds greater reward, to Mekong Hotel's intimacy. It is an opaque film but not a difficult film in terms of plot because, arguably, there is no plot. It is a string of interactions where we get into the lives of these figures, and the ghosts too, ruminating on their lives. Slow content guitar over conversations is apparently my jam, even when it keeps playing nonchalantly over a pop ghost eating someone's entrails on a hotel bed, but you can miss without sufficient cultural knowledge of Thai history some of its more striking pieces of dialogue. One female character openly talks about being taught by the military soldiers how to use a rifle and be militarized, something viewed by her as fun and matter-of-fact of an ordinary life despite being unordinary out of context. The ghost of combat is here, and still was in-between the filming of Mekong Hotel, as between this film and Uncle Boonmee you had the 2010 military crackdown on Red Shirt protestors and the 2014 military coup transpire in Thailand. Details could be dismissed, as unfortunately might have been the case to critics at the Cannes Film Festival premiere, that ask so many questions especially if you are entirely unaware of Thai history but register this, from the detail from the same female character of having dated a US soldier stationed there, and to the nod to the Mekong River being a border to Laos of Laosian migrants entering the country. There's a sobering moment discussing this, where Laotian migrants had such difficulty in living in Thailand as documented in one scene, which becomes more meaning when migrants are still a discussion today.

Some harmony is however found within Mekong Hotel. The landscape is still beautiful despite the excavation in the distance. Friendships and bonding between ghost mother and daughter transpires. There is a machine, predating what you have in Cemetery of Splendour, which lets one leave their body as a spirit explore, looking like a VR headset with the humour that the out-of-body experience is only undercut by how much battery power there is. A ghost can still live, still knit, if locked to a hotel room or so for six hundred years and needing to feed a craving for flesh. Then there is the final scene, a prologue shot of the river with jet skis in the distance which feels closer to Weerasethakul's installation projects if with the sense of tranquillity felt from sitting and contemplating the environment that is close to Apichatpong Weerasethakul for emotional weight. As well, for an underrated film in his filmography, there's also the base pleasure of just watching people having fun on jet skis, a reminder that a lot of my appreciation of his films is as much for this sense of tranquillity that permeates all of his work too.

 

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1) His Particle, Somewhere: Mekong Hotel (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2012), written by Duncan Caillard for Sense of Cinema, and published June 2021.

Visible Secret (2001)

 

Director: Ann Hui

Screenplay: Abe Kwong

Cast: Eason Chan as Peter Wong Choi, Man Kin-fung as young Peter, Shu Qi as June / Wong Siu-kam, Kelly Moo as young June, Anthony Wong as Wong-lin, Sam Lee as Simon, James Wong as Lo Kit, Wayne Lai as Peter's brother, Kara Hui as Siu-kam's mother

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

As a young girl, June (Shu Qi) saw a man is decapitated on rail lines, played by Anthony Wong, and whilst everyone was horrified by the body briefly wandering about headless, she learnt she could see ghosts when she found his head. Just because you can see ghosts however does not mean June has other problems to deal with, like ex-boyfriends, let alone when the karaoke room she wishes to use is haunted. A horror comedy, but with an emotional edge, it is noticeably by Ann Hui, an acclaimed female director whose career was sadly not that wildly available in the United Kingdom considering how well regarded she already was by this film in her long career. Behind such films like Boat People (1982), a sombre drama part of her acclaimed set of films about displaced Vietnamese refugees, she is also evidence of how Hong Kong filmmakers have developed the ability to switch genres with ease. Some legends found niches - John Woo with the heroic bloodshed genre, Wong Kar-Wai with doomed romances - but even those two examples changed tact and even genres occasionally in their careers too. In the case of Visible Secret, Hui is behind the camera for many dramas in her career, but has also made action films, comedies, and already had a film about people being able to see ghosts decades before called The Spooky Bunch (1980). By itself, it is noticeable how Visible Secret feels of its own in terms of mood and tone within a new decade.

You can see that, for a comedy, it plays with a sense of quiet emotion only to puncture it with moments of slapstick, ghoulish humour and bleak humour, where soon-to-be-fired hairdresser Peter (Eason Chan) encounters June during a one night stand together and find them entangled in each others' lives. Emotions are interrupted by how he lost his job, though the boy finds it cool to see blood even if it is his own, or the likes of one's uncle, meant to be in an old folk's home, appearing covered in red paint claiming to be attacked by ghosts and trying to bite someone's nose off. The possession of a single mother by two ghosts, arguing over the body within a spectacle of physical comedy for one of the film's stand out sequences, is contrasted by the sad final discovery after that sequence, and that tonal shifting by screenwriter Abe Kwong plays a huge part to the entire production. The drama is there, and many scenes this absurd humour is contrasted with sudden emotion, as Peter finds himself encountering the world of the supernatural, both learning too late people he has crossed paths with are already dead, or struggling through those many possessions and hauntings he encounters with June by his side. As the pair of slowly falling in love, June herself is not exactly as comfortable with her gift either, able to see the dead through one eye. Shu Qi stands out just in terms of her gothic appearance as the character, and the playfully flighty attitude June has at her happiest, but she also plays a young woman struggling with the sights in general, and is very captivating as the awkward co-lead with Eason Chan.

The world they exist in is also very distinct in terms of aesthetic. Of the early 2000s, with its digital effects and visual look, the film has an appropriately washed out mood to its urban landscapes. Colour is here, vibrant still, but within a Hong Kong city that feels stepped in melancholia and alienated young adults, it feels apt that among its docks and markets there are all the ghosts wandering about with all their stories. Random possession by a female ghost in a toilet, who committed suicide due to being jilted by a lover, makes sense with matter-of-factness in context to this world. Even when it has the least excepted reference to a Toblerone I was expecting to see, which would be unintentionally funny in another context as a Swiss chocolate popular in my home land, that is brought up in a deeply emotional meeting between son and his father that, seen twice in two different ways, is one of the scenes with the most heart in both versions. The comedic tone at times throughout Visible Secrets is clearly being used to emphasis the dramatic weight of its themes of loss and mourning.

In a world of muted green and blue lighting, the obvious theme for a story like this, with the ghosts when they possess people, is all the emotions and rage they dealt with in their lives they cannot get rid of. This is especially in mind to two of them being women spurned by men and heartbroken, and Antony Wong's character, whilst not returning in the full flesh, being a prologue figure important to the latter act but whose gruesome demise is entirely a bad luck of the draw in how it transpired. There is even a charlatan exorcist who finds himself embraced in June's case despite his open scepticism to his work, which just emphasises the tone and mood perfectly of the entire film, where the supernatural passe
s the weird lives of the living like ships passing in the night.

There is the one aspect of the film which may divide viewers thought, and that is the twist ending. To spoil two films at once - [Huge Spoilers] this is the same twist The Sixth Sense (1999) by M. Night Shyamalan had [Spoilers End]. It is on one hand a huge emotional gut punch, if one which has the potential to a) add a greater weight to scenes when revisited in terms of how characters interact, or b) just cause a tangled and confusing mess to rationalise it all. Taking it for what it is, then worry about this, it is the last dose of melancholia, emphasising the humour in Visible Secrets, even its scares, were always taking the backseat to the emotional drive of the film. It is for that reason, if with a caveat depending on the individual viewer's reaction to that twist, mine to the entire production was an admiration of Ann Hui's film in its entirety.  

The Football Factory (2004)

 

Director: Nick Love

Screenplay: AJ Lovell

Based on the novel by John King

Cast: Danny Dyer as Tommy Johnson; Frank Harper as Billy Bright; Tamer Hassan as Fred; Roland Manookian as Zeberdee; Neil Maskell as Rod; Dudley Sutton as Bill Farrell; Jamie Foreman as the Cabbie; Tony Denham as Harris; Calum MacNab as Raff; John Junkin as Albert Moss

Ephemeral Waves

 

Jesus, I was expecting cornflakes and a morning wank.

Produced at a time when the likes of FHM and Loaded magazines existed, for a young male demographic in the United Kingdom, post Danny Boyle's Trainspotting (199) adaptation, and produced by Rockstar Games, the British developer at the time when Grand Theft Auto was making waves post Grand Theft Auto 3 (2001) onwards, The Football Factory presents a contentious subject for a film about football (soccer) hooliganism. The opening credits play to this contentiousness with newspaper headlines, but the irony is that, returning to the film, it really is not about the beautiful game in the slightest. All the concerns of this promoting hooliganism from the time come to a film which merely mentions the sport, never shows onscreen games, and is more about a ritualistic world of fans of different teams getting together in an underpass to fight each other, all disillusioned and bored working class men with not much else to do.

My hostility when I first watched the film, back when I was in college at the late 2000s, the NME magazine era of indie bands like the Noisettes and emo to time stamp when this was, was entirely under the immediate presumption to hate The Football Factory for presenting lads being violent and racist. What this is now in the modern day, when those lad magazines with topless model photos are now gone, and films about crime and geezers is not as much of a trend as back then in British cinema, is a film which should have been more braver and transgressive but spends its time trying to be cool. It is a tonal choice which makes no sense as, to an outsider like me, these are desperate characters whose acts of standing in a line in an urban wasteland beating each other up into the hospital, or spending all their money down the pub, is not heroic but tragic. The Football Factory's tone, meant to be heroic but within a grey Britain, is its own worst enemy and the real flaw to something which could have worked. Considering the first brawl has a woman with a pram call it out as idiocy, only to undercut it with Dyer's thoughts that at least it is a good Saturday's activity, the film is clashing with itself. This could have led to something about a world of drugs, brawls, racism and people stuck on council estates as kids, subjects which are deserve their time to be detailed upon even with a chirpy sick sense of humour as this tries to have. With these subjects however, arguably the film is far safer with hindsight than one realises, and at times is being safe to the point it makes certain moments more an issue with hindsight, such as the racist cab driver, a semi-frequent side character that represents all the worst anti-immigrant ideas, who called a wanker and is a butt of jokes but is allowed to spiel monologues without actually tackling why racist cab drivers even exist and what makes them tick.

Context really comes to mind with The Football Factory for me, less nostalgia but more an artefact which brings up a lot of the aesthetic and tone from this time period throughout this movie, seeped within this period and thus difficult to separate without going off into a tangent. This entire period into the 2000s can be seen through this film for me, where one on one side you have the music promoted by Q and NME magazine, some of which scores this film, and on the other side you had the aforementioned lad's magazines, which in tone you can find in all the times the term "bird" come in when describing women the cast are attracted to. It was a time when you saw Nicolas Winding Refn's Bronson (2008), about the notorious criminal Charles Bronson, on a Tesco's supermarket DVD shelf with a British Union Jack in the background of the cover, trying visible to sell this type of film to a guy's market of being cool, about crime and men, despite films like Refn's especially being far more complicated in its subject and even style. The most infamous I remember, promoted with Danny Dyer's face on the cover and also spotted in the same Tesco store, was The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael (2005), a forgotten work which would have been a disastrous marketing choice to sell on Dyer's popularity pre-EastEnders era; from director Thomas Clay, it was a British entry in the wave of extreme cinema in the 2000s like Irréversible (2002) which pushed extremes including the depiction of rape. These films were finding themselves being slotted to specific audiences even when they probably should have focused on being sold not as crowd pleasers. The Football Factory is no different as a film, in scope a lot more complicated in its themes, particularly as the original novel by John King, his debut, is one I think would be rewarding to read. It comes off as a much more complicated and elaborate piece on this subject and the themes it is tackling, the film feeling like it glances past so many for the briefest of macho cheers.

In the centre of Football Factory too is Nick Love, the director whose career up to American Hero (2015) has moved towards executive producer roles and television, whose work around this time into the 2010s includes work about criminals and remaking Alan Clark's The Firm (1989), another work about football hooliganism. His entire filmography is remotely alien to my own personal interests, which I admit a bias to, but what concerns more with The Football Factory is how there is enough grain of interest here and that, in a twisted irony, a far more misanthropic and transgressive film on this subject, bearing in mind it would have to work around being a novel adaptation, would have been far more successful. It may take risk of being more offensive and being misinterpreted as being pro-hooliganism, but it may have gotten to the themes more successfully if it had pulled them off. It begins with how much heavy lifer Dyer himself has to do in terms of narration, where there are large portions where the term "show don't tell" really would have been necessary even if I have no qualms with narrative heavy films existing. The influence of Trainspotting cannot be denied, but whether you think that film was good or not, it carried with it moments of horror as much as gleefully leant into its world of heroin addicts.

The style is also a clear influence, in spite of the fact that, as mentioned, football barely if tangentially is part of this world. The arranged brawls between teams, with only one full length one actually happening by its ending, are more the existential crisis of working class men, something which also can be seen as a link to the Boyle film in how its down-and-out addicts were miscreants of society. Whilst their arguments they would prefer their drug filled life over a materialistic one were in themselves liable to be challenged as juvenile, the closest thing here is the lowest of hanging fruit, the middle class woman one of the characters dates which is just an excuse to mock the middle class, insult her with sexist language, and really not prod at class biases with anything trying to leave a justifiable scar. The one time the film is catching onto something, but barely covers it, is the elderly character who acts like Tommy's father figure, who is from the source novel. The World War II veteran who now, with his friend, lives in an estate with the only hope for life being Australia, saving his pension, his story raises where this film could have gone. He complicates this film and offers a tantalising subplot barely covered, especially as whilst a war hero, his anger also comes from how, having fought the Fascists, he now has to live in a place where casual racism against minorities happens on the bus in front of him. Played by Dudley Sutton, stealing the film, his contrast to Dyer's Tommy, the surrogate grandson who has willingly given himself into violent hooliganism to compensate the ennui of his life, is something you could have expanded upon.  

The stylisation of the film in itself is also something of its time. I do not mind the almost magical realist tone of Tommy's journey, in which an event in the future returns to him over and over, presided upon by an angel of ill omen with bandages on their face. The attempt at being cool as mentioned however struggles. Miss Lucifer by Primal Scream is a good song, but its use here is less appropriate, meant to be for a fist pumping film when the brawl comes, but in reality about guys struggling in what their lives are even if they try to find it by punching Millwall fans. It is not glamorous in context, and should be more cathartic ugly in tone, especially as there is never a football stand or pitch where these events transpire; likely this is due to the controversial subject matter, and trying to film it, but the grey urban locals and CCTV footage are not what I personally would call "chic" for a edgy hooliganism film. The dark ambient of the score makes more sense, especially as the one fight the film reaches is where all the premonitions of ill omen, shot in grey in an underpass and a brick being used on the skull, transpires alongside the lasting physical damage when it finally comes to be. Examples like this, or the weird use of The Jam's Going Underground, which makes no sense with its politicised lyrics, clearly undercut the film. Like that song clearly being one where people only know of it through singing the chorus, the film really is not as confrontational as it should have been.

This is also aware that, with certain Blu Ray releases of The Football Factory as I had, Nick Love's 1999 short film Love Story shows what he should have stuck to only on a significantly higher budget. A tale of two drug addicts, one a pregnant woman about to have a child, the production restrictions on that film would have worked perfectly for a film about football hooliganism. He has a personal touch, having written that short unlike the theatrical film, dialogue from working class characters who cuss all the time, but is distinct and interesting to hear. The emphasis on Love's dialogue, the c-word up the wazoo, and longer scenes using diegetic sound make more sense to have brought over to The Football Factory, only using the style of the feature film and certain songs like Primal Scream's Swastika Eyes when needed. Love Story, a series of vignettes around this central pair of characters, but also following the likes of a lonely cab driver hiring sex workers or the unexpected cameo of Ewen Bremner, aka. Spud from Trainspotting, could have easily been made into a feature film and a rewarding one, intertwining in this world of the homeless and the poverty class interesting characters. Alongside the prowling camera, spinning around the cast and following them like Nick Love used a wheelchair to carry the film camera on, and it is an admirable work set among the graffiti covered public bathrooms and streets. Considering too its use of licence songs works fully, suitable for the slower tone like electronic musician Surgeon or Portishead's Undenied, and it exposed the real issues with The Football Factory. This is a film whose surfing on what was considered hip for the time would make it a far less interesting and far less brave film than it presumed itself to be.

First Name: Carmen (1983)

Director: Jean-Luc Godard

Screenplay: Anne-Marie Miéville

Loosely based on Georges Bizet's opera Carmen.

Cast: Maruschka Detmers as Carmen X; Jacques Bonnaffé as Joseph; Myriem Roussel as Claire; Christophe Odent as Le chef; Jean-Luc Godard as Jeannot

Canon Fodder

 

No one needs an atomic bomb. Nor a plastic cup.

Jean-Luc Godard is Mr. Jeannot, a patient stuck in a health clinic, a has-been director pretending to be sick to stay in his room on threat that he will be kicked out by the staff. "Uncle Jean" as he is explicitly called by his niece Carmen (Maruschka Detmers), who visits, is a filmmaker who refuses to make films again, lost to his boom box matching classical piano pieces to combat sounds. Said niece Carmen, part of Godard's loose adaptation of Georges Bizet's opera Carmen, comes to her uncle, during his stint in getting stick every week to find somewhere else to live, to ask to use his paid up place at the coast for a film production she is currently in the middle of with friends. This is however a cover, as she is part of a gang, posing as a film crew, who intend to rob a bank. The equivalent of Don José, the soldier who falls in love with Carmen from the source, is Joseph (Jacques Bonnaffé), one of the bank guards there who falls in love with her mid robbery, joining her.

Godard was always unconventional. His eighties output is stranger knowing he clearly wanted to transition to experimentation post 1968, his Dziga-Vertov Group work, due to his concerns of trying to be a political filmmaker, but returned back to narrative cinema from his second "debut" Slow Motion (1980). This second "mainstream" run before he went to, arguably, the post Film Socialisme (2010) era as the elder statesman still has experiments within them, and the more I see these films, the more it becomes obvious he was still interested in narrative dramas even if he would gracefully move away from them. The thing about his films however, in the same way as with the original run of his first successes in the sixties, is how he would structurally undercut them in presentation.

First Name: Carmen is narrative drive, among films where he found narratives which he could tell, with his other concerns, which were still interested in the experimentation around the plot. This is also at the point when Anne-Marie Miéville, an important Swiss filmmaker by herself, is important to consider, meeting Godard by accounts in 1970, at the Cinémathèque Suisse, and their relationship growing further after his near-fatal motorbike accident in 1971¹. Their collaborations in the seventies into the eighties mean a lot for me in context - the Historie(s) du Cinema and post-Film Socialisme work feel indebted to their collaborations, experiments in video for television and short films sadly not readily available to see, and for the eighties films, she worked in this "mainstream" period as a screenwriter, a co-writer or here for First Name: Carmen the sole screenwriter. She would also work as an editor, and as a general collaborator, which gives her significant weight to this era of films alongside how Godard was changing in his own right too in this later period.

Here, Godard with Melville makes a narrative film but, like even his sixties output, this among the other eighties and early nineties films I have seen move like sketches and character dramas than actual plots, even when a group armed with gun abruptly storm a bank out of nowhere. That Godard has an older man sitting nonchalantly during a gun fight, reading his newspaper until he is shot, or a female cleaner left to sort out the mess with her mop, really emphasises as well how he had a tangential attitude to plot, include farcical moments like this, even if the character drama still drives this film far more than others from his output. With this central pair of Carmen and Joseph hiding out in Uncle Jean's apartment, the later falling for Carmen fully, there is still the set up of a poetic story, contrasted by scenes of a string quartet that score this narrative almost entirely outside the main narrative. This drama is sincere even if with the scenario undercut by grim and absurdist moments of humour. The central romance a tense one, effectively a more sexually frank take on his sixties films where Carman's romance with Joseph has left her precarious among her own group, he a latch-on to theirs. It is frank in how sexually explicit it is in nudity, but it is equal opportunity, Bonnaffé as much as Detmers to bravely bear all onscreen. Bonnaffé also has the most explicit moment of self touching; in fact, whilst an entirely different film in attitude, that moment does feel like it would appear in French New Extreme films decades later, a prototype more appropriately to the type of naturalism, including sexual explicitness, a director like Bruno Dumont would casually depict.

Godard is also making a film in eighties urban France, not the classic sixties France which he himself idealise with his pop art films. Neither is this the France of later productions from the nineties on with middle class characters in the narratives, but the world of gas station France with some extravagant locations just in-between a locations. Eric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette among others like Godard wandered into this world, and whilst elegance is here, it feels fascinating to see a film this grounded and closer to the modern day in look, despite some technology and fashion, with its idiosyncrasies like VHS tapes and shell suits just touches of the time. Godard would even explicitly touch on these subjects, in dialogue and in terms of playing with the medium, like playing with a Triple XXX sign in neon and videotape in Détective (1985), so he was more naturally suited to play with the changing France onscreen. There is a sense, honestly as I will get into later, this era feels neglected from Godard's career, because of the iconography of his sixties films was what codified what his style was for many, even parodied in the mainstream, alongside when he fully embraced colour in magnificent visual choices in films like Pierrot le Fou (1965). By the later renaissance in the 2010s, that final era before Godard's passing in 2022 was experienced in real time when he was already canonised as a filmic giant.

In contrast, something this grounded, even if of the past, feels less comparable and closer to the modern day than images from the likes of Breathless (1960), its own rich art style of naturalism constantly punctured by the experimentation. Godard's films, from the eighties within these environments, fascinate between how he stretches and kicks even against plots, wanting to clearly wanting to bend the form, and also a sense of melancholia found in certain films. This does admittedly provide his humorous side including the delight of how he would parody himself, here lovably goofy as an older befuddled man in one scene who just wanting some baked productions and a wardrobe woman to mend his coat. He is riffing on a man who exists out of time and even bumbling in-between a second fake film shoot, to kidnap a man and daughter at a casino, channelling his love of Jerry Lewis in awkward form. Even this character though has his moments of clarity and show Godard's mood from this era, the quotation opening this review his, of a man who has seen time continue, and neither likes the threat of nuclear war nor the consumerism of the time.

First Name: Carmen is almost the least experimental of a lot I have seen from the eighties period barring its use of sound. Intercutting continually to a strings quartet practicing in a room, the soundtrack is very idiosyncratic and one you would never get for a film like this in another context. The soundtrack can switch to gulls, to abrupt silence, to using Godard's beloved Beethoven but also suddenly having Tom Waits at one point, even within that scene having both Waits and strings at the same time. Here, as he would also lean on very recognisable names in his work onwards, from Bob Dylan to Scott Walker, Godard would be playing with soundtracks onwards, heavily as well showing he was good at choosing choice music cuts for whatever purpose.

In terms of the melancholia the film has, in contract to a King Lear (1987), the most infamous of his films from this run, a Shakespeare adaptation by Cannon Group not made by someone who read Shakespeare, or to actually follow the source, First Name: Carmen is a languidly paced and tragic tale of love between two people which will not come to be. He has his humour within this still as mentioned - the man spooning a jar of food, in a Mobil garage mini-market bathroom of all places, springs to mind whilst two people handcuffed together attempt to negotiate around one of them needing to pee whilst he is in the same bathroom - but this still a sombre and ultimately rewarding drama as a result. It feels a forgotten film for me, which is odd to say, felt only in how, with titles from the eighties in general, even King Lear, his output from this era is frankly maligned, Carmen not a film talked of greatly. Again, his sixties work, to be honest, casts a shadow on who he is as a film maker until Film Socialisme onwards, where his more experimental work from the 2010s has the benefit, for incredibly radical work that would be difficult to sell, of a legendary name to sell them on. This is a shame as, with the eighties films incredibly rewarding, this among them as a drama is a highlight.

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1) Love and work differently: Anne-Marie Miéville’s cinema of companionship, written by Albertine Fox and published for Sight and Sound magazine, in an updated version, on June 20th 2018.

Fruits of Passion (1981)

 

Director: Shūji Terayama

Screenplay: Shūji Terayama and Rio Kishida

Based on Retour à Roissy by Anne Desclos

Cast: Isabelle Illiers as O, Klaus Kinski as Sir Stephen, Arielle Dombasle as Nathalie, Peter as Madame, Keiko Niitaka as Aisen, Sayoko Yamaguchi as Sakuya, Hitomi Takahashi as Byakuran, Miyuki Ono as Kasen, Kenichi Nakamura as Le jeune homme, Ogaku, Akiro Suetsugu as Obana, Renji Ishibashi as Kato, Takeshi Wakamatsu as Le gardien de la maison, Georges Wilson as Le narrateur

An Abstract Candidate

 

Fruits of Passion feels caught between an unfortunate schism, a compromise between two sides which fits the legacy of a sequel novel by Anne Desclos, the original novel itself caught between the schism of being criticized by feminists for a tale of a woman becoming the ultimate submissive to men, yet also was a work by a woman who, even if hiding under a pseudonym until she finally revealed her authorship, was intelligent and as much writing the book as a challenge to the person she held the dearest, Jean Paulhan, the director of the prestigious Nouvelle Revue Française literary magazine, in his belief no woman could write an erotic novel¹. In general the erotic films of the past, specifically the ones this is linked to from the seventies, are always going to be challenging in terms of whether their ideas and tone can be defended or not, but this one is also matched by a director in Shūji Terayama, with his collaborators, who was unsung and interesting as he found himself her stuck trying to escape the cage of the genre as the lead herself symbolically wishes to. The film’s central premise of transgressive is questioned by the film itself, as it becomes a pretext which clearly sold the film, with its nudity and sex, but as the most un-erotic of erotic films and more concerned with its tale of Western imperialism on the East, gender and the denizens of a brothel we find ourselves with.

Terayama’s films have been generally difficult to actually see officially, which has made them a Holy Grail for me as a fan of surrealistic cinema, with Fruits of Passion one of the few more readily available as a French-Japanese co-production with a wider reach, one of a couple from a time where Nagisa Ōshima's In the Realm of the Senses (1976) was another Argos Film production they funded and the most notorious. Its presentation as a generic sounding erotic film with the potential for problematic content would have not necessarily been a promising introduction to this figure, in which the notorious actor Klaus Kinski, as Englishman Sir Simon, takes a young woman O (Isabelle Illiers) to 1920s Shanghai to become a willing/unwilling brothel sex worker for his fantasies. It is a subject that may prove a concern, but is shot through the eye of a director with a complete lack of interest in eroticizing this, and even in mind to the film feeling like a compromise, shows his voice in a distinct direction, as he brought with him his cinematographer Tatsuo Suzuki and composer J.A. Seazer to drastically undercut the direction of the premise. Also important is the co-writer, Rio Kishida, a female playwright and collaborator with Shūji Terayama who wrote plays explicitly dealing with the lives of women, such as the play Thread Hell about women working in a silk thread factory in 1939. That she wrote among multiple films Marquis de Sade’s Prosperities of Vice (1988), Akio Jissôji's sexually explicit erotic drama set in the 1920s and based on the writings of the Marquis de Sade, she had no qualms about dealing with transgressive sexuality as much as feminist ideas.

This is felt with a sense of a film which is running away from its central premise as soon as possible. As much of this comes from O’s story itself as, barring some moments, it is not of real interest for either screenwriter. Shūji Terayama does evoke moments, like a childhood memory of her father abandoning her symbolized by a chalk outline as a child she cannot escape from, which show more to her psyche, but she feels like an outsider to the material as well as with Isabelle Illiers really feeling uncomfortable onscreen having to be continually nude, so much so a client of O’s comments about it and asks if she ever gets cold. Ultimate her plot barring its symbolic template is more rewarding than her dramatic arch, as it is visibly clear the brothel as a whole, and Shanghai under the influence of corrupt Westerners like Sir Simon, is the greater concern. Whilst a curious concoction of a Chinese setting, French co-production credits with French or English dubbing on the cast, and a Japanese production team behind the camera and Japanese actors onscreen with European figures like Illiers and Kinski, you also get a cast of idiosyncratic faces. Legendary model and Steely Dan album cover figure Sayoko Yamaguchi is one of the women working in the brothel, and whilst the brothel mistress is played, whilst dubbed, by Peter, the actor from the seminal LGBTQ film Parade of Roses (1969), and would later appear in Akira Kurosawa’s Ran (1985), looking as glorious as you can get whilst also emphasized as a more complex figure in the little he gets. Whilst initially presenting a strict punishment regime including punishing prayer, the mistress is revealed to actually be a caring woman in charge of a family of women and some male assistants who are just trying to survive.

The complete disinterest in being sexy feels on point, in contrast to the aesthetic beauties that are Terayama’s trademarks, such as the use of colour lighting, the surrealistic and melancholic sequences in-between, and the general lush aesthetic style, both attempting to be realistic to the time period but due to the curious co-production history showing its artifice at times. Attempts at a more distinct plot – as a young man who works at a cheap restaurant just by the brothel becomes smitten with O – are interesting, but it’s a fragment of an entire eighty minute film which in that short running time does show potential evidence that the film was compromised on its way to being completed. It feels like it was not given the potential to expand with the grace Terayama’s other films, even a piece explicitly about sexual desire, the mini-feature Grass Labyrinth (1979), could show.

The most compelling fragments from what survived come from the side characters and the context, which in its use of exotic aesthetic, whether defendable or not, evokes the works of Josef von Sternberg; the set up without the explicit sexual content in the thirties would have been a film Marlene Dietrich could have been the star of. The little of the historical plot is the most dynamic in how, with his desire to corrupt O, whilst also having a mistress on the side named Nathalie (Arielle Dombasle), Sir Simon is a terrible person. Kinski’s real life is one I do not want to touch with a barge pole, but he was a compelling figure especially in his antagonism with Werner Herzog. Even dubbed, the twisted aura he always had whilst too uncomfortable at times in certain places fits here, apt for the corrupt figure who thinks he can play games with the Chinese locals, even on a whim funding the Coolie Rebellion, trying to liberate the country from Western influence, and finding himself on a knife’s edge due to this. Even here the erotic set up makes sense as, being a voyeur wanting to see O degrade herself, the romance with the young man in the restaurant and his precarious gambling with life, literalized in metaphor in a casino, is his downfall spiritually and physically when money cannot get what he wants.

Alongside the humour which crops up, like a soldier being spanked for stealing the fictional underwear of his metaphorical mother in a BDSM mistress-client fantasy, or the weirdness of the swan rocker, briefly seen as a combination of a rocking horse and a sex bench, which cuffs a person in it belly first with its rib cage-like mechanics, allowing them to flap their arms like a swan, you see the side of this film which is Terayama’s, and it stands out. Alongside undercutting the illusion of its premise, like J.A. Seizer long before his work in the anime Revolutionary Girl Utena (1997) indulging in some time inappropriate but awesome prog rock, there are plenty of times this is undercutting the expectations. It has a lot of bird metaphors in their freedom symbolically, from cutting to a dead one filmed floating down the river, or the dream sequence of Illiers naked and chained on a bed, on the roof outside with birds tied to it flapping about, or really poignant scenes not involving O, such as the life of the former actress who is one of the sex worker. She has the most interesting route, from the humour of her role plays in imaginary films with clients, with male staff playing the director with a fake camera, or the tragic “adieu le cinema” that finished her story, which has the set up of a grand piano being talked of in the river pay off in a beautifully haunting moment when it rises out of the nearby water with a corpse being lifted on top of it.

This definitely counts as a flawed gem, especially as it has very little time to fully dissect the complex gender politics it had clearly in mind, something out of the ordinary in this especially when a few years later, you get the likes of Bolero (1984) with Bo Derek held as infamously bad, and erotic cinema would drastically change against especially into the nineties. It feels like the weakest of Shūji Terayama‘s films I have seen entirely because it feels compromised by its production history, working with material to the best he could, and that we were able to get makes this still rewarding. Only the fact most of his career is difficult to officially see, unlike this film, feels the sour aspect to all of this.

Abstract Spectrum: Dreamlike

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

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

1) The Story of the Story of O, written by Carmela Ciuraru for Guernica, and published June 15th 2011.

The Voice of the Moon (1990)

Director: Federico Fellini

Screenplay: Federico Fellini

Based on the novel Il poema dei lunatici (The Lunatics' Poem) by Ermanno Cavazzoni

Cast: Roberto Benigni as Ivo Salvini, Paolo Villaggio as Gonnella, Nadia Ottaviani as Aldina, Marisa Tomasi as Marisa, Angelo Orlando as Nestore, Susy Blady as Susy

An Abstract Candidate

 

It seems my whole life is just this night.

Federico Fellini's last film, premiered outside the Cannes Film Festival competition in 1990, was tragically dismissed. It never got distribution in the UK until Arrow Video made it their task to release it in the late 2010s finally.

It begins introducing us to Roberto Benigni's Ivo Salvini, released from a mental hospital, starting from one night going on a journey through vignettes. Whilst it begins with a sense of humour, Ivo accidentally wandering into a nephew letting people pay to see his aunt undress, The Voice of the Moon feel streaked in melancholia of a different time. Based freely on a novel by Ermanno Cavazzoni, where Cavazzoni was taking his influence from the writings of real mental health patients, this film comes with the knowledge Benigni's character is a Holy Fool, with a fixation on wells which may pose a danger to him as others watch over him in fear of this, and with all the voices in his head. All we see is entirely subjective from his perspective. He is an outsider who will be ignored, and whilst his journey is brimming in life and vivescent, he is cast off in society alongside others. The first person he encounters demonstrates this: a musician living in a graveyard who found a man randomly eating everything in his kitchen, following by more appearing in his room when he rehearsed forbidden cords.

Ivo is blissful even when thinking of those he knew of who have died, but the world continues around him regardless of his presence, the modern changes to Italy visible in the background as tourists have collected together around the streets in the day, TV aerials are on all the roofs, and washing machines and refrigerators of pure manufactured white are especially everywhere. Against this, the film feels melancholic and eerie, even when Ivo is speaking tenderly of life, realities bleeding into each other especially when it comes to memories of his grandmother, Roberto Benigni playing the role whilst meant to be a child and a young actress is cast as the grandmother.  

The tentative plot is his love for a woman named Aldina (Nadia Ottaviani), as pale with blonde hair as the Moon she will be positioned as later on, trying to return a shoe back to her after an ill advised incident her sister helped with, clutching onto throughout without any true insidious (or unintentionally insidious) aspect to his love for her, almost childlike instead as a crush. The closest thing to another prominent figure, among those displaced like he and seen throughout in reoccurring roles, is a prefect named Gonnella (Paolo Villaggio), shown initially fearing his neighbours will infect him with their old age as an older man himself, made to retire due to his mental health and believe everyone is a spy out to get him, even thinking his own son is a fake pretending to be a son. There is still a light humour, and it is still bawdy, one of the stories is that of the wife whose libido is so strong it lead to an amicable divorce from her husband, who adored the hairdresser's manicurist but could not keep up with someone so passionate the sofa starts steaming up with their embrace and hurdles on literal train lines in one of their many frequent love making rituals. Honestly, where the film was probably dismissed is how gentle it is, following characters and scenarios Ivo encounters without a sense of plot driven melodrama. Considering early in his career Fellini jettisoned plot driven stories for this template which help bring his acclaim, such as with the likes of Amarcord (1973), it does raise the sense Fellini sadly was out of time for cinema in 1990 then the film being flawed in pace or meaning.

The film looks beautiful, Fellini's trademark a baroque maximalism where depicting entire aspects of Italian culture, even its ancient past, were depicted with every detail and every extra having interest to examining them. This was all with a dream logic that explored the "texture" of his worlds whether the internal subconscious of a lead, the environment itself, or both, the gnoccata festival is a good example here. Without the loaded satire of Roma (1972) of the fashion show of priest uniforms covered in neon or riding bicycles on a catwalk, it is still over-the-top in taking the real tradition of a festival based on the food item gnocca, with a crowned gnocca Queen and even mascot costumes of gnocca royalty, done in this case as a loving nod to tradition whilst having a sense of humour.

The film does dangerously get close to Fellini looking at the modern day dismissively whilst lamenting the past, which is righteous when mocking the obsession with fancy new electronic appliances, but with music would veer into closed mindedness of an old man. Thankfully, the sequence when this comes in clearly embraced the spectacle and feels less dismissive, more the lament of everyone charging ahead in the new world without pause for the past from the perspective of those lost from before. That is the discotheque sequence, an awesome scene for Fellini's swansong, of a giant warehouse with towering reflective panelled walls that move on rails, and crowds decked in late eighties fashion. The biggest surprise, which clearly was not a musical licensing issue at all when the film was instead "lost" to lack of interest, is how he managed to get Michael Jackson's The Way You Make Me Feel, off the Bad (1987) album, a huge album and one of its singles which also happens to work perfectly for the sequence itself. The scene, where Gonnella laments the music lost in the past, thankfully does not quash the beauty of this moment, actually evoking what David Lynch does in a set piece for Wild at Heart (1990). The irony is not last as, at that Cannes Film Festival where Fellini's film was dismissed it was Lynch, who admired the filmmaker and would even befriend him, who won their most important award the Palme D'Or for that year with Wild At Heart. Both films have scenes juxtaposing wildly alien fans of a different genre of music, in Lynch's a heavy metal concept, suddenly stop and become an audience for an entirely different reality, time stopping for everything as these youths circle around a beautiful slow dance with an older woman who loved Gonnella despite he being so gone in his conspiracy theories, getting to rekindle that love over a classical piece.

And thankfully, Fellini ends his last film, before his 1993 passing, with the satirical touch he streaked his career with, as whilst politics do not necessarily appear in his films, he did prod follies in humanity continually. Two brothers, set up early on wanting to accomplish this, end up literally capturing the Moon herself at one point, and as crowds gather, priests and politicians intermingle on TV, and it is a world changing event of spiritual profoundness. What happens is that this monumental event is to be ruined by bickering, the Moon getting abuse hurled at it for no reason, and a gun being fired spoiling a profound moment. Fellini still loves humanity but gets a humour in humans being distracted by their own pettiness, rather than enjoy the things in life Ivo as many characters before him had throughout the director's other films, a fitting end to a magnificent career.

Abstract Spectrum: Dreamlike/Eerie/Whimsical

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

À l'aventure (2008)

 

Director: Jean-Claude Brisseau

Screenplay: Jean-Claude Brisseau

Cast: Carole Brana as Sandrine, Arnaud Binard as Greg, Étienne Chicot as the Taxi Driver, Jocelyn Quivrin as Fred, Lise Bellynck as Sophie, Nadia Chibani as Mina, Estelle Galarme as Françoise, Frédéric Aspisi as Jérôme

An Abstract Candidate

 

Sadrine (Carole Brana) begins with a friend on a bench where an older man sat near them on the same public furniture starts talking about their complacency as a species to act like sheep, starting her journey in self doubt which in context to how the film goes, could easily become a pretentious smut film. If my choice of words seem scathing, this will be a kinder review of À l'aventure, though viewing it as a flawed production which still is worthy of examining over and over. It is not a condemnation of erotica as a potential for art, or smut as inherently a bad thing, but in mind that this is a film by Jean-Claude Brisseau. The late French filmmaker presents a film which is doomed in nature, a film by an older cis male director making an erotic film with a female lead, which is common in the history of cinema, and made more complicated due to Brisseau's controversial real life history. A filmmaker since the seventies, I watched a film like Noce Blanche (1989) which still has erotic elements, but is a drama which focused on its characters complexities. Many will probably know him from Secret Things (2002), which was promoted in the early 2000s as a sexually explicit thriller and also begins the contentious aspect of his career. In 2005, he was found guilty in French courts for sexually harassing actresses in the auditions for that film, two actresses asked to perform explicit sexual acts during the audition process which included them being filmed, leading to him being fined and a one-year suspended jail sentence¹. This does not help scrutinise his career afterwards, especially when with The Exterminating Angels (2006), Brisseau had the gall if you condemn the man to depict his own criminal event in a speculative dissection of the incident which is sexually explicit as well. À l'aventure presents, however, something which feels drenched in ennui, presented as an erotic film where sensuality is still there, but the initial premise of Sadrine looking for the perfect orgasm, a premise from any softcore erotica, given way as a Trojan horse to existential dread. This review will not defend the man at all, but it fascinates as if the results of that criminal charge bled into this production completely.

It feels too obvious, before even watching the film and digesting it after, to just damn the production, more as even if its director presents a concern, now he marked himself for sins away from the film camera, films still present complicated psychological readings. The challenge for a man to write a woman's voice, and the perils of them doing it in a way which is potentially embarrassing, does however not ignore how intentionally (or unintentionally) write their own psychological state into any character they touch. With Jean-Claude Brisseau, this is even more of an issue, but Sadrine's lack of satisfaction with her boyfriend and routine starts as a set up for so many erotic works, sleeping with the stereotypically handsome male psychoanalysis, but feels like the work of a man drained in what he made. Even if going through the motions of erotic, it feels instead like Sadrine's sense of dissatisfaction is more than arousal, and this is also Brisseau's own, more poignant when his fascination of female sexual desire rightly got him criminated.

Whether the film itself actually succeeds is subjective, but in this case for this viewer, it is a failure from trying to be a profound about the meaning of life, as it falls into clichés, but becomes far more interesting and more rewarding as the struggle for meaning, and that pervading sense of distance a director-writer who pigeonholed himself into the stereotype of erotic cinema ended up in here. Brisseau has a type, let us be honest, of the slim intellectually beautiful woman who is bisexual in the ideal of certain cis male views, but even the male lead is an erotic ideal for him as a cis male, the ideal erotic man in Greg (Arnaud Binard), handsome and intelligent, embodying the desirable figure for this ideal woman. It is to the point he is named after actor Gregory Peck for a cineaste reference, a figure who believes in confronting conventional morality. The irony is knowing he will be skewered as a false love interest for Sadrine, and that feels on purpose, whilst Brisseau's own stand in is the older male taxi driver, who has no interest in Sadrine physically but like each other as figures wanting to talk about their place in the world. It is an erotic film which however falls back onto Brisseau's static camera takes, from cinematographer Wilfrid Sempé, of talking and Sadrine finding more insight with the aforementioned taxi driver, played by Étienne Chicot, who began her self doubts and shows more interest for her as a fully thinking figure.

It would almost be self parody in some of the scenarios here, as she encounters a submissive mistress to an open minded heterosexual couple, that indulge in cinematic light BDSM, but the idea of a restless middle class who need to escape routine is felt too, following sexual fantasies whether they can help or not. This comes with the issue of gender bias, beautiful women in the conventional idea who are intelligent on a surface level and open to all sexual scenarios as here. It becomes an issue with the figure who made this film who fell into the trap of thinking this ideal would be forced onto women, rather than how much more complex people are, and rightly got a criminal prosecution for this and thus marking all his art work with a stain we need to always point at even if we stay open minded to watching the films still. I would even accept being called a hypocrite for even watching this film or even taking some surface pleasure from it, but it comes with many details that dissect itself, becoming more than the stereotypical film of a bad filmmaker, bad in the true sense for badness as a man and not for something arbitrary as whether the dialogue makes sense, or if the film is well made. Figures, all women, are figuring themselves out existentially, be it from trauma of losing a child, or boredom and stifled sense of their purpose in life, and the mess of this take on the subject is still compelling even from a deeply failed production.

Even if objectifying a figure of desire, if figures speak at all of concerns or pains, even for humour, that can be a writer revealing more of themselves then they may realise. À l'aventure, set in the urban France of so many French films about anxiety and relationship tensions, where tellingly enlightenment comes from fleeing to the countryside, is filtered through divorces, the issue of the ideal marriage of heterosexual couples being hollow, and of how many of these characters here talk of themselves as wives or female figures being bored. The friend meant to say Sadrine's decision to ditch her job and work, drifting along in her sexual journey, is deluding herself ends up running off with an arms dealer in a romance and disappears from the film entirely, an absurd touch in the context but apt for the film. Even if the film ultimately feels like it is grasping at straws sexually and philosophically, that touches on a feeling of conventional reality being unstable from aimlessness that is one of the film's better aspects.

The fantasy the film is set up in is an issue unless you accept the inherent flaw of this particular piece of erotic trying to be serious, instead revealing itself as softcore punching above its weight but with the failed boxing blows still revealing so much more. You cannot work unless you are on the dole, or a true outsider, and there is more to even a naive writer like myself about the notion of a polyamorous relationship that, even for unrepentant and proud smut, you could work with beyond this, whilst this feels tame and falls into the problems of really hollow sexual fantasies shot for cinema that have women as the eroticised figures. But the fantasy still starts as a perfect template because of the fact it collapses, and the fantasy instead exaggerates the fixations that are uncomfortably real. Even when it looks like it is getting into a fantasy scenario that would be considered problematic and requires a lot more concern, even if transgressive to consider, about the place the willing submissive enjoys and controls the scenario as much as the dominant, the film throws the least expected curveball.

That scenario is when Greg is convinced to hypnotise the three female leads by the women themselves, which can make a viewer uncomfortable especially as erotica has the fantasy of mind control and hypnosis, frankly with the issues right to consider about whether it is a healthy scenario to imagine depending on the context. À l'aventure however completely undercuts this. Even if these turns in this type of world cinema I got into from DVD can be the moments which lose viewers as ridiculous, I am always happy when I get what I was not expecting from such films. It is set up that one figure Mina (Nadia Chibani) is susceptible to hypnosis, to the point a coin on her arm when told is hot does leave a real burn, leading into the supernatural crushing this fantasy as she starts to bring up past memories and past lives into what was meant to just be softcore. What was a set up to the sexual fantasy involving all three women turns into a work of figures trying to figure themselves out, accidentally prodding a hole in reality, and Greg making an ill advised attempt to explore this hole that just causes damage. All because he was not prepared to not go into the experiment and went in cluelessly, especially when people start to levitate off the floor in a real miracle.

The philosophical ideas of our repetition and sense of infinite are not original and of depth here, which would become an albatross if a viewer took this film to be a take on existentialism in a really detailed form, but even this abrupt turn in a plot is a surprise, including the one nod to a very contentious subject in French culture when Mima remembers an incident from Algeria in the past, talking of a horrible tragedy she caught the results of when too young to process it. Even the idea, if caught in the issues of Brisseau himself as a compromised artist, of the sexual ecstasy being linked fully to the spiritual is a compelling theory to think of, even if it ends here instead in disaster, those not prepared for the real force beyond their process, and Sadrine realising her ideal erotic man in Greg is not the person she can ever feel fullness as a person from. Ultimately the sex becomes unrewarding, more of a choreographed scenario by the end of this, which is pretty damning for a film that would have been sold on sex, leaving on a beautiful countryside field and discussing how people live in such little time of reality for what has been a millennia plus of the Earth's existence. Eroticism still plays a part in Brisseau's work, but it feels as if it is slowly ebbing away here, burnt by his own controversies of his career but also feeling like it confined him, none of which is a defence of the man in the damndest, but with the sense here the struggle came to the screen in a compelling way.

Abstract Spectrum: Introspective

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

=====

1) French Director Found Guilty Of Sexual Harassment, written for Movie Mail and published December 20th 2005. Archived for the Web Archive on April 26th 2014.