Thirst (2009)

Director: Park Chan-Wook

Screenplay: Park Chan-wook and Jeong Seo-kyeong

Inspired by Thérèse Raquin by Émile Zola

Cast: Song Kang-ho as Fr. Sang-hyun, Kim Ok-bin as Tae-ju, Kim Hae-sook as Mrs. Ra, Shin Ha-kyun as Kang-woo, Park In-hwan as Fr. Roh, Song Young-chang as Seung-dae, Oh Dal-su as Young-du

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

When I think about what helped me become a huge cineaste, the 2009 Cannes Film Festival was a huge turning point for this among other factors, a strong line up in terms of just the competition when I took interest in reading the coverage. That festival had the infamous Lars von Trier film Antichrist, and Gaspar Noe's Enter the Void, had acclaimed films likes Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, Jacques Audiard's A Prophet and the eventual Palme D'or winner for that year, Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon. There are also the other fascinating films in the official selection, not even factoring in the other screening categories for awards or not, such as Hong Kong film maker Johnnie To collaborating with French actor/singer Johnny Hallyday on Vengeance, or Thirst, Park Chan-Wook making his way from the acclaimed Oldboy (2004), part of a trilogy on vengeance which premiered at Cannes, into a vampire film.

Chan-Wook, a decade later, has had a strong career, The Handmaiden (2016) another huge film alongside a career with a divisive American production (Stoker (2013)) that are mandatory, but also something I would have never had predicted on the bingo card when I first saw films like Thirst, a BBC mini-series called The Little Drummer Girl (2018) based on a John le Carré novel. Thirst comes from a time before this where I vividly remember Western audiences asking themselves what he would do next now the then-completed Vengeance trilogy had ended. Chan-Wook was helped considerably by the wave of interest in Asian cinema, including South Korean, that came in the early 2000s, and whilst the middle film of this eventual trilogy, Oldboy was the film which caught attention and could have won the Palme D'Or in 2004, the unofficial Vengeance trilogy as a whole was what was on peoples' minds especially when he finished it, starting with Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002) and ending with Lady Vengeance (2005). Before Thirst was I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK (2006), a divisive but necessary move into a comedy with melancholic edges about a young woman in a mental hospital because she thinks she is a cyborg. Thirst took a further direction in being a horror film whose erotic and violent love plot centers on a Catholic priest Fr. Sang-hyun (Song Kang-ho) being turned into a vampire. It was a step confidently forwards, whilst absolutely staying as idiosyncratic as I remembered it even in terms of its sudden switches to comedy.

Kang-ho's priest Sang-hyun goes to a research lab tackling a near-if-not-fully fatal disease, and is the one man who survives as a willing test subject. He finds himself meeting a childhood friend as a result of his miraculous recovery, one whose adopted member and wife of this male friend, Tae-ju (Kim Ok-bin), is treated like trash by the mother. This is all in mind his survival comes due to a blood transfer of his involving vampiric blood and that he has fallen in love with Tae-ju; when he changes fully into his new form, alongside the taste for blood, so does the subtext of a man who lived his faith only to be drawn to earthly pleasures. It feels less like an anti-religious film, before one asks, but explicitly riffing on the French novel Thérèse Raquin by Émile Zola, his fight against his own Catholicism part of the psychodrama that this film has, one which just happens to involve vampirism, where it becomes the catalyst for both power but an unquenchable thirst.

The title is perfect for its themes where we sympathetic with our two leads who fall in love but see them slip into a downward spiral confusing between sensual pleasure and needing to murder the son, all amongst the reasons for a growing body count. It is a tangled web where Tae-ju was treated terribly by the mother, overprotective of her hypochondriac adult son, tormented to the point that, when power comes to her in her romance with Sang-hyun, simply running at night to avoid contemplating the son's murder is not enough. Even if she does love Sang-hyun, the tragedy is still there are the film escalates, and here I also have to credit co-writer Jeong Seo-kyeong who became a frequent collaborator from his final Vengeance film onwards, Lady Vengeance (2005). She is arguably a huge factor for the turn of his films from then on, as she worked with him on films like The Handmaiden to Decision To Leave (2022),. She could been seen as a huge catalyst for where his career would go in-between projects with other writers, alongside how she became acclaimed in South Korea for her work as a screenwriter not only his films.

The complexity has grown in this film when having returned to it. Faith exists but if you struggle with your emotions, you will suffer the infernal war, and that is not helped when you've been turned into a vampire that ramps up this war. Song Kang-ho plays his character as a priest that even to the end, when he has killed in horrible ways, is struggling with his real morals as a good person, neither helped that people close to him turn around him at his lowest. Even the priest who raised him spiritually, who willingly slices a wrist to feed him and listens with concern for his vampiric issues, just wants to be turned into one due to a life blinded in the eyes. Tae-ju too, whilst loving him dearly, has been twisted by her situation to effectively use him to get power in her household. It is a great performance from Kang-ho, but that it isn't a surprise, whilst Kim Ok-bin goes between sympathetic, disturbing and, when she becomes a vampire with the makeup and costume upgrade to match, devilish in a compelling way.

Reading the synopsis to Zola's Thérèse Raquin, a surprising amount of the narrative was transferred, a film like Zola's story about studying temperaments of its cast, even when it is reinterpreted in humorous ways here like the dead refusing to leave their murderers' lives even when it comes to the coital bed. Sensuality here is a vibrant, explosive act even in the joys of kissing bruises from self flagellation for sinful thoughts to toe and armpit sucking, the eroticism on display here something that would return significantly with The Handmaiden. The tonal flip-flops make sense in mind to this presentation of these complicated characters in terms of morals and their emotions, a melodrama between comedy and extreme violence for a film that was a huge hit back in its native South Korea. The emotional mind field here is what is central to the story, whilst the horror premise becomes itself the stylization, yet to the production's credit, how this is depicted still stands out. The plasticity of the special effects, in terms of depicting Sang-hyun being able to leap tall buildings and even crawl on walls, is great because it doesn't try to ground the unnatural power he now has. It has a major part to the emotions, like punching a lamppost in half in anger, or the least expected and abrupt neck break in the final act, and the tone of scenes alongside the bloodshed itself befits this hyper-stylized tone to the drama.

Winning the Jury Prize at that Cannes Film Festival where the film premiered, Park Chan-Wook didn't really have to worry in regards to his career after this, and from the strong acclaim he got from his earlier films in 2000s, he has continued on with a healthy career. Thirst itself would have stood out of interest for me just for the fact it was a director not known for horror tackling the subject, catnip for me for what he would bring differently to this area of cinema. Revisiting it this year again, a lot of that different and the surprise in the best of ways is what makes Thrist still a strong film, of tawdry, explosive passion and violence by way of its horror theming.

She's Allergic to Cats (2016)

 

Director: Michael Reich

Screenplay: Michael Reich

Cast: Mike Pinkney as Mike pinkney; Sonja Kinski as Cora; Flula Borg as Sebastian; Veronika Dash as Nancy; Honey Davis as Honey

An Abstract Candidate

 

What, demon cats you’re saying?

Made like a modern, multimedia anxiety, Mike pinkney (Mike Pinkney) is a young man living in Hollywood, wanting to make films and creating video art lamenting his life in his spare time, having to make his income by grooming dogs for celebrities. He also wants to remake Brian De Palma’s Carrie (1976) with cats, i.e. not some unholy musical hybrid from the Andrew Lloyd Webber work with an anthropomorphic John Travolta, but recasting Sissy Spacek with a Persian cat. Obviously, there is a post-ironic absurdity to the proceedings, but director-writer Michael Reich’s film is a chronicle of a mental breakdown, even if it is clear there is humour to this with a prolonged scene dealing with squeezing the anal glands of dogs, which viewers will have to sit through real examples of. Salvation is offered for Mike by a female client named Cora (Sonja Kinski), an assistant to Mickey Rourke’s daughter, who has as chemistry with him and decide to go on a date. He is coasting in existence however, and the rat infestation in his home he needs to deal with before she arrives for date night requires drastic action.

It is tinged with a sarcasm, where his producer is more concerned, when pitched the Carrie remake, that he has never heard of the original film nor the Stephen King novel, but the film undercuts this with moments of the sinister, such as this figure named Sebastian (Flula Borg) suddenly start to talk like a demon at the racquetball court. The best comparison is the “Infomercials” produced and screened by Adult Swim, the adult targeted programming block broadcast by the American basic cable channel Cartoon Network, where they produced works which are meant to be absurd, but with entries like Too Many Cooks (2014) cutting the jokes with conclusions which eventually get into horror. This is more psychodrama in mode, yet the same rules apply, where there is a serious subject in its centre, but there is a prolonged scene, to cause awkwardness, in the locker room afterwards with a man’s bared penis in the centre of shot. There is this sense of bordering on being funny but too weird to laugh is a constant factor here, both to cringe and feel disjointed. This juxtaposition of tonal whiplash does fit the breakdown in Mike, and whilst this cannot afford showing scenes of Carrie, the obvious metaphor of another Travolta film The Boy in the Plastic Bubble (1976), a made-for-TV film in which, born with immune system issues, Travolta plays a young man who has had to live in a n incubator-like conditions, represents the sense Mike is trapped in his own world even if this plays to deadpan absurdity. The tragedy is there even when he laments at multiple points that he no longer has bananas because the rats ate them.

In structure, this is equivalent of a short story, where the choice which will doom him is a tiny one which is magnified, that he decides to “borrow” from his employment a cat Rosemary to hunt the rats, a cat dubbed vicious by a colleague. What happens in reality is openly stated in the title of the film, the source of where things will go wrong, but the build is more character driven. At first Cora seems to be someone who may be entirely in his own head, as at first her face is mostly obscured on purpose to suggest something is amiss. She is revealed, when clearly a real person, as someone with a complicated psychological back-story of her own, with the shock if you know who Sonja Kinski’s family tree is adding something even unintentionally. The daughter of acclaimed actress Natasha Kinski, thus Sonja Kinski is also the granddaughter of the acclaimed and notorious Klaus Kinski, as known for his off-screen personality (with director Werner Herzog especially) as much as onscreen; whilst this should not cast a shadow over the proceedings, this befits a family which have had distinct and idiosyncratic filmographies between them, and her proper introduction does add a lot more to the film considerably. 

Once Kinski appears and allows Mike Pinkney to interact in their characters, this film despite playing up to ironic wackiness also at the same time becomes a short story toned piece about alienation, based on events that have no basis in producing plot incident but delving into the characters. Sadly it does involves a joke on the lost dog poster that plays a plot point, about transgender people which has no aged well at all, the one real blight on the film as an ironic joke than done to question a character even writing that on the poster looking for the dog. Beyond this however, everything involving said dog, a missing pug named Karma, is without issue, a catalyst for the depth this starts to bring in when the dog makes an onscreen appear. This passage about Karma, when found by the leads, is a shift in drama. It allows these characters to show their own disconnect issues as they, trying to get the dog back to its owner, end up together talking when they decide to break in to complete this virtuous mission, including Cora’s tale as a child of teaching baby ducks to swim in a paddling pool which has a disconcerting end to where the narrative finishes.

It is here where the ironic humour, needing knowledge of pop culture of the YouTube poop video or the Nostalgia Critic, may help appreciate the film, as the man we never see and whose home they break into has a DVD collection entirely about talking animals. I have also found, however, having little context adds to certain works, in context, when even if the references have no grounded form, they became part of the tapestry. The discussion on Howard the Duck (1986) alone is weird, about a topless female duck humanoid with breasts, before you even realise that was a real scene, a brief moment, in a film produced by George Lucas just after the first Star Wars films. Even as the central couple are discussing that real ducks do not have nipples, it is contextually about people who are surrounded by this pop culture and trying to gauge their growing romance underneath this construct. In terms of actual pop culture with meaning for myself, it was actually amusing Congo (1995) is an integral work to an emotional beat, at least as held up as a stolen DVD by Kinski in the rain, especially as I do like that film for its flaws.

Interlacing video layered footage together with this drama also leads a disconcerting edge to Allergic..., especially as it plays to using digital artifice and VHS flaws. The aspect involving the cats and the dog grooming footage, evoking Everything is Terrible!'s DoggieWoggiez! PoochieWoochiez! (2012) in layering footage, is clearly absurd as much as playing to cute animal videos; the Carrie remake is shown, with the famous bucket of blood scene recreated ,by a cat getting the pig’s blood on her through a homemade image layering video project. As Michael’s breakdown continues, and everything is going to end in tears, the more this is involved, including the suggestion of people being possessed by cats, this artifice increasing more and more to the breaking point. That is not including scenes, posing the lead actors or layering, which juxtapose them to ordinary likes art pieces, surreal for the sake of this, but with at least the creative spark with the choices, especially as we are factoring in, in the editing, they represent the thoughts and anxieties of Mike our lead trying to get on with life, slowly becoming more weird and loosing grip with these images exhibiting this. She’s Allergic to Cats will be an acquired taste, undeniably kooky and accused for doing it on purpose to the detriment of the film’s tone, such as a gag of Michael literally falling face first into dog faeces, but the humour is laced with a discontent which becomes more pronounced as the film eventually finishes, not with a bang, but a literal meow.

Abstract Spectrum: Disturbing/Eccentric/Ironic/Wacky

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

Dream No Evil (1970)

 

Director: John Hayes

Screenplay: John Hayes

Cast: Edmond O'Brien as Timothy MacDonald; Brooke Mills as Grace MacDonald; Vickie Schreck as young Grace; Marc Lawrence as the Undertaker; Michael Pataki as Reverend Paul Jessie Bundy; Paul Prokop as Patrick Bundy; Arthur Franz as John the County Psychiatrist; Donna Anders as Shirley; William Guhl as Sheriff Mike Pender

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Err Shirley, your duck is bleeding very badly.

From John Hayes - a working director whose career varied between World War II set action films to adult movies - Dream No Evil is part of a stint of horror films he made in the seventies, and is a woozy and idiosyncratic one you can happily slot among the many from the seventies. Arguably something like this, upon revisiting it, explains why I have felt ambivalence at times to the period of "elevated horror" movies from the 2010s on, or the late 2000s on films from figures like Ti West, christened auteurs but at times never capturing the unpredictability even a Dream No Evil possesses even when it has some obvious plot tropes front and centre.

Grace (Brooke Mills), in the prologue, is an orphaned child adopted into a church who, searching for her father, works with her future brother-in-law as an adult when he has taken it over and turned it into a travelling faith healing show, she part of a carnival stunt of her falling off a giant ladder for his preaching. With John Hayes having written the script as well, this becomes a proper creative piece for a genre and he emphasises a slow burner, set up with Jessie (Michael Pataki) the dubious preacher brother-in-law and her fiancée, a doctor who is developing a relationship with a female colleague where he is working from, all whilst Grace's story is one of reality fading away. From here, the film is peculiar, the narrator in particular an idiosyncratic touch as an inclusion, like this was a horror story for a TV show, far from a critique but tonally setting up the tone.

The biggest flaw is that you know what this twist is, that the narrator even gives it away early on bluntly, without hiding it, as Grace rescues her father from the morgue table but is unsure of reality. That the film has the narrator not hide this clearly emphasises that this, however, is of the least importance. The film's emphasis is on different priorities, as it takes a long passage of time to get to the central premise, but not without having used this time to spend it with the cast. It allows them to breathe until Grace is set on course by an undertaker with a second job as a pimp, whose older sex workers are catering to elderly men, the rumour her father having passed undercut when he gets up off the morgue table and gets a scalpel as an offensive weapon.

It takes forty minutes of an eighty minute film to reach this, but it is worth it, especially as it is clear the film realised the twist was obvious even without the narrator, working around it in both the drama before this point, and afterwards with its strange melodrama between reality and dream. The obviousness of the plot twist comes in mind that, even when it is explicitly dealt with onscreen, that it was clearly not the point as a film still goes on and even Grace herself debates this, questioning her father at one point for being an illusion. Instead what prove the apparent filler is the concern, such as the extended scenes of the fiancée trying to get a tired and strung out female colleague woken up to go to an important exam, character building where even the landlady who is there for that sole scene gets a lot to build herself with. That this is ultimately a tragedy, of what happens to Grace even if this follows genre trappings, including someone getting a scythe in the torso, is itself the most important thing to consider, this ultimately a bleak drama at its heart where we see someone unravel, a story John Hayes wanted to tell and the genre trappings far from undercutting this emphasises this central aspect. Dream No Evil, which has thankfully been re-evaluated and made more readily available, is among a lot of films which have had these characteristics, but together it really emphasises the worth of that older era of genre films from American independents when any, like this one, can shine.

The Driver's Seat (1974)

 

a.k.a. Identikit

Director: Giuseppe Patroni Griffi

Screenplay: Giuseppe Patroni Griffi and Raffaele La Capria

Based on the novella by Muriel Spark

Cast: Elizabeth Taylor as Lise; Ian Bannen as Bill; Guido Mannari as Carlo; Mona Washbourne as Mrs. Helen Fiedke; Luigi Squarzina as Lead Detective; Maxence Mailfort as Pierre; Andy Warhol as the English Lord

An Abstract Candidate

 

But orgasms are yang!

The Driver’s Seat, when I first heard of this film adaptation, was presented as a bizarre folly¹, something camp which is arguably deliberate when you get to Bill (Ian Bannen) and his macrobiotic diet. However there is so much more here, now you are in an era where the film can be seen in pristine form as intended than a bootleg¹, that is disarming on purpose, comedy there but morbid and, against the eerie nature inherent to many Italian productions in how they were made, a dread clinging to this. There is a perverse humour to our lead Lise (Elizabeth Taylor), on her way to Italy, meeting an older woman who asks which pulp novel is the more “sadomasochistic” for preference, one of the few moments, including her recounting in delight reading her lawyer son’s records on crimes, which is not from the source text but not out of place from the novella’s tone. The corpse humour however leads into the tale of Lise herself, a woman on a knife edge who is after the perfect man on her trip, but not for a clear reason until it is too late, especially as it has flash forwards when it is seen that Lise will be dead and the police will be trying to figure out what happened.

It is a befitting film from an author, Muriel Spark, who literature could be uncomfortable. She wrote stories which could be also whimsical in their tone whilst nonetheless posing moments which undercut it – The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) flashes past the lives (and abrupt deaths) of a troupe of teenage girls forming a cult around a female teacher whose liberal attitude is however cut by her ego and passion for Mussolini – and for the bleakness of the story’s final reveal, The Driver’s Seat has its own idiosyncrasies which blur the lines between funny and dark too.. All set in the (real life) tense situation of kidnappings, crime and terrorism in Italy, a vague location in the novella given flesh by the production at an incredibly turbulent period in modern Italy, where random outbreaks of crime even happen here in the airport, Lise is on a mysterious goal to find the right man. There is a wit, but with an aura where everyone is apparently afraid of Taylor’s Lise, you have a lead who is not likable on the surface, with a hair trigger temper over anything from a glass left in a hotel room which a dissolvable aspirin to stainless dresses, but is also someone who is visibly on a trajectory in a fragile state. It is great performance you could dismiss as camp except it has the layers of the film helping enrich Taylor’s acting. Take the first scene, more disarming in a location where feminine mannequins in the shop have a foil-like material wrapped around their heads like a crime scene; her temper at a stainless dress which causes upset is absurd until you see how Lise continues, and how her fear of “stainless” fabric is meaningful as the secrets are unlocked. Considering, as in the novella, her behavior is as much to get attention, from her over-the-top and multicolored clothes to her responses to people, like kicking a fuss at the airport security, then Taylor’s performance is appropriately heightened.

Some of this is gleefully absurd, taken from the novel for the most part. The touches the film add work, such as the novel Lise carries being something specific here - Richard Neely's The Walter Syndrome (1970), one of many pulp crime books from this period that causes one to think director/co-writer Giuseppe Patroni Griffi, or the co-screenwriter/novelist Raffaele La Capria, wanted to parody the giallo boom in Italian culture and cinema, as well as feel absolutely right for the twist that centers Lise's plans, as a murder mystery about a killer. The decision to emphasis the political turmoil the novella is set, by placing it in Italy, where we see an attempted kidnapping at the airport, and an ambassador for an Arabian King having their car blown up in the street, fits contextually for the time period and fits how the novel, while vaguer, nods to this period in general for the political strife too. Other passages are entirely from the book if enriched in the film, especially in the case of Bill.

The “macrobiotic diet” was a concept developed by Sagen Ishizuka, and codified by George Ohsawa, the later a Japanese educator who also drew from Zen Buddhism with its ideas of ying and yang being balanced by what you ate, which means it does have a streak of non-scientific New Age to it in concept. Even the most ultra cynical disapprover of alternative medical diets, like Penn Jillette, would be in Ohsawa’s corner, mortified, if they saw a real life representative of the macrobiotic diet like Bill, one of the many sexually predatory men from the novella who try to force themselves onto Lise aggressively, which requires a trigger warning but is in mind, in the end, she is the one in control making them look fools. The difference between the version of Bill in the book and this version is that Scottish actor Ian Bannen really adds so much to make him stand out, the first shot perfect as Bannen’s entrance fully gets the character over, looking lustfully at Lise on an airplane with a literal comparison to Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother wanting to eat her thrown back at him. Believing in a mandatory orgasm a day, ignoring the existence of masturbation, and that two in one day would cause him indigestion, alongside his habit of carrying tiny plastic bags of unpolished rice on his persons in a way suspiciously like he was smuggling cocaine into Italian soil, he is a cruel parody of New Age figures from this era. He is however also a perfect centre to the reoccurring aspect of Taylor’s Lise, as an older woman, among libidinous men trying to get a woman (even by force) despite Lise with no desire for sex, barring one scene by herself, but for a different goal.

The film leans on the police investigating the case more than the book, a crime thriller touch that does not neuter Spark’s novel but feels the same way legitimately, like Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970) by Elio Petri, as a way to emphasis the complex psychology at hand when other characters can present fragments of images of Lise. Yes there is plenty here which does scream “cult” – Andy Warhol cameos as a vague character from the book, a lord who Lise briefly fixates on, Warhol there at the right time, aptly around the time when his name presented the Italian shot Flesh for Frankenstein/Blood for Dracula (1973) films by Paul Morrissey, and also a perfect choice in hindsight for the tone, even in terms of an English lord clearly played by an artist from Pittsburgh in his pure white hair and suit. There is however so much here which a level above, even for a film streaked in camp, that is incredibly well made, a huge factor to the proceedings being Vittorio Storaro as the cinematographer. Set in modern environments, with a large portion of the film in septic white and alien-looking shopping malls, Storaro adds so much by himself in showing this fascinating but sterile world where Lise literally is the most colorful detail within them. It is a film which, like so many idiosyncratic productions particularly with the sixties and seventies, came but seemingly became lost to time, with no actual British release for the film until a 2023 British Film Institute Blu-Ray for a debut. It will confound a few viewers but feels too precise to dismiss. Certainly it makes a legitimate argument, from a figure of the golden age of Hollywood starlets both in terms of her own screen roles but the gossip around her life, that Elizabeth Taylor was both a great actress but one with this entire deeply unconventional period in her filmography – next to Boom (1968) and Secret Ceremony (1968 too) in terms of deeply unconventional films she controls – that is ripe for dissection.

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric / Psychodrama

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

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1) Elizabeth Taylor's Craziest Role: 'The Driver's Seat' aka. 'Identikit', by Richard Metzger for Dangerous Minds, published 24th March 2011.

Vertigo (1958)

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Screenplay: Alec Coppel and Samuel Taylor

Based on the novel D'entre les morts by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac

Cast: James Stewart as John "Scottie" Ferguson; Kim Novak as Madeleine Elster; Tom Helmore as Gavin Elster; Barbara Bel Geddes as Marjorie "Midge" Wood

 

Vertigo was once a critically maligned film from Alfred Hitchcock only to grow into one of his most critically lauded, so much so it knocked off Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (1941) from the top spot of the Sight & Sound magazine poll for greatest film ever made in 2012. That was not exactly an easy achievement to have completed when Citizen Kane was number one before it for five plus decade, and the fact Vertigo has gained this stature is both an achievement but also strange for me when viewing the film. Vertigo is a true one-off deserving to have done this, but it is a difficult film to digest, one which is possible to criticise for being too languid, too obvious and at times too stripped of Hitchcock's precise, expert filmmaking, even having something the director himself considered a plot flaw in how reliant the protagonist’s acrophobia would be for the plot the succeed¹. It is also justifiable to champion, even if it involves digging into his own psyche at the same time as a filmmaker, for how alien, disquieting and hypnotic as a film it is. The premise is one perfect for a Hitchcock thriller: when he develops acrophobia and vertigo at heights, San Francisco detective John "Scottie" Ferguson (James Stewart) is forced to retire from his career, but is asked by an old friend to follow his wife Madeleine Elster (Kim Novak) under the belief she has been possessed by one of her late ancestors. The results of taking this job lead to Scotty becoming detached from reality chasing after a woman he falls in love with, one who might not be all she seems. This however leads to a very different result, an unnerving melodrama with vaguely Gothic tinges.

You have to accept a lot of poetic license. That Scotty's vertigo is a MacGuffin. That a major plot twist is shown earlier than it would in any other film, and very obvious if you are attuned to these types of plots, turning the rest of the movie into a type of psycho-dramatic character piece that roots itself into a direction detached from the rational. If you "get" Vertigo's tone and appreciate its crafted elegance, however, it is an unnerving film about psychological breakdown and neurosis, the plot crux more to do with the emotions of two characters, Scottie and Madeleine, who become more emotionally disconnected from reality and pull the rest of the film with them into their heightened worlds. For the moments of lightness that take place, screwball comedy with Scottie's friend and ex-fiancée Midge Wood (Barbara Bel Geddes), who still loves him, most of the film is connected to Scottie almost entirely, onscreen for most of the film in the centre during his descent into dark obsession.  When the film shifts to its second half, the already mentioned plot twist which would usually happen at the end of another thriller is suddenly revealed halfway through with half the film left, leaving Vertigo in uncharted waters where one is disturbed by Scottie's increasingly erratic behaviour after he is briefly hospitalised.

Passages of Hitchcock's career have this film's tone, an odd supernatural or psychological murkiness. Rebecca (1940) is an obvious cornerstone of supernatural melodrama, even Under Capricorn (1949) expressing his interest into slow burn dramas based on hidden neurosis. However even the dream sequence in Spellbound (1945) is safeguarded by the fact, despite being designed by Salvador Dali, that it is a dream whilst Vertigo, despite also having a dream sequence, is entirely in the vague and mysterious. In Vertigo the characters are drawn along narratively by emotions and unseen forces, not elaborate plots of other Hitchcock films, locations such as flower shops, woodlands and a mission called Mission San Juan Bautista all becoming imbued with ghosts of many forms, literally in an image at the ending in the bell tower of the mission. The use of striking colour especially adds to this. Made in the height of Hollywood's Technicolor era, the film is striking in its aesthetic and use of San Francisco locations, but it is especially when you get to the interiors this stands out. Those scenes emphasises the ghostly air from the red walls of a restaurant that is repeatedly entered by the characters and the reoccurrence of the colour green in the second half which purges the world into a sickly obsessive form. It is a deeply perverse film in its themes, carefully dictated by Stewart and Novak, between them managing to keep the film's tone in the right groove, despite the visible age difference, Stewart able to switch himself from the stereotypically jovial and charming man he is seen as in cinema to someone almost shell shocked or a walking comatose, while Novak also has to juggle a complicated role when the film pans out in the end.

Shot in said lush Technicolor by director of photography Robert Burks, a regular collaborator with Hitchcock into the early sixties, Vertigo is as much able to work because the aesthetic of classic Hollywood that the story is depicted through, especially when this takes the studio system style of Hollywood, always evoking for me the sense of the elaborate and stylish, literally the "Dream Factory" creating dreamy films even when shot on location, and undercut it with this tale of obsession. The rear-screen projection for actors driving cars to the colour palettes now become unintentional tools for creating heightened dreams, here becoming more and more unsettling as this narrative of a love for a construct continues. The San Francisco locations, especially the gorgeous panoramas of the sprawling metropolis, add a sense of scale, keeping a Gothic tone for the plot but setting it in a modernist urban environment. Another big contribution to the film is Bernard Hermann's orchestral score, the drama contained in it solidifying the characters' emotions as a lush but far-from-generic score, adding further to the mysterious air surrounding all Scottie encounters and does. That it can switch from the legitimately romantic to the disturbed, and you can pick up the difference in the orchestral instruments and the notes they play, is evidence of its success as a score.

The most openly unconventional aspects of Vertigo are specially created animated sequences. The first is the opening credits by Saul Bass, the title emerging from a woman's eye in extreme close-up, the very modern design of Bass' work for Hitchcock still to this day incredible for their craft but also unique compared to modern title designs still, the use of colour and shape. They become almost avant-garde especially as the credits do not portray anything that takes place in the movie but sets up an unnerving mood it has. The other is the mid-film dream sequence designed by abstract artist John Ferren that takes the same route, flower petals spiralling outward and a figure falling into the void, one of the most iconic images of Hitchcock's career being James Steward's disembodied head staring straight at the viewer which comes from this sequence. It is an iconic image as he is sucked into a mental abyss of his own psyche that he is chained to for the rest of the narrative. It aptly sets up the emotional shock, in the series of events that set up the second half, which will turn Scottie drastically.

Barring its style, including the innovative depiction of Scottie's vertigo, a distortion of our perception as well as his as it is always in first person, cinematic space growing in size without any seemingly actual movement, the rest of the film's unconventional tone is internal. Alfred Hitchcock was a Hollywood director who made commercial films, his auteurism coming from how clear and involved in their craft he was from the get-go of each production, but Vertigo does reach its tendrils into the expressionistic, with its languid pace, in that it is all induced and affected by its characters' minds. When it gets to the second half as Scottie meets another woman similar to Madeleine, the ghosts of the first half change from historical ones to psychological baggage of sexual and gender issues. About a man's memory and view of others becoming distorted and affected as he tries to control and groom this second woman to be Madeleine, Hitchcock was completely blunt about the sexual meaning of this in his interviews with Francois Truffaut, even going as far as say that Scottie was “indulging in a form of necrophilia”², but there is as well the notion of idealism and how it can become poisoned is noticeable. It also cannot be denied that, to an uncomfortable degree after this with his problematic history with Tippi Hedren, Hitchcock himself had blatantly obvious fixations on the idealised woman, and whether he can be defended as an artist for this or not, Vertigo becomes a text unintentionally, but with greater weight, in seeing obsession as a concept for the perfect woman be dissected by its plot.

[Spoiler warning. Skip italicized text if you do not want the film to be spoilt for you]

Adding to this is knowing the woman Scottie is obsessed with is a mere image, a fake stand-in for his friend's real wife in a twist Italian giallo filmmakers would have ran with. The woman he loves manages to die twice in fact, his love only existing for the form of Madeleine, wearing a certain flower, a certain way to their blonde hair style tied up in the back, a certain grey suit dress designed for the film by Edith Head, and an image created based on the real wife, the individual Kim Novak's character actually is and Carlotta Valdes, the ancestor Madeleine is said to be possessed by, amalgamated together. The image of femininity he adored is a mere picture, while the stand-in who promises to love him is rejected for admitting how she is not the Madeleine he wanted and that she was used to trick him into a murder scheme. The "abstract" I am obsessed with in cinema, how I use the word, is as much about the questioning of subjective reality, and the theme of Vertigo of an idealised image, a beautiful woman, being both impossible to be reach and not even existing is a good example of this type of questioning, when the symbols of femininity for Scottie not the woman herself is what he desires. As an entertainment film, this makes the film a cautious tale of this obsession, and that the film is as languid as it is befits this.

[Spoiler ends]

Whilst there would be a film later on which is stranger than this in tone - The Birds (1963) even as a monster film is more stranger and chilling in the baggage it evokes - Vertigo is haunting as an entertainment feature, and as art, because its conceit is about the image one has overtaking reality as Scotty is chasing after a phantom in many a sense. This comes with mind as I have had to gradually warm to Vertigo over the times I have seen it. It does meander significantly halfway through, noticeably slower in pace to other Hitchcock films, and that makes it a film whose acclaim is fascinating in that it shows visible flaws in plotting and pacing that cannot be denied. It possesses something which overcomes this, even if it is unnerving, even before the Sight & Sound polls, back when the film was not readily available to see, causing someone like Brian De Palma to openly riff on the same theme of perception in Obsession (1976), the title spelling out the themes openly. Film critics dug into this film when it was more readily available to see, and what virtues the film has - its performances, the music, the aesthetic style - make what would be a hammy melodrama at points in another's hands enticing as it is disconcerting.

 

Abstract Spectrum: Expressionist / Mind Bender/ Weird

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

 

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1) Truffaut, François (1985). Hitchcock/Truffant, Revised Edition. First Touchstone Book Edition. Pg. 247.

2) Truffaut, François (1985). Hitchcock/Truffant, Revised Edition. First Touchstone Book Edition. Pg. 244.

The Bedroom (1992)

 

a.k.a. Unfaithful Wife: Shameful Torture

Director: Hisayasu Satô

Screenplay: Shirô Yumeno

Cast: Kiyomi Itô as Kyoko; Momori Asano as Ai; Kyôko Nakamura as Kinue

An Abstract Candidate

 

Lasting only an hour, this film within the pinku erotic genre is clearly less interested in erotica in a titillating way, but as a theme, about obsession. A woman is our central figure, Kyoko (Kiyomi Itô), whose sister has died under tragic circumstances. Leaving a mystery she wishes to solve about the death, Kyoko before the film starts has already joined a club where, as a willing participant, women are hired to take sleeping pills and let themselves be sleeping beauties for male clients sexually in sessions.

As erotica, from the get-go, this is tonally more ethereal, a mood piece about sexual desire, where for certain scenes the harsh reds, pinks and blues feel apt for the tone as do the scenes of septic white living spaces. There is going to be content here that will make people uncomfortable in content, about playing to faked non-consensual scenarios, but it is something distinct as a tale of a woman who, investigating this mystery, is also trying to figure out her own self. Kyoko also loves a husband who may even be a fake one, desires him, only to feel no love back, and the loss of her sister intermingling within this context adds to the psychological schisms which grow to plague her as the film progresses in narrative. From here, it goes into this weird club of men with curious fetishes and willing dolls, even with Kyoko not taking the sleeping pills and becoming a fully willing participant, even if one female member died of an overdose on the job of these pills, a factor which adds a suspicion of those involved.

These do include kinks which are less extreme but follows a theme of ennui felt in society, where the husband is taking the same type of sleeping pills himself due to stress of his ICT job. It is a malaise leaving men with obsessions of photographing these women to one man who likes oiling people up, which in context is sensual, belying how this is tackling taboos with a neutral stance. These is however the most notorious scene here too, the one which may raise concern, of a client fixated with biting playing by Issei Sagawa. Sagawa is a choice of a scene's casting which is shocking, as he was a notorious figure convicted in France in 198 for an incredibly disturbing case, the murder of Renée Hartevelt in Paris which also involved cannibalism among its many disturbing aspects. He was deemed mentally unfit for trial, but would be eventually able to return back to his own country in the later part of the eighties, which was incredibly controversial, with a growing morbid celebrity he was developing back home and in France itself. It is the one moment which could be seen as morally problematic in casting him, though considering he even became a food critic for the Japanese magazine Spa, you can entirely blame certain pop culture being ghouls too. It is balanced as well as the fact that as a figure whose notoriety ebbed away, the seeming ability Sagawa had to continue as a free man became a curse for him due to how he developed this celebrity fed reputation, until dying in on the 24th November 2022.  Director Hisayasu Satô, whose career in pinku ranged between transgression (Lolita Vibrator Torture (1987)) to explicit homoerotic themes and subject matter (Bondage Ecstasy (1989)) is someone who clearly used pinku cinema to tackle taboos and thinking of his films beyond titillation, so the casting whilst eyebrow raising is clearly in mind to someone who was being provocative in this casting choice even if one with hindsight which may have been a step too far.

The Bedroom is fascinating even beyond this as an esoteric mood piece, apt from its aforementioned director Hisayasu Satô. Alongside Kazuhiro Sano, Toshiki Satō and Takahisa Zeze, he is one of "Four Heavenly Kings of Pink", he was among the group acclaimed in pinku cinema but as explicitly experimental figures. The eroticism is explicit but centred on images like Kiyomi Itô on a bed wrapped in cling-film, it is a disarming tale of disconnected figures attempting to connect through their bodies and sex. It is almost like J.G. Ballard in its septic metropolitan world and obsessions such as the voyeurism of film cameras, Kyoko keeping one on in the fridge to talk directly to, or how the owner of the sleeping doll club is an unseen figure hidden behind an industrial white face mask, who can see all through cameras. The only thing which seems abrupt is the very unexpected twist ending, which is one that may be divisive for those who appreciate the film already for how abrupt it is, even if built upon in the sense of disconnect in the reality of the film. Nonetheless, it is a compelling example to how erotic cinema in Japan became a way to produce some very unconventional productions over the decades, in any tone and genre, winning favour for me the more I see.

Abstract Spectrum: Atmospheric

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

Brand Upon the Brain! (2006)

 

Director: Guy Maddin

Screenplay: Guy Maddin and George Toles

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

An Abstract Candidate

 

A womb opening up like a window!

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

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

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

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

Abstract Spectrum: Avant-Garde/Weird

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

Half A Man (1966)

 

a.k.a. Un Uomo a meta

Director: Vittorio De Seta

Screenplay: Vittorio De Seta, Fabio Carpi and Vera Gherarducci

Cast: Jacques Perrin as Michele; Lea Padovani as Madre di Michele; Gianni Garko as Fratello di Michele; Ilaria Occhini as Elena; Rosemary Dexter as Marina; Pier Paolo Capponi as Ugo; Francesca De Seta as Simonetta

An Abstract Candidate

 

A man in a suit, with a briefcase, is laid down in the grass of a recreational park. With psychological issues coming forward, he asks why he is there, beginning a trawl through past traumas. They involve his family and a potential love that reveals the isolation that he is in within his mind as well as to others. Halfway through the film, after seeing only fragments, we see how he became who is he is fully.

Vittorio De Seta is an Italian film maker I was introduced to when not as readily available as all filmmakers should be. De Seta is interesting in how, out of his films I have seen, Half a Man was an outlier for his career. A large portion of his legacy is not feature length or fiction, but a series of short documentaries christened the ten films of “The Lost World”, made in southern Italy and Sardinia between 1954 and 1959, and connect to his debut theatrical length film Bandits of Orgosolo (1961). Half a Man is a curious production for De Seta in hindsight, an abstract film which has such a drastic change of pace in his filmmaking history from before, something which does not stay to the legacy of a neo-realist whose career has been beforehand documenting the likes of fishermen in his homeland. As one would hope, however, the outlier for a director is fascinating and this particular case is special, fully investing into how these types of films are still personal for their creators, De Seta producing it, but with an exceptional final result here.  

The film plays off with a languid tone as the viewer is drip fed new memories. Shot in black and white, it has a woozy poetic tone as it shifts between what is imagined and what is actually happening, and even as a film I have had to see in digitized rips over the years, i.e. unavailable with a print version which was not great, it is all deliberate and exceptional to see. The plot as it is becomes very simple when put together – with neurosis over a women in his life named Elena, our lead Michele (Jacques Perrin) has been placed in a mental health clinic for the eventual breakdown, caused when there was another man in her life and an ill advised yacht trip lead to him committing violent act with an implement through a bare foot. Michele’s health issues stem from his youth before, with his domineering mother and his older popular brother who was a war hero, the film connected to World War II with how the older brother’s standing is greater fighting for his country whilst Michele stayed at home.  Michele, who barely talks, has struggled with more than one woman he has been attracted to his whole life, and that in itself has factored into the many weights on his mind.

It is clear, as De Seta’s documentaries were as natural to their subjects as possible, that he wanted to make a film that is intentionally alien in presentation, with slow motion and slow paced editing to create a dramatic effect. The sense of a documentary filmmaker is making the film is clear by how he makes sure the scenes do not feel artificial but environments and moments you are drawn into. It is however also clear, in how the film is shot, that he is cutting loose, to use a blunt point, with a tone and style to match the absolute ill ease on hand, most shots insanely striking and the mood at ill-ease. Everything is amiss, with sexual repression involved, the dominating presence of Christianity, by way of how his mother welds it, enforced when she reprimands him for perceived lustful acts with a woman he is smitten for. It even gets into something more uncomfortable by, in one scene, having this woman of his then-dreams replaced on a swing near him with a twelve year old girl. There is also how children in this tale, having to live in a place where children are being cared for by a German maid under his mother’s watchful eye, are figures he is fascinated by, with no hidden sinister nature to his gaze, but they themselves unsettling in their appearance with how the film shots them in context. For all their innocence too, these child characters are also shown to be world weary as they talk among themselves of how initially he is being lead along by the woman, from a well off family, who has had to taken shelter in their place mid-war.

Ennio Morricone, able to shift into varying types of Italian cinema, contributes one of his most avant-garde scores to fit the nature of the film, drones and atmospheric sounds that adds to the sense the film is from the main character's self-analysing mind. This is just one of the many likely unknown to people considering how prolific the legendary composer was and, having fallen under his spell for his incredible work with Sergio Leone’s westerns, it rewards me the more I see of his career in cinema how Morricone could vary himself between giallo thrillers to contributing these abstract scores through his filmography.

The central drama itself is immensely engaging. At times even unable to say a word, the protagonist Michele is literally half a man, the favourite of the father who is not there, hated by his mother, the past revealed to the viewer showing that he is damaged by his upbringing but as much the result of who he is as a person since he was born, alien to the world. His horror, as we see the images in an unsettling amount of slow motion, of the act of hunting birds for sport with the family, emphasises that he is disconnected to his own lineage and isolated. The characterisation has been seen before in many other films - of the mother disappointed in her son, the superior older brother, the distant and antisocial younger son - but the tone of the film gives the drama more effect because the abstract tone forces you to engage with the drama more when it is finally given to you. After abrupt images of birds falling out the sky in slow motion are first seen, the original context of such images later makes them even more striking when tied to a key point in the character's memories. It is a shame the film is as obscure as it has felt for me, as this fascinates as De Seta, gaining his acclaim for his work in documentary, committed as much to this project he helped co-write, showing his voice was as committed to a project entirely outside his work from before. What he makes, fully feeling like the logical progression of how the vastness of a novel can be interpreted in the medium of cinema by the latter’s techniques, is the kind of intense, minimalist drama comparable to Michelangelo Antonioni, that is far more rewarding in that it makes the route of the truths as rewarding as the reasons behind the characters themselves.

Abstract Spectrum: Avant-Garde/Psychodrama

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