Funny that after decades of seeing her only hither or yon, I find Elina Löwensohn in two new movies (en français), which I happened to watch back to back, by daring auteurs that take wild surreal detours involving her as a semi-insane ruler of a remote location, watching over scenes of death and sex with a haughty glee and owning her masculine side, if you will, and ageless anima side, a psychopomp beyond gender for the next millennia. In THE WILD BOYS and LET THEIR CORPSES TAN--startling auteurial exercises that draw kinky sexual imagery from the darndest of places--we find this Romanian-American actress (just one year older than me, she's handling it way better) sure can swing a wild dick, if you'll pardon my French. Both from last year but just getting here now (via DVD and streaming rental, sigh), both films shot in super 16mm, both films ravishingly beautiful and auteur to the core.
What are the odds I'd see these movies back-to-back, not knowing Löwensohn was in either one, after not seeing hide nor hair of since her small role in The Forbidden Room (and before that, Nadja), where she looked, frankly, like a different person - she was still 'gamin'-esque in Room, but here she's surrendered even late inning Delpy/Huppert-style hotness in favor of a fat cigar and a laugh throaty enough to choke the communism out of Lionel Stander, wagging her sun-browned body around like a general bounding over piles of enemy corpses of the other side, breasts bared with the 'who cares?' haughtiness that marks European women as the superior to all other genders and continents. She's rocking punk rock bangs and a stare that could freeze the blood of a drowsy kitten basking in the sun. Those breasts are young and full-still, as if eternal. Shall you not try to swing the same?
8 THE WILD BOYS
(Les garçons sauvages)
Dir Bertrand Mandico
***1/2
Surreal and strange in ways that mixes Clockwork Orange-Captains Courageous bad boy rehab adventures into erotic gender-bent deconstructions like Batailles' Story of the Eye and Angela Carter's Passion of a New Eve, it's the hardy tale of of a youth rehabilitation program cure taken by five over-privileged punks after they brutalize their literature teacher. Trevor, a voodoo-like spirit of violent destruction that wears a glittery skull mask and likes to run around as a dog (!), overtook them during a masked drunken performance art piece (reciting the opening three witches scene of Macbeth) while wearing terrifying maskies. After a brutal period at sea, collared to the ship and regularly choked to within an inch of their lives at the salty captain's whim, the wild boys wind up on a mysterious island with sexually active vegetation, the ever-present smell of oysters and a strange hormonal magic, including the ability to slowly turn boys into girls (their penises drop off and are swept away in the uncaring surf, suddenly no more relevant than land crabs). Trees and rocks become giant asses and mocking breasts.
Soon joining forces with a mysterious lady (formerly male) doctor (Löwensohn) they start sexually devouring and killing randy sailors, committing high seas mutiny, and surrendering to the intoxicating touch and taste of the local plant life. Touching Lord of the Flies meets The Pink Lagoon kind of castaway weirdness, our Les garçons sauvages is really off in a field by itself, chasing horny phallic dragonflies, drinking manna-jaculate from phallic tubers, screwing between leafy legs, sleeping deep in the shrubbery, evoking everything from Naked Lunch to Matango its hallucinatory amok Friday-Crusoe wandering (and even Valhalla Rising if you're keeping score), it may well and goodly be conjured.. (The great twist though is that these boys were played by girls to begin with, and the freedom accorded these already free French actresses allows them to swagger in ways that are good to see.)
What does it all mean? You know damned well what it means. Read Batailles and Angela Carter and learn something about just how precarious your own sexuality is, that words on a page can--by reading--reorganize the molecular structure of your private parts - you'll get aroused in places you didn't even know were there, and suddenly buried infant memories sweep up onto the rocks. Then you'll understand: When French women put on male drag look out, they swagger and wave their cocks around like they just strapped them on, and when they fall off, they behold their breasts like they just got their team colors. It's quite revealing when deconstructing the postures and posing of the Paris is Burning houses (with which it would make a wild double feature), all swivel-hipped sailors and grabby crotch-forward surrender --the way letting your unconscious anima/animus stretch out in drag brings all sorts of in-the-moment awareness and mojo. Shot in startling black and white with forays into surreal color, the spirit of experimental expressionism and psychosexual weirdness is alive and well with this new force of surreal grandeur Bertrand Mandico. Remember that name, Bunuel, Jarman, Anger, my mamas, you can rest in peace at last (yes, Kenneth, I know you're still alive, but rest... there... there now).
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LET THE CORPSES TAN
(Laissez bronzer les cadavres)
Dirs. Helene Cattet's and Bruno Forzani
***
My expectations ran mighty high for this, Belgian couple Helene Cattet's and Bruno Forzani's third feature being such a gigantic fan of their 2009 debut,Amer, and a cautious admirer of their sophomore effort, The Strange Color of Her Body's Tears. Turns out, while still suffused with their signature style (gorgeous 35mm photography, tastefully-recycled Ennio Morricone, lots of feverish close-ups of eyes, hands, knives, guns, mouths, wild clothing, associative editing) there's no room in a traditional crime thriller (adopted from a potboiler French novel) for the kind of psychosexual or post-structuralist departures that made their earlier work so delectably artsy. On the other hand, they do capture every nook and cranny of the sun-drenched rocky locale with such energetic rigor that you want to pack up and move there, even if they don't have air conditioning. The story has a gang of gold hijackers laying low with the loot at a remote crumbling villa atop a mountain overlooking the sea, run by a crazy artist (Elina Löwensohn!) and her has-been writer, played by the indefatigable Marc Barbé (they were last paired together in the unrelentingly grim Sombre, so it's nice to see them all sun-baked and in cahoots). Stephane Ferrara is a guy named Rhino, but he's not the big bald bruiser you'd think was named Rhino --that guy's in the cold storage cave, screwing the roast lamb hanging there (that lamb gets pretty gross and shot up by the end of the film). At least I think that's true. Who can keep all these craggy faces straight?
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Anyway, it's a perfect location. Who wouldn't want to shoot a movie there, or hide out after a crime, even without air conditioning, phone or electricity? Even the writer's wife comes there, uninvited, with her kid (stolen from her ex-husband who has sole custody) and a cute young maid. Complications! The crooks will have to kill everyone. And then two motorcycle cops show up. Oy, it's going to be a long afternoon. With its gradual existential dwindling and the idea of a remote location occupied solely by armed men and women angling after loot, comes visions of everything from Point Blank, For a Few Dollars More, and--a recent surreal discovery lurking nonchalantly in the ocean of Prime streaming Italian westerns, Matalo!), and as long as we focus on the gorgeous, well-thought out compositions and gorgeous cinematography, well why not? Let the sunshine and the night perpetrate and the cliche'd close-ups of ants representing the scattering crooks be minimal. Forzani and Cattet have such devotion to the startling composition and deep colors of the stark Spanish air that they may miss the big picture but they sure do get the little details: when one man is shot the gold he's carrying is hit and explodes as if liquid, splashing all over him and occasional extrapolations of the art on the scene makes us realize just how little art there is laying around, aside from a very cool skull-headed hobby horse, and a painting Elina makes in the beginning by shooting paint pellets at a canvas and burning holes in it with her cigar. As a result the filmmakers need to use people and guns, rock, and sky for their compositions, and though they find lots of weirdly sexual tableaux (below).
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In what are either fantasies of flashbacks, a young silhouetted anima figure (presumably Löwensohn in her younger artist muse days), stands over a horde of men and pees on them, while Morricone guitar stings bray, jamming her heel into the mouth of one of the men in a later fantasy/memory which of course is intercut with a gun, but also clever deep cut references to similar 'dying primal scene reverie' images in Argento's Tenebrae. But, more and more the unique synergy that made Amer so magnificently Antonioni-meets-Argento-esque (dialoguing with Lucretia Martel's paranoid soundscapes and Claire Denis' shadowy sexuality as well as Argento's psychosexual post-modernism) is all missing, in place of more obvious references (pee = gold; paint = gold); the two voices--the feminine avant garde experimental non-narrative and the masculine/Apollonian narrative don't connect like one would hope and while we end up admiring the lovely location, the photography, the range of styles, the clever use of close-ups, style over substance and a who cares confusion overtakes us -it's impossible--at least at first viewing--to keep much of an idea of who's who, the writer, the lawyer, the criminals, the etc. I'll definitely see it again and hope my feelings change. But now I'm just confused. (Another weird connection - seeing this film the same year as the release of Other Side of the Wind, for the artsy film-within-the-film sure has a lot in common. Shhh)
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That confusion worked in Amer, it was even intentional --the modernist frisson of not recognizing signifiers we find in the best of Antonioni, and in other great Darionioni works, like , perhaps since the story was so familiar - it was a clear line from fairy tales to sexual awakening romps--the endless sexy summer holiday movies (boys on scooters whisking nubile girls off to picnics with baskets of phallic bread and succulent fruits) to Argento/Antonioni pawing and old Italian macho leering making women paranoid and we viewers feeling post-modernly suspect in her mental disintegration. We didn't need a narrative in Amer because we saw the common thread through it all, as if all the movies made in Europe about woman's sexual maturity suddenly rearranged themselves into a completed puzzle with this central magnet of a film. It didn't have to make sense, it was sense, itself. Sophomore effort Strange Color was more like an exercise in bravura style, but with enough enticingly lovely symbols floating through it and such a gorgeous art nouveau hotel (set? Wherever that is, I want to live there) it didn't matter if the story got monotonous and incoherent. With Corpses though, what do we have? Bronzed Mediterranean forty-fifty-somethings lounging amidst the cloudless blazing blue sky and groovy ruins? One is tempted to recall Hitchcock's line about how some directors make slices of life, while he makes slices of cake. What is Corpses a slice of? Can one really slice a slice?
I imagine the archetypal mythic resonance Tennessee Williams could do with a location like this --this crumbling Mount Olympus, this Catholic Ozymandias, or art metatextual connection the way Suzuki, Godard or Petri would. Instead, what we come away with is a beautiful postcard that, if you stare at it long enough, starts to seem dirty.
By then Löwensohn isn't even human anymore- she's replaced by a young silhouetted anima psychopomp, standing in front of the sun or hovering above cars, pissing on the devout in rivers of liquid manna fantasy flashbacks, or being flogged on the cross and roped til the milk comes gushing from her breasts like fountains. Is that anyway to treat a lady, even in flashback? Even if she was no lady, but some kind of a man?
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Anyway, it's a perfect location. Who wouldn't want to shoot a movie there, or hide out after a crime, even without air conditioning, phone or electricity? Even the writer's wife comes there, uninvited, with her kid (stolen from her ex-husband who has sole custody) and a cute young maid. Complications! The crooks will have to kill everyone. And then two motorcycle cops show up. Oy, it's going to be a long afternoon. With its gradual existential dwindling and the idea of a remote location occupied solely by armed men and women angling after loot, comes visions of everything from Point Blank, For a Few Dollars More, and--a recent surreal discovery lurking nonchalantly in the ocean of Prime streaming Italian westerns, Matalo!), and as long as we focus on the gorgeous, well-thought out compositions and gorgeous cinematography, well why not? Let the sunshine and the night perpetrate and the cliche'd close-ups of ants representing the scattering crooks be minimal. Forzani and Cattet have such devotion to the startling composition and deep colors of the stark Spanish air that they may miss the big picture but they sure do get the little details: when one man is shot the gold he's carrying is hit and explodes as if liquid, splashing all over him and occasional extrapolations of the art on the scene makes us realize just how little art there is laying around, aside from a very cool skull-headed hobby horse, and a painting Elina makes in the beginning by shooting paint pellets at a canvas and burning holes in it with her cigar. As a result the filmmakers need to use people and guns, rock, and sky for their compositions, and though they find lots of weirdly sexual tableaux (below).
In what are either fantasies of flashbacks, a young silhouetted anima figure (presumably Löwensohn in her younger artist muse days), stands over a horde of men and pees on them, while Morricone guitar stings bray, jamming her heel into the mouth of one of the men in a later fantasy/memory which of course is intercut with a gun, but also clever deep cut references to similar 'dying primal scene reverie' images in Argento's Tenebrae. But, more and more the unique synergy that made Amer so magnificently Antonioni-meets-Argento-esque (dialoguing with Lucretia Martel's paranoid soundscapes and Claire Denis' shadowy sexuality as well as Argento's psychosexual post-modernism) is all missing, in place of more obvious references (pee = gold; paint = gold); the two voices--the feminine avant garde experimental non-narrative and the masculine/Apollonian narrative don't connect like one would hope and while we end up admiring the lovely location, the photography, the range of styles, the clever use of close-ups, style over substance and a who cares confusion overtakes us -it's impossible--at least at first viewing--to keep much of an idea of who's who, the writer, the lawyer, the criminals, the etc. I'll definitely see it again and hope my feelings change. But now I'm just confused. (Another weird connection - seeing this film the same year as the release of Other Side of the Wind, for the artsy film-within-the-film sure has a lot in common. Shhh)
That confusion worked in Amer, it was even intentional --the modernist frisson of not recognizing signifiers we find in the best of Antonioni, and in other great Darionioni works, like , perhaps since the story was so familiar - it was a clear line from fairy tales to sexual awakening romps--the endless sexy summer holiday movies (boys on scooters whisking nubile girls off to picnics with baskets of phallic bread and succulent fruits) to Argento/Antonioni pawing and old Italian macho leering making women paranoid and we viewers feeling post-modernly suspect in her mental disintegration. We didn't need a narrative in Amer because we saw the common thread through it all, as if all the movies made in Europe about woman's sexual maturity suddenly rearranged themselves into a completed puzzle with this central magnet of a film. It didn't have to make sense, it was sense, itself. Sophomore effort Strange Color was more like an exercise in bravura style, but with enough enticingly lovely symbols floating through it and such a gorgeous art nouveau hotel (set? Wherever that is, I want to live there) it didn't matter if the story got monotonous and incoherent. With Corpses though, what do we have? Bronzed Mediterranean forty-fifty-somethings lounging amidst the cloudless blazing blue sky and groovy ruins? One is tempted to recall Hitchcock's line about how some directors make slices of life, while he makes slices of cake. What is Corpses a slice of? Can one really slice a slice?
I imagine the archetypal mythic resonance Tennessee Williams could do with a location like this --this crumbling Mount Olympus, this Catholic Ozymandias, or art metatextual connection the way Suzuki, Godard or Petri would. Instead, what we come away with is a beautiful postcard that, if you stare at it long enough, starts to seem dirty.
By then Löwensohn isn't even human anymore- she's replaced by a young silhouetted anima psychopomp, standing in front of the sun or hovering above cars, pissing on the devout in rivers of liquid manna fantasy flashbacks, or being flogged on the cross and roped til the milk comes gushing from her breasts like fountains. Is that anyway to treat a lady, even in flashback? Even if she was no lady, but some kind of a man?
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