The Last of the Crazy People

Laurent Archard, France, 2007

French film directed by Laurent Achard, based on Canadian Timothy Findlay's novel ‘The Last of the Crazy People’ (‘Le Dernier des fous’ a.k.a. ‘Demented’): a coming-of-age story set in a dying little rural farmhouse where 10 year-old Martin watches his family as it’s besieged by poverty, repression, isolation and madness. Kind of. The trick upon reflection is that no one seems legitimately, technically "mad", but rather beset by a fierce mixture of despair and unfulfilled longing has driven some to apathy - the father - and others to distraction - the mother and brother. And whatever Martin is thinking, how he is filtering these experiences, we aren't too sure. Young Julien Cochelin's face is impassive and ungiving, making Martin quite an abstraction; it's a shock when a single tear quietly rolls down his cheek. His face remains so blank that it could be considered non-acting. He wanders around, all elbows and awkwardness, looking for morsels of affection. Around him, the adults give brilliant performances that fall just short of indulgent, bringing out the real tragedy of their inability to communicate successfully with one another. Martin is the opposite of his brother, Didier (Pascal Cervo), whose emotions both good and bad explode everywhere with the gusto of a wannabe poet. Dominique Reymond is the pale, elegant reclusive mother, screaming the house down in the middle of the night. Only the warmth of the maid keeps the family together.

 

The Gothic trimmings are always welcome, most glaringly the mother as the Madwoman in the Attic and a sense of perpetual decay. It looks like a provincial idyll, beautifully framed, leisurely paced so that small details of the kitchen and the courtyard can be relished. Small gestures mean everything: the boy at the table football nodding to the girl; mother's stare back at her son so fixed, it looks like a freeze-frame. It's somewhere between the bleakness of Hanake and the dour humour of ‘Koktebel’. It is this that prevents the story from falling into the pornography of wretchedness, although as soon as a gun is introduced, all mystery evaporates. A gun is often cheap drama because you can tell pretty much how it's going to end up as soon as you see one. And when it finishes as you thought, you realise there was nothing new here, that no extra great leap was made, and that beautifully judged as it was, that's a shame.

Nevertheless, I am a sucker for this kind of rural dystopia, and although inferior to, for example, the thriller narrative of ‘I'm Not Scared’ or the chilling ‘Olivier, Olivier’, ‘The Last of the Crazy People’ succeeds as a minor but engrossing melodrama.

     

DAYBREAK

Om jag vänder mig om

Björn Runge - 2003 - Sweden

Swedish melodrama by Bjorn Runge based around three couples and a night of secrets, shouting, sharing, absolution, etc. You know the score. Comparisons with Bergman’s family dramas are obvious, but the roaming camera pursuing and swinging between characters looking for cracks and blame seem more akin to Haneke. If anything, despite a quality cast, Runge’s allowing everything to be resolved by histrionics only shows how carefully calibrated Bergman pitched his melodrama. Despite its chilly, despondent disposition, "Daybreak" has more in common with soap operas.

Also like Hanake, Runge ultimately comes out as hectoring and exhibiting moral superiority. There is evidence of casual humanity, but in the end the blame is - as in Hanake - with a middle-class bourgeois who Won’t Face Things and earnestly live their lives in denial. The oddness here is that Runge throws culpability mostly all on the men. A builder who works so hard to earn money for his family, he never spends time with them. A man so embedded in his own loss of his daughter and disgust at the outside world, especially people of colour, that he wants the house bricked up so no one can trouble him and his wife. A philandering doctor about to lose his job and family who, when confronted with painful truths over a dinner of revelations, simply keeps saying he is going to make dinner or coffee to comical proportions. And, oddest of all, a man who left his clearly disturbed and demanding wife for a younger woman years ago. He is obviously happy with his new life, and his ex-wife clearly needs psychiatric treatment and a restraining order; and yet perversely we are apparently to empathise with her agony, with her inflicting what can only be termed torture upon her ex and his wife, for this is the only way he can be made to face the grief he has caused so that she can achieve closure. The ex-wife is left to wander into the dawn, presumably cleansed and less sociopathic, but I wouldn’t bet on it. It’s a fine line between addressing the flaws of average people for a humane outlook and criticising those mistakes into something more judgmental.

The overt symbolism is occasionally cloying too. The bricking-up-the-house is a decent conceit, for it generates a little quirk and mystery besides representing willful alienation. But we start with the graphic removal of the heart; a car chase that ends with them going in circles; a moment where the different narratives briefly pass one another at a crossroads; and then, when revelations have been made and absorbed… daybreak. Like firearms, hysterical characters are often cheap dramatics in search of meaningful drama. More reliance upon the fine cast and greater restraint might have given the show more elegance.

Persona

Ingmar Bergman, 1966

What you hardly read about Bergman is that he is often scary. If you are looking for a precursor to David Lynch's creepiness and surrealism, turn to the opening nightmare sequence of "Wild Strawberries"; or to the hanging woodsman in "Summer’s Children" for a genuine ghost story chill; or death walking the lounge in "Fanny and Alexander"; or the all-round eeriness of "Hour of the Wolf", amongst others. And this is before we have even encountered his essays in psychological breakdown. For someone who isn’t known as a horror writer, Bergman was very assured and casual with the genre’s motifs. "Persona", for example, not only has psychological breakdown and seemingly a personality-transference between an actress and her nurse, but also plays with a wealth of vampire imagery.Or, perhaps, we are dealing in split personality, which we must puzzle out and which is another horror staple. Bergman happily has his characters and dramas interacting with seemingly supernatural elements that may or may not be genuine. I have always loved this because you never know when he is going to spring these moments upon you, and when you are not watching as a horror audience, your guard is often down and the effect is often genuinely surprising and chilling.

"Persona" is a famously unsolvable mystery, and if the opening montage of images are clues, they don’t really help with answers: film stock reeling and burning up; an erect penis (originally censored, naturally); bodies in a morgue; a boy asleep like a corpse in a white empty room. He wakes… is he the actress’ son, dreaming of her, or is she dreaming of him? Or is he a manifestation of the nurse’s aborted child? We can wonder this later or after, when we know some stories concerning our main characters: an actress who refuses to speak or function, apparently in an artistic and existential collapse; and the nurse assigned to oversee her recuperation in a beach house. But it is the nurse who uses the actress’s silence for experiments in unburdening herself in a quintessential Bergman confession of an adulterous dalliance. When the nurse feels her confidence has been condescended and betrayed, a confusion of the women’s characters threatens meltdown. What is real and what is fantastic is not clear: does the actress’s husband really turn up to the beach house and mistake the nurse for his wife? Some kind of emotional vampirism is occurring here, and the actress pours out of fog to seduce her victim. There is also some sucking of blood, completely Nosferatu. Cinematic conventions being played with, where the screen burns up as if the projector is on fire from the drama, but somehow this is more akin to an emotional variation of the formal shock moment from a horror film (rather than, say, the kind of conceited self-reflexive trick of the fast-forward moment of Haneke’s "Funny Games").

It is open to readings of criticism of psychotherapy, and it also acts nicely as a tale of the unreal affinity and emotional demands audiences make of artists: the nurse (Bibi Andersson) may just as well be telling her secrets to a poster of Liv Ullman. But for all this stark, pretty imagery and genre bending, Bergman knows that the real horrors can be existential states of despair and fear, that non-communication, disloyalty and superciliousness can force wide open cracks in vulnerable people. Fascinating, frustrating and compelling, very few can force such ideas to work and transcend. Bergman had a vast output and range, and even now he never fails to surprise and, frequently, to chill.

obligatory 2006 comments

END OF YEAR FILM ROUND-UP

I was kick-started on my end-of-year retrospecive by seeing that "Sight and Sound" critics voted "Cache/Hidden" top dog of 2006, and for all my reservations about Haneke's intents, he makes great psychological horrors. "Cache" and "Borat" were probably the biggest shockers of the year, in different ways and for different reasons, obviously, and they showed what their respective genres really could do. Did "Cache" doth protest too much? Was "Borat" a case of the Emporer's New Clothes? Intellectual, moral and discursive challenges abounded from these two, and their reputations will stick for a long, long time, I'm sure. How "Borat" will appear come ten, twenty years time will be fascinating to see, if it is remembered at all. "Cache's" immediate long-term prestige is probably a foregone conclusion.

Inevitably there were so many films on the list that I didn't see, although I guess many were are always going to be festival entries. But I did get to a couple of festivals to see a couple of coming-of-age flicks, and they were both highlights.

In fact, rather than Top Ten, I am going to do this instead:

My most MEMORABLE MOMENTS IN A CINEMA had to be:

- Seeing "The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros" at the London Film Festival and chatting with the director Aureaus Solito in the lobby afterwards.

- Watching "Slither" and at the end, seeing a group of under-15s huddling around to talk loudly and proudly at how grossed out they had been.

- Hearing and feeling an entire audience jump out of their seats during "Cache".

- Ditto audience's mounting horror and disbelief during the "Borat" wrestling tour-de-force.

- Taking a Russian and Polish friends to some old-style cinema to see "Superman Returns": I had forgotten what it was like to go to a non-multiplex picture house. The screen was surrounded by a black frame sprinkled with little lights meant to look like stars. Wow! The sound seemed to come from some elaborate loud-hailer device. There was even an unwieldly 'interval' in the middle which freaked out the students no end (it just confused them). The place was frayed rather than grubby, and one of a dying breed. It was kinda neat.

- PLEASED that "The Squid and the Whale" got a large critical and commercial response. A real triumph of a good product attracting the attention due to quality. A prime example that American character drama can be slick, accessable, intelligent and true, even with the most soap operatic of premises. A film that felt too short. Funny too. A real little gem.

- MOST SMART AND INTRIGUING HOLLYWOOD FEATURE which I saw was "Good Night, And Good Luck". Critic Demetrious Matheou wrote: "Confirms Clooney as the heir to Warren Beatty: a matinee idol with brains, brimming with liberal commitment." And I agree with every syllable. It felt adult and worthwhile, and packed with elegant performances. "Thank You For Smoking" gets and honorable mention.

- FAVOURITE CROWDPLEASER: "Drommen/We Shall Overcome" - so you know how these things go and that the good guys win (The English title variation states as much) but sometimes predictable narrative can still be rendered with smarts and nuance. So the good guys win, but the struggle here certainly takes its toll.

- ANIMATED HIGHLIGHTS of the year were

(1) "A Scanner Darkly", which I suspect will be a sleeper cult hit who will gather status as the years drift on. For good and bad, it captured the essence of Philip K Dick brilliantly, including (and this is where the 'bad' comes in) the anti-climatic come-down ending. Those are the Dick endings that haunt you, but they are also the endings that only seem to really hit you the second time you watch a film. The animation was something else and captured all the otherworldly drugginess that is usually shown in lame "trip" sequences. It was as much about loss of identity and reliable reality as Lynch ever was, and just as scary for that.

(2) And yes, I am going to put up "Monster House" as a highlight. Despite a gratuitous ending, any Joe Dante fan should lap this up. It was just so great to find a kid's animation that wasn't trying to be so hip and knowing and post-modern. No, this was a great minor horror with some real nastiness, a neat script and real charm. It touched my soft spot for American Suburban Horrors. Funny too.

AND TO MENTION:

"X-Men3: The Last Stand": Of course it is customary now to lament that Bryan Singer jumped the X-ship for a grand homage to Superman, and it is a shame never to know what he would have delivered. What we do have is Brett Ratner directing and a sense that someone said, "Well, if Singer's not here, let's just round the whole thing up for no good reason." But although X-Men has always been full of doom-mongering, and although taking note of mutant mortality ups the stakes, mutants get thrown into the mix and bumped off seemingly at random and without much reflection. Angel has a fantastic introduction as a kid, a scene that taps into the heart of the struggle with being "different", and leads to nothing but Angel spreading his wings. Similarly, the bald kid who can nullify mutations - and doesn't everyone in sci-fi living in a room-cum-laboratory wear white?? - gets to ... do nothing. There is enough plot for two or three X-mens here. The bald kid and the mutant "cure"; a hint of Sentinals; Dark Phoenix; the Morlock uprising; Angel's coming-out... there just seems too much. It's all handled with great gusto and action sequences, and it's a fun superhero flick, but perhaps we had expected something a little more nuanced because of its predecessors. Less sense of build-up and more bangs. It also edges towards the more cosmic end of X-Men stories with Dark Phoenix, but just rounds things up with a little stage-tragedy. For my money, Kelsey Grammer was a surprising, inspired and wonderful piece of casting (who would have thought he'd play a blue furball?) and, inevitably, gave an effortless depth to his character and stole every scene without having particularly much to go on. Too much, too quickly dealt with.

"Silent Hill": Christophe Gans gives great visuals here, and despite awesome atmosphere and a good little conclusions, fails like so many horrors at the last hurdle. That is, I don't believe a spooker needs acres of narrative if the visuals generate nightmare logic and ambiance (hence my tolerance for "The Grudge" franchise, for example), and inevitably "Silent Hill" soon becomes tedious as soon as it rounds up with backstory, explanations and blood-splattered finale. Or maybe it is just the backstory here is tired and familiar and comes at the expense of all else. "The Descent", for example, showed that location, execution and subtext could elevate the thinnest of narratives into something special. All "Silent Hill" made me think was, hmm, bet I will enjoy playing that (I haven't yet).

"The Hills Have Eyes": Sabotaged by gratuitous backstory. All of sudden, once the mutant starts droolingly accusing humanity of heinous immorality, you realise the film is hollow. I didn't buy that preachiness for one minute; don't believe Alexandre Aja cares about those matters one jot, not even in any schlocky B-movie sense. Despite some serious gore and violence, some great visuals of car-park craters and Atomic Testing towns, and another great rendering of the horrible mid-set piece seige, Aja can't quite knock up that closing intelligence that would really knock his horrors into crossover appeal. For all its shabbiness, this doesn't supercede the Wes Craven original.

"The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning": - where they put in all the bits that people only thought they would see in Hooper's original. Backstory sabotage again. It scores for being more like "Wolf Creek" than "Friday the 13th", but you still walk away knowing it wasn't much.

"DEMENTED" - your average French mood piece about a disintegrating rural family, but I am a sucker for this kind of thing. Bolstered by a couple of brilliant moments, good acting and a startling anti-performance by the lead kid.

My GUILTY PLEASURES, as ever, were b-horrors. You know, the brief chills from "The Grudge 2", "Silent Hill"... Er. No excuses really.