We live in the best of times in which we are able to learn about the world and its incredible diversity of cultures/beings/places/perspectives in a way never historically possible. We live in the worst of times when we are able to isolate ourselves completely from anything different from our own narrow view/conception of the world/reality. The choice is yours!
Cemetery Man (Italy/France/Germany: Michele Soavi, 1994: 105 mins)
The excellently named Francesco Dellamorte (Rupert Everett, never better) is the moody caretaker of a small-town Italian cemetery where the dead just keep coming back to life, much to his annoyance. His everyday tedium of reading phone books and killing zombies is broken when he falls madly in love with a nameless beautiful widow. Unfortunately, she too perishes and returns as a zombie. A strange and entertaining erotic-horror-comedy, Cemetery Man (titled Dellamorte Dellamore in Italian) is required viewing for anyone of the sadboi persuasion. – Anna Bogutskaya
Christopher Boe on Love and Personal Identity in "Reconstruction"
by Liza Bear Indiewire
Inspired by a Jacques-Henri Lartigue photograph of a woman standing in a room with empty bookcases, Danish director Christoffer Boe's first feature "Reconstruction" fittingly won the prestigious Camera D'or at Cannes in 2003 and a Golden Plaque for Manuel Alberto Claro's luminous wide-screen cinematography. It brings closure to the exploration of themes of love and personal identity begun in three earlier shorts, "Obsession," "Virginity" and "Anxiety."
"They're all about a young male being obsessed by a beautiful woman and then being trapped in his own logic of what love is," says Boe, 30, a passionate still photographer as well as moviemaker. It's that logic which Boe dissects in "Reconstruction."
As its title suggests, Boe uses a fractured narrative and startling visuals to create a haunting rumination on the mysteries of desire (and the consequences of acting them out), rather than a romantic comedy. A kind of triangular square dance, "Reconstruction" sports excellent performances from its leads, with Nikolaj Lie Kaas playing Alex as a cypher and Maria Bonnevie doubling up as both Alex's steady girl-friend Simone and his new flame Aimee. It doesn't help Alex that Aimee is married to older man August (Krister Henriksson), who happens to be a writer. But it does give a few extra twists to the narrative. August is the film's narrator. There are echoes of Francois Ozon's cryptic thriller "Swimming Pool" here, though style and sensibility are poles apart. Having an attractive live-in girl-friend doesn't stop Alex from one day falling for Aimee, August's wife. A narrator who's also a character in the film naturally raises questions about what's real and what's imaginary. But then, so does being in love. The next day, Alex's world has changed, literally. His apartment has disappeared and so have his friends. An existential conundrum? Maybe. Or rather an attempt to create a metaphor for the paradigm shift that love induces.
Kennedy, A.L. "Sartre and the Individual."A History of Ideas (April 15, 2015) ["Writer AL Kennedy on Existentialist ideas about the individual. Jean Paul Sartre argued that, for humans, 'existence preceded essence'. This means that there is no blueprint or template from which to work - humans are free to make themselves up as they go along. Being an individual comes from the way you negotiate this freedom and the choices you make in the face of it."]
The body horror, reminiscent of early Cronenberg films like Rabid and Shivers (aka They Came From Within), comes from the film’s MacGuffin, a worm or grub found in the roots of orchids that secretes a drug, prized in certain circles for its psychotropic properties. If the worm is implanted in a victim, he or she becomes a virtual zombie, susceptible to any suggestion, obeying any command.
To say the film is enigmatic is an understatement. This might be the WTF film of 2013. Its complex story is told almost entirely through its visuals. There is minimal dialogue, and what there is of it is fragmentary, heard – or overhead – in bits and pieces. The visuals themselves are elliptical – we might be shown only the beginning, the middle, or the end of an action and have to infer the rest of it. Sometimes it is uncertain whether what we are looking at is literal or metaphoric. Chronology is scrambled. But the effect is not off-putting. On the contrary, this is an extraordinarily compelling film. Because we have to piece the narrative together ourselves, we pay closer attention.
Moreover, there is a sound basis for the film’s peculiarities of style. The two main characters, Kris (Amy Seimetz) and Jeff (writer/director Shane Carruth) are both victims of the worm – both brain-damaged. Consequently, we experience reality as they do.
Sex is a Hen Decapitated: Bluebeard and the Eroticism of Catherine Breillat
by Erich Kuersten Acidemic
The ancient tale of Bluebeard is rife with archetypal resonance for the budding feminine psyche: it's a rite of passage myth, a map of patriarchal oppression's mine field, an initiation into sexual maturity, where the fear of pain is enough to make actual pain a relief in contrast; a color-symbolic dream where the blood of menstruation anxiety (the redness of the clitoral "riding" hood) and the swollen purples of honeymoon savagery (the black and blueness of the groom's bristly beard) mix and match. Like many fairy tales centered on a young girl, it encodes the onset of menstruation into a Pandora's Box moment of discovery, from which innocence can never return, leading inexorably into the scary rites of the marital bed, the agonies of childbirth, and so forth. Do we not, in associating white for virginity and purity, forget that red means the alchemical opening up of that purity into the raw violence of procreation? So what does that third color of the French flag--blue--represent? Naturally, the cooling rescue of death--or rather as symbolized in the 'bloody chamber' where all the previous brides are stored, a suspended animation, a sleeping beauty status wherein the enslaving agonies of childbirth and old age are forever kept at bay, in short, the blue represents frozen death and timeless decadence, pleasure and a disruption of the natural enslavement process of patriarchy. Bluebeard postpones sexual relations in order to keep romance forever young.
The coming of age girl myth tends to focus on the moment of the first dripping eradicable red stain, one that no amount of Clorox will undo. Such a moment--loss and gain coagulated into one crimson blotch --seems to obsess French director Catherine Breillat, a female auteur as detached and horrified in her existential search for meaning as her fellow Frenchmen Gasper Noe, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Claire Denis [note from Michael Benton: Denis is a French woman]. But as Breillat is a woman, her take on femininity is free to delve much much deeper into waters too cold and dangerous to ever be known to men. Eagerly complicit with the grotesque truths of feminine sexuality, Breillat's eyes are not blurred by the glamor and beauty that hypnotize most male directors. Rather than 'fall' for the genetic con job of desire, she focuses on her gender's fascination with the gross otherness of the male body, and vice versa - she wants to explore her own body--stripped of its veils and glamor-- through male eyes. Men after all aren't as obligated to be beautiful. They're position as desirable or beautiful is seldom considered in a marriage. If a woman can't learn to love ugliness, she never gets a prince and stays forever turned off; the beast stays a beast.
For his part, when Bluebeard spots the telltale blood stain on the key to the forbidden chamber, he is sad and disappointed, once again his bride has been unable to remain 'unopened' and so must be literally opened, as in decapitated. But Breillat's crafty beauty knows to stall, to feign compliance with her impending death on certain conditions, and to seek help from the passing musketeer/woodsman(the woodsman gets all the girls because he's already 'slain' his own wolf). If she merely screams and cringes, she's devoured. This is a valuable honeymoon lesson considering the absurdly young marriage ages of our forebears, one surely told by moms of old: do not resist or cringe when your new husband advance; instead, flatter, and stall him. If he will but relent today he shall get double tomorrow, and so on until a nice woodsman can rescue her, or she can develop enough that her deflowering is less of a painful, traumatizing violation.
The patriarchal readings of these tales runs counter to this approach, flipping the beast into a prince with a magic (phallic) wand and happily ever aftering the story before the children reading can learn that the magic wand's spell fades in a matter of hours. Soon enough the hair begins to creep back on their prince and his fangs grow long with the full moon. He seems to get uglier and more ill-tempered as the marriage marches on; that's the part Disney rolls its credits over. Only Breillat dares see not just the beast, but the frog, the vile toad still dwelling behind the sparkly eyes of the prince, and only Breillat nonetheless finds a way to love the thing, proverbial warts and all.
In her fearless approach towards this taboo subject, Breillat seems to possess an ambivalent--if not outright hostile--attitude towards sex. Her liberated female characters are often accused of being masochist subjects. But we have to dig deeper for her real reaction, perhaps a way would be to see her as the French female version of Lars Von Trier. But where Lars uses the D.W. Griffith / Sirkian soap opera woman's story in his savage deconstruction of innocence, purity, deflowering and sex, Breillat eschews any direct relation with 'woman's picture' trappings, to shoot for pure myth, looking past Griffith all the way back to the dawn of the printing press. Her cinema is--in Bluebeard literally--like the pages of a storybook that shows everything the normal books do not.
