Movies – Abuse Of Weakness

Isabelle Huppert in “Abuse Of Weakness.”

I used to post foreign film reviews on the now defunct Examiner.com. I’ll start to make some of those reviews available here to preserve them online.

The title of French director Catherine Breillat’s excellent film, Abuse Of Weakness (Abus De Faiblesse) (France, 2013), is taken from legal terminology; it’s a designation of law designed to protect people of diminished capacity from being manipulated, misrepresented or swindled by opportunists. (It’s a fascinating law that is intermingling, for better or worse, with parallel prosecutions against brainwashing scams and religious cults.) Nicolas Sarkozy, and the de Védrines family, have both had experience in the application of this law, and so, incidentally, has Catherine Breillat. Breillat, like her character here, suffered a debilitating brain hemorrhage, and went through grueling physical therapy (and a fair amount of personal isolation) in order to fight her way back to something like her previous creative prowess. Her swindler’s name was Christophe Rocancourt, who, like his filmed counterpart, was already well-known as a scoundrel, and yet continued his conning exploits well after his initial scandals over a long course of years.

How much of the film portrays the real story, and how much of it is fictionalized-to-her-purposes, of course, is the variable here. We witness the traumatic onset of film director Maud Shainberg’s (Isabelle Huppert) debilitating hemorrhagic stroke before we really know anything else about her – she’s obviously fairly successful, living in a spacious loft-like home, with a number of filmmaking administrative assistants and co-producers available to her. But contact with her direct family – brother, sister, her own child – had been erratic even before her attack, and seems no less tenable after. Resuming work on an ongoing project soon after her rehab, Maud sees the semi-legendary swindler Vilko Piram (French rapper Kool Shen) on a TV talk show, and is taken by his confident air of self-possession and his stern refusal to show remorse for his crimes. He has just emerged from a lengthy jail sentence – that’s done, it’s behind him, and he’s moving forward now. Maud resolves that this is the guy she needs for her film, and shortly afterwards meets up with him at her loft. He agrees to perform in the film (a dark portrayal of a sexual relationship laced with cruelty and violence – in other words, a Catherine Breillat film…), and declares that he’ll be a frequent visitor day-to-day while the project is coming together.

Maud is no pushover, though – she constantly works the line between desperately depending on the help of others and taking manipulative advantage of that same help. Her physical difficulties are profound, and yet she charges forth from place-to-place undaunted. Stairs and chairs are fraught with danger – standing and sitting are stable, but any unbalanced stage in between could result in a nasty fall. Yet, once standing, she hobbles along precariously quickly, at times practically skipping on one leg. When Vilko helps her down stairs, or lifts her into a chair, she’s practically panic-stricken with fear; afterwards, she taunts him about all of the things she talks him into doing for her.

Vilko, on the other hand, doesn’t work nearly as hard, or in such gamesmanlike fashion, as Maud. He knows how to present an identity, a presence, that’s rock-solid, almost irreproachable. He creates a world around himself (mostly fictional) where he’s always in the middle of four or five big projects – big money and big personal stakes. Dealing with Maud is just another ball he keeps in the air. For example, he suggests taking co-author credit for Maud’s next book – his notoriety will increase sales for her, and associating with her work will enhance his socio-cultural credibility. Everything he suggests is always targeted at the Bigger Context, the Bigger Mutual Benefit, even though, unbeknownst to the mark, it doesn’t exist. Two other ‘projects’ have left him illiquid – cut me a check and I’ll repay you next week when the other deal cashes in. If you come with me for a day-trip to Switzerland, I can land a million euros for both of us. You had a relapse and couldn’t go? You cost us money. Cut me a check for my trouble. I’ve got a wife and kid to support. Maud thinks she’s constructing mutual interests between them to suit her purposes. But Vilko knows ‘mutual interest’ is already there, from the start, and he plays her like a violin – cutting him checks almost becomes reflexive to her.  But she’s also renovating her home, and cutting check after check to her contractors as well. Vilko, ironically, asks her if she can really afford this – “I wanted a garden,” she shrugs.

Are these decisions and activities that Maud would normally be inclined to commit to, or is there a lot of unconscious overcompensation happening here due to her diminished circumstances? Many of us have had elderly family members, or severely disadvantaged friends and acquaintances, whom have fallen prey to bad investments, performed ill-conceived financial favors, fabricated untenable ‘get-rich-quick’ schemes, or spent money they didn’t have on TV or radio deals that just seemed too ‘good’ to pass up. We’re stunned, and a little embarrassed, that their judgment has gone so seemingly astray. But Breillat also takes great pains to analyze the foundations of Maud’s behavior outside of her present trauma – the insistent indulgence of her creative prerogatives, and the counter-cultural frisson of meeting the lower-class Arabic Bad Boy striver, putting herself at his mercy while presuming to mold him to what she needs. I don’t think it was an arbitrary decision to give her protagonist a Jewish last name – it’s just another of the tiny socio-psychological land mines that Breillat loves to scatter her narrative landscape with.

Isabelle Huppert is superb here, both in the thoroughness of her character’s conception and the actual physical rigor she commits to the role – she’s never a victim, never an outright sucker, and her Maud Shainberg is a fascinating and energetic woman with real gravity, intelligence and a sense of humor. And Kool Shen, while exhibiting little if any actorly flexibility, is nonetheless well-cast here – he fills his function in the narrative credibly and seamlessly. Eventually, of course, Maud finds herself at the end of any financial resources of any kind. Surrounded by her astonished family at the film’s conclusion, she can only say “It was me, but it wasn’t me. No one else spent that money, so it was me. It was me, but it wasn’t me.” Breillat, who has made a fascinating and provocative film here, won a pretty sizable judgment from Christophe Rocancourt in the real world, and he’s in jail now. The fictionalized Vilko is the obvious villain here, but we can’t help imagining what his response might be: “It was her, it was always her.” And I can’t help but think that, in an odd way, Breillat might not disagree with him.

Movies – A Touch Of Sin

I used to post foreign film reviews on the now defunct Examiner.com. I’ll start to make some of those reviews available here to preserve them online.

Tao Zhao in “A Touch Of Sin.” credit: KinoLorber

Even the sunniest cockeyed optimists among us are going to be able to relate to Chinese director Jia Zhang-ke’s jaundiced survey of ascendant capitalist absolutism and the globally waning sense of commonwealth in his film, A Touch Of Sin (天注定, Tian Zhu Ding) (China, 2013). The four stories Jia relates here are, in fact, based on true stories that occurred in four distinct corners of continental China, and each story carries with it implicit questions – When does civility give way to survival? What is each person’s breaking point? When must we lash out at personal injustice, despite knowing that our own self-preserving counterattack will do little, if anything, to change the things that gave rise to it in the first place?

Jia’s films tend to focus on individual people as cogs in a much larger gear-driven machine: the displaced workers and associated adjacent businesspeople of a factory that’s being torn down to make way for a giant residential complex, amusement park employees who emulate the landmark entertainments and environments of the rest of the non-Chinese world, the inhabitants of a town who are dismantling it prior to it being buried underwater by the Three Gorges Dam. The films, up until now, have always blended individual people-portraits with documentary-style overview, scrupulously observed but undeniably humanist. But here, Jia is taking the predominantly fictional style of wuxia stories – heroic tales of lone warriors fighting against historical injustice – and applying those genre tropes to very modern purposes in uncharacteristically bloody fashion.

One of the four stories concerns Zhou San (Wang Baoqiang), who is almost entirely defined by his relationship with the handgun he carries at all times. Early in the film it helps him repel an attempted robbery. Later, at a New Year’s celebration with his young nephew, he fires it in complement to a barrage of celebratory fireworks. Finally, it assists him in commiting his own seemingly cold-blooded robbery of a conspicuously rich couple. As the sword, the bow-and-arrow and the martial arts defined the usefulness of the historical warrior, so too here Jia seems to proffer the quiet and sullen San as an identical figure of comparably fearsome resource in the modern age. But what in the modern world is shaping his moral philosophies? What is the noble ideal he can refer to that enlarges, or transcends, his own sense of self? What is he preserving? That larger view is disturbingly conspicuous in its absence.

A pair of avengers comprise two of the other stories. Xiao Yu (Jia regular Tao Zhao) is yet another good-hearted woman having a love affair with a man who will never leave his wife, and she carries the ongoing anxiety and resentment of that situation with her to her thankless job as a receptionist at a retail-franchise sauna-spa in Hubei. Dahai (Jiang Wu) lives in a small, remote mining town, Shanxi, and insistently engages his long-suffering neighbors and fellow workers in hot-blooded diatribes against their greedy bosses, their corrupt local officials, and the arrogant corporate-types whom, Dahai preaches, are pulling all of the others’ strings. Jiang Wu (like his equally talented actor-director brother, Jiang Wen) does great work here, always keeping us guessing whether he’s right about it all, or just a malcontent crank. But when his proselytizing turns from verbal outrage to violence (in response to violence he may, or may not, have brought on himself), we must make up our own minds whether he’s abhorrently gone off his nut or acting as a truly justified equalizer for his less courageous comrades. Xiao Yu, as well, endures an escalating cascade of small humiliations, in the affair and at work, which results in a similarly grisly episode. Here our sympathies are far more deliberately directed towards Xiao, but do those sympathies still warrant what happened? With both Dahai and Xiao, Jia elicits an undeniable satisfaction with each of their acts, even as we lament that things had to come to that.

The fourth story, on its face, seems to be the mildest, but eventually traffics in such conflicting moral ambiguities that it’ll no doubt be the one I think of the most days after viewing the film. Xiao Hui (Luo Lanshan) is an amiable, easygoing young man who floats from job to job, pursuing his own self-interested path to steady work and security in a manner that Ayn Rand herself might reluctantly applaud. When he causes a problem at the factory job that starts the story, he simply relocates to another part of Dongguang province, and takes another. Eventually he ends up on the waitstaff at a very high-end businessmen’s hotel, which is discreetly but clearly also a very high-end businessmen’s brothel. He meets one of the hostesses, Lianrong (Zhang Jia-yi), and cultivates a friendship with her that he hopes will escalate. But, ultimately, relentlessly, business is business, and job-to-job, place-to-place, paycheck-to-paycheck, Xiao is tragically undone by that simple, relentless fact.

Generally, Jia’s film is seen as the story of how encroaching capitalism is eroding centuries of humanistic common cause and the general welfare of the citizenry of one of the largest and most populated countries on Earth. And there are many parallels to our own situation here in the United States. But Jia is doing far more than just presenting a they-did-it critique of capitalism; he’s indicting those on the receiving end of its ill effects as well. “People get depressed when they’re confronted by examples of enduring privilege and social injustice… our society lacks channels of communication; when people don’t have the habit of communicating with each other, violence becomes the fastest and most efficient way for the weak to protect their dignity.” Jia Zhang-ke is no great fan of corporate capitalism, but he’s even less enamored with the idea that violence is the only thing that will counteract its effects; that’s on us as much as it’s on them. He’s not indicating the line where those responsibilities transfer, but he wants us to feel thrilled and vindicated when, at last, the knives and shotguns come out, but then wonder to ourselves later why we think that’s really going to change anything.

Movies – The Giallo Project – Emilio Miraglia

From the early fifties to the late sixties, Emilio Miraglia was a script supervisor, unit director and assistant director for a pretty varied series of Italian genre films, from sword-and-sandal epics and sex comedies to political thrillers. His first directorial efforts were two Henry Silva vehicles, Assassination and The Falling Man. (Frequently cast as a classic villain in Hollywood, Actor’s Studio-alumnus Silva made a number of westerns and poliziotteschis in Italy throughout the seventies, cast, refreshingly, as a more heroic protagonist.)  A tepidly-received international caper film, The Vatican Affair (1968), then led to the two giallos for which he is most famous: The Night Evelyn Came Out Of The Grave and The Red Queen Kills Seven Times. Neither film is any kind of masterpiece, but Miraglia’s insistent visual sense and muscular storytelling panache make both films far more compelling than they perhaps deserve to be.

Marina Malfatti and her ghostly nemesis in “The Night Evelyn Came Out Of The Grave.” credit: dvdtalk.com

In The Night Evelyn Came Out Of The Grave (La Notte Che Evelyn Uscì Dalla Tomba) (Italy, 1971), we meet Lord Alan Cunningham (Anthony Steffen), a ridiculously wealthy country gent whose marriage to the late redheaded Evelyn ended tragically – he schemed to punish her for infidelities, but not before she bore him a child. Alas, both she and the baby died in the childbirth, and Alan took leave of his senses almost altogether. When the film starts, Alan is convalescing in the asylum run by his longtime friend Dr. Richard Timberlane (Giacomo Rossi Stuart). His treatment supposedly completed, Lord Alan maintains a few faulty circuits nonetheless – he likes to pick up available local redheads, bring them back to his crumbling estate, act out on his S & M revenge fantasies concerning his dear departed Evelyn, and then murder them. The ever-helpful Dr. Timberlane suggests that maybe he needs to get over these unfortunate proclivities by getting married again!  Nonetheless, Alan actually has very supportive family and friends whom are unaware of his more extreme indulgences: the wheelchair-bound Aunt Agatha (Joan C. Davies), who runs the household and supervises the domestics; the family’s estate manager, Farley (Umberto Raho); Evelyn’s sullen younger brother Albert (Roberto Maldera) (whom Aunt Agatha has kept on for groundskeeping and discreet hanky-panky), and Alan’s boisterous cousin George (Enzo Tarascio). Alan, in fact, recruits man-about-town George to help him shop around for potential wives (doctor’s orders!). George’s first recommendation is Susan (giallo trouper Erika Blanc), a redheaded stripper who emerges from a coffin as part of her dance routine. It doesn’t seem like George’s efforts constitute much of an upgrade, especially when Alan lures Susan back home, brings her into the dungeon, and commences his usual lethal whips-and-bondage routine. Susan isn’t buying into this, though, and she manages to flee outside, intrusively stumbling into Evelyn’s mausoleum and traumatizing Alan, causing him to collapse. When he awakens, still in the crypt, Susan is long gone.

Anthony Steffen and Maria Teresa Tofano in “The Night Evelyn Came Out Of The Grave.” credit: 10Kbullets.com

Weeks later, George is having a party at his estate where Alan meets the gorgeous (and blonde, not redhead!) Gladys (Marina Malfatti). Alan is smitten, and with none of those urges in sight, proposes to her that very night. What a relief to put all of that other stuff behind him! Gladys will save him! Aunt Agatha even hires a new quintet of housemaids, all in blonde wigs, to help Alan divest himself of his redheaded specter. Of course, now that everything is seemingly resolving, other mysterious omens appear. Gladys tells of happening across a friendly and helpful redheaded maid in the kitchen whom Aunt Agatha insists she never hired. Convinced that Evelyn may not be dead, Gladys takes her own tour of the Cunningham mausoleums. The groundskeeper Albert meets a mysterious grisly death, followed by the even ghastlier murder of Aunt Agatha. It seems now that while Alan is no longer haunted by Evelyn, Gladys now is; she convinces Alan to let her destroy Evelyn’s painted portrait, but freaks out when Evelyn appears hovering outside the bedroom window one fateful stormy night. Clearly someone is conspiring to screw up Lord Alan’s self-rehab efforts, terrorizing Gladys while murdering anyone who might be lending them support. But the likely suspects are dwindling fast.

Marina Malfatti in “The Night Evelyn Came Out Of The Grave.” credit: cigaretteburnscinema.wordpress.com

The film contains a number of plot holes and continuity problems that a more highly-budgeted or more tightly-produced effort wouldn’t suffer from. But Miraglia is so structurally insistent on telling the story in a visually compelling way that we just let them float past; he and cinematographer Gastone Di Giovanni manage a nice Hammer/gothic vibe – the castle, the tombs, rainstorms, the hunting milieu, all rendered with cool blue shadows and crisp widescreen compositions. And the acting is committed and energetic, even if the script doesn’t always earn that. Most of the film concerns itself with Lord Alan’s long haul to redemption, and the unfairness of attempts to perhaps gaslight him out of his rightful control of the estate. But it’s pretty tough to manufacture goodwill towards a guy who, in the first 10 minutes, whipped and murdered probably the nicest and most beautiful woman in the entire film (Maria Teresa Tofano as Polly). Some half-hearted attempts are made to place the story in England, but traffic on the wrong side of the road blows that idea pretty early on. Lord Alan’s purchase of a pen full of foxes to raise for hunting can only be a device for creating a nasty death scene later on, and, sadly, it’s the film’s least convincing atrocity. At one point Aunt Agatha rises from her wheelchair and walks a few steps. Why? Dunno…  There’s a lot of unexplained, downright sloppy, stuff, and sympathetic characters become scarcer as the narrative proceeds, but the weird and nasty plot twists of the last ten minutes come pretty close to making up for it.

 

Barbara Bouchet and Marina Malfatti in “The Red Queen Kills Seven Times.” credit: malesoulmakeup.wordpress.com

Many hundreds of years ago, there were two rich sisters living in a giant castle, one good, cheerful and friendly, one bad, spiteful and selfish. The selfish one constantly tormented the good one until one day the good one, at her wits’ end, murdered the bad one (just before her wedding day) with seven lethal stab wounds. Not only was the good girl (the black queen) riddled with guilt over her crime, but the bad girl (the red queen) came back from the dead a week later, killing the sister and six others. Legend has it that she returns every 100 years to take the lives of seven different people as eternal retribution for her sister’s killing her.

The late-twentieth-century version of the legend is related in The Red Queen Kills Seven Times (La Dama Rossa Uccide Sette Volte) (Italy, 1972). Kitty Wildenbruck (Barbara Bouchet) is the tormented blond sister of the darker Evelyn, who, like her predecessors, has been killed by Kitty. When a beloved Wildenbruck grandfather dies, and his will is read, there’s a necessity for all of the heirs to assemble – that’ll be a neat trick for Evelyn, whose death has understandably been covered up by Kitty and her other married sister Franziska (Marina Malfatti). But there’s also some evidence that grandpa met his fate not by natural causes, but at the hands of …the Red Queen!

“The Red Queen Kills Seven Times.” credit: ilmiovizioeunastanzachiusa.wordpress.com

Kitty is a fashion photographer for a large fashion brand called Springe (the fashion industry is textbook surroundings for many giallos, and serves admirably here as well.) The director at Springe, Hans Meyer (Bruno Bertocci) has a few special extracurricular tastes that make him easy pickings for Red Queen murder #2. His handsome successor, Martin Hoffman (Ugo Pagliai), must now contend with a workload that’s sure to interfere with his wooing of Kitty, as well as the parade of other in-house employees who can’t wait to hop onto his casting couch – Rosemary (Pia Giancaro), the executive secretary, p.a. Lenore (Dolores Calò) and model Lulu (young exploitation veteran Sybil Danning). Meanwhile, a local junkie, Peter (Fabrizio Moresco), doesn’t believe the story that his old flame Evelyn is languishing in the U.S., but is in fact the victim of foul play – he terrorizes and blackmails Kitty, but inevitably meets the Red Queen as well. So if Evelyn hasn’t returned from the dead as the psychotic white-faced, red-caped and cackling Red Queen, who could it possibly be? And who are her other victims before she finishes up with Kitty?

Barbara Bouchet in “The Red Queen Kills Seven Times.” credit: malesoulmakeup.wordpress.com

Even with a new cinematographer (Alberto Spagnoli), Miraglia keeps a firm and lush Hammer-tribute hand on the visuals. He gives a far more modern feel to the proceedings here (assisted by the same apartment that Mrs. Julie Wardh inhabited), but Castle Wildenbruck still provides an effective dose of Bava-like gothic thrills. There’s even a flooding room to be escaped from! The Night Evelyn Came Out Of The Grave (and, by the way, there’s no connection between Evelyns in these films) is a little less consistent, a little more dynamic – the deaths are nastier, there’s more nudity, and the characters overall are far less sympathetic. The Red Queen Kills Seven Times gives us a couple of genuinely sympathetic protagonists to follow, backs off on the levels of skin and violence (though there are still a few shocks, and some pretty inventive death scenes, as well as the usual tasteful eveningwear of the ladies…) and is far easier to follow narratively, even with the usual quota of jawdropping twists (of varying believability) in the last ten minutes.

“The Red Queen Kills Seven Times.” credit: atthemansionofmadness.blogspot.com

As stated before, there’s something admirable about Emilio Miraglia’s strong and straightforward storytelling style – it renders mistakes and tastelessness irrelevant, and sticks to the business of keeping us interested in watching what’ll happen next. These two will certainly be near the top of the Project-concluding list, but we’re barely into the seventies – there’s oh-so-much more to come!