Blind Tuesday: Seeing-Eye Cat

Somebody is killing fashion models in Amsterdam — ever wondered why models are paid so highly? Because they’re always getting murdered.

Rejected from Forgotten Gialli, CRIMES OF THE BLACK CAT winds up in Blind Tuesday (our occasional feature on blind-person-in-jeopardy thrillers), just because it’s made me rather cross. At the core of the film is a rather darling conceit, a killer using a black cat as assassin, its claws coated with deadly curare. The delightful absurdity of this idea — ever tried getting a cat to do anything? what happens when kitty washes her paws? and also, just WHY? – is rather stifled by the wrapping around of the entire plot and all the set-pieces from 23 PACES TO BAKER STREET.

Stealing is inevitable, and largely to be encouraged, in the arts, but there are times when it is to be condemned. The shot-for-shot lifting of the love scene from DON’T LOOK NOW in ABOUT LAST NIGHT… is one of them (why remind the audience, so forcibly, that Demi Moore is not Julie Christie and Rob Lowe is not Donald Sutherland [or vice versa] or that Edward Zwick does not even share a species with Nic Roeg?). This is another.

The rule is that stealing is good when it makes things better, but that holds it to a high standard — the artwork must be better than it would have been without the theft, but also better than it would have been with something original of an adequate standard. Ideally, the theft should be the kind whereby, if the viewer recognizes the source, pleasure is increased (“How clever!”) rather than spoiled (“What a blatant swipe!”)…

In the case of CRIMES OF THE BLACK CAT, it’s to be condemned because it’s lazy and unimaginative, and because it doesn’t help the film, it actually constrains it. The effect is to break the thing in two, so that Anthony Steffen (rather good and sepulchral as the sightless hero) and his investigations seem to occupy a whole other movie from the bout of silly killings.

The big adaptation is to make the hero not a playwright who uses a tape recorder to practice his dialogue, but a film composer (who can’t see the film — how does THAT work?). This allows for a giallo-within-the-giallo, which is par for the course in this compulsively self-reflective genre. Graphic close-ups of breast-slicing in this embedded movie are far more horrible than anything in the main body of the narrative, until the ending, when director Sergio Pastore goes all vicious again, and we can guess that the killer is a woman. You see, whenever the killer does something truly nasty and misogynistic, you can be fairly sure he’ll turn out to be a woman (dishonorable exception: IGUANA WITH A TONGUE OF FIRE, where he’s gay) . It’s a kind of alibi instinct, to deflect the filmmaker’s own guilt.*

This is, on the whole, the kind of giallo that makes me not like the genre. It’s a field which triumphs when it unlocks its imagination, and there’s something deeply tedious about all these black-gloved killers. I think that’s the true explanation for the decline of Dario Argento: he’s become bored by his own tropes, and God forbid that he should ever examine them critically for signs and meaning. Mario Bava, God love him, wasn’t inclined to introspection either, but he felt compelled to explore every genre on offer, even those like the sexy-type-film which he instinctively disliked. It’s because he didn’t view himself as an artist that he experimented so much, making him kind of (but only kind of) the Keaton to Argento’s Chaplin.

Hey, another strange thing. The woman with the killer cat operates out of a pet shop called, according to its sign, UNDULATER. Why would a pet shop be called UNDULATER? And if you ran a pet shop called UNDULATER, wouldn’t that cause a fair bit of confusion (especially in Amsterdam)?**

*The other bit of giallo cowardice: if the killer is a priest, he will soon be unmasked or unfrocked as a bogus priest. Most of these movies are deeply conservative at heart.

**Stop press: W Krikken suggests,via Twitter, that the setting is Copenhagen. I think that is correct. Still, makes the possibilities for misconstruing UNDULATOR even richer, if anything.

In other news: Limerwreckage – Carradine rhymes again!

Don’t

The sex scene in DON’T LOOK NOW is something I’ve already written about, but what the hell — there’s always more to say. It’s a sequence that rewards study. The last time I ran it I was struck by elements of explicit actor-on-actor contact I’d never noticed before — possibly because they disappeared in pan-and-scan TV and VHS versions, actually. Possibly because director Nic Roeg places them at the edge of frame to make you only subliminally register them. So the scene feels stronger than it appears to be?

But I want to address another impression that struck me, and which belatedly occurred to me to write about as I’ve been walking around with Pino Donaggio’s score playing on my old coal-burning Nano. I want to talk to you about the very weird stuff Donald Sutherland is doing.

The scene starts, really, with Julie Christie, as Donald’s lady wife, observing that he has toothpaste on his chin from his recent ablutions. “Lick it off,” commands Donald.

This is, one might think, a quirky form of loveplay, and not one we can really blame Donald for. But since Donald is genetically of Scottish blood, and co-scenarist Allan Scott is likewise, I’m tempted to blame the famed frugality of my own race.

“You’ve got toothpaste on your chin.”

“Well jings, woman! Dinnae let it go tae waste!”

We then get this odd moment, during the actual “at it” sequence (editor Anne Coates to Soderbergh on the rip-off version in OUT OF SIGHT: “They don’t seem to ever actually… go at it.”) — Donald bends one arm behind his back, as if being arrested by an invisible judo instructor. I don’t know what kind of mime training they gave him at Perth Rep, but it’s paying off in spades.

That’s one moment I was always aware of. Fiona claims that she pointed it out to me, but don’t believe her. Possibly it’s some kind of rarified tantric technique Donald picked up in the sixties. Possibly he just had an itch between the shoulder blades. But it’s IN THE FILM. It clearly means something.

STOP PRESS: It’s NOT in the film. On revisiting the sequence, I find I’ve misremembered it entirely. Donald’s arm is bending behind Julie’s back, not his own, as if he’s preparing to swivel her around on his member. Still: not quite normal.

Then we get Donald physically licking Julie’s lips. Licking his own lips would be bad enough. There’s nothing, on paper, about licking a pretty girl’s lips that’s off-putting to me. For some reason I’ve never been moved to try it, possibly because it seems somehow weird, but the principle doesn’t seem obviously worse than French kissing, for example. But now, having seen Donald do it, somehow the possibility of my ever wanting to try this diminishes rapidly. I’m ranking it somewhere below incest and coprophilia on my list of things to try. Maybe it’s the mustache.

Of course, in putting together a sequence like this, so intricately edited, many shots did not make the cut, so I was pleased to come across the genuine continuity sheets for this day’s filming, with the notes next to takes that were judged “NG” (No Good). here are a sampling, for your edification ~

Take 4. NG. Donald inserts his head between two pillows and barks like a seal.

Take 7. NG. Donald seems to become hypnotized by his own knee. Falls off bed.

Take 11. NG. Donald starts biting Julie’s hair. Julie becomes irate. Donald bites own hair.

Take 12. NG. Donald starts biting Julie’s hair again.

Take 15. NG. Donald behaving strangely. Explains that he’s trying to lick his own eye.

Take 16. NG. Donald begins playing an Ozark harp. Julie complains this is distracting.

Take 17. NG. Donald’s whistling puts Julie off.

Take 18. NG. Julie discovers Donald is wearing flippers. Urgent conference with Nic. Donald agrees to remove flippers. Asks for snorkel. Agrees to do without snorkel. Asks for perm. Nic agrees to perm.

Throughout all this, the only strange or unbecoming thing Julie does is to bite Donald. Which I’m down with, seems like only fair retaliation. But she bites him on the ball of the foot. Maybe I’m prudish, but I generally like to keep the feet as far removed from the actual sex act as possible. “I’m not knocking it,” as Donald repeatedly says in LITTLE MURDERS, it’s just not my scene. So, Julie, I’ll let you off with a warning this time: never bite a man’s ball.

A friend once corresponded with la Christie, concerning a movie. The starting point was an old chestnut about a couple having sex on a train, who offend their fellow passengers by sparking up cigarettes after performing the act. At some point the script improved from the initial idea of sexy young people offending the fuddy-duddies, to the more interesting idea of an older couple offending the stuffy kids. So Julie was approached. And sent back a very nice letter, handwritten, explaining that she did not buy into the story, because in her (apparently considerable) experience of having sex on trains, discretion had been the watchword, “even down to having my lover place his hand over my mouth to stifle my cries.”

Which is more information than was requested, yet not necessarily more than we wanted to know.

The Horror…

In VINYAN, written and directed by Fabrice Du Welz, Rufus Sewell and Emmanuelle Béart play a couple who lost their young son in the tsunami while holidaying in Thailand. Unable to accept that he’s dead, they stay on, and when Béart thinks she sees the boy in a video of survivors in neighbouring Burma, they decide to hitch a ride with triad people-smugglers into the heart of darkness to rescue him.

The whole time I was watching the film — magnificently shot by Benoît Debie (an amazing aerial shot introducing and then sinking inexorably into a verdant ruin, the film’s Conradian darkplace, is breathtaking) with impressive sound design and fine performances, especially from Sewell — I was conscious of discomfort at the portrayal of the Thai and Burmese characters.It was only after the film ended that I became aware that I was shaking with anger. An unusual reaction for a mild-mannered, good-humoured type like your friend and humble blogger.

It wasn’t just that the “ethnic” types on display were all either shady gangster murderers or weird, alien, incomprehensible and possibly psychotic “savages,” although that is certainly central to my problem. Since the film starts out with both feet at least partially planted in the realist domain — I’d say heels, arches and balls of said feet in realism, toes in psychedelic melodrama — but ends in CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST by way of APOCALYPSE NOW, with face-painted feral children re-enacting your favourite moments from the Kurtz compound, there’s a tonal problem which cannot really be resolved except by dismissing all the film’s sociological/ethnographic trappings as pure fantasy. And if it’s pure fantasy, riding it in on the tsunami seems like a pretty gross error of taste.

But the error is more egregious than simply exploiting a real-life tragedy for purposes of entertainment. That happens all the time, of course, and there are all sorts of factors which can come into play and arguably make it more acceptable: the passage of time seems to be one many of us accept. It’s hard to imagine the INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS getting made, in any form, near the end of World War II, but certainly there will be those who don’t have a problem with it now. And making an entertainment with a real-life tragedy as backdrop might also be quite acceptable if we could say that the entertainment has its heart in the right place.

Of course, neither time nor heart-placement seem to be on the side of VINYAN. The tsunami is horribly recent, a living memory to millions, and the really offensive thing about this movie is that it wades into a landscape ravaged by a natural disaster and casts the victims as the villains. This seems to me to be like making a monster movie in Germany in 1947 with cannibalistic Jews as the monsters.

It’s all very unfortunate, to say the least, considering the amount of craft and talent at work to make this film. There are some absolutely stunning images, not just the expected landscapes, but the way the light falls on Béart’s eerily beautiful, scalpel-sculpted face, or Sewell’s rugged, hollow-eyed mask of pain. The relationship between the protagonists is mostly compelling — though as Béart slides into madness, all we really get is the lowered chin and up-gazing eyes known to impudence as the “crazy Kubrick stare,” a once-effective gimmick which, through substituting posture for psychology, has become seriously devalued currency. But at least,as regard the couple at the film’s heart, there is a seriousness of intent. But there is no seriousness about the portrayal of the world of the film, which is an idea of the East that would have looked lurid and one-sided in a 1930s Hollywood melodrama. And when you weigh the dimensional and clearly motivated white folks against the evil and, yes, inscrutable Asian characters, the imbalance tips the film into an abyss. Praising the film in the Edinburgh Film Festival’s programme, fest director Hannah McGill focuses on its portrait of a distraught couple, calling it a kind of “APOCALYPSE DON’T LOOK NOW.” You might as well call it DON’T GOOK NOW.

Since I don’t believe the filmmakers are purely evil, I have to assume a colossal blindness to issues of sheer human decency. DW Griffith owed his bigotry to his upbringing but was still culpable for his inability to mature past it. JUD SUSS is a crafty piece of anti-semitic porn, wily and insinuating but quite resistible to anyone not already steeped in racism: the film’s wickedness is quite conscious. VINYAN seems at least as worthy of condemnation because surely there’s a point where thoughtlessness becomes criminal, and it worries me that people will accept it merely as a hardcore thrill-ride like the director’s previous CALVAIRE, and not question the sinister lens through which it observes the East.

Those Burmese and Thais are very far away. Their culture is very different from ours. They’re not like us, are they?