Damn You, Television!

Now we’re hooked on American Crime Story, AND we have a new series of Better Call Saul to contend with.

Sensibly diverging from the American Horror Story format, ACS benefits from a tighter focus — nothing is permitted which doesn’t further the basic story of the OJ Simpson trial, though as judge and jury discovered to their cost, that means that almost anything happening in twentieth century America can be ruled relevant. Even the future is included, since head writers Larry Karaszewski & Scott Alexander manage to shoehorn the Kardashian family in on the pretext that their dad was OJ’s friends and one of his lawyers. The kids’ glee at their fathers’ meaningless and distressing fame is either the Secret Origin of the Kardashian Family — how they learned the wrong lessons at a damagingly early age, or else it’s proof that the tendency to regard celebrity as equivalent to sainthood was already engendered. O.J.’s acquittal for murdering their mother’s friend would thus seem like ultimate proof of this value system, so that Kim K. can this week dismiss a thoughtful comment by Chloe Grace Moretz with the devastating rejoinder “nobody has heard of you.”

It’s interesting to me how the show has seamlessly maintained a high standard of writing even when the head writers hand over duties to the B-team (The Knick was also good at this), though I do find the direction slightly more variable. Ryan Murphy favours propulsion, his vigorous camera movements rushing the story onwards. Anthony Hemingway, known for The Wire and whose RED TAILS I thought was really terrible, has a tendency towards slightly meaningless show-off shots, but I found by his second episode I was even enjoying these, The contrast in style between this and his feature film suggests he was really being heavily sat on by George Lucas and his cohorts. And then John Singleton contributes one episode executed in a slick, almost classical manner that looks admirably restrained by comparison.

The idea of cinematic TV is interesting — I wonder if any of these guys would find a natural home on the big screen. Singleton has had the most distinguished career, but it’s been very erratic. The tighter discipline of TV, where the director is more like a studio employee in the old days, choices confined to guiding the actors and placing the camera, may suit such filmmakers better than a medium where they’d be responsible for everything. Although not having George Lucas sitting on you must help too.

The ensemble here is too good to pick favourites. John Travolta has taken some flack for his expressionist perf, and for looking “like haunted spam,” but I find his choices both bold and amusing. It’s true, he doesn’t quite look human anymore, and maybe he’s adapted to looking like an artfully-chewed pencil eraser by developing a manner of acting — all precise, prissy gestures and words bitten off delicately like umbilici — to suit his new, biomechanical instrument. We will see more of such post-human performances as the twenty-first century nears its apocalyptic climax, an event which will no doubt be documented by American Crime Story around about season 5.

Freud and Fumetti

I like Corrado Farina’s obscure first film, THEY’VE CHANGED THEIR FACES, even more than his better-known cult second, BABA YAGA, but the latter is still an impressive oddity, attempting to combine sex, kink, fantasy and politics and succeeding as a kind of surreal snapshot of seventies youth, incorporating traces of BLOW UP, gialli, soft porn and youth protest. All this and a camera which kills, and Carroll Baker as a lesbian dominatrix. You can’t complain you’ve been shortchanged.

The source material is Guido Crepax’ perverse comic books devoted to Valentina, a lanky beauty with a bob, inspired by Louise Brooks who was apparently delighted to become a bdsm graphic novel porn star in her sixties. She had previously become a cartoon heroine in the Dixie Dugan strip of the twenties and thirties, which were maybe slightly racey but nothing like this. (In a striking bit of cross-medium pollination, Brooks became Dixie who became Alice White in two feature films inspired by the strip, the recently-rediscovered GIRL and SHOW GIRL IN HOLLYWOOD.)

Valentina later became a Berlusconi TV series, worthless like every cultural outpouring of the bunga-bunga sleazemaster, but here she’s Isabelle de Funes, niece of Louis, with bulbous manga-babe eyes and loose, fleshy lips making her something like an elongated Barbara Steele, but minus the fierceness. She’s an impossibly cute, rather sympathetic presence — a great shame this was the last feature for both her and her director.

A lesser shame is that the film can’t quite connect the political musings of the main characters with the elusive plot — a lot less elliptical and dreamlike than the freeform meanderings of the comic, but still pretty fluid and free-floating. But where the various interests of the filmmaker do converge, there are glimpses of a blend of arthouse and grindhouse which could have conceivably given rise to a whole new form of Italian cinema.

Kink-wise, the movie has a real enthusiasm for costume-box dress-up, but uses Crepax’s uniform fetish to evoke fascism and state menace, which hovers in the background throughout, connected to the main plot by obscure, irrational tendrils. It’s often hard to know how to treat perverse fantasies which seem sinister but aren’t really, as they’re only fantasies — in film, an innately fantastical medium, a bondage fantasy has as much reality as anything else, and can seem too “heavy” — I think BELLE DE JOUR gets this right, because it establishes a boundary between the real and unreal, then artfully blurs it.

BABA YAGA contains a whipping scene played like straight horror and more disturbing than erotic, for all the stylised red paint slashes. Maybe Valentina needed more of Barbarella’s “Whatever” approach to sexual situations, which the comic book character, essentially a horny sleepwalker, certainly has.

Being Obstructive

Apart from his TV show The Kingdom, which delighted me, the only Lars Von Trier joint I have any time for is THE FIVE OBSTRUCTIONS. It’s a great teaching tool — Von Trier and his collaborator, Jorgen Leth, show how an artist can triumph over all sorts of arbitrary, seemingly impossible handicaps. It’s a very hopeful film, in that sense, which cannot really be said of DANCER IN THE DARK or NYMPHOMANIAC.

Von Trier, knowing Leth quite well, can pick obstacles he knows will truly vex his old friend, and I thought it might be amusing to invent obstructions for other filmmakers, based on their particular ways of working.

For Quentin Tarantino, you might pick almost any of Trier’s Dogme 95 rules, especially —

1. Music must not be used unless it occurs where the scene is being shot.
2. Temporal and geographical alienation are forbidden.
3. Genre movies are not acceptable.
4. The film format must be Academy 35 mm.

Tarantino is practically the only filmmaker in the world who might be forced to raise his game by these rules. Since he already obeys rule 9 by not listing himself as director, a useful fifth rule for him might be

5. Samuel L. Jackson may not appear.

Peter Greenaway should be disbarred from symmetry. In fact, he should be forced to work with asymmetrical actors — Ian Dury’s appearance in THE COOK THE THIEF was a god step in this direction. And he should be prevented from hiring actors who speak in arch, mannered tones, or flat, boring tones. No Michael Nyman. Instead, the Yakkety Sax chase music from The Benny Hill Show should be played every ten minutes, no matter what is happening. Oh, and his tripod should have one leg shorter than the others.

Michael Bay shouldn’t be allowed special effects. Or music. Or sound. Or a camera. And he has to direct it while gagged, blindfolded and wearing a straitjacket, locked in a cupboard in a coal cellar in a country at least five hundred miles away from where the shoot is taking place.

Of course, Lars himself needs to fall victim to his own foul scheme. No suffering women. No miserable ending. Shoot it on film. Shoot it in Danish, for God’s sake, your English dialogue is terrible. In fact, get someone who can write to write it.

Actually, none of Lars’ obstructions are really obstructions. He doesn’t need obstructions, he needs help.

Who would you obstruct, and how?