Musical Interlude

Weird folk stuff, as I dig into Rob Young’s Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music.

A Little Inexpert

“Suppose, instead of what we have, that we are on a vast, streamlined spaceship — something with design pretensions, with pizazz, with decor by Travis Banton or Ferdinando Scarfiotti, not one of those clunky, turreted dinosaurs with the air of an old blacking factory. As this ship (let’s call in the Narcissus) surges through space […]”

This is an extract from David Thomson’s Bloomsbury book on the ALIEN quartet, as it was then. And no, Travis Banton did not design decor, he was a costume designer (Edith Head’s predecessor at Paramount) so the idea doesn’t make sense. I would like to see a Scarfiotti spaceship, though.

I used to own this book but I gave it away. The same series brought us volumes on BLUE VELVET, APOCALYPSE NOW and PERFORMANCE, and those are excellent.

Thomson is good on the virtues and later demerits of the ALIEN films. But, because he’s David Thomson, he can’t resist chancing his arm, so when it comes time to write about ALIEN RESURRECTION he (rightly) finds the movie not really worth discussion so he decides to offer up his own, alternative version. A bold idea — I’m not knocking it as an approach. But not every critic is also a screenwriter, and it turns out that Thomson’s idea of an ALIEN movie is even less like a proper ALIEN movie than ALIEN VS. PREDATOR or PROMETHEUS.

“[…] we feel as if we are in the best stateroom of a luxury liner cruising for ever. There is some moody music in the background – it might as well be Sinatra doing ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’ – and the windows give us one more panorama of space in which suns seem to be rising.”

Rising from behind what? There could be some planets in the way, or maybe they’re rising into view in the window, but the reader can’t visualise this without the necessary details.

“There is a great wash of cream, amber and raspberry in the light. Ripley, in a long, gold-coloured skirt, but naked above the waist, is sitting back in a chair eating figs. These might be her first, and they are perfect figs. So, much as she relishes them, she is a little inexpert yet, enough that the ripeness runs down her skin and falls on the healed scar between her breasts. She dabs up the stray juice and, in the process, feels the scar. She draws a finger along its line, and on her face we see feelings of pleasure and loss unaccountably mixed together.”

Are you cringing yet? Something else is being unaccountably being mixed together here, and I think it’s middle-aged wank fantasies and the ALIEN franchise. Thomson is writing in 1998 and we can’t accuse him of inventing fan fic, but he’s a somewhat early adopter.

I met DT briefly at Telluride and he was nice. So I don’t want to trash him too much. I think what this example shows is something of the difference between bad and good eroticism. The smut here is tasteful and restrained on the surface, but it still reads like classy porn, which isn’t really classy at all. The distinction between this stuff and non-cringe eros is, when the sex feels appropriate, it doesn’t make you think of the author sweating and perving. And it’d be thrice as tricky to pull off in a critical work, because it’s not generally called for. An appreciation of the sexiness in a film or a film star can be a legit part of the critic’s job, but inserting the kind of titillation you feel a film SHOULD have is likely to feel creepy.

Definitely has a tab open with tentacle porn.

Honorary mention in the Bad Sex Prize line — Geoff Dyer’s Zona, which is quite a good study on STALKER but features a mad digression where he confesses his desire to experience a threesome. I haven’t read his book on WHERE EAGLES DARE because it makes no sense that he’d write both books, and also I’m afraid of what sex fantasies he’s going to shoehorn in.

And I haven’t read any of Thomson’s movie star biographies, because I have this terrible fear that they’ll be like this. I gave this book away but then I just bought it again for £1.50 in a charity shop in the “Pocket Movie Guide” edition, so I could reproduce this muck for your reading pleasure.

If you like the thought of Sigourney Weaver eating figs topless then the movie for you is HALF MOON STREET. It isn’t any good and she doesn’t eat any figs but otherwise you’ll love it.

All that glitters

OK, so as I half-suspected, NUIT D’OR is consistently rather dazzling but doesn’t add up to an entirely satisfying film experience.

Klaus Kinski is back from the dead and bent on revenge. He’s been part of a weird cult of some kind but at some point in the narrative there’s a falling out. His enemies include flic Bernard Blier, and family and friends Marie Dubois, Jean-Luc Bideau and the great Charles Vanel. Maurice Ronet is an Interested Party — and also the title character. Yes. Nuit D’Or is a dude.

Kinski talks a lot about what these swine did to him and why, but it never quite came into focus for me. And the relations of each character to the others remained blurry, although they definitely explained it all. The problem is that the film shuns flashbacks, so we never SEE any of the backstory, and we never SEE the characters interacting in a way that makes their interconnections obvious. The only thing I really grasped is that Dubois has a little daughter, played by the talented Valérie Pascale, who Kinski kidnaps.

So the movie resembles a giallo in style, and in story it;s reminiscent of Kinski-starring spag western AND GOD SAID TO CAIN… But it’s oddly devoid of killings. A typical scene will have Kinski show up, threaten one of his enemies with a gun, or insult them, or both, then bugger off. Or he sends them creepy dolls.

Instead of the murders which would make up the set-pieces in an Argento or Bava film, we get the continuing threat of infanticide after Kinski turns kidnapper. This is very uncomfortable, but just watching Kinski in a scene with a child is uncomfortable. Don’t ask me why, but you know it’s true.

His scenes with his character’s mother are creepy too — partly because Elisabeth Flickenschildt gives a brilliantly batshit performance, but I think also because Kinski exudes this polymorphous perversity that embraces man, woman, child and prop.

It’s quite possible to make a revenger’s tragedy with sympathetic characters — you can even distribute the sympathy among both revenger and targets. But what seems slightly more common is the cold, rats-running-a-maze narrative — I guess Rambo is meant to be sympathetic in FIRST BLOOD, but do we have enough access to his personality? That film, by the way, is practically a remake of CHATO’S LAND, the Charles Bronson-Michael Winner DEATH WISH-in-stetsons flick, where no human warmth obtrudes.

The coldness and queasiness of NUIT D’OR isn’t a deal-breaker for me, and I can even get down with the irrationality — what’s going on when la petite Valerie opens the Bluebeard-verboten door and finds her doppelganger hanging from a noose? It’s never, ever explained. But you can’t say it’s not interesting.

Director Serge Moati keeps things looking striking and eerie but always observes from outside. We can root for the poor child, in an abstract way, on principle, but we’re never given access to her inner character. Her mother’s anguish ought to elicit compassion, but we’re held at arm’s length. To bring this kind of story to a satisfactory conclusion, some kind of paradigm-shifting twist, some kind of shocking spectacle, or some kind of poetic puzzle would be required. Instead, we get just another stylish, gnomic confrontation in an impressive setting.

While at first I thought PHIBES would be a good comparison, now I lean more towards Rivette’s DUELLE is a closer match. Doesn’t mean fans of one will like the other, but maybe they’d be likeliest to.

NUIT D’OR stars Maurice Martineau; Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald – ‘Fitzcarraldo’; Thérèse; Athos; Alfred Fichet, le commissaire; Dr. Gabrielle Martin; Lady Emily Lebanon; Kroum; Jean-Baptiste Turlot; and Philippe Greenleaf.