Teen Spirits

So, we finally caught up with THE EMPTY MAN which seemed like it would be our bag, but kind of wasn’t, not entirely. And we also watched TALK TO ME, which totally impressed us. It became our bag whether we wanted it to be or not.

We absolutely loved David Prior’s episode of Guillermo Del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities so our hopes were high for TEM. All through the long pre-title sequence we were riveted. Then we got less and less involved as the film began showing its influences, and seemed increasingly removed from real life. (A ghost story should touch reality in 100 places, argued Henry James.)

The film has a fairly interesting structure, with the prologue crashing into the main body of the film a la EXORCIST (Bhutan here = Iraq) and key story elements revealed in flashback. From RINGU it borrows the very effective trope of the supernatural investigation being rendered urgent by a ticking clock curse — the Bad Thing that will get you if you don’t find the truth in time, and maybe even if you do.

Unfortunately the use of VHS tapes in a cabin as backstory infodump tips the hat too overtly to that source, and the green light and glitching are too Fincheresque (Prior collaborated with Fincher on his Voir video essay series for Netflix, and got his start making behind-the-scenes extra feature for DF). And the horror honk needs to be retired as a soundtrack device. Elsewhere there’s an impulse towards the Lynchian, but Lynch is really hard to imitate — I think the sensibility has to be FELT. Likewise, Fincher comes by his style honestly, and what works brilliantly for him is less successful for a mere imitator.

The one really original discovery is how scary BRIDGES can be.

Prior composes really well, though, his movement of characters into and out of the frame is constantly sharp and does feel original. The talent is there, he just seems to need to get away from conventional plot beats and explore things he has a personal connection to — the traumatic backstory stuff here is particularly tired and fails to move.

Leading man James Badge Dale is perfectly OK, but the film’s own emptiness hinders him, and I can see why Prior has turned to F. Murray Abraham and Glynn Turman for his CoC episode — when you have great actors, everything just gets better. (When Phoebe Nicholls turns up as a scary nurse, everything in TEM DOES get better, including Dale.)

She was Merrick’s mom in THE ELEPHANT MAN!

As part of the film’s nicely modular structure, there’s a teen horror movie buried inside the middle-aged detective story, an urban legend bit of spookiness that’s fun if derivative. (The film DOES manage strong suspense and anxiety, but it’s purely technical — we never care about anyone in it.) TALK TO ME is entirely a teen urban legend horror story, but for once the teenagers feel credible.

I guess both films deal with teenage recklessness — blowing on an empty bottle found on a bridge to summon the Empty Man, who will kill you, is a stupid thing to do, but as a test of courage it does feel like something teens might do. Grasping a porcelain hand and inviting the spirits of the dead to possess you, as happens in TTM, is equally dumb — but no dumber than imbibing illicit substances of uncertain provenance and strength.

What elevates TALK TO ME is not just a matter of style — though directors Danny & Michael Philippou wield their tricks with great flare, and they’re integrated into story and character so that they never feel like indulgent showing off. The performances are FANTASTIC — I’ll even take the muffled mumblecore quality of the dialogue, because the film gains so much from its sense of believability. You don’t want anyone to enunciate even 1% more than they would normally, and spoil the illusion.

It would seem sound to shoot the naturalistic performances in an artless mockumentary fashion, but instead the filmmakers make sophisticated use of long takes, elegant transitions, and following shots that keep us glued to the characters. Sophie Wilde is a star.

The film speaks to real human experience not in spite of the fantasy element, but through it — this is a neat trick, and one that may be impossible to learn. Unquestionably the filmmakers have picked up a lot of knowledge of cinema by seeing stuff and analysing it, but what makes the film really interesting is the sense that they understand and care about their characters, and really know them on a deep level, and have encouraged their actors to do likewise. And they’ve really cast this thing well, down to the smallest part. What is it about Australian actors these days? I guess they’ve always been good, at least since the seventies, but is it maybe some combination of traditions? British technique plus American honesty and naturalism? But maybe we should just call it Australian excellence. It’s all over this film.

The Sunday Intertitle: Pursued by a Bear

THE BEAR’S WEDDING deals with maternal influence, the Victorian idea that the experiences of a pregnant woman could affect her offspring — a sort of anticipation of modern epigenetics, but a discredited idea that’d make a good subject for Dario Argento (extra Y chromosome causes psychopathy; the murder victim’s eye records the last thing they saw; he loves his outmoded medical theories).

See also THE ELEPHANT MAN, in which Lynch chooses to assume that John (really Joseph) Merrick believes the (fictitious) showman’s account of his origin story (“Struck down in the fourth month of her maternal condition by a rampaging African elephant…”) His family did seem to accept this explanation, per Wikipedia.

TBW (Medvezhya svadba) is a 1925 Soviet historical pageant in which the protagonist’s mother gets traumatized by a bear which kills her husband, and he grows up with wild, violent moods “when the forest is full of noise.”

I’m struck by the resemblance to CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF here. But COTW is one of those weird Hammer films that begins decades early and takes forever to reach its actual storyline (see also the pathetic CREATURES THE WORLD FORGOT). TBW brings its bipolar protag within the first nine minutes, and demonstrates that this approach CAN work if you’re reasonably brisk about it.

Konstantin Eggert and Vladimir Gardin directed, very effectively, and the production design is rich and atmospheric. I love the huge bed.

This is how the filmmakers show the young hero, as a boy, being influenced by the malign bible stories he’s told:

Really good!

Elsewhere, admittedly, the filmmakers’ attempts at a montage style falters slightly because the shots are too wide, too neutral, to do the Eisenstein thing, which requires intense compositions carefully designed to clash dramatically, each with the other. This is just a bunch of long shots cut unpleasantly fast. I appreciate tight pacing, but the footage and story often seem more suited to a slow, atmospheric approach.

A real coup de cinema — our hero comes to his senses and realises he’s mauled his loved one to death — he retreats — the extremely long bedclothes wrapped about him are gradually pulled away from the slain, woman, revealing the tragedy, as he sinks into a dark and blurry background, a vivid picturization of the internal horror.

The film is full of striking visual ideas. The requisite torch-wielding villagers are portrayed first through a sedate darkened archway, but as more join the hint, the screen is filled with flames and becomes a hellish abstract.

Frequently the film achieves this — not quite enough to reach Eisensteinian montage, but enough to be inspirational — a modern filmmaker could steal these effects and look good doing it.

An exciting film which plays like a commie Hammer flick — and illuminates the ways in which Hammer films, with all those depraved aristos, are open to sinister left-wing interpretations, heh heh.

In Heaven

Enter Marjorie Bennett, in a one-note performance of a one-note role — officious and stroppy to the last — which is somehow perfect. She’s a comic character in a fundamentally serious film (yes, we’re talking about Chaplin’s LIMELIGHT again, at last). Since Chaplin is making the film, and since it’s, in a way, a drama ABOUT comedy, the caricature works.

I like, immediately, how Bennett knocking on Calvero’s door causes the man himself, halfway up the stair, to lose his balance/sense of direction and sway into the wall. As if not only his concentration was disrupted, but his sense of where he was. “I can’t be ascending the stairs if someone’s knocking at my door…”

I’m not convinced Chaplin has built all the storeys of this rooming house, but he’s built two and he can double ’em up, and the wisdom of placing Calvero up two floors is revealed when he has to stagger all the way up with Bennett watching in a cutaway that might as well be a still photograph. All of that is peculiarly funny.

Calvero, while drunk, is terrified of his landlady — he knows he’s in trouble, potentially or actually — and so Chaplin makes him particularly elfin in his attempts at ingratiation.

Suspicious, Bennett looks through the keyhole and is granted an optically impossible closeup of Thereza’s head on Calvero’s pillow. He must have shoved the bed right up against the door and mounted it on blocks, but it’s back where it should be in the next shot.

The fact that English landlord and ladies were legally obliged to prevent unwedded sex under their roofs (ought to be rooves, surely?) is a weirdness of history that might need explaining to future generations. The fact that they took their duties so seriously is further proof of the British native’s inbuilt prurience, which also informs the sniggery music hall routines we will witness later.

Some variable dialogue — though I quite like Calvero’s “You have a leaky gas pipe. I mean, your room has a leaky gas pipe,” — a fine but important distinction. His capper, after being told that Thereza is ill — “It wouldn’t be dandruff, would it?” is highly lame, though, especially as he then has to pause and bring in the tragic music to effect a mood change that wouldn’t have been necessary if he’d kept his yap shut like a good silent comedian.

Calvero tucks Thereza in, then goes to bed under posters celebrating his glory days, serenaded by a trio of street musicians, who include, wonderfully, Chester Conklin and Loyal Underwood, in their final appearances for their old colleague. Underwood hadn’t appeared in a Chaplin film since THE PILGRIM in 1923, and would never appear in a film again. The third of the troupe is Julian Ludwig, listed by the IMDB as a producer on UNFORGIVEN, which surprises me very much but appears to be true.

Dream Sequence! “Why does this film remind me of ERASERHEAD?” Asked Fiona. Because it has that rare thing, theatrical dream sequences.

Both Calvero and Lynch’s Woman Behind the Radiator seem to perform right at the camera. Only Chaplin operates a flea circus at the same time. Essaying a sort of sergeant-major’s elevated-plebeian accent, he revises a routine he’d first tried to fit into a movie back in 1915/16. But this time with a song.

It’s quite a good song, and quite a good pastiche of English music hall, which means it’s not that funny. The difficulty of a film depicting a comedian being successful, as Scorsese decided while making THE KING OF COMEDY, is you’re a hostage to the audience’s tastes. If they don’t agree the comic is funny, they don’t believe he’s a popular comic. So Scorsese cut Jerry Lewis’s comedy performances out of his film. I could see an argument for Chaplin holding off Calvero’s act until the end of the movie, but I’d miss the routines. For a while, the movie looks as if it’s going to alternate dreams and reality in an almost 50-50 split, which would be incredibly avant-garde. I sort of wish it had.

The end of this sequence may be the best, most haunting, and most personally revealing in the movie. An offscreen audience is lengthily applauding the act. Then the clapping fades. Calvero looks anxious. POV sweeping a deserted theatre. Back to Calvero, who now has THE FACE OF AN EMPTY HOUSE.

Match dissolve to Calvero, back in his room, still looking stricken.

This kind of close match reminds me of Buster Keaton’s teleporting sports car in SEVEN CHANCES, and his journeys across edit points in SHERLOCK JR, and the connection may well be one of actual influence, since, of course, Buster will appear at the end of this film.

But we still have about an hour and a half until then…

TBC