The latest in our occasional series on underdressed film directors. Because YOU demanded it! A fully nude John Boorman, appearing in his daughter’s documentary, ME AND MY DAD. Well, he got her to disrobe for EXCALIBUR, so it only seems fair for him to return the favour.
I was initially a bit frustrated with this film. Katrine Boorman starts out knowing nothing about filmmaking, it seems, not even how to set up a tripod straight. The entertainment comes from grumpy Dad’s irritation at her amateurishness, and his inability to stop directing his director. Also, she’s one of those people whose words don’t actually make any sense, but you know what they mean. So, as a storyteller she has a double handicap, but she certainly has access. And some great characters, with her mother, Boorman’s German ex-wife, high on that list. She’s a very sympathetic interviewee, solo, but then a family gathering is staged and the dynamics get really weird… It turns into a mini-version of FESTEN.
But, to my surprise, as the film went on I got over my own pedantic objections and warmed to Katrine’s approach. Her very inexperience works as a brilliant provocation to bring out all her dad’s worst qualities. Though he gets more and more likable too. You wouldn’t always know the man had a very strong sense of humour from his films — EXCALIBUR, in particular, seems to have no notion that any of this sex-in-plate-armour stuff could be perceived as comical. And then there’s ZARDOZ, which is only funny when it’s trying to be serious, and as for EXORCIST II: THE HERETIC…
(But POINT BLANK still contains some trace of original author Donald Westlake’s sensibility, which finds amusement in everything — his Richard Stark books just conceal the comic plotting with hardboiled deadpan. Curiously, many of the movie’s most Westlakian aspects owe nothing to the source novel. But I think the screenplay, and Boorman’s approach, somehow picked up a little of Westlake’s literary DNA. Plus, I just watched Boorman’s THE GENERAL, which is maybe TOO funny. More on that soon.)
Boorman’s a pretty funny guy, Why haven’t I read his autobio?
shadowplay 