Screening somewhere - Rod Bishop retrieves the overlooked THIS MUST BE THE PLACE (Paolo Sorrentino, Italy, 2011)

Robert Smith, the creator, writer, and vocalist of British band The Cure has made no public comment about this Sorrentino film. 

But Smith’s face-painted, lip-sticked, gothic, ragged visage has clearly been lifted by the Italian director for Sean Penn’s Cheyenne: a dissolute, squeaky-voiced, former rock god who gave up the profession after a couple of young brothers committed suicide from listening to his angst-ridden “depressed songs for depressed kids”.

Sorrentino has said: “I saw [Robert Smith] backstage after a concert in Rome…it’s a disconcerting dichotomy to see a guy of fifty years with the look of a sixteen-year-old, you don’t know what to focus on. Apparently Robert Smith keeps this look because his wife loves it, so he has that look all day, not only when he goes to a concert.”

Cheyenne is living a lonely life in a Dublin mansion with his wife Jane (Francis McDormand), who loves him and his “look”. If the idea of a Robert Smith lookalike shacking up with Francis McDormand seems unbelievable, well yes, it is. Sorrentino clearly knows it’s unbelievable, but he has only just started playing games with his audience.

Unfortunately, the first act is almost as bad as the film’s title. Sometimes, a song title for a film title isn’t a great idea, even if this one does come from Talking Heads. Serious audience endurance is required for the rambling first 40 mins, but the film does eventually take a dramatic tonal shift as Cheyenne travels to New York to see his dead father, a former survivor of Auschwitz. Cheyenne then enlists the help of a veteran Nazi hunter (Judd Hirsch), clearly modelled on Simon Wiestenthal, and pursues his father’s on-the-run Nazi tormenter, through New Mexico and Utah. 

It’s incongruous, of course – seeing a Robert Smith look-alike drag his suitcase through desert and mountain landscapes, to take revenge on a World War II monster, but Sorrentino pulls off a final confrontation between the goth and the 95-year-old Nazi, that’s as memorable as most things in cinema.

Made on a budget of $28 million, it grossed a ridiculous $144,000 in the USA, despite the presence of Oscar-winners Penn and McDormand and a soundtrack and live performance from David Byrne. 

However, it did take $8 million in Italy and close to a million in both Germany and France. It’s a film about the USA for Europeans.

The weirdness of This Must Be the Place is reminiscent of a small group of other notable Americana road movies written and directed by Europeans that tanked at the box office.

US friends of mine were scathing about Paris, Texas (1984) from the German Wim Wenders, sneering at what they perceived as an Americana fetishization of billboard signage. It didn’t appear that way to Europeans, however, who promptly gave the film the Palme d’Or.

The prolific Spanish director Bigus Luna also had a go at Americana in Reborn (1982). Dennis Hopper is a television evangelist who enlists the Italian mafia to supply him with a stigmatist to help him reap in donations at Texan church meetings. A real Italian woman who can’t speak English but who can bleed at Christ’s crucifixion wounds turns up, and Hopper’s evangelist abruptly turns virtually catatonic. Reborn is almost certainly the only time in the cinema where three petrol pump jockeys appear as The Three Wise Men. The film never made it past VHS and is now only available in dodgy bootlegs.

The crazed Serbian filmmaker Emir Kusturica, twice winner of the Palme d’Or, went all Americana in 1993 with the surrealist Arizona Dream, casting Johnny Depp as a flying fish expert who loves listening to the dreams of fish while working for New York’s Department of Fish and Game. He journeys to Douglas, Arizona, to work in a car dealership (run by Jerry Lewis) and becomes romantically involved with a husband-killer (Faye Dunaway), who is trying to build a flying machine, and with her daughter (Lili Taylor) who plays accordion to her pet turtles. It’s a film about magic realism and dreamers, and was very cooly received in the USA and elsewhere. 

Made for a budget of $19 million, it played in only three cinemas in the USA for a ridiculous gross of $112,000. The New Zealand box office gross was $24. Europeans, however, gave it the Special Jury Prize at Berlin.

These weird USA road movies by Europeans for Europeans - despite the star power of Penn, Depp, Dunaway, McDormand, Hopper, Jerry Lewis and David Byrne - haven’t come within a coo-ee of covering their budgets. Paris, Texas did the best, even though Harry Dean Stanton and Nastassja Kinski can’t be classed as star power. It grossed $3.5 mill worldwide and on a budget of $1.8 mill, it might have broken even. But for the backroom executives, $3.5 mill is a poor return on a Palme d’Or winner.

But who wants to live in a world where Arizona Dream, This Must Be the Place, Reborn and Paris, Texas can’t be made?