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?

On 4K HD - David Hare swoons over PARIS TEXAS (Wim Wenders, 1984) and adds a thought about THE THIRD MAN (Carol Reed, 1949)

Direct from Paree aujourd’hui.

Wenders’ Paris Texas in a new 4K 2024 restoration. I have the earlier 2022 Criterion and honestly wondered how much better this could get.

 

It is amazing. The clarity’s more film-like than ever. Depth and grain are like velvet. You get the feeling from watching this 4K that Robby Mũller was really falling in love with the super clean light of the Texas locations. The 2014 version which was the basis for previous discs managed all of that, but the new 4K with HDR/DV seems to capture the real “bloom” of Eastman Kodak stock (perhaps the “Vision” line.) There is a feeling of textural refinement that seems to cocoon each image, regardless of the striking slices of colour that constantly play with the eyes. 

 

If you are thinking about making a move to 4K this might be a decider, along with next month’s 4K remaster of The Searchers.

 

I bought the Carlotta release because they usually get all their encodes from David McKenzie. This release is only enabled for English French and German territories and comes with the expected language and audio options, including a totally gorgeous 5.1 mix which knocks the Ry Cooder score outta the room. 

 

Madman is releasing a version of this next month in Australia, but for reasons I cannot comprehend only in DVD and Blu-ray formats. But that’s their nightmare I guess. 

 

Oh, the Canal disc of the Carol Reed’s The Third Man picture… that’s another McKenzie encoding and is, if it could be possible, even more refined and texturally cinematic than the Canal/Criterion Blu-ray of two years ago. 

 

Worthy distractions from the circus that is now becoming the slow death of the American Empire.

The Current Cinema - Barrie Pattison traces the origins of TRIANGLE OF SADNESS (Ruben Östlund, Europe, 2022) and finds much to lament.

"...washed up.." part of the ensemble from 
Triangle of Sadness

I did not enjoy Ruben Östlund’s new Triangle of Sadness any more than I would have enjoyed the first Ingmar Bergman films if anyone had had the nerve to show them here, or I enjoyed L’avventura when it was flavor of the month when it surfaced in 1961 or Bela Tarr’s 2000 Werckmeister harmóniák when it was the buzz entry on the festival circuit. These films are all product of a common aesthetic which says that popular entertainment lacks the substance of high art, the features of which are to be admired when they are imported into movies.

This is case unproven with that cycle and its satellites. How about Triangle of Sadness as the culmination of another line - The DeMille Male and Female with its riotous bad taste, the stunning tedious Rank 1957 The Admirable Crichton/Paradise Lagoon, along with a l918 British Film, a George Schaefer l968 TV movie and Royston Morley’s 1950 BBC production, all adaptations of J.M. Barrie’s The Admirable Crichton. Giving it a 21st century sex change is not that good a disguise. None of the reviews I've seen note Triangle of Sadness' obvious derivations, which is revealing. 

We kick off with a casting call for male models (above) demonstrating the “triangle of sadness”, the severe look required for upmarket underwear commercials (recall Zoolander) and shift into beautiful people Harris Dickinson (Richard Attenborough in See How They Run) and Charlbi Dean scrapping over her manoeuvring him into paying for their meal at the up market restaurant. This airhead couple could have wandered in from a Tilda Swinton movie. 

We see a yellow waterproof container being rushed by launch to a two hundred and fifty million dollar luxury yacht. It proves to contain Nutella. Our leads have won a cruise run by the no-nonsense chief steward Vicki Berlin, while Captain Woody Harrelson, who obviously wasn’t being paid enough to hang about for the whole movie, ties one on in his cabin. Either from inattention or malice, he sets the date for the Captain’s Dinner for the evening of the one batch of bad weather predicted. Meanwhile, the mainly aged, mainly over-indulged passengers get to exploit the fact that employees are instructed never to say no to them - scenes of the crew piling down the waterslide and Woody ordering the non-existent sails to be scrubbed. 

Rubbish management millionaire Zlatko Buric, who manages to dominate his footage, and Woody, the only ones not nauseous, have a drunken evening - a Russian Capitalist confronting an American Marxist - which is pretty much the level on which this film operates. Meanwhile, effluent and projectile vomit engulf the ship as each of the dinner courses, with a remarkable resemblance to the ones given similar close ups in The Menu, are served. This one keeps on evoking other, better, productions. 

Harris Dickinson, Charlbi Dean 

 

Limiting Iris Berben, once the winning teenage lead of Sergio Corbucci’s 1970 Compañeros, to repeating the phraze “In Den Wolken” endlessly, rips off Vin Diesel in the Guardians of the Galaxy films or maybe Timmy from South Park. 

I did like the elderly Amanda Walker recognising the hand grenade (“It’s one of ours!”)  which goes with the arrival of pirates (a survivor is indignant when they assume he was a pirate because he’s black) What happened to all those patrolling armed guards? We get the last shall be first stuff pivoting on Philippina toilet controller Dolly De Leon coming to shore in a lifeboat equipped with pretzels. 

 Dolly De Leon (front)

The director’s films seem to be aimed at telling us something about the thin veneer of civilization. Östlund’s The Square was sufficiently disturbing to attract attention. It made a couple of nice points about the arts scene, even if the footage with the wild man at the charity benefit was so conspicuous that it obliterated the rest of the film. Östlund appears to be preoccupied with shirtless fellers. One of the better touches in Triangle of Sadness is Dickinson, surprised at seeing Timoleon Gketsos put off the ship after the complaint that his bare torso caught Dean’s eye. 

The craft aspects from his Euro pudding crew are adequate. They run to five credited donkey painters. Once again it attempts to use fine art disciplines like a fifty, forty, ten colour palette. This all distracts from whatever the film thinks it’s telling us.

As with his predecessors, no one seems to be prepared to challenge Östlund’s status as a serious artist. I scored heaped abuse when I covered a time lapse in The Zombie Brigade with a title. So far, Ruben Östlund seems to be going without reproach for his.

Woody Harrelson

The Current Cinema - Rod Bishop examines The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeois–sea in TRIANGLE OF SADNESS (Ruben Östlund, Sweden and nine other countries, 2022)

Woody Harrelson, Triangle of Sadness

In the second act of this year’s Palme d’Or winner, a group of obnoxious,wealthy passengers on a $250 million yacht, skippered by an unhinged, alcoholic and dysfunctional captain (Woody Harrelson) sit down to fine-dining at the Captain’s Dinner. 

The yacht starts to wallow in a progressively strengthening storm and a lengthy sequence of vomiting and exploding toilets follows. 

Sight gags aside, as the mayhem swirls around them, a Russian businessman, who has made his fortune from manure (“I sell shit”) and the captain take over the yacht’s public address system and drunkenly trade quotations from Kennedy, Reagan, Twain, Thatcher, Marx and Lenin.

Passengers cringe in walkways in vomit-strained life jackets, avoiding floating excrement, runaway tables and other falling passengers, as the captain rants over the PA with “something that I wrote”:

“My government murdered Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Bobby Kennedy and John F Kennedy. My government overthrew good, honest, democratic leaders of the people in Chile, Venezuela, Argentina, Peru, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama and Bolivia. Along with Britain, we carved up the Middle East, creating artificial geographical boundaries and installed puppet dictators. War, itself, became our most lucrative industry. Every bomb that’s dropped makes someone a millionaire. You don’t have to know where those bombs are exploding. You don’t have to see the grieving mothers and the mangled bodies of their children”.

The last few sentences are overlaid with images of a pirate boat armed with grenades and automatic weapons silently approaching the luxury yacht.

So begins the third act, as a handful of these wealthy survivors make it to a tropical island only to discover one of the yacht’s employees, a Filipino “toilet manager”, is the only one capable of catching fish and making a fire.

After the setups, the second and third acts suffer from our ability to telegraph what comes next. But the first act is more intriguing. Two runway models – he and she – are in a relationship. She earns more money than he does (female models do) and she is also a social media influencer with a decent following. When she allows him to pick up the dinner bill one night (she’s distracted and texting), he confronts her about the inequalities in their relationship. The dinner bill dispute escalates and suddenly consumes all of their lives – will they survive this First World problem? Or will a cruise on a $25 million yacht revitalize their relationship?

After his similarly acerbic The Squarein 2014, this social satire from writer-director Ruben Östlund wasn’t universally acclaimed at Cannes. Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian described the film as “an unworthy winner” of the Palme d’Or:

“There were no ideas in it that had not already been aired more subtly, more rewardingly, and yet also more powerfully in his previous film The Square, and it seemed very shallow to me”.

Östlund’s win places him a rare club of dual winners of the Palme d’Or - Coppola, Haneke, Kusterica, Loach, Imamura, the Dardeenes, Sjöberg and August. Does he deserve to be there? Does anyone really care? After all, Godard, Varda, Bertolucci, Tarkovsky and Bergman never once won a Palme d’Or, let alone two.

And the title? The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeois–sea would have been better.

 

  

Sydney Film Festival and The Current Cinema - Rod Bishop reviews the wild ride of TITANE (Julia Ducournau, France, 2021)

Agathe Rousselle

Organizers of the world’s leading horror and fantasy film festival in picturesque Sitges outside of Barcelona must be bemused. 

They have been at it for 54 years and now one of their own, down the coast at Cannes, has nabbed the Top Gong from the most famous film festival in the world.

Unthinkable is probably close to the mark. After all, even the most venerated of the ‘arty’ horror mob at Cannes like the two Davids, Lynch and Cronenberg, haven’t come within a bull’s roar of taking home the Palme d’Or. 

In 2016, Julia Ducournau’s first film, the cannibalistic-horror Raw, collected the Best New Director award at Sitges. And now here she is, five years later with her second film, landing what is unquestionably the most prestigious recognition a film director can have.

By any standard, it’s a meteoric rise and Titane, by any standard, is a wild ride. 

Vincent Lindon

Body horror at its most expansive, it reconstructs rather than deconstructs notions of gender, sexuality and body-image. Opening with a car accident and a young girl having a titanium plate embedded in her head, Alexia (Agathe Rousselle) grows into a woman who has sex with - and gets pregnant by - a car, while doing a variety of murderous things to a variety of people with her lethal hair pin. And that’s just the first act.

Logic is not a strong suit here, nor is it meant to be. Much of what happens makes no sense and the viewer is asked to take plot contrivances on the chin. Playing the main character, Rousselle was cast in the role after only one short film and some Instagram photos. But as riveting as she is to watch, when she has to pass as a man (a French firefighter!), we don’t believe it and have to watch incredulously while her male firefighting colleagues take forever to twig to the truth. 

It’s reminiscent of the character of “Onion” in The Good Lord Bird, an African-American boy dressed as a girl throughout this Civil War era television series, clearly male and recognized as such immediately by every black he meets – male or female – but not by any of the whites, who are stupid enough to accept his feminine gender. 

Here, Ducournau seems to be saying most men wouldn’t know a cross-dressing, gender-bender, serial killer if they fell over one. There is one exception, however. The firefighting chief Vincent (Vincent Lindon) who wants Alexia (now known as Adrien) to be his lost son. 

Vincent is like a 21^stCentury incarnation of Osgood Fielding III (Joe E. Brown) in Some Like It Hot. When Jerry (Jack Lemmon) reveals he is not a woman and Osgood replies: “Nobody’s perfect”, you can almost hear Ducournau and her characters laughing their heads off.

*********** 

Titane has already screened at the Sydney Film Festival and begins screening at your cinemas across Australia on November 25th.

Julia Ducournau with the Palme d'Or