Marked Eyes - 1964

Robert Hossein is a pulp genius and master stylist. He makes more from less than any director I can think of. His simple, evocative camera movements align with his unpredictable, powerful editing to generate suspense, tension, arousal - lotta shockingly hot stuff for the era, as usual in his pictures - compassion and ever-deeper involvement in the story.

This is Hossein's most direct narrative. It seems to be about exactly what plot says it is, which is almost weird, given the multi-layeredness of his other pictures. And it's no less hypnotic for that.

This is also his most Noir Noir. BLONDE IN A WHITE CAR is so weird and singular I'm not sure it's a Noir at all. This features not one but two femmes fatale. The young, seemingly innocent one in her little girl pajamas casually walking around a filthy basement bashing at everything with a razo-sharp hatchet while blithely blackmailing her victim is peak Hossein.

Hossein co-stars with Michéle Morgan, and treats her austere, enigmatic face and balletic grace - wait til you see her glide through the forest in her chic city shoes – as Antonioni treats Monica Vitti: an infinite, glamorous, cinematic mystery.

Hossein's genius is something of a mystery, too. He's a pure cinematician working with the most low-brow, pulp material that he turns into poetry. His father's (!) beautiful, lyrical score works in exact opposition to the grit of the story, thus raising even more contradictory emotions.

It Ain’t All Ambrosia – Gods and Goddesses Cavort in A Bigger Splash

An astute, merciless, Pinterequse duel to the death. Courtesy Fox Searchlight

Vanity Fair only profiles four types of people:

1) Someone young, glossy, gorgeous, mad fuckable, talented, lucky and on the rise. She wouldn’t touch you with a ten-foot pole and her week beats your year. *

2) Someone in the prime of life and career. A gleaming armor of success gilds his wealth, beauty, fuckability and celebrity. His weekend beats your year.

3) Someone in their golden years who either remained successful, gorgeous, fuckable and famous or who lost it all. Whether reminiscing from their cashmere couch or scarfing cat food with their remaining Tiffany spoon, his or her memories of a single glorious night beat any ten years you can barely recall.

4) Any of the above who get their comeuppance/martyrdom by dying/getting killed.**

A Bigger Splash features all four types. And on first viewing, proves as irritating as any Vanity Fair profile. There’s something profoundly irksome about “all this useless beauty,” glamor and privilege. ***

Yet the very aspects of Splash that seemed so off-putting prove to the most fascinating and sustaining. First time round, the mostly naked Tilda Swinton, Dakota Johnson, Ralph Fiennes and Matthias Schoenaerts prove too distracting. They’re so darn purty! And worldly! And chic! It’s hard to focus on subtext when Swinton does one of her patented, languorous angel/demon/alien pre-coital stretches. Providing more distraction is an unending parade of movie star full-frontal. Ralph Fiennes dick? A gynecological close-up of Swinton from behind? Schoenaerts’ scrotum? All you might want and more. Johnson plays a 17-year old and so appears only naked from head to toe.

Schoenaerts and Swinton are in love. They’re hiding out up in glamly understated villa on the barren, serene island of Pantelleria. Swinton’s former flame and Schoenaerts’ former pal Fiennes shows up, with his maybe-daughter Johnson in tow. Swinton’s a rock star recovering from surgery. In flashbacks of her onstage, she’s a semi-Bowie figure and Swinton – who’s rumored to be considering playing Bowie in a biopic – makes you believe. She makes you believe by never singing onstage, a rare moment of restraint from director Luca Guadagnino. His previous film, the camp, risible I Am Love, suggests that restraint is not in his quiver.

Fiennes is a guy we all know: nonstop energy, unquenchable sex drive, outdrinks/drugs everyone and wakes up un-hung-over and ready to go go go! Produces the Stones and knows a rundown house on a back alley where an Italian granny-lady makes the world’s best ricotta. You know a guy like that, right? Neither do I.

"I'm not fucking my daughter!" Courtesy Fox Searchlight

It’s the performance of the year and of Fiennes’ career. From Schindler’s List to In Bruges, Fiennes played a bubbling volcano, a seething mass of repression. Here, the lava spews. He’s a conniving prick and totally upfront about it. Fiennes’ frantic, scampering dance around the villa gives the Stones’ Emotional Rescue more credit than it deserves, but should win Fiennes an Oscar.

He incarnates this universe of hard-earned license, individuality and id. Did these folks get world famous by being nice? Or putting anyone else first? This is a nest of lovely vipers. I mistook Splash for Bertolucci lite: a stylish, empty wallowing in the haut lifestyle – like Stealing Beauty. It turns out to be something much richer: an astute, merciless Pinteresque duel to the death.

Over love.

Though Bertolucci’s style informs every frame, the characters evoke Chabrol and even Hitchcock. The suspense derives not from the action, but the conversation. You have to pay attention. This sophisticated bunch lives for a multi-layered retort. They hide their venom in verbal cookies full of arsenic; indicating what they mean, never saying it outright. The truth hides in every deceitful word or ambiguous shrug as the non-stop camera whirls to the next exquisite landscape, naked ass or gyrating poolside supermodel. It’s compelling and at times exhausting, but irresistible.

Everyone’s feelings for everyone are complex, and, as Keith Richards told a judge fifty years ago, not concerned with petty morals. Johnson’s constantly cruel – always seeking the most furious response. Swinton’s superstardom’s brought her compassion. When Johnson attacks, Swinton responds with truly moving kindness. At some point, everyone behaves exactly as you thought they never would.

Splash is a remake of the 1969 decadent French nugget la Piscine.**** By ‘69 standards, Piscine’s as explicit and steamy as Splash, with va-va-voomy Romy Schneider languidly strolling naked by the pool or lolling around in bed. There’s one big difference: Alain Delon plays Schoenaerts’ role. Swinton’s nursing Schoenearts as he recovers from a half-hearted suicide attempt. Given Schoenearts’ sensitive reticence, you buy it. But Delon? He’s indestructible. So why title this version with a meaningless Hockney reference? Please see “camp, risible,” above.

The plot slowly emerges through the mists of glam. Fiennes came to win Swinton back. He brought his daughter as a honey-trap for Schoenaerts. That’s how these people roll. Then playtime ends and something terrible happens.

Guadagnino indulges in a deflating Hitichcockian conceit: a dim, fawning cop bedazzled by stardom. It’s the only point Guadagnino pounds with a hammer: the blind love of silly mortals lets the gods soar free. In the final shot, the gods realize they’ve escaped. They did horrible things. They learned unexpected lessons about their own corruption. But their luck held and they love one another all the more. A final, bitter triumphant smile makes all the plot and character elements suddenly cascade into order, like film of a collapsing Lego structure run in reverse. It may take that smile, and the clarity it brings, to realize this is the best film of the year. It only took me seeing it twice.

Uneasy even in mud.  Courtesy Fox Searchlight

 I Am Love was Guadagnino aping Visconti. He sought grandeur but lacked Visconti’s gravitas – who doesn’t? Splash is Guadagnino as Antonioni, finding profundity in the jet set with all their angsty solipsism. For Antonioni, alienation meant stillness. His characters, even when running, so vested in every gesture they seemed in slow motion. Living with their existential pain took so much effort. Not these folks. You can feel them fidget, vibrating with unease. That unease lingers long after the movie ends. Not the amazing clothes or the celestial light or the perverse bonding. What sticks is everyone’s unspoken terror that – despite all they’ve earned and been given – they’re flying too close to the sun.

* Lou Reed from the liner notes to Metal Music Machine

** Thanks Sarahjane Blum

*** Elvis Costello

****Amazon Prime https://www.amazon.com/Piscine-English-Subtitled-Alain-Delon/dp/B009ASU1JI/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1465596067&sr=8-1&keywords=la+piscine

TWO LANE BLACKTOP

Laurie Bird as The Girl, James Taylor as The Driver, Dennis Wilson as The Mechanic, '55 Chevy as The Car. Courtesy of the Criterion Collection

By David Wilentz

Is there anything left unsaid about the greatness of Two Lane Blacktop? Note to the uninitiated: Two Lane is the epitome of that modern American art form, the road movie. Easy Rider established the genre (For The Mainstream) with its counter-culture quest for the self unraveling along the American highway.

Two Lane took this concept to another level, breaking all the tropes down to a bare minimum until all that remains are characters named ‘Driver’ and ‘Mechanic.’ Even more telling is that the cars (a ’55 Chevy and a ’70 Pontiac GTO) are characters themselves, who rival the humans for prominence as they fly through our languid landscape. While Easy Rider overtly referenced that other great American genre, the Western (protagonists named Wyatt and Billy), Two Lane thematically and stylistically bears the trait that defines the greatest heroes of the West: restraint.Two Lane replaces both the horse and the gun with the cars; the drag races that move the narrative are metonymical gunfights. Curiously, the journey has been inverted—our protagonists travel west to east, and their path seems to have neither goal, nor an end in sight. The quest has been reduced to nothingness: these characters go just to go.

Director Monte Hellman’s vision leaves exposition by the wayside, allowing the visuals to elicit devastating emotions from the weight of simply being; framing often removes the audience from the usual role of spectator, putting us inside the existence-defining action (or non-action). In the film’s opening, a figure glows in the darkness as he switches the red-green light signal that starts a street race. The figure—isolated in that one tiny but momentous moment—is removed from any cultural assumptions as the illumination of Hellman’s mesmerizing frame grants him transcendence from any identifiable existence.

Hellman’s elliptical style recalls European auteurs such as that other non-actor-employing existentialist Bresson or that former painter Antonioni. But the American tradition is also strongly felt. Working for Roger Corman trained Hellman in the fast buck, no-budget school of filmmaking. Corman’s first film was The Fast and Furious, a racing picture. Car and highway culture are, after all, vital elements of Americana. Mesh that with counterculture fallout and youthful ennui and you arrive at the makings of a road movie.

Hellman’s mastery of efficient, minimal storytelling is evident in the power and beauty of Two Lane’s simple, stripped down visuals. Those seeking a story-driven plot and tangible character motivations will find Two Lane challenging. What makes Two Lane rewarding is the dream-like state it evokes from seemingly mundane moments. iftheymovekillem's very own film editor David N. Meyer is featured on one of the two commentary tracks on this deluxe edition, in which he had the honor of interviewing Two Lane screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer. Meyer and Wurlitzer pose the question “What is a road movie?” On a basic level they posit a simple aspect of a multi-layered definition: it is so American to be able to use so called low-culture, such as that of gear heads and drag racing, as a lens through which to examine some seriously heavy metaphysical shit. Ultimately it doesn’t matter if anyone wins the race—the drive exists forever in a dreamscape.