266. Fatal Attraction

Song: Billie Jean (Michael Jackson)

Movie: Fatal Attraction (Adrian Lyne, 1987)

Well, that explains Jacob's Ladder! I saw that a long time ago and was surprised by how relentlessly terryfing it was. I felt it was out of character for Adrian Lyne, who seemed to mostly specialise in what you could call elevated sexploitation, not that there is anything wrong with that - I greatly enjoyed Unfaithful and 9 1/2 Weeks! Turns out Fatal Attraction is much more interested in being a thriller, in the most literal sense of the word, and one that would make a great case study in film classes on the use of negative and external spaces. At a certain point you get the sense that there is danger lurking behind every piece of furniture and every corner of the screen. You just admire how much Lyne enjoys playing around with the audience, making ordinary objects and spaces seem ominous by pointing the camera just a fraction too long at them. Often times nothing actually happens, but that misdirection only makes the film more effectivly stressful. You never know what's coming. 

I may have mentioned before here that I am not the biggest fan of Glenn Close, which doesn't even have that much to do with her acting choices. I think her natural disposition just makes every single character she plays more dour and pitiful by default. That makes her a rather perfect fit for this role, in which she plays a steely businesswoman who is barely able to hold together her professional demeanor in public. Her playful flirty confidence is a front for a lonely woman with fear of abandonment who is unable to make meaningful connections to people. It's quite fitting that while she works for the kind of Manhattan corporation that was the symbol of victory in the 1980's, she lives in an apartment in a questionable meat district. Lyne shoots this place as if he wants to reference every single experssionistic horror film he's seen, and fills it with burning fires, in case you don't get the metaphor that it is hell. There is nothing wrong with good pulp, and Fatal Atraction is really good pulp. 

Apparently many of the actors were disappointed by the decision to change the ending of the film. In the original ending Glenn Close, who spends most of the film stalking Michael Douglas and his family after a one-night stand, claiming she is carrying his child, would have commited suicide staged in such a way to succesfully frame Douglas as the killer. That ending was deemed too bleak by test audiences, so it was reshot, leading to a deliciously over the top climax that kills Glenn Close. Goes to show that sometimes the commercial choice is also the correct artistic one. Because it would be a betrayal of Close' performance to have her 'win'. The whole point of her character is that all her actions are essentially a powerless cry for meaningfullness, and a futile attempt to be the kind of woman she presents hersefl to be, and her peers expect her to be. From that perspective, the current ending is also far bleaker than the original one. 

265. Assa

Song - Wind of Change (Scorpions)

Movie: Assa (Sergey Solovyov, 1987)

For a long time this is the kind of euphorically wonderful film that teeters on the brink of absurd, darkly funny surrealism, without ever crossing the border into full-blown fantasy. Many lesser films do make that cross, losing much of their strangeness and eccentricity in the process. Assa goes the opposite way, eventually becoming a somewhat predictable tragic youth romance. It's still good, but it's dissapointing to see a movie that was so confidently balancing so many different ideas, tones, moods, styles, and feelings go into such a conventional direction. Thankfully, Solovyov takes the long way round and though it is always evident that he is building towards some sort of plot, the first half of the film feels more like a series of loosely connected vignettes set agains the Soviet rock scene. We meet a band and their lead singer, a girl who gets infuatuated with the lead singer, an older gangster who is threatened by this infatuation, an alcoholic who is lying about his status as a Major, and a dwarf theatre actor, who is portrayed as an adult, but made up to look like a teen. 

In the film's first half Solovyov is mostly interested in showing how these characters cross each other's paths, often set to a soundtrack of (really great!) Russian rock, without bothering too much with how interactions are logically connected. The film can switch in an instant between the deeply weird and the effortlessly cool and scenes of great melancholy and romance are followed by moments of dumb goofy fun. It may not make much narrative sense, but you always feel it makes emotional sense, getting the exact mood Solovyov is going for. He sets the tone pretty much from the opening when a guy enters a stereotypically Communist-looking restaurant theatrically telling a story about Noah's Ark, only for the camera to pan to the left to reveal that the music we thought were hearing non-diegetically was actually the result of a bunch of flamboyant rock stars preparing their act. It's odd to see the musicians share a same space as the sad looking chairs and tables we saw just before, and there is no real connection between the rock stage and the story about Noah, but Solovyov makes the moment work perfectly, just as he does throughout the film. At one point the gangster starts reading a book about the assassination of the Russian emperor Paul I, and the film starts cutting between the main story in contemporary Soviet Union and the assassination plot, told as a historical costume drama, in 1801 St. Petersburg. Another highlight is the interrogation of the fake Major, who tells a bizarre monologue about how Yuri Gagarin inspired him, while on the soundtrack we hear incessantly arrhythmical guitar sounds contributing to the nervously funny mood of the scene. 

The film is as close as you'll ever get to seeing a window into an alternate, better world. It is explicitly made in the context of Gorbatchev's reforms in the Soviet Union and not only a direct expression of the hope that these would lead to a better and more attractive, democratic society, but also an expression of how that society could look. It sees rock music, and the youth counterculture developed with it, as a harbinger of what is possible. It is fully in love with the eccentric independence of its rock stars and their freedom to be who they are without conforming to dominant structures. At the same time, it is not in opposition to the Soviet Union, but it sees it as a country that can give young people the opportunitiy to be cool,interesting, have fun, and fall in love, and that has room for alternative lifestyles and views that are not necessarily aligned with the politically desired culture. 

The most charming scene of the film sees the rock star and his girl dance to a song made on a "Japanese" Yamaha computer.  It's a good example of how the film also sees the Soviet Union as a country that can adjust and become a fully functioning part of the emerging modern globalist world. And yeah, OK, the journey into the new world may meet some bumps along the way. The drummer in the band is portrayed by a white actor in (halfheartedly applied) blackface, but in the history of film there has probably never been a more wholesome or more progressive use of blackface. As one of the characters exclaims, "now there are not just black Mike's and Joe's, but also black 'Vitya's', as Vitya is the son of a Russian mother and an Angolan revolutionary. 

That's some great writing that reminded me of a moment in the 2017 film Ali's Wedding, about a Muslim family in Australia that struggles to be accepted by the white Australians, while also being harassed by the more fundamentalist members of their faith. Ali's Wedding is one of those films that got dumped onto Netflix to be forgotten, but at one point a character desires to move to America, exclaiming that 'In the US we can finally live like Australians." As far as I am concerned, that's one of the lines of the decade, one that like the point about Vitya more forcefully evokes the hope and progress that (American) pluralist multicultural society represents than many western/American films that are explicitly about that. Setting this aside, it's also worth noting that in Assa, the guy in blackface fits the broader ethos of the film. At one point the rock starr tells his girl to wear lensless glasses, "as the suggestion that you see better, will already make you see better." The film knows that the society it depicts doesn't really exist yet, but maybe it can be manifested by a sincere belief in it, and some ingenious acts of creation.  

Alas, now there is Putin. But it's good to know that the spirit behind this movie is still a little bit alive. Most of the songs here are written by Boris Grebenshchikov, who is known as the Godfather of Russian rock, and opposed the invasion of Ukraine. The lead singer is played by Sergey Bugayev, an avant-garde artist who is still working (though mostly in the US and Western Europe). The film ends with a song about how the Russian youths want change with all their hearts and all their minds. It's sung by Viktor Tsoi, a Russian with a Korean father, who was at one point the biggest rock star in the country, but died in a car accident in 1990 at the age of 28. In 2015, he was portrayed in the film Leto by Teo Yoo - the annoying hanger-on in Past Lives (yeah, not the biggest fan of that film). My favorite fact about Tsoi though is that the greatest shorttrack skater in history Viktor An, who first represented Korea and then Russia, chose Viktor as his Russian name in honor of Tsoi. It would be nice if, at some point when the Putins of the world are in the dustbin of history, these will be the Russians more of the world will remember.

264. Bound

Song - Girl (Anouk)

Movie: Bound (Lana Wachowski & Lilly Wachowski, 1996)

I think The Matrix is one of the greatest films of the 90''s, but having seen V for Vendetta and Cloud Atlas it's eeasy to be skeptical of the revisionism surrounding the Matrix sequels. Thankfully, Bound shows The Wachowskis aren't just one-trick ponies, even if their characteristic flourishes sometimes work against the film. Their grandly operatic style, full of slow motion, disorienting zooms and camera moves, and cuts that don't respect temporality and/or physics, is a perfect fit for a film that is all about discovering the vast unreality of our world, but less so for a tense neo-noir that takes place in mostly one location. The apartment in which the film takes place is a bit too much a purely stylistic invention; it sometimes feels as if the camera is creating spaces out of thin air, just to get an interesting shot. As a result no one can fault the film for having a dull look, but you do lose a bit of tension when you make a space appear this fake and contrived. The more characters feel bound by physical limits, the more you fear for their safety. One especially sloppy sequence shows two people leaving the apartment for another place, without showing them getting back and without making any significant visual distinction between the two places, resulting in confusion about how the action is progressing. 

The apartment in question belongs to Caesar (Joe Pantoliano), a middle man for the mafia, whose bosses are much more willing to treat him as a sacrificial lamb if the need arises than he surmises. The dons are not his only problem. His wife Violet (Jennifer Tilly) hsa fallen for Corky (Gina Gershon), an ex-con hired to be a plumber at the apartment next door, and now the two women are conspring to steal maffia money from him. Joe Pantoliano has a lot of fun playing an irrationally confident irritant scheming frantically as he gradually realises how screwed and out of his depth he is. He is contrasted by Tilly and Gershon, giving more exact and distinct performances. Tilly is a confident seductress whose demeanor and actions mask her fear, while her husky vulnerable voice masks her willingness to act on her most dangerous ideas. She confuses not just Caesar, but also Corky - one of the things I liked about the film is how much Gershon emphasises ber skepticism about the choices she makes. She makes a conscious decision to act out of a potentially irrational love, knowing full well that it may be the wroing choice. 

The film makes it easy to root for Violet and Corky. They are smart, sexy and charismatic, but also mostly decent people whose actions are informed by love and self-defense, However, they too are beset with an irrational confidence, bordering on arrogance, that leaves them more out of their depth than they realise. It's key to what makes this film work so well - everyone is constantly making decisions that you can anticipate going wrong, and when they do go wroing, Corky, Caesar and Violet all have to scramble and think fast and hard about their next actions, producing a film of unrelenting tense set-pieces in which everyone is constantly on edge. The few moments of peace mostly happen in bed between Violet and Corky. I complained earlier about how the apartment's interiors lack a coherent sence of place.The opposite is true for the love scenes which pay attention to the tiniest details of body movement.