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. 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. 

263. Desperately Seeking Susan

Song - Susie Q  (Creedence Clearwater Revival)

Movie: Desperately Seeking Susan (Susan Seidelman, 1985)

Remember Barbara Loden? After making Wanda, a very good film exposing all her potential vulnerabilities and weaknesses, she never got another opportunity to direct. Such examples should probably inform a bit more (the correct) criticisms of Beyonce's butchering of Jolene. Purely as a piece of music, I actually like Beyonce's version more than Dolly Parton's. but rewriting that song to present yourself as a badass queen who will wreck Jolene is rather pathetic and does indeed highlight that Beyonce is more interestend in being her own brand manager than in being an interesting artist. I have never cared much for her, but it is worth asking whether she would have been as big if she didn't present herself so forcefully as a strong powerful woman. Probably not, but still, Dolly Parton's (who is of course white) career is no slouch despite openly fearing Jolene's competition. 

Anyhow, I've never much cared for Madonna for similar reasons. By the time I got into pop culture, she was already an institution, who seemed mostly interested in highlighting how much of an institution she was. Desperately Seeking Susan, in which she plays Susan, does make you understand how she could have become the biggest star in the world - it is not by projecting indestructible power. Madonna plays a cocky confident woman with a great sense of style, who knows her way around men and always comes off as the most charismatic and assertive person in the room. She is however also poor and on the run from criminals with guns. The police are not her friends and neither are the rich businessmen with expensive home decoration. Her people are her charming aimleslly drifting boyfriend Jim (Robert Joy), movie projectionist Dez (Aidan Quinn) who lives in a half-empty loft above the cinema he works in, desperate housewife Roberta (Rosanna Arquette, the film's actual lead), and Crystal (Anna Thomson), who is not even able to keep a job as a magician's assistant in a dingy magic club. In other words, Madonna is placed among the vagabonds and misfits of New York and presented as one of them,, always one stroke of bad luck away from the gutter. That makes her coolness and bravado come through more than any context in which she is presented as the effortlessly all-conquering queen of the world. I have mostly registered her songs as background noise, but her appeal here inspired a YoiuTube Madonna session. It appears Vogue, Material Girl (decidedly not a song presenting Madonna as an underdog) and Into the Groove are rather great!

Desperately Seeking Susan is a mistaken identity film in which various colorful New Yorkers, led by Roberta, frantically traverse the city streets without ever having the full or the correct information to find what they are looking for. Shenanigans and misunderstandings ensue, and because the audience is always one step ahead of the characters, all of this is often very funny, This the kind of film that I will always like, but for it to be truly great, it needs to either take its surreal absurdity up a notch or have a screenplay that is tight as a rock. As it is, Desperately Seeking Susan finds itself in the unenviable position of being the perfect companion piece to After Hours, without ever being able to measure up to it. It does have though absolutely exceptional costume and set design. One reason its screenplay is not as sharp as it could have been is because it features a lot of scenes which exist mostly to geek at Madonna and her outfits. Madonna released Like A Virgin during filming, and although the film was rewritten to cash in on her success, these scenes do have a purpose beyond just that. The film's fun  comes from putting New Yorkers with different attitudes and of different walks of life together, and Seidelman is clearly interested in how their aesthetics clash and contrast. You may not be surprised to find whose aesthethics are presented as the way of the future, but you may reflect on how long it's been since a mainstream film/tv show presented such a progressive, loving and colorful view of life on the New York streets.

262. Wanda

Song - I Would Stay (Krezip)

Movie: Wanda (Barbara Loden, 1970)

When done right, there are few things in American cinema better than a romanticised outlaws-on-the-run movie. However, folks who can express themselves colorfully, who can present themselves as cool and attractively distinct individuals, and who are crafty enough to be able to conjure a vision of a better life, and to subvert authority in ingeniously nifty ways, aren't the kind of folks that need to become outlaws on the run in the first place. That's more likely to be the fate of people like Wanda (Barbara Loden), who lasts only two days at the sewing factory. She is too slow, according to her boss. We haven't seen her at the job, but the film never even tries to give the impression that he could have been wrong. Wanda is slow, both mentally and physically, and it's no surprise that when she ends up, almost by accident, in cahoots with a petty criminal she goes along for the ride. She lacks the (financial and intellectual) capacity/imagination to make active choices about her life. 

I had been under the impression that this is a film about a woman who, tired of being a submissive housewife, abandons her family for an adventurous life on the road where she can assert her independence. Barbara Loden was married to Elia Kazan, who was by some accounts, patronizing, lealous and dismissive of her ambitions. Despite that. Loden became one of the few women to direct, write and star in an American movie; having read that the film had some autobiographic elements, I expected it to be a reflection of her attitude and intelligence. Moreover, the film is considered a landmark of American feminist cinema, and contemporary American feminist cinema, with some exeptions, doesn't have much room for portrayals of women who are not primarily strong and independent. 

Barbara Loden is quite merciless in depicting how men abuse Wanda. Almost every man we meet uses her for sexual and/or material gain and the film is quite clear-eyed about the societal structures that make such exploitation possible. However, Loden is equally merciless in depicting the intrinsic negative qualities of Wanda, leaving little doubt that independently from whichever patriarchal structures exist, Wanda would be incapable of building a better life for herself. Those two ideas rarley live side by side in (American) movies these days - movies that present themselves as feminist are mostly about celebrating the great succeses of specific women who have overcome the hurdles on their way, but rarely question/depict what happens if you are simply incapable of doing that. Too many people refuse to acknowledge that individuals can fail for their own personal reasons regardless of whether existing societal structures are advantaging or disadvantaging them. 

It's an understatement to say that Loden doesn't depict its society as advantageous. Most of the film takes place in crumbling rural areas, crummy hotelrooms with barely anything beyond a bed, and on lonely highways. Everything looks so drab, grey and plainly unispiring that it almost feels too pessimistic to call it naturalistic. But the faces on display indicate that what we are seeing is indeed as depressing as it seems. Almost everyone in the film looks as broken down, defeated and disheveled as possible. Still, even within this context Loden manages to find moments of humanity, levity and dark self-deprecating humor - if the film was paced a bit faster it could have been a crime comedy. It's ultimately about two people who fumble crimes because they don't realise they are way in over their heads. I quite liked it and it does indeed feel as an indictment of American cinema that this is the only thing Loden got to direct.  

261. My Fair Lady

Song - Geef Mij Je Angst (Andre Hazes)

Movie: My Fair Lady (George Cukor, 1964)

This is the first Audrey Hepburn film I've seen and it's easy to see why she was so beloved. She essentially plays four different iterations of her character here - a coarse flower girl, a sincere pupil grappling with proper language and etiquette, an aristocrat, and an educated, confident working class woman. She is always effortlessly charming and likable, which is in this case more important than being effortlessly convincing. Eliza Doolittle's supposedly unadorned working class accent at the beginning is, even within the theatrical needs of the film, so over the top that it comes off as more affected than the posh speech of Henry Higgins (Rex Harrison), a linguistics professor who has bet his 'friend' Colonel Pickering (Wilfrid Hide-Whyte) that in just a couple of weeks he can pass off common Eliza as a duchess of wealth and sophistication.

Hepburn's performance is further challenged by the studio's demands, against her wishes, to dub most of the songs. As the camera is pointed straight at Eliza (often in close-up) during many of her songs, Hepburn's lyp sincing is extremely obvious and distracting. The dubbing however works in the film's favor during its greatest sequence at the Ascot race course, where the highest of Brtish high society meets to observe each other, solidify their place in the hierarchy and occasionally watch a horse race, This crowd is introduced in a series of still shots that are made to look like Impressionist paintings. All people are dressed in similar, yet distinctly different costumes in various shades of grey, black and white. The interplay of various colors and shapes creates some of the most impressive compositions I've ever seen in a film, and things only get better when Cukor introduces movement to these shots. The movement is however deliberately stiff and mechanical, as if we are watching diorama theatre, or one of those museum experiments where they take a classical painting and use the latest technology to stimulate/re-imagine the movements of the work's subjects. 

The sequence is not only a technical and stylistic wonder, it also completely re-arranges how we are supposed to see this film. Up until then Henry Higgins is presented as an obviously intelligent person who is comfortable with his position at the center of the London upper class. There are some jabs at his arrogance and chauvinism, but the film mostly doesn't seem to doubt the idea that it is just and right that this man is supposed to teach Eliza the ways of the world and that she will be obviously better off if she listens to him. In the process, it reproduces some, generously called, old-fashioned (even for 1964) ideas about class and gneder. In combination with the comfortably traditional musical theatre songs, it's easy to get the impression that beyond Audrey Hepburn, the movie doesn't have a lot going for it, especially if you are not a fan of populist American musical theatre. However, even before we get to Ascot, there is a fantasy sequence where Eliza dreams of the King murdering Henry, and an unexpected aside in which the house staff bursts into song demanding better working conditions. By the time Henry Higgins shows up at the horse races wearing a discordant brown suit, and is almost shunned by his mother for his lack of manners, you have to admit the movie is actually doing stuff.

What the movie is doing, among other things, is show how language, class and appearance are being used to hide more uncomfortable truths about both individuals and society as a whole. It is succesful in part thanks to the great performance of Rex Harrison who allows you to interpret Henry Higgins' posh, self-centered intellectualism as the defence mechanism of either a ragingly insecure charlatan mysoginist or a deeply closeted homosexual, without ever tipping his hand as to what interpretation should be correct (he is helped by the brilliantly ambigous song "Why Can't A Woman Be More Like A Man?"). It's worth noting too that even if you ignore the satirical subtext, Higgins succesfully passing off Eliza as a duchess is in itself quite a pointed criticicsm of the Britisch class system.  Unfortunately, as this was a major, highly expensive, studio film it can't end on the note it's been building up to and tacks on an entirely unfitting happy ending. It's as if The Social Network would have included a final frame showing that Zuckerberg's friend request is accepted.  

260. Basic Instinct

Song - She's Always A Woman (Billy Joel)

Movie: Basic Instinct (Paul Verhoeven, 1992)

In 1993 George Sluizer directed The Vanishing, a remake of his own 1988 Dutch movie Spoorloos. Such projects tend to be derivative anyway (I haven't seen The Vanishing, but its awful reviews make a lot of sense), but at its best, Basic Instinct already feels like the greatest possible Hollywood remake of Spoorloos. The two don't share the same plot, but are about the same obsession to understand the exact nature of a mysterious death/disappearance, with its heroes knowingly putting themselves in the exact same life-threatening position as the victim was in before the fatal blow. Now, in Spoorloos that leads Gene Bervoets to one of the most horrifiyngly nightmarish situations imaginable, while in Basic Instinct it leads Michael Douglas to "the fuck of the century."  I don't know how conscious Paul Verhoeven was of the connections between the two films, but Spoorloos is based on a famous Dutch book written by Tim Krabbe, the brother of Jeroen Krabbe, who's had multiple major roles in Verhoeven's Dutch films, and is probably the most recognisable Dutch actor outside of Rutger Hauer.

It's not much of a spoiler to reveal that Basic Instinct ends with Michael Douglas and Sharon Stone in bed, with the camera panning to show an ice pick underneath it. The film opens with a blonde woman killing her sexual partner in bed with an ice pick, and although her quick movements and concealing hair make it hard to identify her, once we get a few good looks of Sharon Stone, it becomes fairly evident that she is the killer. As a result Basic Instinct is least succesfull when it pretends to be a investigative thriller. It produces a lot of repetitive scenes that logically always lead to the same conclusion, while we are asked to believe that they potentially don't. Equally frustrating is Verhoeven's need to always be signifying. A cigar is not just a cigar and a blonde woman is not just a blonde woman, but also a reference to film history (especially to Hitchcock), and more importantly a symbol of how American society is supposedly much darker and perverse than we notice on the surface. This would be more effective if Verhoeven was capable of integrating his symbolism much more organically within his story, but many of his choices keep stopping the film in his tracks. That's much less a problem here though than in Turkish Delight, Elle and espcially Starship Troopers (it's amazing that people still misinterpret that movie, but that doesn't make it good. I think it is the most boringly obvious satire I've seen).

Still, most of his films are good, smart and entertaining, and Basic Instinct is much more interesting and provocative than even its reputation suggests. Yeah, there is not a moment when Sharon Stone is on screen, when she isn't doing something sexily, and her chemistry with Michael Douglas is great. It's a film that fully earns the right to call itself an 'erotic' thriller, but Verhoeven connects the eroticism directly to danger and death. Douglas' atrraction to Stone is not in spite of her murderous criminality, but heightened by it. The most sexy and erotic scenes in the film are also the ones which are the most violent, or have the most potential for violence (The 'fuck of the century' described my Douglas is shot and cut to explicitly resemble the opening scene) All of this is highlighted in the interrogation scene, where, even before Stone's famous crossover, the cops in the room are fully helpless, They are not just attracted to her beauty, but to the way she combines that with her viciousness and her complete disregard for laws and rules. That gives more than just a sexual connotation to Michael Douglas' obsession and also puts the ice pick at the end of the film in a different context. What if we are not supposed to see that as a clue to solving the mystery of the murder, but as a clue to why Douglas despite his better judgement still chooses to be with Stone? 

259. Edge of the City

Song - (Sittin' On) The Dock Of The Bay (Otis Redding)

Movie: Edge of the City (Martin Ritt, 1957)

I saw In the Heat of the Night a long time ago and liked it, but aside from Sidney Poitier slapping Rod Steiger, I don't recall any of it. Having now seen Paris Blues and Edge of the City, it may be time for a revisit, as it appears I've been having a rather wrong impression of Poitier. Most of what I know about him and his cultural imprint comes from peripheral sources, such as Denzel Washington's reverence for him and writings about black actors and movies shaped by him, and about the Civil Right Movement's influence on American culture. Through all of this, I somehow absorbed that Poitier was a gravely serious actor of solemn dignity. In Edge of the City, that couldn't be further from the truth. He is so effortlessly cool here that he manages to give a distinct personality to a terribly underwritten role that basically turns him into John Cassavetes' personal Jiminy Cricket. 

Cassavetes and Poitier play Axel Nordmann and Tommy Tyler, two dockworkers in New York. Axel is the kind of guy that was almost invented by American movies of the 50's: a lost young man alienated by the values of the old generation and without a clue how to shape his own. He is now running away from a troubled past and an equally troubled relationship with his parents (living in a comfortable house in smalltown Indiana), unable to settle down and keep a job anywhere because of the chip on his shoulder. His first instinct is to always mistrust his fellow man and to start every conversation as if he is on the brink of a fight. Tommy befriends him and patiently guids him through life, comforting him, and providing him with a job and a potential romantic partner, without ever putting his own needs first. Tommy's easily palatable nobility is countered by Poitier who plays him with an irreverent zest that makes the friendship feel realistic. Axel's anti-authoritarian attitude matches perfectly with Tommy's restless energy, his penchant for sarcasm and irony, and the excitement he gets out of a dirty joke, a cool tune, or a flirt with his wife (Ruby Dee, also giving a really good performance). Poitier creates the impression that Tommy's selfless protectiveness is simply an accidental byproduct of his spontaneous and expressive personality, rather than a blunt screenwriting device.  

The film's ending is quite interesting too. Just looking at it narratively, it further complicates its comforting view of race. However, Ritt's visual choices in the final scene, in combination with the score (which is overbearing for most of the movie anyway, and completely misguided during its conclusion) communicate that we are now to see Axel as an iconic working class hero, which doesn't fit and whitewashes the character a bit too much. Moreover, this finale is tonally completely off. It feels tacked on to add dramatic heft to a movie that doesn't need it - its lighthearted looseness is its greatest quality. As in Paris Blues, Ritt is at his best when he is just filming two friends and their lovers infectiously hanging out together in a lively lovely city.