emperor_norton

Outstanding. Unnerving. Visceral. Creepy. Intense. Maddening. Genius. Nothing else even remotely like it.

Out of all the films I've seen lately, nothing was as fresh, as original, and as profoundly unsettling as Peter Watkins' "Punishment Park". The premise: "Park" is a faux-documentary being filmed by a British TV crew in the California desert. The story takes place in a alternate America where laws have been passed cracking down hard on poitical dissidence. Radicals and dissidents arrested by the government are given a choice: serve a harsh prison sentence, or participate in Punishment Park. Those who choose the Park option are told that if they pass through the Park, their sentences and charges will be dropped. The Park: a three day trek through the desert. If they can reach a lone American flag standing at the end of their trail, they will be pardoned. The problem: Punishment Park is used as a training ground for police officers and the National Guard to practice their riot control techniques, so they'll be hounded by the law for the three days (and if they're arrested on the way to the flag, they're out of the game). The premise alone hooked me (and before anyone bitches about spoilers: that premise is spelled out plain very early on in the film and spoils nothing; the journey through the Park itself is the meat of the film).

The film focuses on 2 groups of radicals: the first are being put through the Park, while the second group is being brought before an intolerant court ready to usher them on to the Park. In the wrong hands, Punishment Park could have easily devolved into a screaming rant, all hectoring polemic and no substance. Watkins doesn't take that cheap, easy way out: the radicals in the film are often depicted as pie-in-the-sky looney tune rebels, while the reactionaries (in the form of the cops who chase group 1 and the glowering bureaucrats who are trying group 2) are given some redeeming characteristics. While its obvious that the viewer sympathy should lie with the prisoners, Watkins as a writer and director doesn't browbeat the audience into automatically jumping to that conclusion. Plus: he takes the faux-documentary, a conceit that has been used and abused by many others, and really makes it feel authentic in this film. I never got the sense of being ironically detached, of characters smirking and mugging at the camera, the way many other faux-docs do; it looks and feels real (apparently, when it was first screened in the 70s, foreign audiences actually thought it WAS a documentary). Adding to the realism was the fact that all the actors in the film are actually portraying their own political leanings: the reactionaries in the movie really are reactionaries, and the radicals really are radicals (I think thats partly why the scenes where both sides launch into bitter arguments during the trial don't feel trite and staged the way most political discourse comes across in movies: the sheer belief that the actors convey in their dialogue is very intense). The only other film that grapples with heavy political themes that I've seen that can be considered more intense and provocative than Punishment Park would be Pontecurvo's "Battle Of Algiers" (another film that I STRONGLY, WHOLE-HEARTEDLY recommend), and in my mind any film that can be considered to be a peer of "Algiers" is in the best kind of company. Granted, there isn't much in the way of humor, or a love story, or any of the narrative devices used to put an audience at ease, but that doesn't hurt "Park". "Punishment Park" is cinema at its subversive and immersive; watching it is akin to holding oneself underwater in a cold bath for 3 minutes. The tension that builds and builds and builds like trapped air while watching this film is incredible.

So, yeah, ladies, gentlemen, and lowlifes: put this on yr. Netflix cue post-haste.

I'm often intrigued by films that discuss subjects that I know nothing about, or have completely no interest in. Case in point: Powell & Pressburgers' "The Red Shoes", hands-down one of the best films I've ever seen, a film that revolves around something I couldn't begin to give a shit about: ballet. A similiar "opposites attract" vibe draws me to "Hands Over The City" because the film is about (drum roll please) real estate speculation (and the crowd goes "aaaaaaaah maaannnn"). A lot of my family are tied up in the real estate game, so I hear my fair share of shop talk on the subject, and I've got to tell y'all that I just don't care. Houses bore the hell out of me. I can sleep as easily in a one-bed studio as I could in a six-bed opulent manor. Shelter is shelter, mon ami. So at first the idea of watching a film about real estate doesn't exactly toggle my joystick. However: the Criterion Collection put it out (and they have yet to lead me astray in their film choices, aside from the fact that they put out a couple of Michael Bay films... but hey, Bergman films alone can't pay all the billls, dig?), it was made in Italy during the big neo-realist boom (and while Fellini and Antonini films don't thrill me to the bone, they were aesthetically pleasing and rewarding, so why not give Rosi a shot?), and hey, it deals with politics, and anyone who reads this blog on a semi-regular basis knows that I'm a bit of a politics junkie. So enough with the foreplay: how was the film, oh snobby mcsnob-pants?

It was worth my time, first off. Definitely worth my money (key point here: Criterion DVDs are NOT cheap). Like the aforementioned Fellini and Antonini, Rosi's film is gorgeous to behold. I don't know what it is about old Italian films, but they can make black and white imagery sing. I could get drunk on Blue Moon and Guiness and just lazily stare at the TV while its playing "Hands" with the sound off and it would still be an intensely rewarding experience. As for the plot: a building in Naples collapses, killing 2 and injuring dozens. Controversy sweeps across the city council, as allegations spread that the building was built hastily and ignored building codes because certain councl members were in cahoots with the builders to make a killing on el-cheap-o construction blah blah blah. On paper: a film about a committee looking into building codes and corruption could be boring as all hell. Not "Hands", however. Matter of fact, its quite refreshing to watch a film as refreshingly unsentimental and straightforward as this one. The central characters are never depicted as being anything more than what they are: politicians who are just doing their jobs. In another film, they may have tried to show us some profound insight into their characters, or show them hanging out with their family, or speechifying and justifying their actions (legit and illict). Not "Hands". This isn't the capital C corruption we see in American films: nobody gets threatened, nobody gets shot, nobody gets denounced in a crowd pleasing fashion. "Hands" shows political corruption as thick and transparent and ubiquitious as the air around us: something we can't but help acknowledge, because its impossible to escape.

As for performances: like "Park", director Rosi made the ballsy choice of actually hiring ACTUAL Naples city councilmen to play themselves (it becomes even more ballsy in a scene where the council, who are obviously guilty as sin in the film, throw up their hands and chant "OUR HANDS ARE IN CLEAN" in the middle of their actual council room; it'd be the equivalent of asking the Republican Party to appear in a film where they play scumbags who loudly profess their innocence... i.e. themselves). The only familiar actor/face in the proceedings they flew in from out of country: Rod Steiger. Most of his dialogue is dubbed, so it is weird at first watching his lips moving out of sync with the dialogue (but I got over it quick enough). Steiger plays Edouard Nottola, the shady councilman/construction mogul at the center of the scandal, and his performance is striking. Veering between confidence and near-desperation, Steiger's Nottola is the King Of The World who hears the riff-raff screaming for his head at night (one scene that has Nottola staring out at the Naples sky line at night is particularly striking, both for its stunning music and the imagery of Nottola's room, which has a giant map of Naples pasted over one wall, with giant blown-up photographs of various sites spread across the other walls). Steiger's performance is great because he plays up his bulk: he pinches his face in aggravation, looms over his opponents, and just comes across as imposing in every scene he's in, even though he never actually threatens anyone with violence.

Great film. A bit slow in its pacing at times (but slow pacing is an Italian cinematic standard, so one must deal with it). Final thought: the soundtrack to this film (which is only sparingly used) is great. I'm not even going to bother describing it in my own words, because Stuart Klawans in his essay on the film summed it up better than I ever could:

"Piero Piccioni's musical score rises on the soundtrack: a cloud of brass, gathering amorphously like a headache, until it's broken through by a jazzy, threatening twang, as if an electric bass were being kicked downstairs".

This was film 1 in the IFC double feature. I was psyched seeing this on Ye Olde TV Guide, because I've always wanted to see Rene Clements' film, I just wasn't so sure about dropping the $20-30 on it beforehand. I probably will get around to buying a copy one of these days, because it was awesome,

To clarify: its not awesome in a Bill & Ted sense. Or a Ghostbusters sense. Or a Die Hard sense. Bust-a-gut hysterics and adrenalin pumping bad-assery are completely absent in "Forbidden Games". This is art-house-awesome, an entirely different brand of cool (not by any means superior to Bill & Ted awesome, mind you, just a different kind of awesome). This is a film that transcends the cliches of a foreign film while embodying them at the same time: its about foreign poor people struggling to get by in the face of death, with unhappy endings for all, the death of innocence, symbolism-a-go-go, etc etc. What makes all this deep heavy-dutiness go down smooth is its immediacy: the film is very direct, and doesn't get all dense and detached the way a film like Seventh Seal does (not that I'm dogging 7th Seal, because its a great flick, but it certainly isn't a frolicking thrill ride or a particularly joyous viewing experience). The premise: a young girl traveling with her family to escape from war comes face to face with tragedy, and ends up taking refuge in the home of a family of deeply religious French peasants. I won't discuss what happens before she gets to the countryside, I'll only say that its hard to think of another film that depicts the madness of crowds and the horror of random violence more effectively than "Games" (Speilberg should watch "War Of The Worlds", and then watch "Forbidden Games", and then he should commit seppuku in shame for being outdoned decades ahead of his time). The scene with the (SPOILER!!!! I'M NOT TELLING) being tossed into the river like trash was just... god damn. So anyway, once she gets to the farm, things perk up, as the film's POV centers around the girl, Pollette, and her new friend, countryboy Michele. As child actors go, these kids are natural. They aren't annoying, which is the highest compliment one can ever pay a child actor.

The rest of the film is filled with little subplots: the rivalry between Michele's family and their neighbors, Michele's sick brother, and the "forbidden games" she and Michele play in the woods (nothing like THAT, people, get your minds out of the gutter). "Forbidden Games" is a movie about death, and how kids react to it and cope with it. To give it credit, it doesn't feel like a downer film, because in spite of its morbid themes, it doesn't get all moody and emo on the audience. Excellent film, and along with the films of Jean Renoir, its a classic example of great old school French cinema.

Part 2 of the Francotastic (or is that Frogalicious?) IFC double feature. Much like "Forbidden Games", the thing that bowled me over the most about "400 Blows" is just how GOOD the kid actors are in this flick. I mean, the kid who plays our protagonist, Antoine Doinel... I can't compare it to a single performance by an American child actor. Not one. Fuckin' Haley Joel Osmont looks like Carrot Top next to the lead actor of "400 Blows". Ze premise: Antoine is a rascally wabbit who runs afoul of his family and his school, and gets embroiled with numerous misadventures over typewriters, Balzac, milk bottles, and what not, and gets punished in increasingly severe ways. The joy of "Blows" is in the details: the peculiar mannerisms and vicious banter between his parents, Doinel's dour "I lie because nobody believes me anyway" demeanor, his running all over Paris as though it were a giant playground. A quick note about the music: GODS, what a soundtrack. It sounds like the best album that Disney never recorded, all operatic, full of the-world's-a-musical-and-everyone's-Fred-Astaire epic grandeur, The music works so well because director Truffaut always drops it in during inappropriate moments, the truimphant happy ending music slyly mocking all the pitfalls and traps Doinel gets stuck in. I don't want to discuss much more of the film, because the pleasure of this film is just sitting back and watching the little things play out. Watching it, I'm more and more convinced that of the French New Wave directors, I like Truffaut the most. Sure, Goddard's films are fun and edgy and loopy and experimental, but they lack the heart of Truffaut's work (and "Blows" for all its occasional Dickens-esque grimness is full of heart).

One complaint: towards the end, there's a sequence of Antoine just running for like 2-3 minutes that gets annoying real quick (I get the meaning behind the whole sequence, its just too long). Great film, aside from that scene (and another classroom scene that drags, but those are the only two misses I can recall in a film abundant with hits).