zetetic

Like a version of Brazil carved out of human pain, or the sequel to Eraserhead, where the mutant baby actually lives, and grows up, Bad Boy Bubby is an experience both profound and confounding. It offers up a controversial central character, an individual given to both acts of unbridled aggression and moving sentiment, and demands that we find a way to like him. It takes a strong stance against parents and parenting, proving that most of the misery in the world comes from a biological basis. And when genetics aren't grinding you down, God and his ritualistic requirements are out to upend you. Indeed, what Bubby learns is that, even with all the support and love you can gather around you, the removal of hurt is a personal process. Until you understand and forgive yourself, you will never be one of reality's residents. You will always be lost in a realm of irregularities, a place where the past and all its suffering shortchanges your being. There, you will always be a child. There, you will always be someone's Bad Boy Bubby.

Farewell My Concubine


Chinese director Chen Kaige's Farewell My Concubine is a visually impressive and emotionally complex historical epic. The film, which won the Cannes Festival top prize, the Palme d'Or, is always fascinating to watch, despite a running time of 2 hours and 36 minutes and other problems.

Mother And Son


From 1997 comes Alexander Sokurov's Mother and Son, which barely received a theatrical release here. (Sokurov fared much better in 2002 with his art house hit Russian Ark.) Mother and Son depicts one day in the life of a grown son (Aleksei Ananishnov) and his elderly, ailing mother (Gudrun Geyer). They have murmured conversations, look at photos and go for long walks. The son must gently -- ever so gently -- lift his mother and carry her from place to place. Sometimes they'll sit on a bench, and she'll doze in his arms. It's as tender and peaceful a final moment as anyone could ask for, as seen through Sokruov's gorgeous, misty cinematography that resembles oil paintings. The film only runs 72 minutes, so this slow pace should be tolerable to even the most impatient of viewers. And it's one of the greatest films I've ever seen.

Dead Ringers

With Dead Ringers, Cronenberg fashions a single entity from two wholes--a continuation in spirit of The Fly, exploring an idea of imposed order (with its blue-lit examination theatres, sterile red gowns, and polished penthouse surfaces) sabotaged by the ever-present spectre of sexual jealousy and addiction. Insects make a return in Dead Ringers in the form of a specially commissioned set of surgical steel gynaecological instruments (leading to a medical examination as discomfiting as anything in the director's oeuvre), illustrating Cronenberg's juxtaposition of the unassailably human with the indisputably inhuman. Described in two ways in the film--as tools for operating on "women with mutant biologies" and as "tools for the separation of Siamese twins"--the Mantles' steel insect (and crustacean) parts are canny representations of the concerns of the picture and, ultimately, of the director's keystone concerns. Jeremy Irons as both halves of the suggestively named Mantle twins ("mantle" being both a cloak of authority and a crustacean's protective covering) is simply astounding: by the middle of the film the illusion of duality is seamless, as is, by the end, the somehow more difficult illusion of cohesion. The star of the picture, however, is cinematographer Peter Suschitzky's (in his first collaboration with the director, a partnership that has lasted to this day) cold colour scheme and smooth movements--the kind of detached remove that fits perfectly with Cronenberg's sensibilities. With the addition of Suschitzky's architectural compositions, Cronenberg, with Dead Ringers, becomes the director that Roman Polanski could have been. There is an apocryphal tale concerning conjoined twins Chang & Eng retold in the film: Chang, the weaker of the two, has a stroke in the night and perishes. When Eng awakes to find his brother dead, he dies of fright. The implications of the tale and the ways with which Cronenberg winnows its essence down to a story of a sensitive dependency made fatal by the dreams of the flesh is the very definition of "auteurism"--and the Cronenberg film.

n his book Sculpting with Time, legendary Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky states about Stalker's futuristic setting The Zone, a mysterious place that was reportedly created by an asteroid and may contain otherworldly forces: "People have often asked me what The Zone is, and what it symbolisesThe Zone doesn't symbolise anything, any more than anything else does in my films: the zone is a zone, it's life." Considering the general self-analytic insightfulness of the director's writing, one is almost tempted to believe such an assertion. Yet any perfunctory assessment of the director's second science-fiction effort (after 1972's spaceship-set Solaris) inevitably raises doubts about the accuracy, if not the sincerity, of Tarkovsky's bold claim. The story of three strangers' quest into The Zone to reach The Room, an enigmatic enclave that allegedly grants visitors their deepest, darkest wish, 1979's Stalker, which is loosely based on the novel The Roadside Picnic, may not be the most signifier-loaded film in the auteur's canon. Nonetheless, it remains a dense, complex, often-contradictory, and endlessly pliable allegory about human consciousness, the necessity for faith in an increasingly secular, rational world, and the ugly, unpleasant dreams and desires that reside in the hearts of men.

Cordoned off with barbwire by a military state that fears its power, The Zone is the destination of Writer (Anatoli Solonitsyn) and Professor (Nikolai Grinko), both of whom are guided into the dangerous no-man's land by Stalker (Aleksandr Kajdanovsky), a tour guide of sorts with intimate knowledge of The Zone. The angry, self-loathing Writer has embarked on this journey in search of "inspiration"; the Professor is determined to make a "discovery"; and the Stalker, a man who finds escape from his unhappy, nagging wife (Alisa Frejndlikh), and deformed child (Natasha Abramova) in The Zone, performs his duty out of a belief that it brings "hope" to his lost, wretched clients. Aside from bookending urban sequences involving Stalker and his spouse, the film concentrates on this trio as it wends its way through The Zone, a lush, green landscape littered with the burned out husks of automobiles, military tanks, and askew telephone poles no longer in use, and marked by pools of water in which can be found the debris of modern society, from syringes and calendars to a van Eyck painting of St. John the Baptist. Appearing outwardly innocuous, the trap-filled, apparently sentient Zone is dubbed "capricious" by the Stalker, who leads his charges to The Room via a circuitous, invisible path that's delineated by an arbitrary set of guidelines that (like God) can't be seen, only sensed.

Having found the high-tech gadgets and outer-space paraphernalia of Solaris distracting, Tarkovsky here strips his sci-fi premise down to its thematic essence, barely bothering_outside of occasional electronic noises which accompany atmospheric sounds (footsteps in water, the clanking of a mechanized trolley along rusty tracks)_to affect any semblance of a "futuristic" ambiance. The result is a film that feels like a Soviet hybrid of Dostoyevsky and Waiting for Godot, its plot a coat hanger on which the director hangs oblique, open-ended philosophical, psychological, and existential ruminations about the nature of art and the essence of the human soul. Stalker proceeds as an episodic series of starts and stops, its protagonists' forward momentum through The Zone periodically halted by contentious arguments in which initial assumptions about each character are challenged: the Writer's quest for inspiration is muddled by his self-loathing, contempt for others and moments of nihilistic despair; the Professor's desire for knowledge is upended by the climactic revelation about his true motives for venturing to The Room; and the Stalker's conviction that his job is a righteous one_and that others derive something good and worthwhile from his expeditions_is somewhat contradicted by his own fearful refusal to enter The Room.

Subscribing to the belief that the eyes are the windows to the soul, Tarkovsky locates Stalker's spiritual center in the weathered countenances of his world-weary protagonists. One of the cinema's greatest portraitists, the director offers up a gallery of masterful close-ups, some dipped in sepia-toned bronzes, others cast in the harsh light of a cloudy morning, several obscured by dank, dark shadows. No two alike and all stunning in their formal composition and expressiveness, Tarkovsky's visages_from the large, sorrowful eyes of Kajdanovsky and the anguished expressions of Solonitsyn to the heart-rending candor of Frejndlikh_form the emotional backbone of his heavily metaphorical tale. However, though his stark close-ups powerfully acquaint us with his characters' inner turmoil, Tarkovsky nonetheless regularly upsets any measure of cozy intimacy by eschewing establishing shots and comforting transitions, juxtaposing his standard set-ups with disorienting pans, zooms, and reverse zooms that create a mood of overwhelming physical and psychological crisis. With every constricting doorway frame and methodically choreographed camera movement seemingly designed to impart an impression of what's being left unseen outside the picture's edges, the director's alternately enchanting, austere, and bewildering mise-en-scne is frequently one of denial and disruption.

"The world is ruled by cast-iron laws, and it's insufferably boring," says the Writer during his introductory scene, but Stalker, exuding a sense of the unknown and intangible, refutes this assertion at nearly every turn. What does the awe-inspiring abundance of import-laden details_including Writer donning a crown of thorns, an unrecognizable gold object seen shimmering underwater, a wandering dog, birds flying across a sand dune-covered room, and the supernatural final image_all ultimately mean? As tempting as it is to try to definitively interpret the film's myriad symbols, such an analysis ultimately seems both pointless (since their intriguing appeal is directly proportional to their inscrutability) and, given the director's refusal to posit any easily comprehendible explanations, somewhat futile. In aggregate, however, what these various artifacts, objects, and narrative events do ultimately capture is something akin to the essence of what man is made of: a tangled knot of memories, fears, fantasies, nightmares, paradoxical impulses, and a yearning for something that's simultaneously beyond our reach and yet intrinsic to every one of us. Is that thing hope? Faith? Or, as implied by the masterful climactic monologue from Stalker's wife, is it simply devotion? Perhaps Tarkovsky summed it up best when he wrote about Stalker, "In the end, everything can be reduced to the one simple element which is all a person can count upon in his existence: the capacity to love."

A nursery crime of epic proportions...
A dark, twisted, yet enchanting version of the classic fairy tale. Set in a world of dark and shadowy tenements, shining high-tech labs and spectic landscapes of garbage and ruins, The Secret Adventures Of Tom Thumb makes a touching hero of the tiny child mysteriously born to a woman and a man in experiments in a lab full if mutant creatures. He narrowly escapes into a world where he finds companionship with people his own size and starts to fights back against the 'giants' alongside Jack the Giant Killer.
Nothing is likely to prepare you for your entry into the astonishing, timeless world created by the award-winning bolexbrothers' director Dave Borthwick, where the strange humans are animated, latex figures breathe as if alive and objects and odd creatures crinkle and crunch in the corner. It's a world of genuine horror and moving movements that has the power to unsettle and enchant in equal measure - a potent reminder that fairy tales were never meant to be nursery soothers.