Spell it the way it sounds

Biutiful 2011 Spain/Mexico (148 minutes), directed and cowritten by Alejandro González Iñárritu.

Uxbal (Javier Bardem) is a medium.

In business, he is a local facilitator between Chinese sweatshop owners who have illegal Chinese immigrants producing knock-off designer handbags, West Africans who sell the handbags and bootleg DVDs in Barcelona’s fancier districts (and also deal drugs on their own as a sideline), and a crooked cop paid to look the other way from these goings-on.

Uxbal also is a folk spiritual medium between people who have just died and their families, giving them assurance that their loved one has made his destination safely and without pain, for which he receives small cash gratuities.

Uxbal’s parents died when he was very young; he never met his father, who fled Franco’s Spain for Mexico before he was born and never returned. Marambra (Maricel Álvarez), Uxbal’s ex-wife, is a bipolar party girl, and Tito (Eduard Fernández), his unmarried older brother, is the owner of a strip club and interested primarily in sex, drugs and money in whichever order they turn up.

When Uxbal finds out that he has an advanced, terminal cancer, with only ‘a month or two’ to ‘maintain [his] quality of life’ with chemotherapy, he tries to become a sentimental medium between his parents and his two young children, Ana (Hanaa Bouchaib) and Mateo (Guillermo Estrella), over whom he has full custody.

Uxbal is not a good guy: he is a criminal engaged in a chain of consensual exploitation that greed and economic globalization provide, consensual because everyone involved seems to understand and generally to follow the ground rules. But rules are broken. A beautifully shot, kinetic, violent foot chase by a large number of policemen with truncheons converging on West African street hawkers through tourists in the heart of the city has the feel of a prizefight. And Uxbal’s good intentions to improve the life of Chinese workers go horribly awry.

But he is not a bad guy either: he is a caring and attentive father and seems genuinely to be interested in the welfare of others, among whom the troubled and irresponsible Marambra and the poor Chinese and Africans trying to make a living.

This being Iñárritu, two complex parallel stories with their own cast of characters which relate to Uxbal’s business activities are interwoven simultaneously with those of Uxbal’s personal life, his family and medical problems: the story of Hai (Taisheng Cheng), the Chinese sweatshop owner, a closeted gay family man, and Liwei (Luo Jin), his second-in-command and secret gay lover; and the story of Ige (Diaryatou Daff), wife of Ekwame (Cheikh Ndiaye), one of Uxbal’s street sellers, both from Senegal.

In the end, Iñárritu’s resolutions of these stories would speak for Uxbal’s righteous anger and his loyalty.

But as to whether Uxbal succeeds as the medium he wants to be between his parents and his children would come down to whether they follow the advice he gives his daughter when she asks him how to spell the English word ‘beautiful’ while doing her homework at the kitchen table: ‘Spell it just the way it sounds, my love.’

Life’s a bitch—and so’s your mother

Fish Tank 2009 UK (124 minutes) Written and directed by Andrea Arnold.

            It took me a day or two after seeing this movie to realize that someone nearly managed to sneak a ballet by me in plain sight: in case this worries you, this is not a ‘dance picture’.

At first glance, it is a modern coming-of-age story structured along the lines of a British Victorian novel: a teenager progresses linearly through a series of emotional and moral challenges. But this tale is set in a contemporary council estate [public housing] in Essex, east of London, pretty far off the Masterpiece Theatre reservation.

The most striking thing one sees right away of this subculture is that words have little value. People spit words at each other or throw them like punches, and words not spit or punched often seem to express the opposite of what they mean. Televisions run nearly nonstop playing dance videos and babbling buckets of raw verbal nonsense. When someone feels something or has something important to say, she does this in movement and gesture; or she reads and responds to others’ gestures and movements. In a sense, they ‘dance’ all the time, which includes—but is not limited to—shoving, pushing, slapping, kicking, punching, pinching, head butting and wrestling each other. 

The story opens with Mia Williams (Katie Jarvis) in the vacant flat that she uses as her dance studio. It is the summer of her fifteenth year. She is bent over breathing heavily, as though she has been exercising or is concentrating before beginning a new dance routine; she opens up to look straight at the camera.

Ecce puella!

It may be the gray training suit and hoodie she wears, it may be the rap and hip hop music she listens to, but watching Mia dance, especially at first, is a lot like watching a boxer train. It’s in her presentation as much as her display. What Mia wants to do more than anything else is to float like a butterfly and sting like a bee.

Mia lives with her single mom Joanne (Kierston Wareing) and much younger sister Tyler (Rebecca Griffiths). She faces what for anyone besides a teenager with boundless energy and lacking the experience to know better would be a physically exhausting and emotionally intense several weeks. Yet in this short period we get insight into this girl’s life and an idea as to where she might be heading.

She evidently is a ‘discipline problem’ for which she may be sent to a boarding school for ‘sorting out’ in the coming school term. This seems due mainly to her opposition to her alcoholic mother’s parental authority, an opposition she asserts with typically petulant adolescent righteousness. But despite her faults, Joanne is there for Mia; it is clear that both girls expect their mother to be there for them, and that Mia needs her mother as much as she needs to try her and to compete with her.

The actors in this movie seem more choreographed than directed. The scheme is modern, but the choreography, costumes and sets are less minimalist than incidental, and the movie’s threads weave into a whole that tells a story the way a ballet does.

In a sense, there is a princess and an evil queen: the princess is under a spell, but has the resources to break it; there is no king, but the queen has a consort, Connor (Michael Fassbender), a handsome knight—though he could have a dark side too. The princess also has a kind of prince-champion, Billy (Harry Treadaway), a nineteen-year-old whose trusty steed turns out to be not the old hornless unicorn Mia would ride away on, but an old Volvo automobile that Billy is cobbling together with scavenged parts.

            Citing any one scene takes it out of a context hard to explain without dragging in others and spoiling plot points. Part of the marvel of this movie is watching it unfold, showing us this unusual girl who reveals herself to us in motion as she discovers herself. There is also a lot more to the other principal characters than at first meets the eye. 

That said, one afternoon Connor takes Joanne and the girls in his car on a drive to a pond in the country where, with Mia’s help, he catches a fish with his bare hands. On the drive to this place, he puts on a Bobby Womack CD including Womack’s 1968 pop single cover of John and Michelle Phillips’ California Dreamin’.

Mia subsequently works up and practices her own dance steps for California Dreamin’ for an audition she arranges at a ‘top club’ which advertises by flyer that its pays ‘top rates’ for ‘fresh young talent’. The dance she creates does not follow the conventions of hip hop music videos—or anything else. It looks and feels like the kind of personal statement a teenager would make on a college application, except that it is danced rather than written. In a sense, this is exactly what it is: she prepares for and goes to the audition like an adult, but with a child’s wishful hope that it will get her the recognition she so desperately wants, solve her problems and make things right.

The audition speaks for itself. My sense is that this kid on the right track, against all odds. Maybe she will grow up to direct films. What seems to have left the biggest impression on Mia the summer she was fifteen is what she saw from Connor’s example above: you have to get out of the fish tank if you want to catch a fish.

Andrea Arnold tells a terrific story in pictures of bodies in motion, but in case you are squeamish or watch with kids, be advised that there is graphic sex and hefty helpings of physical, sexual, alcohol, child, and free flowing verbal abuse in the spinning of her tale.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdD7PQPQa08&NR=1&feature=fvwp (the official trailer)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewUt4LM_Fpo (Never mind the French subtitles: the scene sets the tone.)

Mom 102: ‘My first night out in fookin’ ages!’

Wasp 2003 Scotland (26 minutes) written and directed by Andrea Arnold.

This quick sketch of a day in the life of a young mother of four in working class Dartford, Scotland is a short film which is a fine work of art that stands on its own (and won an Oscar).

The opening sets the pace: Zoe (Natalie Press), a young woman in a nightie, marches down the steps of her council flat leading her three fully dressed little girls aged roughly eight, six and four up the street, herself uncombed and barefoot with a bare-bottomed baby boy under her arm.

Zoe arrives at the door of another council flat, hands the baby to her eldest, Kelly (Jodie Mitchell), theatrically rings the bell, then gets in a shouting, hair-pulling scuffle in the grass outside the flat with the woman who answers the door—her adversary ‘Bullet Head’ (Lizzie Colbert)—because Bullet Head allegedly struck one of Zoe’s daughters.

In her tactical withdrawal after a proper telling off, Zoe and her three small daughters flip off the woman and her family in a synchronized motion ‘on three’ (for those who have seen The Fighter, this film would work marvelously as a prequel, with the Mark Wahlberg character as the baby in this one). On the way back to the flat, Zoe runs into Dave (Danny Dyer), an old boyfriend, who asks her what she’s ‘doin’ with all those kids’—‘Looking after them for a mate,’ she says—and wants to take her out that night.

This gets our story rolling.

Okay, the working class is different—it still has the same culture and characters, even though it’s not really ‘working’ in any proper sense any more. What makes this film so good is that writer and director Andrea Arnold gives you what you think you see and then shows you a lot of things you don’t have any idea about and can’t possibly see or have known without knowing these people as individuals—whether Zoe or her ex-boyfriend Dave, eight-year-old Kelly or her little siblings.

Arnold accomplishes this feat in less than half an hour almost entirely in images conceived from a rich palette of mostly unspoken communications that she shows us in the looks and gestures between a woman not much older than her kids and those kids, as well as between Zoe and other adults, and among the kids themselves.

There is a ‘soundtrack’ of ambient pop tunes—Zoe singing and dancing with her kids, the kids singing and playing alone, and in the background at a pub. Though the emotional content of Arnold’s images woven together does the job that soundtracks try to do—and often don’t succeed nearly half as well in accomplishing—in most feature films.

No wonder it took the best short film Oscar in 2005 and stacks of other festival awards.

            This movie is included with Arnold’s feature Red Road.

Now, voyeur

Red Road 2006 Scotland (113 minutes) written and directed by Andrea Arnold. 

Ubiquitous closed circuit television cameras in Great Britain’s public spaces may have put a light in the all-seeing eye of George Orwell’s Big Brother, but what that eye beholdeth depends on who does the looking.

One sees this in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. A temporarily incapacitated newspaper photographer not used to sitting still is forced in his boredom to watch his neighbors’ daily activities from his armchair through a telephoto lens. How much of what he sees does he really know and understand? And to what extent are his observations only pet theories or voyeuristic fancies about the things he imagines that he saw taking place, colored by the biases of his personal frame of reference at the time he happened to be looking?

Jackie Morrison (Kate Vickie), the protagonist of Red Road, watches the city of Glasgow as a closed circuit television surveillance technician for the police department. Like the photographer in Rear Window, we see her sympathetically follow the daily dramas of those she sees regularly sitting at a bank of 28 television monitors fed by a citywide network of closed circuit surveillance cameras. There is a middle-aged man who walks an ill old dog, and a young woman who cleans offices, among others. She also keeps an eye on women alone on the streets at night.

But Jackie herself is a cipher. Her work is her life, and when she is off work, she seems to watch rather than live life. She wears a gold wedding band, but appears to live by herself; she has a sex date in the cab of a parked truck every two weeks with a married work acquaintance. She is in touch with her in-laws, has a strained relationship with her father-in-law, and there is the briefest hint of a ‘they’ not having been buried.

So Jackie may be a widow. She also occasionally goes to places she sees on her monitors at work: she leaves her sister-in-law’s wedding reception to go to the where the man walks the old dog and stands next to them to see the notices he is reading on the inside of a shop window that her camera can’t see.

At work, Jackie sees a man follow a woman into a vacant lot. She alerts a police patrol, and then cancels the alert when she sees that they just are having consensual sex. She keeps watching them and recognizes the man—Clyde Henderson (Tony Curran). She has a clipping at home which reports that this man got a 10-year criminal sentence. Her solicitor tells her that Henderson ‘got an early release for good behavior… he’ll be back like a shot if he messes up.’

Our thriller is in motion. With no narrative exposition as to why, the audience participates in Jackie's voyeurism as she starts following Henderson's activities obsessively at work. In the grip of her obsession, she misses a young girl’s stabbing. And then she seeks Henderson out where he lives, out the Red Road of the title, into a series of eight graffiti-painted and trash-blown high rise public housing projects.

Jackie crosses the line professionally, but she also may be risking her life in seeking out a male ex-felon in whose serious offense she apparently had a personal stake, and with no more than a rock in her pocket. But the way the story plays out, these are risks she must take to cross the line back from being a voyeur to reengaging in her life.

A small but crucial moment comes in what seems like a pause in the narration. Jackie, leaning against a wall inside Henderson’s apartment, catches herself listening to an intimate conversation between a couple around the corner, watching them in their reflection on a window. One of the couple, a young woman with whom Jackie is briefly acquainted, gets up suddenly and comes face to face with Jackie, who as though sees this woman with new eyes.

In a sense, director Andrea Arnold dekes us into sharing her narrator’s personal assumptions and judgments, then shows us how wrong both her narrator and we are by having not looked closely enough to appreciate them for what they are in themselves, rather than as we might have them.

Watch carefully, because Arnold tells her story in pictures; this seems fitting for a culture that does not seem to use many words to communicate things. The dialogue is broguish, but light and not difficult to follow—there are subtitles if you think you are missing anything.

In case you are squeamish or watch with children, there is graphic sex and highly colorful language in the telling of this tale. The British underclass appears to employ the word ‘cunt’ in a sense similar to that in which a certain African-American element freely uses the notorious ‘n-word’ (for instance, Henderson’s mate Stevie (Martin Compston) refers to the strawberry blond Henderson warmly as a ‘ginger cunt’), though the subtitles leave a lot of these out.

Movie trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSfy6UpAXKQ&feature=related

Read MP’s reviews of two more Andrea Arnold films:

Wasp 2003, Andrea Arnold's Oscar-winning 26-minute short film, does everything a feature does, but in 26 minutes. I don’t think there’s a single wasted frame in this film.

Blog link: http://moompitchers.blogspot.com/2011/04/mom-102-my-first-night-out-in-fookin.html

Clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BN6BSVl1zQY&playnext=1&list=PL098E1B0AEB683C54

              

Fish Tank 2009, a coming-of-age story about a hip hop Victorian novel heroine who wants to float like a butterfly and sting like a bee.

Blog link: http://moompitchers.blogspot.com/2011/04/lifes-bitchand-sos-your-mother.html

Theatrical trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdD7PQPQa08&NR=1&feature=fvwp

The banality of evil

Cronicas (Chronicles) 2004 Ecuador (98 minutes), written and directed by Sebastián Cordero.

Cronicas is worth seeing for Mexican actor Damián Alcázar’s portrayal of a serial killer whom the news media dub ‘El Monstruo de Babahoyo’—the Monster of Babahoyo. All the clues are there, but you know nothing for sure until the very end of the movie.

The story opens with a middle-aged man bathing and washing clothes in a muddy rural pond near the remains of an old house.

We learn eventually that this is Vinicio Cepeda, a travelling salesman of religious books. His origins are unclear. Several years before the story opens, he met and married Esperanza (Gloria Leitan), a widow with a small boy in Babahoyo, a rural town in southern Ecuador where he has settled down and gets along well but doesn’t fit in.

Vinicio returns to the town refreshed from his bath, his small truck entering the midst of a festival atmosphere that turns out to be the heavily media-covered triple funeral for the serial killer’s three latest child victims. A small boy runs suddenly in front of his truck. Vinicio accidentally hits and kills the boy, coincidentally the brother of one of the murder victims, provoking a riot led by the boy’s father. The local police, at first reluctant, just manage to extract Vinicio before the ugly mob, energized by its grief and rage, can savage him.

Police jail the father and others involved in the riot; they also detain Vinicio for involuntary manslaughter, as much for his own protection. Vinicio survives an attempted shanking and maintains an almost saintly calm and humble detachment in response to the other prisoners’ scatological rough justice. This is all by way of an appetizer.

Manolo Bonilla (John Leguizamo) is an aggressive, ambitious international television reporter for the show ‘Una hora con la verdad’ (One Hour with the Truth), in Babahoyo on the serial killer story. His boss, Victor Hugo Puente (Albert Molina), the celebrity face of this show, appears in the movie only on television screens. Manolo and his news team take an interest in Vinicio and arrange a series of interviews with him in prison.

Vinicio tells Manolo that he wants the show to broadcast his story to reveal his innocence in the accidental death of the boy, and that if it does, he will tell Manolo what he knows of the killer, whom he claims to have met as a salesman on the road. Manolo suspects that Vinicio himself is the killer.

The two play a cat-and-mouse game in which Vinicio teases out and manipulates Manolo’s weaknesses, while Manolo tries to get Vinicio to confess on camera for his own greater career glory. Manolo’s interactions with the soft-spoken, folk scripture quoting ‘nice little man’ reveal a chillingly realistic and fascinating portrait of a sociopath rarely seen in films which captures Hannah Arendt’s often cited ‘banality of evil’.

The newsroom politics and the dynamic of Manolo’s team, including a gratuitous sex scene, all likely thrown in to show Manolo’s compromised ethical standards, are a drag on the story. What comes around is the banality of normal; what goes around is a surprise ending—and Manolo ends up not getting away with anything.

Also of note is Ecuadoran writer/director and actor Camilo Luzuriaga as Capitán Bolivar Rojas, the local policeman investigating the serial killings.

Rojas is a seasoned professional whose wariness of television cameras and celebrity prompt Manolo’s team to disparage him as ‘the only clean cop in Latin America.’ His challenge is to catch the killer patiently by the book while contending with passionate townspeople, media types obstructing his investigation and, not least of all, his own capricious, television-camera-and-celebrity-loving superiors.

Theatrical trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOym3GTG-tM&feature=related

Why don’t they just build a wall?

Border Incident 1949 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (95 minutes) directed by Anthony Mann, includes a kibitz version featuring film historian Dana Polan commenting as the film runs.

            A group of illegal immigrants robbed and murdered on the United States-Mexico border—the ‘border incident’ of the title—prompts the U.S. Department of Justice and the Policía Judicial Federal, the former Mexican federal police agency, to investigate a pattern of such crimes.

The agencies task Capitán Pablo Rodriguez (Ricardo Montalban) and Inspector Jack Bearnes (George Murphy), agents who worked together before, to investigate human trafficking on the U.S.-Mexican border, operating through a U.S. field office in Calexico, California.

The movie emphasizes U.S.-Mexican ‘Good Neighbor’ cooperation, its tone is earnest and a voiceover tells viewers that the fictional story is based on actual case files. But what follows is a gripping action story: Rodriguez turns up in the rough border town Mexicali, Mexico, working undercover as a bracero, or laborer, trying to cross the border illegally, with Bearnes tracing his steps and working an American angle, together to crack a well-organized and dangerous ring of American human traffickers.

The Mexican bad guys tend to run to a stereotype. Cuchillo (Alfonso Bedoya), one of the coyotes, is the Mexican character actor who as Gold Hat in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre immortalized the line “I don't have to show you any stinking badges.” But the Mexican workers are portrayed with an earnest respect. The American bad guys, lead by rancher Owen Parson (Howard Da Silva), range from Da Silva’s suave sociopath who calmly plunks plastic pigeons in his office with a pellet pistol, to dangerous, order-following bullies.

Because much of the action takes place at night, a lot of the film was shot day-for-night (shot during daylight hours using camera filters to give the print the appearance of having been filmed at night), which occasionally lends the film a shade more mystery than necessary.

Nevertheless, this is tight, a well-made B-picture on an issue every bit as pressing to this day.

Sex, meat and potatoes on Cannery Row

Clash by Night, 1952, RKO (105 minutes) directed by Fritz Lang; includes a kibitz version featuring Lang and Peter Bogdanovich commenting as the film runs.

Clash by Night is a ‘love triangle’ story shot mostly on location in the heart of what used to be an active fishing industry in Monterey, California—John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row.

Physicality is this movie’s meat and potatoes. It’s summertime, but that’s not the only reason the atmosphere of this working class town is sultry. There are bare-chested young men and older bears in wife beaters, Barbara Stanwyck looks great in a slip, and Marilyn Monroe looks terrific in everything.

A world-weary Mae Doyle (Stanwyck) returns home after ten years seeking her fortune on the road. It doesn’t take her long to decide to settle down with Jerry D’Amato (Paul Douglas), a reliable fishing boat captain who sees only the good in people. Mae and Jerry marry and have a child, but Jerry’s best friend Earl Pfeiffer (Robert Ryan), a cynical ladies’ man, pique’s Mae’s memory of the pleasures of a former faster life she feels that she begins to miss in the routine of being a wife and mother.

Though directed by Fritz Lang, a key influence on the noir genre, this black and white A-movie is not, strictly speaking, film noir: the femme has an edge but is not fatale, and there are no guns and criminality. Rather, it is a romantic melodrama set within the context and rules of the orderly daylight world and the conventions of the time.

Lang said that he got to Monterey a week before the actors did and filmed a lot of local fishing and cannery activity: the first five minutes show the town in a documentary style with its ambient sounds, placing the main characters at work among others in the midst of Monterey’s commercial activity: a sea captain, a roustabout, a cannery worker.

The story opens with Mae ‘coming home’. She carries a large single suitcase away from a railway siding with a train pulling slowly away, walking through town to Angelo’s, the local watering hole, where she first meets Jerry. Then she walks back across the tracks to her childhood home, where her brother Joe (Keith Andes) lives with his girl friend Peggy (Monroe).

Lang tells the story mostly in choreographed long takes that give his frames depth and emphasize his characters’ physicality and body language, particularly the dynamic between different characters and among groups of characters. Mae dances one way with Jerry, half clothed because she is safe; and though she may dig under Earl’s wife beater, she never appears less than fully clothed with him. The physicality in long shots also serves Monroe well. She is luminous, she speaks with her body, not really acting so much as dancing through her scenes. It is clear that she has an intensely physical relationship with Joe, which Lang shows us this in a short, sweet scene with Peggy and Joe walking home together from work­­. Peggy also picks up on Earl’s cruel streak, which both excites and repels her.

In one of many remarkable scenes, Mae is in the back yard of her childhood home standing amid five horizontal lines of laundry in the lower half of the frame, hanging clothes out to dry. Peggy pops out the back door on the upper right side of the frame in a long skirt that Mae has loaned her, skips girlishly down the back steps and twirls across the yard in top half of the frame as Mae looks on, a bit amused, maybe a little jealous, but more likely as surprised as the viewer—and, in a sense, awakened to the next act.

Also of note is Jerry’s eccentric Uncle Vince (former Vaudevillian and character actor J. Carrol Naish), an alcoholic Iago who precipitates the denouement by stirring the gentle Jerry to action.

Kaleidoscopic cult Western all about The Journey

El Topo (The Mole) Mexico, 1970 (124 minutes) written and directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky.

Had Pulp Fiction’s Jules (Samuel L. Jackson) carried through on his thought to quit being a drug dealer’s enforcer and ‘walk the earth’ like Cain in the 1970s television series Kung Fu, he might well have entered the land of El Topo.

This pop-expressionist Western is easily as fascinating as it is odd to watch, following gunfighter-metaphysician El Topo (Alejandro Jodorowsky, who also directed the film) as he encounters earthly beings and evildoers, cross-dressers and misfits, a pair of women who could be the light and dark sides of his soul, and four master gunfighters—a fakir, a guru, a flute-playing bodhisattva, and a Zen adept—among many others in the desolate desert wastes and under the high, unending blue skies of northwest Mexico.

The movie is in essence El Topo’s quest, first to overcome a series of masters, then to overcome himself. To seek out the masters, he tells a companion: “The desert is circular. In order to find them we have to travel in a spiral.” That may sound like high-flown malarkey; the cool thing is, this view seems to inform the way director Jodorowsky imagined and filmed the story.

What makes this movie really sing is that it unfolds in expressive, beautifully composed shots, especially the medium shots, which stay with a viewer long after the credits roll.

There is a rich diet of sex and violence mixed in with dollops of the kind of pop philosophy that since has beaten its well-worn way into countless self-help books; the blood looks more like bright red paint and, more often than not, the sex is something inflicted on the weak by the powerful. But the sex and violence are so offbeat that they tend to fascinate rather than to arouse or repel.

Bad guy vaqueros, banditos, and bullies turn out to be shoe fetishists, cross-dressers, obsessives and zanies more out of the crackpot imagination of Terry Gilliam and his Monty Python colleagues than the cruel and usual pistoleros of Tombstone and Dodge City, though this movie’s backbone is the traditional Hollywood horse opera.

The settings and landscapes derive from the vernacular of the Great American Western drama, from the massacred Mexican pueblos that would not be out of place in spaghetti westerns to the white Victorian clapboard frontier town under the thumb of its ‘League of Dignified Women’ (La Liga de Mujeres Dignas), hexed by the league’s twisted moralism—and its ubiquitous black on white eye-in-the-pyramid banner.

The film also is filled with a grand curiosity headshop of mumbo jumbo from eastern and western religious traditions: its titled main parts appear to allude loosely to Scripture—Genesis; Prophets; Psalms; and Apocalypse—though not in any readily apparent way, and set in a Roman Catholic country, the movie’s imagery and symbolism draw heavily yet not exclusively on Roman Catholicism.

In the beginning, El Topo (The Mole), a gunslinger in black leather travelling with his naked seven-year-old son (Brontis Jodorowsky) behind him in the saddle, has his son ‘put away childish things’ by burying his teddy bear and a photograph of his mother in the sand. El Topo avenges two massacred villages, then abandons his son to make his own way in the world.

‘Genesis’—Leaving his son behind, El Topo rides off into the desert with a young woman, Mara (Mara Lorenzio), to find and challenge the four master gunfighters. He encounters the First Master (Héctor Martínez—‘El Borrado’), a loin-clothed ascetic with a pair of helpers—one with no arms who carries the other with no legs who carries a pistol and a lantern; and then the Second Master (Juan José Gurrola), an Indian Cossack large as a bear, in a full gray fur coat and black astrakhan hat, devoted to a tarot-reading gypsy. Another woman (Paula Romo), a dark, gunslinging stranger in black leather, joins El Topo and Mara.

‘Prophets’—El Topo finds and challenges the Third Master (Victor Fosada) a musician and herder of rabbits who shot for the heart when he should have shot for the head; and the Fourth Master (Agustín Isunza) and old man in the dunes who traded his revolver for a butterfly net. At the successful end of this quest, El Topo renounces his supremacy; the women (who bonded while fighting each other on the dunes with bull whips) turn on him and cause him to suffer a ‘passion’—i.e., he is ‘stigmatized’ by pistol shots to his hands, feet and side.

‘Psalms’—El Topo is reborn into a new life as a demigod of the halt, lame, and deformed who rescued and nurtured him, whom the nearby town has imprisoned in the bowels of a mountain. Back among men as a man of peace in a monkish frock, El Topo resolves to free these people by digging a tunnel through the mountain. In the course of his work, he impregnates Mujercita (Jacqueline Luis), the ‘small woman’ who serves him, clowns and begs with him. The town’s religion—a false charismatic faith built on Russian roulette played with a blank charge, practiced in a former Catholic church—is debunked after a young monk (Robert John) replaces the blank with a bullet and a small boy shoots himself.

‘Apocalypse’—The young monk is El Topo’s now adult son. El Topo meets his son once more; the son swears to kill him, and dons his father’s black leather gun-slinging togs. Working with his son, El Topo finishes the tunnel and frees the cave people to return to the town, but the townspeople massacre them when they arrive. As this happens, El Topo’s second son is born on the mountain. In his anger, El Topo massacres the townspeople, then sets himself alight in the center of the town like Thich Quang Duc, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk who immolated himself in the streets of Saigon in 1963—an iconic image of the Vietnam War. El Topo’s adult son rides off with Mujercita and his infant half brother, completing the circle and ending the film.

This synopsis barely scratches the surface, but one may find it helpful to start with a strip map because the story this film tells is all about The Journey and experiencing the bizarre, grotesque, entertaining, and intriguing sights and scenes along the way.

Link to the trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceHH3QGXvNw

Neurotics anonymous, or, one empty chamber says ‘You won’t’…

Intacto (Untouched) 2001 Spain (109 minutes) directed and cowritten by Juan Carlos Fresnadilla.

Tomás (Leonardo Sbaraglia), a man who robbed a bank in a desperate bid to make a new life for himself, is the sole survivor of a commercial airliner crash. He is sprung from police custody in a hospital room and drawn into a secret society of death-defying neurotics who ‘collect’ luck and wager against each other for more in series of outlandish and increasingly hazardous propositions.

This thriller interweaves myth, folk legend and a peculiar neurosis with several related straightforward plot lines; the main characters are a little like bad guys in a James Bond movie.

Federico (Eusebio Poncela) is a son is cast out by his father, Sam (Max von Sydow, but here without the fluffy white cat), a professional gambler whose largesse he rejects. Federico vows to claim his legacy with the help of an invincible champion. Alejandro (Antonio Dechent), who retired as a bull fighter because his luck in the ring robbed him of his fear, is obsessed with continually trying and increasing his luck, like Federico and the other members of this society.

The official English translation of the title—‘Intact’—is inaccurate. ‘Intacto’ in Spanish means ‘untouched’: central to this story is the belief that one can enlarge his luck or secret power by ‘touching’ others to take theirs, as a primitive might believe he can increase his soul or gain certain powers or attributes by taking them from other humans and animals by what an anthropologist might call ‘sympathetic magic’. One also can lose his luck by being ‘touched’ by another. Members of the secret society are ‘untouched’.

Their obsession leads to a series of peculiar games of chance for increasingly more dangerous stakes, such as running blindfolded through the woods, and likewise crossing highway traffic. These games culminate in a round of Russian roulette with a revolver with one empty chamber with Sam, purported to be the luckiest man in the world.

Sam is a mysterious figure known to the society only as ‘El Judeo’ (The Jew). He evidently survived a version of this game in a Nazi death camp as a child, and lives in a remote casino which is a neon-lit jewel set in the foothills of a mountainous moonscape on the island of Tenerife, off Spain’s Atlantic Coast—a place that looks like somewhere desolate and remote in the American West.

Sara (Mónica López), a police detective who miraculously survived a catastrophic car crash in which her husband and two daughters were killed, is acknowledged by this odd assemblage as ‘one of us’, but she wants mainly to catch the bank robber.

Tomás, whom Federico has scouted to be his champion, plays along because he lost his bank robbery gains in the plane crash. Knowing that he faces prison for the bank robbery, Tomás figures that he has little to lose and he cannot believe that these neurotic people with too much time on their hands actually risk things of value for what seems to him like a crackpot superstition.

What this all comes crashing down to is that a young woman entirely innocent of this lethal foolishness is imperiled and must be redeemed by ‘a hero pure of heart’ as in medieval legend—which could be a tall order against someone who as a returned crusader once held his own in a cinematically famous game of chess with Death.

Theatrical trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-nz4pJDDsM

…but five empty chambers says, ‘You might.’

13 Tzameti 2005 France (90 minutes), directed by Gela Babluani.

This story is a little like a William S. Burroughs version of Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, though neither Burroughs nor Kubrick is the least involved.

Sébastien (Georges Babluani), a young Georgian immigrant in France, gets tantalizing glimpses of a hidden world while working to make ends meet by doing repairs on a seaside house. The house is owned by a morphine addict under police surveillance, apparently engaged in an illegal secret activity at the heart of this hidden world.

When the addict overdoses, Sébastien, having twigged to the possibility that the ‘secret activity’ involves a large amount of money at stake somewhere, takes the addict’s place and follows oblique directions around the country to find the hidden world.

He ends up a participant in what turns out to be a high stakes competition in which wealthy thrill seekers—another collection of obsessives with way too much time and money on their hands—wager princely sums on Russian roulette. Tzameti, ‘thirteen’ in Georgian, is the number Sébastien is assigned.

The film is shot in black and white, but without classic film noir’s characteristic expressionist lighting and long shadows; here the black and white would underline a certain taut spareness in the narrative in a manner similar to a bare stage.

Theatrical trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54jn0_ugqco