1960s, Comedy, Drama

Two Weeks In Another Town (1962)

Director: Vincente Minnelli
Screenwriter: Charles Schnee

By Roderick Heath

In Memoriam: Kirk Douglas 1916-2020

Kirk Douglas and Vincente Minnelli worked together three times, on 1952’s The Bad and the Beautiful, 1956’s Lust For Life, and 1962’s Two Weeks In Another Town. Douglas and Minnelli seemed on the face of it to be very different creative personalities, and yet their collaborations constituted some of their best and most influential work, and stood with Douglas’ films with Stanley Kubrick as his most vital partnership with a director. Douglas rose to the peak of Hollywood stardom with a reputation for playing antiheroes in tough dramas with a chitinous shell of confrontational masculinity and physically manifest streak of rage and pain in battling the world. Minnelli initially made his name in Hollywood after a successful stage career as a maker of musicals and romances wrapped in airy splendour. He had signalled most loudly with Madame Bovary (1949) that his ambitions and skills for directing drama were rapidly evolving, and whilst his two Oscar wins would both be for musicals in the 1950s, he kept fighting not to be pigeonholed.

Minnelli and Douglas had similarities, similarities shared with many denizens of Hollywood, as people who had left behind or covered up their backgrounds and their natures, in order to make it and persist in the spotlight’s glare. Minnelli’s emerging fascination for deeply conflicted, often abrasive characters struggling to understand their own natures also offered Douglas exactly the sort of role he craved, and working with an actor like Douglas imbued Minnelli with new stature. The Bad and the Beautiful found unique equilibrium in unifying each man’s artistic drive, as Minnelli adjusted to a low-key, black-and-white palette to portray Hollywood’s darker facets and explore industry lore. Douglas went to town playing the prickish yet dynamic movie producer Jonathan Shields. Despite their apparent diversity, The Bad and the Beautiful extended the nascent postmodern aspects of An American In Paris (1951), studying the relationship between creative people and their patrons in all their glory, spite, and absurdity, and teasing out the relationship between the artwork and the artists who make it. Lust For Life offered the perfect vehicle for the two men to explore degrees of both realism and stylisation in assimilating Vincent Van Gogh’s artistic approach to tell his life story. The film was a lauded hit and saw Minnelli’s late style emerge in confidence, ready to explore the florid yet slyly ironic cinema he turned on some of his best subsequent films like Some Came Running (1958) and Home From The Hill (1960).

Two Weeks In Another Town, by contrast, has an aspect of the purgative to it, an expression of still-fervent creative desire but also exhaustion with the bullshit of waning studio-era Hollywood. Minnelli had just come off directing an expensive, flashy but shoddy, studio-mandated remake of the mouldy hit The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and the box office failure of Two Weeks In Another Town on top of that white elephant labour helped deflate Minnelli’s career, as Minnelli’s ornate melodramas went out of fashion hard. Douglas later blamed its flaccid reception in part on studio editing that cut some significant scenes. Two Weeks In Another Town is nonetheless my favourite of Minnelli’s films, a glossy yet pungent blend of character study, showbiz self-excoriation, and blackly comic caricature, and the climax of Minnelli’s fascinating efforts to weave what we would today call the self-referential and meta-theatrical into his cinema, an aspect of his films first really manifested in Madame Bovary which offered the novel’s plot within a framework of its author being tried for obscenity, art and its creator seen as inseparable entities, one nesting inside the other.

In Two Weeks In Another Town this manifests most famously, and archly, when the central characters, faltering director Maurice Kruger (Edward G. Robinson) and fractured star Jack Andrus (Douglas), watch a movie they made in their heyday together, a work represented by The Bad and the Beautiful. Just about the entire creative team involved with that movie in fact returned with Two Weeks In Another Town, also including writer Schnee, producer John Houseman, and composer David Raksin. This baits the audience to accept Two Weeks In Another Town as a combination of self-satire and confessional, and it certainly is both, although it’s also a fascinating play with form and sign. Two Weeks In Another Town adapted Irwin Shaw’s novel, one of a breed of bestseller takes on Tinseltown gaining popularity at the time albeit blessed with more literary cred by Shaw than stuff like The Carpetbaggers or Valley of the Dolls. Like many such books Shaw built his story of industry gossip and rumours about real people, including Tyrone Power and Montgomery Clift lurking in Jack’s makeup and the likes of James Dean and John Drew Barrymore in Davie. Minnelli and Douglas turned this to their own purpose.

Much as Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time…In Hollywood (2019) cast its mind back to the days when Hollywood stars and talents could head to Italy and spark or reignite their careers, Two Weeks In Another Town took on the same phenomenon in its heyday. The film’s opening, with Minnelli’s camera drifting around classy, serene-looking estate grounds that could be some top star’s palatial abode with ornate gates that suggest both exclusivity and entrapment, provides the first of many malicious jolts as it turns out this place is actually a rehab clinic for the rich and famous. Jack has been in retreat there for a long time, repairing body and soul after a terrible car crash that left him with a prominent scar on his once-handsome mug. Fretting about a telegram he’s received from his long-time director Kruger offering him a supporting role in the film he’s shooting in Rome, Jack visits the supervising doctor, whom he dubs “Dr Cold-Eyes” (Tom Palmer), who tells Andrus he’s essentially recovered and ready to leave the clinic, but has to face down the demons immersion back in the film world will immediately stir up again.

Jack has to run a gauntlet of humiliations, some petty and some borderline sadistic, like the pleasure Kruger’s assistant Janet (Joanna Roos) takes in watching him flounder, and an encounter with his former agent Lew Jordan (George Macready) in the airport, where Jordan happily takes the opportunity to finally tell Jack he hates him: Jack responds with a smack on the face. When he arrives on set at Cinecitta, Andrus finds Kruger hard at work in time-worn style, directing his two stars Davie Drew (George Hamilton) and Barzelli (Rosanna Schiaffino) in a historical romance that looks a little like Luchino Visconti tackling Dostoyevsky’s The Gambler. Davie is a young hipster actor who electrified audiences in his movie debut but has since become virtually unemployable after running out on two productions and seems to desire annihilation by dissolving into the bohemian pits of the city. Barzelli is a local movie goddess who can’t speak English. Kruger berates and belittles Drew, often calling him a “nauseating little creep,” whilst rhapsodising over Barzelli and carrying on an affair with her. Kruger is facing a rapidly nearing deadline when he has to finish shooting the movie or the producer, Tucino (Mino Doro), an expert in cheaply financing and distributing movies who knows how to make a profit even from absolute duds, will have the right to supervise the dubbing in expedient fashion with inevitable damage to the film’s quality.

Kruger is desperate, not only short of money but after several failed pictures urgently wants to ensure the film’s success to reinvigorate his career, so he decides to manipulate Jack into helping him out. Telling him he’s too badly scarred for the camera now and that he only offered him a role to help him out at his doctor’s request, Kruger instead offers Jack the same money for overseeing the dubbing. Jack accepts, after demanding double the money, and battles his way through attacks of anxiety and the contempt of Janet, as well as the close proximity of his sexpot ex-wife Carlotta (Cyd Charisse), who’s staying in the same hotel with her current husband, Zeno (Stefan Schnabel), a shipping tycoon plainly based on Aristotle Onassis. A lucky encounter helps Jack keep it together, as he strikes up a romance with Davie’s occasional, mistreated girlfriend Veronica (Daliah Lavi). Davie, full of dope and rage, threatens to stab Jack for stealing her away, only for Jack and Kruger to disarm him. Kruger suffers a heart attack as the shoot nears its end, and Jack leaps into the breach to try and get the film finished in time.

Robinson’s Kruger is a compendium of traits associated with some famous directors, ferocious and insulting like Otto Preminger, macho as William Wellman, famed for his richly layered soundtracks a la Howard Hawks, for arty auteurist innovations like Orson Welles, and given to sleeping with his leading ladies like, well, most of them. As a character he’s sometimes frightening and yet also charged with pathos despite his often ugly actions, a man trying to keep running lest the thin ice below give out. He comes armed with his booze-sucking banshee of a wife, Clara (Claire Trevor), who enacts a well-established kabuki play with him day in and day out as she gets loaded in their hotel room and berates him for his infidelities. In perhaps Minnelli’s most blackly amusing yet stringently acute portrayal of marital co-dependence, one of these abuse sessions sees Kruger finally lash out and insult Clara back (“My lawful wedded nightmare!”), driving Clara to lock herself in the bathroom and attempt suicide, a ploy Kruger seems very familiar with. He kicks down the door and tells her not to bother if only because the sight of seeing her stomach pumped makes him feel sick. That night, ensconced in the marital bed, Kruger suddenly starts confessing his terrors and Clara consults him like a mother with a child: the chains of emotional need and alternations of role defining the two blend extremes of sadism and masochism define the couple. Minnelli’s casting of Robinson and Trevor in their roles again smacks of an in-joke, evoking and distorting their parts in John Huston’s Key Largo (1948) where Trevor won an Oscar as the fraying former mistress of Robinson’s gangster, except in an even danker mode of co-dependent perversity.

Kruger’s relationship with Jack is similarly fraught, riddled with betrayals and yet, like coals in a burnt-down fire, still with flashes of real affection and mutual admiration glowing around the darkness. When Jack first arrives Kruger finds he’s packed along his Oscar, won for one of their films together (wishful thinking given Douglas and Robinson both never won one) and the two men muse on their great work. A few minutes later, as they start arguing again, Kruger plants the Oscar down declaring, “What do I want with this? That’s all that’s left of you!” And a short time later they reunite in a pavement café table, singing “Auld Land Syne” after Jack shakes Kruger down for more money and teases him by stealing his drink when Kruger presumed he was on the wagon. As in The Bad and the Beautiful, Minnelli and Schnee explore the unstable concoction of mercurial personalities and creativity as well as money required to make movies happen, sometimes demanding forgiveness for intolerable behaviour, an idea Two Weeks In Another Town also suggests is pretty true of all human relationships, defined as they are by so many cross-currents of need and desire and will to both power and degradation. But unlike the earlier film it also states there are limits that can’t be crossed.

Jack, as the survivor of celebrity life’s gaudiness slowly piecing himself, together contrasts Kruger’s clammier, more insidious degeneration, a man who sweats in bed with his wife and questions in midnight urgency why he seems to have lost his golden touch: “Is it ego? Self-indulgence? Or am I just plain afraid?” Kruger nonetheless continues to abuse the fount of power that is his lot as director, the creature whose job it is to make a great lurching machine of skill and conceit form together into a film, but even that power has limits. This is illustrated with cruel concision as he begs Tucino for time to finish the film properly, only for the producer to tell him carefully how he can make a profit of a half-million dollars even if the film is unreleased provided it doesn’t cost one lira more than the contract states. The pretences of art are a by-product of commercial overflow. “Tucino, you international peddler,” Kruger berates his producer as they watch The Bad and the Beautiful, “Take a look at a picture that was made because we couldn’t sleep until we made it.” Whilst it was hardly the first movie about filmmaking, Two Weeks In Another Town was groundbreaking in offering a mainstream drama where the very nuts and bolts of moviemaking like the arts of dubbing and editing, are not just noted but part of the story, as well as the motivations of the people doing it all. The construction of the illusion and the defacing of it are entwined acts.

Producer Houseman, who had infamously parted ways with early collaborator Orson Welles in feeling Welles’ need to take credit for everything had crossed the line into megalomania, might have felt he’d earned a measure of payback in making a movie about an aging former wunderkind director who doesn’t know how to collaborate stuck trying to make things happen in European exile. Minnelli’s semi-sarcastic self-identification with Kruger as the emblematic director partly masks the way Jack and Davie also embody aspects of him, the weathered professional and the young man trying to work out how to outrun his past and remould himself to fit the world’s expectations. The hyperbolic female characters amplify the macho crisis, with the beatific Veronica embodying a blithe and generous attitude. She, tellingly, doesn’t go to the movies (“Gelato,” she mutters dismissively), seeking pleasure and connections in the entirely real world. Veronica cops a black eye when Davie smacks her aside whilst bellowing protests at Kruger, making her receptive to Jack’s mature and gentlemanly courtesy, although Veronica’s connection to Davie remains drug-like to the younger man. Veronica is munificent enough to heal both Jack and Davie, but Davie confronts Jack in his hotel room with a knife, demanding Jack “give her back to me.” Kruger enters to ask a casual question and bullishly confronts and disarms Davie, berating Jack for trying to help (“Don’t fight my fights!”) even as Jack knows well Kruger might have kicked Davie’s face in and made it impossible to finish the film.

The party thrown for the Krugers’ wedding anniversary is a black comedy zenith as Maurice delivers a speech where he pleads to “being sentimental” about such old-fashioned virtues even as Barzelli rubs his ass, inspiring Clara’s wrath and sparking a fight between the two women. Minnelli’s mordant wit extended to the casting of Charisse, herself like Minnelli a talent whose fame was rooted in stuff usually dismissed as lightweight, her greatness as a dancer as well as an arresting beauty, and who had trouble being taken seriously when she turned her hand to starring in more serious fare. Charisse is asked in Two Weeks In Another Town not so much to act as to embody Carlotta, who in turn personifies the illusory tease that is the cinema’s siren song, lounging on her gold-sheeted bed in seductive fashion as the abstracted, emblematic epitome of a female movie star, a creature existing entirely to taunt and tease with sexual promise. Carlotta herself is in thrall to the great black god of money: “Have you ever seen a billion dollars breathe?” she asks Jack whilst indicating her new husband Zeno, a man too busy with his business to bother her much and very happy to watch “men wanting me,” to the point where Jack could very easily be accepted as kept sexual surrogate to service them both in their fashion. Barzelli is archetypal Italian version of the on-the-make starlet, a tough nut from somewhere out in the campagna made over into a gleaming jewel, seductively pawing at the crotches of men who make her fortune and partying alone with a selection of willing and able toyboys, unleashing bloodcurdling shouts of anger in on-set tantrums.

The psychodrama at the story’s core eventually reveals itself, as Kruger was one of the many men Carlotta slept with whilst married to Jack, and discovering them together sent Jack of on his near-fatal ride. Jack contends with the constant, niggling uncertainty as to whether he actually tried to kill himself in the crash, or if it was an accident. Jack’s efforts to save Kruger’s picture hit two roadblocks, the first being Davie’s intransigence. The shoot has to be shut down for a night whilst Jack and the stalwart assistant director Ravinksi (Erich Von Stroheim Jr, who really was a stalwart assistant director, including on the film he’s in) enlist Veronica’s aid to search Rome’s nightlife. When they fail, Jack’s gambit already seems foiled, only to find Davie asleep on the sofa in Jack’s hotel room, awaiting his return. Davie confesses he fears he’ll be completely lost if he can’t finish another movie, and so has come to Jack as the one man around who understands the terrors of acting stardom. This proves the catalyst for both Jack and Davie to unleash their talents, and the shoot goes so well their careers seem on the cusp of being revived. Jordan jets in to sign Davie up, and Davie insists that Jack direct his next movie. The second and more damaging block comes when Clara, revelling in finally having command over the Kruger legacy, and the man himself, still poisonously possessive in his hospital bed, conspire to try and destroy Jack, accusing him of trying to steal the movie.

Minnelli’s efforts to locate needling truthfulness magnified through artifice in his films were never so well-balanced as here. The mordant exploration of the movie business and evocation of the romantic freedom of a spree in Rome gave him the perfect stage for such an aesthetic, filled as it is with poseurs and profligates and games of surfaces that eat away insides until the facades are all that’s left. Minnelli’s Rome is scarcely less aesthetically remade than the Paris of An American In Paris and Gigi (1958), with his careful use of lighting to paint real backdrops in variegations of luminescence and colour, refashioning reality into a teeming and aesthetically vivid film set. Jack’s wanderings around the city with Veronica evoke the city as one would like to dream it, vibrant with life in the streets and dreamlike in its nocturnal beauty. One shot sees Jack and Veronica, clad in black and white, walking on a Roman street with a palazzo daubed in blue to one side and four red-clad cardinals passing them on the other.

And yet the actual human environment Jack stumbles into is ludicrous in its grubbiness, filled with thieves and tyrants, satyrs and sluts, and most perniciously of all, people locked in various postures of servility and suppliance to the fantasy world of cinema and its attendant superstructure of power. Minnelli’s films often covertly analysed his own situation as a bisexual man who struggled constantly with his identity and the politics of sexuality as a driving phenomenon in society, overtones of which are just as present here. Easy enough to read Jack’s desperate need to leave behind his former sexual identity as personified by Carlotta, and also Davie’s, in the suggestive contours of his confession to Jack, “All the stories about me over here and in Hollywood – all of the filth, most of it’s true. Until Veronica.” Minnelli readily grasped the universality in his quandary, presenting a bleak vision of much human life as a roundelay of people trying to get what they want with sex or experiencing their desire as a perpetual, personal Calvary, and seeing Hollywood as a machine chiefly driven by this phenomenon, the alternated business of selling and staking claim to objects of sex appeal.

Minnelli often enjoyed introducing qualities from his musicals into his dramas, including the dance-like finale of Some Came Running and street riot of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and here that same urge manifests in using sets and costuming to depict states of mind and body. Veronica is always clad in angelic white that always seems to be trying to peel itself off her barely contained form, her sexuality wielded like a nature goddess for the sorry citizens of modernity. Jack lounges in red sweaters that declare his burning neurosis, but when Kruger has his heart attack it’s his room that becomes a blood red trap. Carlotta attends a ritzy party and dances with Jack wearing a dress festooned with black feathers, become an angel of death who, having already driven Jack almost to death once, has now come to sup on his bones. One of the most beautifully visualised sequences unifies the two motifs as Jack and Kruger expiate their shared past after Kruger’s heart attack within Kruger’s palatial hotel room, with a spectacular Roman fountain covered in statuary aglow just outside the window, suggesting the linked pretences of medieval princes and contemporary film gods. Kruger’s quoting of Carlotta’s line of seduction, “The water’s warm,” is rhymed with the water gushing from the fountain. The fountain transforms from grandiose vestige of the past and monument fitting Kruger’s imperious ego to a mocking mimesis of Jack’s pain. The coolly balanced and exactingly lit and framed composition enclosing the two men gives way to expressionistic angles and dialectic editing, the gravitas even the illusion of Kruger’s pseudo-monarchical stature that helped keep Jack stable as his amanuensis, once as actor and now as crew member, suddenly collapsing and leaving him to struggle through his new squall of self-doubt and pain alone.

Minnelli’s widescreen framing teems with panoramic detail, as when Jack and Kruger are reunited with the industry of a film set sprawling behind them, or when Jack talks Tucino into backing him as director, the producer doing business like an emperor in his ornate bed, the lesser organs of his enterprise reflected in the great mirror over his head. It’s easy to imagine Douglas just as happily playing Kruger as Jack, much as he played the lousy if motivating Shields in The Bad and the Beautiful. Douglas loved playing such bristling Calibans as the boxer in Champion (1949), the scheming reporter in Ace in the Hole (1951), or the one-eyed barbarian troubled by flashes of humanity in The Vikings (1958). Movie stardom made him play more heroic figures, but even then, with the likes of Colonel Dax in Paths of Glory (1957) and the title role in Spartacus (1960), it was as characters contending with bleak and provocative situations, playing men smart enough to know obeying a personal moral compass is often a luxury but still driven to a decisive act. He gave of his very best performances as Jack, a more vulnerable type of character and one where Douglas couldn’t fall back on the galvanic physical quality he often projected, as if his whole body was a clenched fist and he didn’t so much want to act as paint with his whole body as metamorphic canvas, the intensity for which he was both often acclaimed and mocked for.

After slapping Jordan early in the film, Jack is defined by his need to keep control and avoid such ruptures, a lode of quelled frenzy constantly hinted at but not unleashed until the madcap finale. Douglas depicts Jack’s episodes of consuming disquiet and neurotic palpitation, particularly in one scene where, goaded by Janet and derided by Davie, he experiences a panic attack only to be relieved when a phone call proves to be from Veronica: Douglas tells the entire story of Jack’s experience here without needing words. Jack nonetheless also actively resists falling prey to false sentiment or delusion as an intelligent man beginning to understand his real power, and when calmer displays resources of wit and aptitude, whether extracting more money from Kruger or getting a frazzled and hungry voiceover artist to effectively fill in Barzelli’s voice, which needs to be richly desirous, by imagining a wealth of banana splits. A central scene where Jack tries to explain the strange lot of a successful young actor to Veronica as they picnic on a beach is particularly good, as Minnelli shoots Douglas in a long but hardly noticeable take. Jack’s monologue invokes a sense of humour as he meditates on being obliged to “make love to the most beautiful women in the world hour after hour after hour” for the camera, but also the nettled flipside of having “the face that barflies all want to take a poke at to see if you’re as tough as the roles you play in the movies,” before getting to the crisis of identity that pursued him all the way.

Davie reproduces Jack’s angst only raised to a higher pitch, the inheriting generation driven into pits of madness by the strange new shape of a world people like Jack and Kruger and Carlotta made in their own image, the desperate beatnik pushed to ever more hyperbolic extremes to re-establish his authenticity in the face of becoming a famous falsifier of emotion. Minnelli played with mischievous humour on Hamilton’s status as he his own discovered protégé, albeit one nobody was ever going to mistake for James Dean. Davie’s reformation comes just in time to help Jack rescue the movie, and they find themselves quickly in deep creative accord. A fresh wind of liberation starts to blow, as Minnelli has fun portraying Jack’s tilt at direction as mostly a process in urgent improvisation (stranger things certainly happened in those days: Mario Bava owed his directing career to repeatedly saving such calamitous productions). Jack reveals talents for handling performers, easing Barzelli out of one of her tantrums by somehow managing to sweet-talk her despite him not speaking Italian and she not speaking English, and then going to the other extreme of giving her a boot in the backside when she goes off again. Not very gallant and likely to result in charges these days, although there’s also the detectable note of screwball comedy inflation in such a gesture. Jack’s resurgence suddenly seems foiled by the malignant streak in the Krugers, Maurice backing up Clara’s attempts to crush Jack with a fake story given to entertainment journalist Brad Byrd (James Gregory), even as he silently displays his shame and regret in sacrificing his friend once again to the needs of his ego.

Minnelli initially intended the film’s climax to be a miniature tribute-cum-riff on La Dolce Vita (1960) and La Notte (1961) as the dazed and possibly self-destructing Jack drifts back into the arms of Carlotta and joins her in a high-life orgy, an aspect cut right back to the bone in the released film. Carlotta delivers Jack into the arms of a pair of full-breasted nymphs at one of her parties whilst guests lounge in listless, licentious, cod-Antonioni ennui in listening to a singer (Leslie Uggams). What follows is one of the great climaxes in cinema, entwining direction and performance in a dazzling display of visual storytelling. Seeing Carlotta retiring to her boudoir with another of her fancymen sparks Jack’s long-restrained trauma. As if in a mesmeric daze, Jack chases them upstairs and attacks the lover, battling him in a bout glimpsed as a shadow-play on the wall. Carlotta laughs like an evil queen delighted to her champions battling, until Jack wins and gives Carlotta a few good smacks for good measure. He dashes outsides, leaps into his convertible, and tears off. Carlotta just manages to jump aboard in trying to stop his charge. Jack careens through Roman streets at speed, declaring his intent to finally discover what really happened in his mind on the night of the crash, Carlotta reduced to a screaming, sobbing wreck as she tries to get him to stop. Rather than trying to make Jack’s wild ride seem realistic, Minnelli emphasises the fakeness of the effects – Douglas at the wheel of a mounted prop car, roaring around back-projected streets or simply hovering in hoary darkness with wind and light rushing at him – and instead uses his careening camera and the mechanics working the vehicle to turn the ride into a kind of dance sequence.

The scenes marks the apogee of Minnelli’s efforts to find reality through embracing the artificial, an island of pop-art surrealism illustrating a place in the inherently lunatic modern world where mere realism can’t capture just how strange and violent the new impulses are. The explosion of motion and psychosexual reckoning recreates the past whilst also finally purging it: Jack eventually simply slows down and stops, proving at last that he didn’t have some subconscious wish to die. A great scene for Douglas, too, reaching an apogee of his own, eyes blazing and face twisted into a gargoyle’s visage in exploring the very edge of life and sanity, only for the moment to pass and leave him with all his ancient ills burned out. He drives the car under a gushing fountain, this time the water finally doing its proper function in cleansing him. The final scene sees Jack heading off with new confidence and vigour to prove himself in Hollywood and encouraging Davie to do the same without feeling a need to lean on him as Jack did with Kruger, a genuinely effective and fitting veer towards the upbeat after all the angst, giving Veronica a last kiss of passion before returning her to Davie. Jack’s chief victory is that he sees how inconsequential most of his problems really were. “I came here looking for the past. I found it and to hell with it!” Shameful as it was that Two Weeks In Another Town didn’t gain anything like the respect it deserved at the time, filmmakers certainly took note. Federico Fellini repaid the compliment when he made the “Toby Dammit” sequence in Spirits of the Dead (1968). The influence on Martin Scorsese, particularly on New York, New York (1977) which would expand on the tension between ruthlessly observed behaviour and surrounding artifice, proved inescapable.

2010s, Biopic, Comedy

The Disaster Artist (2017)

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Director/Actor: James Franco

By Roderick Heath

When I wrote about Tommy Wiseau’s The Room (2003) in 2011, I finished up my commentary with a flourish of mock-epic prose:

The Room finishes, and yet its all-pervading awfulness remained with me. Everything seemed to grow darker, tainted by its touch. The likes of Michelangelo and Leo Tolstoy would have had their faith in creative endeavour shaken by it, and afterwards I started seeing the inner Wiseau in many a great artist, as if all efforts lead into an immense heart of crappiness.

It seems I wasn’t the only person to feel a personal implication of all artistic ambition in Wiseau’s intrepid failure, and to be compelled against my will by this fragmentary, heartfelt yet farcically inept by-product, the misshapen offspring of an intended, serious piece of artistry. Since then, in the strange fate that befalls certain movies, The Room and its manifold absurdities have only gained ground as a common touchstone, a rite of passage for students and movie fans, and its inanities, so beggaring on first viewing, swiftly became old friends – the non sequitur dialogue and plotting, the random impulses of emotion and gesture, the screw-loose bravura and shambolic majesty of Wiseau’s lead performance and the valiantly outmatched efforts of his supporting cast.
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After years of speculation and interest as to just how in hell this car crash of a film came into being, Wiseau’s friend/accomplice/bewildered collaborator Greg Sestero worked with writer Tom Bissell to pen and publish The Disaster Artist, an account of the film’s making, Sestero’s adventures as a young wannabe about Hollywood, and his alternately stirring, ruinous, ultimately triumphant acquaintance with Wiseau, in 2013. The book dished a lot of dirt on the production of The Room, and the man who made it. It was also surprisingly entertaining and revealing in its depiction of Sestero’s own period as a try-hard model-turned-actor, a rare portrait of coping with failure in the city of stars after many elusive promises and chances for success, before he reluctantly joined forces with Wiseau for his bull-in-a-china-shop foray into the world of independent filmmaking. Yet it also revealed Sestero by and large just as confused, stymied, and awed by Wiseau’s enigmatic stature as the rest of us. In supreme irony, the book’s often hilarious but just as often melancholy and disillusioned narrative gained accolades Wiseau might have dreamt of, earning Sestero and Bissell awards and now a prestigious adaptation. Yet the book could only have existed thanks to Wiseau’s failure, and the transformation of that failure into an icon of delighted ridicule.
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James Franco seems to have empathised. Like Sestero and Wiseau, he’s been the ardent fledgling actor who worshipped at the altar of James Dean, although Franco actually made the leap to playing the legendary star in a 2001 TV movie. Like them, he’s laboured to escape type-casting and prove himself an adventurous and serious artist on multiple fronts, making a string of movies in the past few years that have often been met with withering contempt, although in Franco’s case the often hyperbolic dismissal of his works far outstripped their modest merits or failings, or at least for those I’ve seen. Franco’s directorial efforts up until now seemed mostly happy as marginalia, using his movie star status to bankroll movies as rough drafts of creative endeavour in the same way a budding painter might tear through dozens of pages on sketches preparing for an ultimate endeavour. His film of The Disaster Artist wields ironies in itself, a ploy for a broad audience built around celebration of a niche cult object, working from a script by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber. That said, The Disaster Artist plainly unites several frames of reference already apparent in Franco’s work. Following in the wake of movies like The Ape (2005), Sal, and The Broken Tower (both 2011), it’s a study of troubled and striving creative endeavour. Like Child of God (2013), it’s a portrait of a gnarled, thwarted, inarticulate, furious outcast trying to stake a claim in the world. It follows Interior. Leather Bar. (2013) as a study in the cinema aesthetic itself, conjoined with a contemplation of cultural priorities.
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Franco casts himself as Wiseau and his younger brother Dave as Sestero. It’s the sort of idea that seems at first like a Saturday Night Live skit writ large, but proves in practice more like a performance-art conceit, shaded by dint of the brothers’ careful, convincing impersonations of their respective avatars. They render Tommy Wiseau and Greg Sestero as parts of a fragmented persona, the bland but likeable all-American boy meeting his intense, destabilising, immigrant partner in yearning. Not that the disparity entirely disappears, nor does James want it to. Franco stages Greg’s illustrious first encounter with the typhonic force of Tommy as a momentous epiphany, complete with rumbling, epic scoring suggesting great forces gathering, although what we actually see are Greg’s awkward, rigid performance for a San Francisco acting class and then Wiseau’s unhinged, almost literally scenery-chewing rampage as he offers his own interpretive dance take on the famous “Stella!” scene from A Streetcar Named Desire (1951). Most onlookers are stupefied and amused, but Greg is fascinated by Tommy’s energy and willingness to put himself out there, and suggests they play a scene together in class.
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Tommy responds by inviting him to lunch and then getting him to read lines in the middle of a crowded restaurant, overcoming his shyness and discovering his inner hambone under the aghast and bemused attention of other patrons. The two men become fast and solid friends, as Tommy seems to be fired up by Sestero’s blonde, cheery inheritance of all natural fortune, and Greg by the older man’s enthusiasm and go-get-‘em energy. They watch touchstone movies together and drive all night to visit the scene of James Dean’s death as a shrine after watching Rebel Without a Cause (1955). On the spur of the moment, Wiseau suggests they both head to Los Angeles and get busy making it as actors, casually revealing that he owns an apartment there they can share. Greg is too thrilled by the idea to pay attention to his mother’s (Megan Mullaly) concerns about Tommy’s intentions, catching wind of homoerotic interest in Tommy’s references to Greg as “babyface” and liking for hanging about with a handsome younger man. Later when they do shack up in Tommy’s apartment he does seem to make a come-on to Greg, only to then laugh it off as a joke. Soon they settle back into amicable, brotherly mutual boosting, but it’s a friendship where Tommy is well aware Greg can only grasp his chances with both hands because his generosity allows him to go for them.
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The two men dedicate themselves to the endless, crushing roundelay of auditions and more acting classes, a process that sees Greg quickly snatched up by a top talent agent, Iris Burton (Sharon Stone), purely by dint of his looks. Meanwhile Tommy chafes increasingly against the common opinion he’s got the makings of a terrifying screen bad guy, believing himself far more the stuff of romantic heroism. “You all laugh,” Tommy retorts to an acting coach (Bob Odenkirk) and his sniggering class after one of his performances and resisting their attempts to pin him as a natural heavy: “That what bad guy do.” Soon, with neither of their careers going anywhere, Greg tries to keep Tommy’s spirits up, and he hands his friend a flash of inspiration–the notion of making their own movie. Tommy, with his mysteriously deep pockets, realises he can make it happen. All he needs is a script, so he bashes out his magnum opus and gets Greg to read it over lunch. In his determination to ensure his production has the stature of a great cinematic enterprise, Tommy approaches camera equipment providers Birns & Sawyer and instead of simply renting their gear insists on purchasing all manner of cameras and shooting his movie on both film and video. The staff realise they have a major-league sucker on their hands, and convince him to utilise their small film studio too.
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An inevitable point of reference for The Disaster Artist is Tim Burton’s Ed Wood (1994), another biographical drama about a much-hailed cavalier of terrible cinema. The differences between Wood’s adventures as a no-budget huckster and Wiseau’s mogul pretences are as marked as the similarities, however. The Disaster Artist portrays the gruelling shoot for The Room as a process not beset by the fly-by-night anxiety and enthusiastic fellowship Burton found in Wood’s forays, because Wiseau’s money furnishes him with largely competent collaborators and a cast of anxious hopefuls who, just like their self-financed auteur, are hoping to carve a niche for themselves in the industry. And yet the result proves to be just as deliriously out of tune as anything Wood made, stricken with the same fascinating blend of cynical and deeply personal impulses. Tommy tries to encourage the cast and crew he hires to follow him on a grand creative journey, but it soon becomes clear to all involved, even the ever-supportive Greg, that Tommy has no idea what he’s doing, quickly earning enmities with imperial egotisms like a specially constructed personal toilet and turning up late for shoots. He also loses his bravado in performing when it comes time to do it before cameras, spending most of a single day trying to shoot a scene involving one line (All together now: “I did not hit her. It’s not true. It’s bullshit. I did not hit her. I did not.”).
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Script supervisor Sandy Schklair (Seth Rogen), who is initially surprised when his pay check actually clears, is obliged to take the film in hand when Wiseau is before the camera, but Tommy studiously ignores his directions and finally, unceremoniously boots him and some other pros from the production. At last, Tommy’s overwhelming desire to realise his perfect fantasy of living in a movie leads to ugly moments like him clashing with the crew when he goes mental over a pimple on the arm of his leading lady, Juliette Danielle (Ari Graynor). Tommy is beset by the simultaneous need to express himself creatively and report his emotional travails to the world, whilst also trying to remain shielded against its prying eyes and judgements, unaware that show business, although a business of image and affectation, also requires a fine human touch to navigate. Tommy never reveals the source or extent of his fortune and steadfastly refusing to reveal his age, claiming to be the same age as Greg. Tommy, like some exploitation movie version of Jay Gatsby, believes American success and self-invention can be extended onto all stages of life, that the image one creates of one’s self can become the reality, and his desire to venture into acting and moviemaking betrays an ambition to escape the aspects of identity he refuses to admit, the foreignness that’s patently obvious to everyone else.
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Tommy’s neediness extends to both wanting to use Greg as his avatar in the world but also getting peevish when Greg reaps the sorts of successes he wants, as when he lands a girlfriend in the form of cute bartender Amber (Alison Brie). Later on, when they’re trying to shoot Tommy’s passion project, Greg’s announcement to Tommy that he’s moving in with Amber sparks a tantrum from Tommy that echoes the climactic moments of The Room, except that apocalyptic desolation plays out in life as kicking a few vending machines and cradling a throbbing foot. Greg’s discussions with the other actors about the characters and their possible real-life inspirations suddenly highlights that many of them could be versions of Greg himself, and beyond that, projections of Tommy’s shifting ideas of Greg, possibly the one true human contact he’s had in years. Finally Tommy’s controlling streak manifests destructively for Greg when he refuses to bend from his shooting schedule to allow Greg to keep the beard he’s grown long enough to shoot a role on the TV show Malcolm in the Middle offered to him after a chase encounter with Bryan Cranston. Soon Greg loses his temper with Tommy whilst shooting second-unit footage (such as it is) in San Francisco, prodding him over his own refusal to open up, finishing up with the two men getting into a scuffling, spiteful yet still rather brotherly wrestling clinch in the middle of a scene shoot. After time apart, Greg is stunned to see Tommy’s mug gazing down from a colossal billboard ad in downtown LA, and soon the man himself comes to invite him to the film’s premiere.
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With Interior. Leather Bar., Franco and documentary filmmaker Travis Mathews collaborated on a nominal attempt to recreate lost material filmed on New York’s gay scene for William Friedkin’s Cruising (1980), footage reportedly hacked out of that film because it was too racy, in the name of reclaiming the world it recorded from the realm of sordid legend. Franco’s interest in film as an artefact in this fashion, the desire to capture lightning in a bottle twice, finds a vehicle here that allows him to extend that kind of avant-garde conceit whilst playing the entertainer. He painstakingly recreates Wiseau’s footage and the hapless acting recorded by it utilising talented, experienced, and famous thespians, including Jackie Weaver as Carolyn Minnott, Juliette’s on-screen mother, Josh Hutcherson as Philip “Denny” Haldiman, and Zac Efron as Dan Janjigian, the actor playing fearsome yet negligible drug pusher Chris R. In much the same way that Wiseau absorbs scenes in Streetcar, Rebel Without a Cause and The Talented Mr Ripley (1999) into his creative lexicon, Franco simulates and transforms Wiseau’s images. At film’s end Franco offers the original scenes alongside his recreations to compare both the success and the failure of the reproduction, the slight variances in timing and actor delivery and camera angles coming with logarithmic variance. Filmmakers who do this sort of thing rarely put their labours on the line in such a fashion, and I get the feeling it’s very much part of what Franco was after in taking on the project, a desire to grab the raw material of this compelling piece of outsider art and disassemble it to see how it works, to apply exacting competence to incompetence.
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What Franco lacks that Burton brought to his contention with Wood’s threadbare oeuvre is a definite directorial signature to utilise in mediating the stylistic mimicry. Franco’s shooting style, developed on the run on his many projects, has arrived at a baseline of fly-on-the-wall realism conveyed with darting, often hand-held camerawork, affecting gritty and happenstance casualness. It’s the exact opposite of the tony, polished, yet utterly stilted professionalism Wiseau spent about $6 million of his own money achieving. Franco brings specificity to the work more through the associations he can leverage with his casting and his contexts. But Franco does make some sport out of reproducing elements of Wiseau’s visual syntax. Unsurprisingly for anyone had ever seen the infamous football-throwing sequences in The Room, Sestero revealed in his book that Wiseau barely knew how to play the game and yet fetishized it as a symbol of Americanness, so when the Francos’ impersonations try to play a clumsy game of catch, Franco reproduces Wiseau’s square-on, middle-distance viewpoint, revealing awkward cinema is rooted in incomprehension of what exactly was being filmed. The sweeping view from the roof of Tommy’s LA apartment block is presented as the obvious inspiration for the blue-screen panorama constantly seen in his film.
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A prolonged and purely cringe-worthy sequence in which Tommy spots Judd Apatow at dinner in an LA restaurant and harasses him with his garbled reading of a Shakespeare soliloquy, sees the brusque producer squirming in his seat in please-make-this-end discomfort, and then attempt to fix Tommy in the eye and make clear to him that he will never be the stuff of stardom. Franco’s own self-mocking subtext here acknowledges Apatow as the man who gave him his break on the TV show Freaks and Geeks. This scene suggests a closer relative to The Disaster Artist than Ed Wood might be The King of Comedy (1983), Martin Scorsese’s ruthless portrayal of obsessive fandom and its ambition to assimilate the vitality of the famous. Except that unlike Rupert Pupkin, Tommy has the money to make his own show happen, to impose his weird, theoretically romantic ayet actually deeply masochistic fantasies. Tommy’s own likeness to a vampire is a repeated quip throughout, fleshing out the suggestion he sucks the life out of anyone fool enough to come into his orbit, most particularly Greg.
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James’ performance as Wiseau has to walk a narrow line, because it must be integral to his approach, moving beyond mere skit-like impression but also conceding its status as performance, to find realism in artifice. He manages to walk that line with impressive fixity, nailing aspects of Wiseau’s persona as his peculiar speech mannerisms where the line between old accent and recent nerve damage can’t be entirely distinguished, the slightly dead-eyed gaze, the anxious, robotic laughs and full-on eruptions of hot feeling that suggest a barely-suppressed volcanic heat at the base of the man’s belly. Dave gives a fun performance playing Sestero, but in many ways he has the harder job in playing the man constantly drawn in the wake of Tommy’s eccentricity. And he can’t quite inhabit Greg: the real Sestero, in spite of his general aura of real geniality and loyalty, looked nonetheless born to play the role of blithe betrayer, with all those sculpted planes to his face under ocean-blue eyes, the entitled surfer boy hunk and white-bread heartbreaker one can so well imagine inspiring Wiseau with existential terror, the being he wants to point to every time someone calls him a villainous-looking dude and say, but that’s what threat looks like to me. The smile Sestero put on when first glimpsed without his beard has a quality of rictus to it; you can see, as he reports in the book, his sinking feeling that all his acting dreams are at an end, and no actor can quite reproduce such a look. Franco ultimately shies away from pushing The Disaster Artist to the extremes of discomforting and dismaying absurdity of Scorsese’s film.
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The galling if querulous misogyny that flows through The Room is also for the most part elided, regarded as an aspect of the paranoid general misanthropy. When the cast of the film talk about what Tommy’s trying to get at in his script, Juliette describes Lisa as essentially symbolising “the Universe” and its treatment of him. But Franco makes sure to depict the casting process for the film consists of Tommy getting the young actresses auditioning for the role to jump through hoops of behaviour including actions like blowing on a saxophone and licking an ice cream, filled with salacious innuendo, suggesting Franco knows very well Wiseau displays some of the tendencies that attract men like Harvey Weinstein into the movie business. On the other hand, Franco also notes and entertains gleeful complicity with Wiseau’s desire to objectivise himself on camera, to offer his own flesh, both anxiously and narcissistically, as a paradigm on manhood on screen. And so, of course, the moment in The Room that gains the most appalled groans of intolerance is of course when Franco/Tommy’s butt is displayed in colossal detail upon screen, granting the viewers the sensation less of having gained an erotic moment of self-exposing bravura than the feeling that, well, someone’s just forced a theatre of people to look at his ass.
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The book was filled with Sestero’s musings on his pal and his shadowy past and modes of income, which are also left out: like many fans of The Room, it’s the very inscrutability of Wiseau that compels Franco, his status as a fever dream sprung directly out of some Eastern Bloc kid’s idea of an American success story made flesh and compelled by his own warring identities to both risk himself and hide all at once. Given that the 21st century has been so far an age of obsessive public fascination with celebrity, with performance of the self as enabled by technology in in all its illusory promise of instant and easy adoration, it’s certainly not hard to see Wiseau as the age’s court jester, its perfect and perfectly absurd embodiment. Less comfortingly, he might even be a fitting antihero for the Trump age as a man who uses a shady fortune to glorify himself and subordinate others to his will. Wiseau’s collaboration was inevitably required in making the film, probably meaning Franco felt obliged to go reasonably easy on him.
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And also because in the end, although hopes are dashed, feelings bruised, fools made, Tommy himself is ultimately the one wounded most, this bedraggled yet weirdly gutsy, prosperous yet pathetic avatar of every weirdo who’s longed to be anointed by a more glamorous world, only to become a figure of fun. “Even if you have the talent of Brando,” Franco has Apatow tell himself as Tommy, “It’s a one in a million chance you’ll make it.” Sestero emphasised in his book the way Wiseau’s efforts added up to a form of therapeutic self-rescue, whilst in Wiseau’s pathos Franco sees something more universal but also quite personal, the lot of every creative person, their desire to reveal themselves, to take risks, but on their own, controlled terms. Where Ed Wood had to imagine a sarcastically triumphant ending for its hero, Franco turns the premiere of The Room, the ego trip as objet d’art no-one ever through would actually make it to a movie screen, as a microcosm of the film’s journey from wince-inducing, career-killing calamity to the subject of horrified fascination, and on to become a source of fiercely beloved merriment and communal joy, its creator suffering through ultimate humiliation only to immediately reinvent himself as the proud maker of a deliberately shoddy piece of punk comedy. Whilst he’s simplified and homogenized the phenomena of Wiseau and The Room to a certain extent, Franco can at least claim, in addition to making them into the stuff of a damn funny and entertaining film, to capture the essence of their curious appeal. And now, thanks to it, you don’t even have to actually watch The Room. But I will. Again.

1990s, Drama

Boogie Nights (1997)

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Director/Screenwriter: Paul Thomas Anderson

By Roderick Heath

Like a miniature, speeded-up version of the ’70s new wave that reinvigorated American cinema, the mid-1990s saw a flurry of excitement about the burgeoning independent film scene. Hollywood suddenly saw a mine of talent in the fringes as Sundance became the hottest spot in the film world following the triumphs there of Steven Soderbergh and Quentin Tarantino. Low-budget filmmaking no longer had to be a seamy zone for rejects and mercenaries, but could promise invention and a tidy profit as long as an audience remained hungry for this kind of storytelling. A lode of young and interesting filmmakers who had pieced works together on hopes and prayers suddenly gained access to major distribution and studio funds, and were quickly drawn into the big, mean world of commercial cinema. The scene didn’t really last very long, and quite a few of the new talents fell by the wayside, but others have proven to be the backbone of serious modern American cinema. Paul Thomas Anderson made his name with a benighted debut film he called Sydney, but that a nervous studio renamed Hard Eight (1995). A fine, intimate work situated at the crossroads of crime drama and character study, Hard Eight didn’t prove to be a Reservoir Dogs (1992). Anderson recovered from that trial and decided to adapt a student film he’d made in 1988, The Dirk Diggler Story, a mockumentary about a fictional porn star. The resulting feature, Boogie Nights, was ambitious and provocative, and most importantly for its success, it was cunning in appropriating everybody’s pop culture memory in just the right way to get attention.
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Anderson has since evolved into a very specific filmmaker, but at the time he didn’t mind letting his roots show, annexing the same zone of retro fetishism and cineaste allusiveness Tarantino had explored, but skewing it to his own, more rarefied purpose. He unabashedly quoted masters, including Robert Altman and Martin Scorsese as well as more obscure classic cinema deities like Mikhail Kolotozov. But he also found the glory in the seamiest and most degraded types of cinematic achievement. Boogie Nights followed Scorsese’s Casino (1995) in making nostalgia for the barbed, seedy, lawless side of the ’70s cool again. Anderson took a chance with his subject matter that doesn’t seem like such a chance now largely because he took it: after ’80s conservatism and ’90 political correctness, delving back into the world of ’70s hedonism and the “golden age” of the pornographic film industry seemed doubly perverse. Anderson created a miniature genre of modern storytelling that gets off on the lost style of a past recreated in bright colours, whilst analysing the cultural shifts that buried both the best and the worst of that lost time.
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The chief inspiration for Boogie Nights was the life of John Holmes, a superlatively endowed porn star who got himself blackballed by the industry for a time for his drug-addled unreliability and became entangled with criminal associates who probably drew him into a drug heist. They targeted a major dealer who repaid Holmes’ confederates in what became known as the Wonderland murders, whilst Holmes himself died of AIDS in 1988. Anderson’s take mimics Holmes’ grindhouse tragedy whilst changing its emphases and investing it with tinctures of parable and satire (another source might have been the career of Dennis ‘Wade Nichols’ Parker, a porn star who tried to reinvent himself as a pop singer). Anderson’s seemingly outrageous intent proved only skin deep, as he avoided not just punitive censorship, but also presented the second variation on his obsessive theme of finding family in a hostile world, ironically locating that family within a realm usually painted as amoral and obscene. Shocking things do happen in the film, and the flaws and hypocrisies of the characters are often laid brutally bare. Yet the peculiar warmth Anderson feels for them, the quietly lucid humour he invests in their behaviour, and the acknowledgement of an adolescent joie de vivre unleashed in their private world made for Anderson’s most accessible work to date.
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Anderson’s view of the era through pop-coloured glasses is cleverly justified by the media-created fetishes of its young hero, Eddie Adams (Mark Wahlberg), whose bedroom walls are a shrine to adolescent desire, from idolisation of Bruce Lee and kung-fu prowess to muscle cars and music heroes, with only a smattering of girly pictures. Eddie’s only special feature, his enormous penis, gets him laid often enough, so he craves fulfilment in other places, places his limited smarts can’t access. Eddie has hopes of finding entry into that bright and shiny world of celebrity and success and works at a flashy disco, Hot Traxx, run by Maurice Rodriguez (Luis Guzmán), where he’s surrounded by the fashionable and beautiful. Luck, or something like it, is on Eddie’s side when porn director Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds) enters Hot Traxx one night with his stable’s two finest fillies, Amber Waves (Julianne Moore) and Rollergirl (Heather Graham). Jack spots Eddie across the crowded dance floor, sensing something about the lad, whose slightly naïve look doesn’t prevent him thinking Jack is another old perv who wants to take a gander at his wang. Eddie’s life in his parents’ home is quickly revealed to be excruciating, and a critical explosion of contemptuous rage by his mother (Joanna Gleason) drives Eddie to leave and run straight into Jack’s arms, where he joins Amber and Rollergirl as part of a pick-up nuclear family. Eddie soon proves as close to a natural in the business as it’s ever seen, and takes a stage name that comes to him as a vision emblazoned in neon: Dirk Diggler.
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Anderson presents much of Boogie Nights as an extended fantasia where the kinky energy and specific needs of these aberrant people are channelled into powerhouse success that makes their dreams, however tawdry, come true. Anderson’s simplest yet most radical idea was to invert the usual moral lessons of stories set in such a milieu: as long as the characters stick to the basic understandings of their “family,” they survive and prosper. The familial relationship of Jack, Amber, Dirk, and Rollergirl is rendered especially perverse when one notes that all of them have sex with one another, save for Jack and Dirk. But most of the bad that happens to them is imposed by the big, wicked world beyond their hermetic life, where they’re mere delusional misfits, and when they try to reach beyond its limits, they are swiftly and mercilessly punished. Boogie Nights therefore explores a similar idea to Tim Burton’s Ed Wood (1994), which likewise viewed the rock bottom of the Hollywood totem pole as a place where society’s rejects can find fellowship. The in-built irony here is that these aren’t exceptional artists or even bottom-rung industry players, but rather denizens of a fleeting subculture who have gotten lucky mining a seam of gold nobody else will touch.
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Jack entices Eddie with a monologue that explains not merely the immediate satisfactions of his business, but a yearning for loftier achievements—Jack’s desire to make a movie that can hold his audience from the raincoat brigade with actual dramatic values, and thus achieve respectability, not such a ludicrous ambition in the days of Emmanuelle (1974). Anderson uses the golden-age porn scene to comment on Hollywood and the filmmaking world in general, glimpsing the pretences of purveyors of the more elevated form through the ambitions of the least. Dirk proves to be the catalyst for Jack’s dream, as he becomes not just an instant star that Jack can build more ambitious productions around, but comes up with a great idea to make just such a movie as Jack dreams of. With stable mate Reed Richards (John C. Reilly), Dirk thinks up a hero named Brock Landers, a cross between James Bond and John Shaft and an actualisation of all Dirk’s fantasies about achieving multifarious grandeur as savvy jetsetter, streetwise tough guy, and legendary super-stud.
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The warm embrace of Jack’s world has a duplicitous quality, as it offers freedom, but only in stasis. Those who try to move away from its orbit quickly discover how inimical the outside world is. This Garden of Eden clearly has its own serpents lurking from the start, too. Jack’s production manager Little Bill (William H. Macy) is quietly tormented by his wife’s (Nina Hartley) wholehearted engagement with the hedonistic lifestyle around her, a subplot that seems wryly comedic in portraying marital misinterpretation of modern licence, but soon reveals a cruel streak driving emasculated pathos to extremes. Horner’s backer, “the Colonel” James (Robert Ridgley, who had played Jack Horner in The Dirk Diggler Story) is the very image of the kind of sleaze who annexes ’70s permissiveness for his own unsavoury ends, whilst maintaining a façade of prosperous bonhomie. He first appears at one of Jack’s epic pool parties with a painfully thin, barely pubescent model in tow (Amber Hunter), and within a few minutes, the girl has OD’d on a bad batch of cocaine brought by another of Jack’s guests, who freaks out over the limp form with blood streaming out of her nose. The Colonel has his driver dump her outside a hospital. Later, the Colonel is arrested and imprisoned, unsurprisingly, for keeping a collection of child pornography, a sin which even the forgiving Jack can’t abide. The Colonel explains all to Jack through prison glass after he’s been arrested, Jack’s face screwing up in rueful fury and shutting himself off from the Colonel’s curiously naïve pleas. Cocaine proves to be Dirk’s dark muse, making him grandiose, paranoid, and intermittently impotent, eventually destroying his partnership with Jack after he feels threatened by a potential rival in Johnny Doe (Jonathan Quint). Dirk and Reed are drawn by a friend, stripper Todd Parker (Thomas Jane), into a drug-fuelled crime after their attempts to break into music are disastrous; the allure of easy cash breaks down what little good sense they have.
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Boogie Nights is such a crowded, dazzling, busy film that it demands multiple viewings to comprehend every trick it pulls off. Anderson’s script resembles a short story collection bundled into an ingenious whole, a stunt that feels intent on mimicking Robert Altman’s Short Cuts (1993) but with all-original material. The storylines are gleaned from real histories from the porn scene, but transmuted by imagination into something very different from the kind of roman-a-clef melodrama the process implies. Boogie Nights’ structure resembles Altman’s communal, multicharacter zones, but the style—a relentless, experiential push—owes far more to Scorsese, and particularly Goodfellas (1990), including the famous Copacabana tracking shot and cocaine-fuelled paranoia sequence. Anderson’s appropriation of Scorsese’s keynotes takes them a step further, charging them with encompassing force. The film’s first half is replete with dancelike tracking shots and rhythmically edited sequences that bind the criss-crossing and interaction of his characters into synergistic panoramas. Anderson uses steadicam shots that pace through Jack’s and Eddie’s houses to communicate a sense of open communality and functioning life. His camera pirouettes often pay off in punchlines like the whole Horner cast dancing Saturday Night Fever style upon the Hot Traxx dance floor, unified in the flashy, vivacious glory of their moment. Or Eddie’s early return home, when Anderson’s camera swivels 360, noting his festooned idols with a rock-and-roll version of Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” blaring on sound, turning his gauche fantasies into contemporary worship.
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As well as offering a multifaceted insight here into Eddie’s mindscape and the culture that defines him, Anderson finds a fun, hip way to communicate an idea that’s obsessed him more gravely in There Will Be Blood (2007) and The Master (2012) that in America, business and the wares it propagates are religion—except that Eddie is a worshipper, whereas the protagonists of the later works are ministers. Boogie Nights’ vein of comedy moves smoothly from observational wryness to outright satire and then to pitch-black absurdity. All of Anderson’s films have a comedic edge, but usually it’s buried more deeply and rendered with a queasier tone, whilst Boogie Nights retains a larkish quality even as it takes turns toward seething darkness. Indeed, it gains power because these two impulses are entwined, mostly sourced in characters who have varying degrees of sweet dumbness or cluelessness about how to act in the world. Dirk’s oblivious side, his and Reed’s initial competitiveness and their later, mutual, blinkered boosting, offer character comedy laced with warnings about how badly they’ll fare when they try to go it alone, paying off in hilarious vignettes of the pair trying to start a recording career, wielding cringe-inducing cock-rock and wheezing off-key renditions of power rock anthems (Stan Bush’s “The Touch,” actually written for The Transformers: The Movie, 1986, never knew what hit it). Anderson’s deep lexicon of such half-forgotten pizzazz informs this pastiche of retro media artefacts. Boogie Nights may well have created a proliferating contemporary aesthetic dedicated to such recreations, chasing the elusive texture of those artefacts.
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The film’s funniest vignettes are built around that mimicry, in Amber’s short film about Dirk, the early scene depicting Dirk’s first experience shooting a film, and the glimpses of the Brock Landers movies. These vignettes are precise in their reconstruction of weak edits, bygone methods of hype, wooden acting, and try-hard charm, reflecting back through a distorted mirror the way time can turn even the most outré material into amusing, deracinated relic at best or camp at worst (the stilted way Moore recites the line, “This is a giant cock!” deserved some kind of award on its own). And yet Boogie Nights was and is much more than a retro parody. Anderson’s career-long fascination with Americana and the peculiarities of subcultures are articulated with obsessive detail to a degree that borders on anthropology. The recreation here of the late ’70s vibe, from the tummy-hugger shirts to the fake-wood-panelled rooms, provides the surface credulity whilst articulating Anderson’s fascination with lifestyle as a mode through which his characters as citizens in a consumerist society express themselves, their desires, worldviews, even philosophical and religious impulses, ideas that would culminate in The Master, where religion, business, and lifestyle are all fused by the great American guru. At first, having cool things is Dirk’s religion, but Dirk, a seed in the same soil that produces the haute-capitalist brutality of Daniel Plainview and the transcendental hucksterism of Lancaster Dodd, giddily celebrates his victory at an adult film award ceremony by rejoicing in how his films have helped people, liberating them from sexual repression, his success now a way for everyone to achieve happiness.
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Anderson is nimble in avoiding depicting the very business that concerns him, turning necessary self-censorship into a knowing game of concealment played with the audience until the very final scene, when Dirk’s dick is suddenly seen in all its glory. By then, the all-important penis is regarded not in action, as the weapon of culture-changing, orgasm-inducing potency that could link it to pagan phallic art, but presented like the kind of consumer object Dirk himself adores: he finally learns and accepts a not-so-pleasant truth, that his body is his only commodity. The one sequence depicting porn photography in depth makes a show of its own evasiveness, by emphasising instead the transmutation of low-rent reality into mythology, via the wonderment, ranging from envy to lust, of the onlooking crew, and the filmmaking process itself. Moreover, the plot of the movie being shot sarcastically reflects the plot of Boogie Nights, as Dirk plays a young man auditioning for a porn producer played by Amber and finding immediate favour. Anderson’s obsession with the theme of master/pupil, father/son relations is here given its gentlest variation by turning Jack into the gruff, almost biblical patriarch and protector of his flock and Dirk into the prodigal son who falls from grace when he gets too big for his breeches, wanders the desolate wilderness for a while, then contritely returns to beg forgiveness.
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Whilst Dirk’s story anchors the film, the galaxy of characters around him vie for attention, cast by life as well as by Jack as supporting players. They vary from comic relief, like Reed and TT, to characters of tragic dimensions, including Little Bill, Amber, whose ex-husband uses her profession as a barrier to her seeing their son, and Scotty J. (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a chubby, schlubby aide on the film crew who falls head over heels for Dirk. Anderson mostly avoids the doll’s house aesthetic this brand of Altman-inspired filmmaking often devolves to when it comes to his gallery of types, though he does get a little cute and unavoidably scant with some of his characterisations. Becky Barnett (Nicole Ari Parker) was supposed to allow exploration of the domestic abuse many former porn starlets suffered once they tried to settle down with men outside the business, but with that subplot cut, she simply seems to be written out of the film when she proves to be superfluous. Don Cheadle’s Buck Swope, a hi-fi expert with a day job as well as one of Jack’s stars, is a black guy with a mysterious predilection for country music, a touch that might have been far too precious. But Anderson is even able to invest his tale with intricate meaning, as this joke about his character both highlight’s Anderson’s interest in lifestyle and self-definition and deepens when Buck finds himself cold-shouldered by banks for loans to start an electronics store, a business he knows inside out, as the Moral Majority backlash begins and his past stymies his future. Anderson’s character vignettes often pay off in unexpected moments of powerful pathos. like Scotty tearfully repeating “I’m a fucking idiot!” after coming on to unresponsive Dirk, and Amber bawling after a custody hearing where her ex, John Doe, brands her as a scarlet woman — such moments are glimpsed and then shied away from, as if with a sense of guilt at having accidentally seen such scenes of exposed pain and humanity. Rollergirl drops out of high school, bewildered by an exam and sexually insulted by a classmate (Kai Lennox), and completely reinvents herself as a media creation who quite literally never takes off her roller skates.
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After the relatively straightforward realism evinced in Hard Eight, Anderson’s rare gift for constructing intensely rhythmic, intricately detailed cinema emerges here. The tableaux-like set-pieces in the film’s first half, the summery pool party driven by a wandering camera that acts like a seemingly casually observant visitor who’s eye is attracted by various vignettes and then a bikini-clad bottom right into a pool (quoting Kolotozov’s legerdemain in I Am Cuba, 1964, and like that film depicting the end of an exploitative Eden). The fateful New Year’s Eve tragedy later in the film is an even more intricate nexus of staging and exposition. Moreover, such scenes depict how the characters connect, or fail to, and make choices about how to deal with life, from Scotty’s masochistic self-abuse to Little Bill’s homicidal explosion, and Buck connecting with sweet-natured costar Jessie St. Vincent (Melora Walters); all are not just linked but tied together with a cosmological sense of human becoming and failing. Amidst the microcosmic events that affect the lives of their employees, Jack and the Colonel and rival porn producer Floyd Gondolli (Philip Baker Hall, crucial actor of Anderson’s first three films) talk about what’s about to make the macrocosm shift. Gondolli warns Jack that video is about to change the porn industry, a notion Jack rejects vehemently as the death of what little pretence to artistry their business has. From today’s perspective, with the internet having slaughtered porn as an industry, there’s some irony in this now, although perhaps Anderson was also responding to the earliest rumblings of the digital filming movement in the late ’90s and its looming impact on the art form he loves, couched in the terms of a character defending what craftsman’s self-respect he has. The New Year’s motif might have seemed excessive, and yet Anderson finally makes time itself and the inevitable shifts it causes part of the texture here, concluding with Little Bill’s murder-suicide as the bang that quite literally ends the ’70s and shifts the tenor of the film.
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Perhaps Anderson’s signature directorial touch, an extended filmic movement intercutting depictions of the characters spiralling in islets of behaviour that see them push to hysterical extremes before hitting epiphanies, was first offered here in the film’s last third. Anderson watches exiled Dirk, Jack, Amber, and Rollergirl hitting rock bottom in varying ways, from Dirk foray into male prostitution ending in a gay bashing, to Jack and Amber trying their hand at a kind of prototypical reality television as they ride about L.A. and pick up a random male to have sex with Rollergirl. Their lucky man proves to be the classmate whose teasing drove Rollergirl out of school, and when he performs badly, he insults her and Jack. Jack loses control and beast him to a bloody pulp, and Rollergirl gets a few of her own kicks in. The two acts of violence here are rhymed—Jack and Rollergirl lashing out at an emissary of the world that absorbs their product but disdains them, and Dirk being singled out as a pervert to be punished. Michael Penn’s scoring of this movement, a low, throbbing, urging drone with chimes, as if time is ticking down toward some doomsday, is particularly great. Anderson charts two diverse reactions in his characters, as Dirk tries to prove himself in the outside world whilst Amber and Rollergirl retreat into a haze of drugged-up, mother-daughter mind-melding and decide they don’t want to leave a room within the safe confines of Jack’s house.
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Degradation segues into confrontations with death and crime. Buck, caring for a very pregnant Jessie, enters a bakery only for a gunfight to break out around him when an armed robber enters. Buck is left splattered with strangers’ blood—he wears an angelic white suit, in a sardonic Kubrickian joke—and frozen amidst corpses, but sees a chance to exit his personal perdition by snatching up the bag full of cash the robber dropped. Such an utterly random/contrived twist anticipates Anderson’s fascination with both narrative capriciousness and classical theatrical devices like the deus-ex-machina, as would again be used in the climax of his follow-up, Magnolia (1999). Boogie Nights’ late swerve into more familiar crime territory stymies to a certain extent the film’s masterful examination of its characters and their unusual world. But nobody could really expect Anderson to resist the ready-made climax the Wonderland case provided, albeit still subjected to his wayward sense of humour and gift for creating cringe-inducing situations. Todd talks Dirk and Reed into joining his hare-brained scheme to sell fake cocaine to dealer Rahad Jackson (Alfred Molina), and then springs his actual intent to rob Rahad’s fortune.
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The careful construction here as the deal becomes increasingly uneasy is beautiful, punctuated by precisely employed yet random-feeling details that work on the nerves like nails on a blackboard, in Rahad’s hopped-up friendliness and the firecrackers let off at random by his young Chinese houseguest (Joe G.M. Chan). Rahad swans about in a kimono, life scored by the blaring mix-tapes he makes in objection to the song-order artists impose on their work in yet another form of lifestyle self-management. The episode combusts with Todd and Rahad’s bodyguard (B. Philly Johnson) ending up very dead, and Rahad chasing Dirk and Reed off into the night with a shotgun, deadly crime and high farce commingling. Dirk returns to Jack and is accepted after admitting his faults, making for a suitably mythic catharsis: after many cues, the underlying Prodigal Son parable emerges fully. Dirk is a “big shining star” for all his foolishness. The final scene, an obvious tribute to the simultaneously pathetic and learned vignette of Jake LaMotta at the end of Raging Bull (1980), sees Dirk restored and reciting dialogue in character that once again nudges the theme of the film around him. Dirk may never become as slick and knowing as Brock Landers, but he has found some peculiar wisdom.

2010s, British cinema, Experimental, Horror/Eerie

Berberian Sound Studio (2012)

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Director/Screenwriter: Peter Strickland

By Roderick Heath

British sound engineer Gilderoy (Toby Jones) arrives at the Berberian Studio of Post-Production, a labyrinthine facility and a niche for creating the aspect of cinema perhaps least appreciated by laymen and yet amongst the most vital. This particular netherworld, where glowing, pulsing red lights wait with infernal meaning for Gilderoy, is guarded by a beautiful Circe, Elena (Tonia Sotiropoulou), armed with all contempt for the merely human expected of a fashion plate functionary in a magic kingdom filled with makers of fame and fortune. Gilderoy, middle-aged and gnomic, certainly seems especially human, like the intrusion of a sewage worker in a royal bedroom. But Gilderoy has gifts, gifts impressive enough to have inspired director Giancarlo Santini (Antonio Mancino) to have imported Gilderoy from England to mix the soundtrack of his latest film, The Equestrian Vortex.
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Gilderoy has recently won an award for his work on a documentary about rural England, evoking the delicate textures of a genteel and pastoral landscape, but now he finds, to his queasy discomfort, that he’s engaged on a blood and thunder flick, filled with bizarre supernatural emanations and grotesque torture. Light years out of his comfort zone, this homely, homebody savant of sound is worried about his aged mother back home, disturbed by the material he’s working on, and gnawed at by financial distress since he spent all his money on the plane ticket and can’t get anyone to reimburse him. He finds himself surrounded by people driven by unpredictable emotions and private agendas, the alienation exacerbated by a language barrier. Gilderoy sets to work with his exacting and deeply introverted method, only to find himself falling into an abyssal trap of anxiety and mystery.
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Writer-director Peter Strickland’s only previous feature work was the eerie, compelling revenge thriller Katalin Varga (2009), set and shot in Romania, and it’s possible Strickland’s experiences working on such menacing fare in a foreign language and locale helped inspire this far more enigmatic, deeply discombobulated follow-up. Berberian Sound Studio is, on the surface, a tribute to, and evocation of, the hallowed era of Italian giallo horror film, which came near the tail-end of an epoch of Italian exports from a film industry uneasy with English-language cinema, which it constantly tried to annex. Tales of disconnection and confusion in that time and place are many and amusing, and have already provided fodder to some filmmakers as far back as Vincent Minnelli’s Two Weeks in Another Town (1962). The mood of Berberian Sound Studios is similar to some other movies about moviemaking, particularly Anthony Waller’s chiller Mute Witness (1995), which offered Hitchcockian suspense in a near-deserted Russian film studio; Roman Coppola’s playful CQ (2000), depicting this often happenstance, esoteric and self-involved world where personal creativity and messy necessity often blend in unpredictable ways; and Brian De Palma’s Blow Out (1981), which turned the craft of its hero, a sound-effects man, into a deeply tactile, experiential drama where bottomless depravity is uncovered through layers of media. Strickland, whilst evoking such progenitors of method, ultimately has a distinct and peculiar purpose. Rather than segueing from the fakery of filmmaking into a zone of “real-world” drama, Berberian Sound Studio instead uses the paraphernalia and artifice of film to conjure an interior journey into places of disquiet and dread.
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Gilderoy is the innocent abroad here, and innocent he is, a bachelor and mummy’s boy who seems to have scarcely ventured out of the garden shed of his recording studio in years. He’s no signposted weirdo, however, only a timid and easily cowered man who has to undergo a sink-or-swim immersion in the ways of a corner of experience at once even more hermetic than his own but through which far more worldly characters occasionally tramp, violating the texture of his immediate surrounds and expectations with excruciating results. Gilderoy, upon arrival, learns that Santini worships his talents, but his hoped-for meeting with the director is delayed for some time and then proves a frustrating meeting with a patronising egotist. Gilderoy spends most of his time accompanied by Francesco (Cosimo Fusco), the film’s producer, always poised on a knife-edge above poles of professional facility and virulent irritation. When Gilderoy presses him about getting his ticket reimbursed, Francesco fobs him off on Elena, who passes him on to anonymous functionaries before Gilderoy learns about dealing with such matters here—get loud, get angry, and get the money—which is, of course, extremely difficult for a timid Englishman, especially one faced at every turn by language problems and wilful obfuscation. For extra genre cred, the studio is, in neat mid-’70s fashion, beset by random power cuts, with candles ready to illuminate the place after sudden plunges into stygian blackness.
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Gilderoy is hired specifically as a sound mixer, but as the post-production lumbers on and the shortfalls of the film shoot have to be plastered over, he’s drawn into helping create sounds through foley work, the artful manipulation of elements to create apt aural versions of what’s occurring on screen. Strickland’s wicked sense of humour in exploiting this element is introduced early on as Gilderoy is first shown some footage of the film whilst the two official foley artists, Massimo and Massimo (Pal Toth and Jozef Cseres), provide accompanying effects. They hack at watermelons with brutal force, evoking the savagery of killing on screen through the most blackly hilarious of indirection, as Gilderoy squirms in his seat: one of the Massimos offers him a slice of the melon to eat, and Gilderoy regards it like a severed body part.
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Strickland’s core conceit is that he never shows any footage from the film, allowing the sound effects the crew are providing and sometimes with a sketchy description of the plot to do the work. Ironically, the only bit of the film we do see is the opening credits sequence, a dynamic pastiche of ’70s-style design effects, which stands in for Berberian Sound Studio’s own credits. The Equestrian Vortex is evidently inspired by Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1976), though with overtones that seem closer to the work of trashier giallo directors like Lucio Fulci and Sergio Martino: the plot seems to involve young women who find that the equestrian school they attend is infiltrated by witches with a history dating back to gruesome medieval witch trials. Santini balks, naturally, at having Gilderoy describe his movie as a horror film: “This not a horror film. This is a Santini film! … This is a part of the human condition.” Santini airily expresses his desire to evoke the horror of historical misogyny, but, our suspicions that it’s utter trash are confirmed by the reactions of his crew and particularly the female cast members like Veronica (Susanna Cappellaro) and Silvia (Fatma Mohamed).
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Berberian Sound Studio is a display of dazzling technique attached to a mysterious-feeling, ultimately interior tale of a solitary man’s mental disintegration, or possible transcendence, conveyed through the methods of his own craft. A gift for film buffs but one that nimbly avoids descending into a mere pastiche for the sake of tickling facile recognitions, Berberian Sound Studio is more an attempt to comprehend the peculiar nexus of artistic endeavour, private psychological credulity, and workaday labour. Strickland celebrates a world, one rapidly fading into history, of analog technology by which so much of the great cinema of the past was created. In its time, Gilderoy’s art represented cutting-edge capacity, but now it smacks of retro fetishisation as Strickland delights in depicting methods of constructing the densely layered compilation of devices we glibly call a movie. Strickland reminds us of the almost fanatical attention to craft that often goes into even the seamiest piece of crap, and which, on the level of contemporary blockbuster cinema’s scrolls of hundreds upon hundreds of crew names in closing credits, feels close to a religious enterprise. There’s more than a hint of connotation here, in that culturally we want to reward modest DIY artisans like Gilderoy, but the industry tends to win out in every other respect. Strickland’s camera roves over Elena’s desk with typewriter and rubber stamps arranged on a trestle like an abstract sculpture, the buttons and dials and charts and tapes that form the paraphernalia of Gilderoy’s art becoming runic, inscrutable alchemic devices for conjuring spells.
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Strickland creates a uniquely strange atmosphere, and tension, but not by offering any specific source for unease, save for the oneiric atmosphere generated by his work. A parade of actors moves through the studio, making perverse and unnerving sound effects for terrified and slaughtered women, witches, and lurking goblins, filling the studio with disturbing inferences and the unpleasant sensation of everyday technical effort being suffused with menace and the ghosts of appalling acts. One scene sees Katalin Ladik, playing herself, recording the sound for her role as a witch, acting the incantatory part, face twisted into a visage of terrible delight, mimicking the faces of death and morbid ecstasy often glimpsed in De Palma and Argento’s films, exposed in artifice and yet still wielding a strange power. Santini proselytises to Gilderoy about his need to depict the horrors of witch trials to awaken his audience to historical crimes, except, of course, that Strickland notes the same crimes, in a far subtler and less immediately deadly fashion, going on in the studio. Santini, the smooth and imperious stud, is accused of casting with his dick, and Silvia, evidently involved with him in some fashion, is filled with disquiet and disillusionment. She forms a tenuous bond with Gilderoy, with his seeming status as meek, attentive gelding in contrast to the brash Italian alpha males, and advises him in how to combat the studio bureaucracy. Francesco warns Gilderoy about getting too close to Silvia: “Be careful of that girl…There is poison in those tits of hers.” Like Gilderoy, Silvia is another foreigner out of her element. Appearing with witchy portent in the dark of the studio and seeming alternately entrapped by the filmmaking and its dark avatar, Silvia finally goes on a rampage of destruction all too cruelly exact for the filmmakers: she destroys reels of sound and footage to announce her furious departure from the project, a special kiss-off to Santini.
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Meanwhile Santini and Francesco push Gilderoy in implicating himself in the professional drama that has overtones of the imaginary one, finally conflating as Francesco forces Gilderoy to turn up the volume on recorded sound effects to literally torture a potential replacement for Silvia into giving a decent sounding scream. The sneaky truth to the casual sexism and contempt for employee needs, like Gilderoy’s, passed over for the joy of working in the big wonderful world of filmmaking, melds with Gilderoy’s evident frustrated sensuality, a sensuality channelled into his work. Gilderoy is something of a gentle magician: in one mesmerising scene, when a power cut leaves the actors and crew bored, Gilderoy is talked into entertaining them by creating eerie sounds with household items, conjuring a UFO from a lightbulb scraped across a grill. Just recently I’ve been much fascinated with the work and life of Delia Derbyshire, a brilliant boffin who helped invent electronic music from the anonymous ranks of the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop, most famously creating the Doctor Who theme: Gilderoy is characterised as just such a classic English eccentric whose introversion masks the ability to create worlds and invent futures, a delicate gift unable to withstand the pressure of industrialised art filled with egotists and moral vacuums.
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One of the film’s most evanescently strange moments comes in one of the several turns in which Strickland uses the blackouts as a way to seamlessly and, with momentary disorientation, change scenes: Gilderoy is awoken in the night, and leaves his room, passing into blackness. The sounds of crunching detritus, as if he’s walking on fallen leaves, are heard, and Silvia emerges from the darkness, clutching a candle, an emanation from an ethereal beyond. Actually, they’re in the studio during another power cut, with Gilderoy recording his footfalls as background noise. Nonetheless Gilderoy’s tactile enjoyment of the moment evokes the very different world he’s used to, a quieter, more natural world. This moment reminded me powerfully of a similar motif in Seijun Suzuki’s Branded to Kill (1967), in which the antihero smothers his face longingly in natural detritus, mourning his isolation in a denaturalised world. Gilderoy sleeps in a room adjoining the studio, and his situation, and seemingly fragmenting consciousness, often seems to dissolve boundaries between liminal and subliminal zones. The rubbish bin filled with all the pulverised vegetables used in the foley work begins to turn into a toxic mass of putrefaction, standing in for the mangled flesh on screen: “Well, I was hoping for a more dignified end than this,” one actress quips upon seeing the mashed marrow that represents her on-screen character’s brutal death.
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Berberian Sound Studio is, in many respects, an experimental film, an extended attempt to explore the pure texture of cinema, a layered journey through the act of creation itself that becomes at the same time a mesmerising experiential plunge. There seems to be an emerging strand of what could be called pseudo-abstract genre work in recent independent filmmaking, mimicking the forms of traditional horror and science-fiction films, but doing so to extract and isolate qualities of tone and method whilst excising literal story development: the U.S. and British film scenes have produced several filmmakers, including Shane Carruth, Brit Marling and collaborators Mike Cahill and Zal Batmanglij, Ben Wheatley, and Ti West, who have deconstructed filmmaking pitched on the edge of the fantastic or the ominous to varying degrees; works by European filmmakers like Michael Haneke and Lars Von Trier have also grazed this zone. Strickland’s effort here stands closer to Hélène Cattet and Bruno Fonzani’s Amer (2009), which boiled the traditional visual essentials of giallo down to an enigmatic narrative freed from responsibility to the boilerplate requirements of genre entertainment. Rather than offer the usual coded metaphors for a descent into a realm of nightmares and the irrational, Strickland goes straight for the purified sense of dread and implication of a solitary man who specialises in creating hints of wonder but is too vulnerable to being immersed in his own works.
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Berberian Sound Studio therefore feels closer to some far more offbeat by-products of the ’60s and ’70s film milieu than to the giallo to which it pays surface tribute. David Lynch is an evident touchstone. Strickland references the shibboleth of Mulholland Drive (2001) through the flashing sign “Silenzio” outside the studio, the intimate examination of decay suggests Blue Velvet (1986), whilst the narrative doublings and dreamlike metamorphoses recall Lost Highway (1997). But where Lynch was fond of creating surrealist textures out of pulp stories, Strickland offers much less immediate strangeness, preferring to create a more definably psychological texture. The peculiar counterpoint of a technologically enabled tinkerer able to transform everyday ambience into strange art and a situation rife with discomforting expectation of violence recalls Jerzy Skolimowski’s The Shout (1976): the heroes of both are sound experts engaged in creating evocations of the uncanny and faced with the disintegration of their presumably stable lives. But the ultimate method feels to me closest to Ingmar Bergman, as in Persona (1966), mental breakdown is conveyed through the literal breakdown of cinema itself, whilst Hour of the Wolf (1968), where an artist’s neuroses consume his life, realised through dreamlike reductions of gothic horror imagery to their phobic essences. Where Bergman referenced the expressionist chillers and Bela Lugosi flicks he’d loved as a youth, Strickland evokes giallo, but both modes are for each filmmaker a style to emulate rather than a genre to copy, a wellspring of expressive ambiguity and nightmarish textures.
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Like the protagonist of Hour of the Wolf, Gilderoy disappears within the ghostly fantasia his mind seems to be projecting. As Gilderoy’s perception of his world becomes increasingly warped, everything becomes charged with a capacity for communing with a nightmare world, and the very filmmaking conspires against him. Gilderoy’s periodic letters from his mother take a dark twist as she recounts the massacre of a nest of bird hatchlings they’d been watching over before he left. Gilderoy’s private reality becomes increasingly mixed up with the film as one of the auditioned replacements for Silvia recounts the letter. We know who Gilderoy is, but what’s his last name? Why was he hired for this project? Why can’t the studio accountants find his flight booking? Is he here at all? Is the whole experience just his dream? Or is he, as the film repeatedly suggests, simply a figure at the mercy of his filmmaker, free to create him and then pull him apart, like Daffy Duck in Duck Amuck (1953)? This seems ultimately the perfect analogue for Berberian Sound Studio, an exercise in layers of cinematic construction becoming its own malefic stunt. Time eventually reboots; Gilderoy, suddenly a speaker of fluent Italian, becomes the high priest and witch hunter, pummelling the eardrums of his actress-witches and lighting candles in prayer to dark gods of nature even as he remains ensconced in his technological cocoon.
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Strickland saves his smartest antistrophe for a sequence in which Gilderoy imagines some hidden force crashing against the door of his bedroom, snatching up a knife and stalking out to search for the shadow enemy, only for the footage of his earlier fear in the room to start unspooling on the projection screen. Then the film melts and gives way to, of all things, the rural documentary Gilderoy won his prize for, tranquil footage of English dales and grass-munching sheep presenting a far more jarring and mercilessly funny twist than any supernatural ambassador could provide. Gilderoy is terrified of the price he will pay for success, of the world battering in his door and implicating him in its evils, anxiety attaching itself to the art he’s prostituting himself out to create. As in many horror films, however, the forces of good and light may have their victory over darkness. Gilderoy finds himself confronted by self-animating equipment that projects a spot of growing light, transfixing Gilderoy and promising to swallow him up, 2001–style, the beckoning promise of transcendence into ecstasy, or obliteration, a final surrender to the irrational. It’s easy, too easy, to imagine Berberian Sound Studio earning the wrath of viewers who would have it finally offer some sort of familiar gothic pay-off. But for anyone who engages with Strickland’s seriously peculiar yet remarkable style, this is a genuinely galvanising film experience—and those are pretty rare at the best of times.