drama

Buffalo ’66 (1998)

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There was a brief time a couple decades or so ago when Vincent Gallo was an exciting creative voice. I was recently reminded of this when visiting the independent theater Cine Tonalá in Mexico City, which prominently displays a framed poster of his directorial debut Buffalo ’66 in the lobby. It’s still a beautiful object that conveys a kind of in-the-know, independent-cinema cool, and it was worth framing to preserve the layer eye-catching glitter in its title text (which reads more as television static in the 2D version I’m more familiar with). The young, mysterious Vincent Gallo who made Buffalo ’66 and Brown Bunny is long-dead, though, having since been replaced by a grimy right-wing demon who lashes out at anyone who dares to question his all-knowing, all-powerful genius. Audiences no longer have to wonder how Gallo channeled such a putrid, self-centered asshole of a character as the lead of his own 1998 debut. The remaining wonder of the film is that Gallo does seem to be fully, demonstrably aware of how unpleasant he is to be around. He starts Buffalo ’66 being released from jail into the winter snow, with no loved ones meeting him at the gate. Unable to impress his parents with a genuine girlfriend, he kidnaps a teenager at gunpoint and forces her to play house to make himself appear loveable. He then spends the rest of the film working up the courage to settle a one-sided vendetta with a single act of violence he doesn’t have the stomach for. He’s deeply, thoroughly uncool – a total loser.

Vincent Gallo put a lot of himself into the depressive loserdom Buffalo ’66, which is something he’d go on to brag about to the press. Every chance he gets, he takes sole credit for everything about the picture that earns positive critical feedback, downplaying all contributions from his creative collaborators. The teenage Christina Ricci gives an incredibly bratty, disaffected performance as Gallo’s kidnap victim, modeling a babydoll grunge dress & tap shoes combo that affords the movie most of its late-90s cool. According to Gallo, she was more of a “puppet” than an actor, with him operating her every move on camera as the omnipotent puppet master. Similarly, he’s taken sole credit for all the creative work in the screenplay, describing his credited co-writer Alison Bagnall as a glorified “typist.” He doesn’t just take credit away from women, though. He’s also claimed ownership of every creative choice in the cinematography, firing industry legend Dick Pope early in the production and replacing him with Lance Acord, whom Gallo describes as a hired “button pusher.” That by no means covers the full scope of “difficulties” Gallo had with his cast & crew (his public feud with a nearly-unrecognizable Anjelica Huston, playing his mother, is even more storied), but it does cover the three factors that make the movie stand out as remarkably great, each apparently attributable to Vincent Gallo’s singular genius in a world full of lifeless automatons that he has to manage in order to see his vision through. Poor guy.

The first time I saw Buffalo ’66, I was around the age & temperament of Christina Ricci’s character in the movie, by which I mean I was a gloomy teenage grump. She’s the only character who fully falls for Gallo’s bullshit, fawning over him as “the sweetest guy in the world, and the most handsome” while his more jaded & faded friends & family resent his lingering presence as if he were a pestering ghost. I was similarly smitten with Gallo’s artistic vision at that age, finding Buffalo ’66‘s unpredictable camera angles and segmented picture-in-picture frames to be an exciting new spin on the lone-wolf crime genre. Revisiting the film a couple decades later, the relentless, exhausting rhythm of Gallo’s dialogue fits right in with the general overwritten machismo of the post-Tarantino cokehead 90s, and you have to squint a little harder to pick up on its one-of-a-kind novelty. Undoubtedly, the movie still looks cool, approximating the same Polaroid-in-motion aesthetic achieved in Fiona Apple’s “Criminal” music video. The dialogue purposefully undercuts that cool at every turn, though, with Gallo’s explosively violent reaction to every minor setback in his go-nowhere missions to impress his parents and settle an old football betting vendetta making him look like the squirmiest of little worms. When I was a teenager, I understood this to be a cool movie for cool people; now I understand it to be a slickly-produced character study of a terminally uncool dipshit.

As relentlessly gabby as Gallo’s antihero is in Buffalo ’66, his self-edited cut of the trailer features no dialogue or moving images. It’s just a series of stills conveying how cool the movie looks as a collection of working-class-fringe aesthetics while avoiding how grating of a personality Gallo himself plays at the center. It’s the same smartly observed marketing approached that inspired the glitter on the poster, promising a kind of indie-cinema glamour that willfully ignores the rotten core just beneath that layer of glimmer. At no point in the film does any of this petty-bully characterization feel at all unintentional. Gallo seems to know exactly how queasily pathetic he’s coming across on camera, which only makes it odder that he seems unaware of how that small-minded narcissism is coming across behind the camera. Maybe his dwindling opportunities to follow through on the promise of Buffalo ’66 & Brown Bunny have cleared that up over the years as he’s burned professional bridge after bridge (at one point even getting into vicious public feuds with his critics, most infamously Roger Ebert). I don’t know that letting him out of director’s jail would do any good at this point, though. His late-90s moment is long gone, and now he’s just a pestering indie-cinema ghost haunting vintage posters & Goodwill DVD shelves.

-Brandon Ledet

Dreamchild (1985)

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Just one year after the classic fairy tale “Little Red Riding Hood” got a post-modern feminist reexamination in The Company of Wolves, the classic children’s novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland got the same treatment in the less-seen, less-discussed Dreamchild. Both films juxtapose real-life sexual predation against its warped fantasy-realm mirror reflections, picking at the gender politics of their selected works to find surprising, uncomfortable nuance. For its part, The Company of Wolves asks how much tales like “Little Red Riding Hood” were meant to protect young women from the sexual predation of older men vs. how much they were meant to scare them off from participating in their own sexual development & pleasure. Likewise, Dreamchild revisits the sexual predation behind the writing of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass to question just how diabolical Lewis Carroll’s relationship with his young muse was, or if there’s room to find his fixation on her empathetically tragic. The main difference between these two literary autopsies is that “Little Red Riding Hood” is a stand-in for all young women everywhere, while “Alice” was a real-life victim with her own name and her own internal life, which makes for a much more delicate, dangerous balancing act.

Carol Browne stars as the real-life Alice Hargreaves in her twilight years, summoned to a Depression Era NYC to commemorate the 100th birthday of the deceased author who made her famous as a child. American journalists hound the prim & elderly English woman the second she hits the shore, desperate for whimsical pull-quotes from The Real Alice to fluff up their human-interest columns. The barrage of questions about her childhood family acquaintance Reverend Charles L. Dodgson (pen name Lewis Carroll) sends her into a tailspin of repressed memories & demented hallucinations, effectively re-traumatizing the poor woman for the sake of a disposable puff piece. Preparing for an upcoming Columbia University speech to celebrate Dodgson’s birthday, she becomes unmoored in time, reliving both traumatic moments as her childhood self and fantastic moments as her famous literary avatar. It quickly becomes apparent in flashback that Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was written as an elaborate grooming tactic, with the middle-aged Dodgson hoping to woo the 10-year-old Hargreaves into being his eventual bride. That toxic dynamic has soured her lifelong relationship with the Wonderland books in a way that the American press is entirely uninterested in interrogating, so she has to work through it isolated in her own dreams & memories. The nuance of that discomfort arises in recalling her own active participation & manipulation of the author-muse dynamic as a child, something she does not care to remember.

A less thoughtful version of this story might’ve characterized Alice Hargreaves as a victim first and a victim only, but Dreamchild puts a lot of work into fleshing her out as a thorny, complicated human being. She’s a hard-ass social tyrant in both her 80s & her adolescence, and she was too sharp as a child not to notice the unseemly power she had over Dodgson as her much-older admirer. Ian Holm does an incredible job invoking both menace and pity as the lonely, nerdy Dodgson, pining after a child in a way even he knows is wrong. The young Alice pretends not to catch on, but plays games with the older man’s heart in a way that recalls the cruelty of a school-age bully. Meanwhile, the 1930s NYC segments draw a parallel between their delicate power imbalance and the normal, socially accepted rhythms of heterosexual courtship, with a fuckboy reporter (played by Peter Gallagher) hounding the elderly Hargreaves’s teenage assistant for romantic connection so he can exploit her access for personal profit. The fully grown men are fully aware how vulnerable the younger women they pursue are to their gendered power & privilege, and they choose to cross the line anyway. What seems to haunt Hargreaves in her final days is how aware she was of that one-sided romantic dynamic as a child, and the ways in which manipulated it for her own amusement. It’s a difficult topic to discuss without slipping into blaming victims or excusing abuse, but the movie pulls it off.

Dreamchild was the brainchild of screenwriter Dennis Potter, whose name is all over the credits as a producer who self-funded the project. All of the visual panache of the fantasy sequences arrive courtesy of the Jim Henson Creature Shop, who illustrate several key characters from the Wonderland & Looking Glass canon as nightmarish ghouls who haunt Alice Hargreaves in her old age. Those sequences are relatively sparse, though, and most of the runtime reflects Potter’s background as a journalist and television writer, staging lengthy exchanges of dialogue in hotel rooms & press offices. In those conversations, Potter pokes at the differences between American & British cultures’ respective relationships with money and, more bravely, the differences between 19th & 20th Century cultures’ respective relationships with age-gap courtship. As depicted in the film, Alice Hargreaves suffered self-conflicted feelings on both subjects and her own personal participation in them. She is, undoubtedly, Lewis Carroll’s victim, in that her entire life is unfairly shaped by his immoral yearning for her as a child. However, Potter finds enough grey-area nuance in her victimhood to allow her to appear onscreen as a fully realized human being instead of a historic symbol of trauma and abuse. Lewis Carroll himself is even extended that grace, regardless of whether he deserves it.

-Brandon Ledet

The Story of Adele H. (1975)

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As recently as a few years ago, the gold standard for an actress performing a full mental breakdown onscreen was the late, great Gena Rowlands’s starring role in Cassavettes’s A Woman Under the Influence. It has since been surpassed—at least in terms of press-junket citations—by Isabelle Adjani’s equally astonishing turn in Żuławski’s Possession. Whether it’s due to the overall cultural warming to Genre Cinema as a respectable artform or it’s due to the wider home video distribution of Possession in particular, Adjani’s horrific mid-film freakout is now cited as artistic inspo for actresses as wide ranging as Sidney Sweeney (in her self-produced nunsploitation film Immaculate) and Reinate Reinsve (in the much classier schoolboard-meeting drama Armand). Even Rowlands’s recent passing hasn’t lessened Adjani’s ascent in influence. In either case, it might be nice to hear a few other performances from those immensely talented actors’ oeuvres cited as influences from time to time, so that Adjani is not only remembered for smashing her groceries against a tunnel wall and Rowlands is not only honored for coming up with that thumbs-up raspberry tic.

Luckily, Isabelle Adjani does have at least one other major role in which she’s tasked to perform manic mental anguish to great success. She does such a stellar job embodying the violent psychosis of unrequited love in the 1975 classic The Story of Adele H. that it often feels as if she’s being directed by Ken Russell instead of François Truffaut. The French New Waver mostly behaved himself behind the camera, shooting the anti-romance period piece with the made-for-TV aesthetics of a Masterpiece Theatre episode – complete with TV-friendly screen wipes. Adjani initially appears to be on her best behavior as well, arriving on the scene as a lovelorn romantic tracking down the traveling soldier who once proposed marriage to her against her family’s wishes. However, the more we come to understand just how obsessed she is with making this romantic connection happen (and just how little affection the soldier has expressed in return), it quickly becomes apparent that she’s a woman possessed. Then she gets worse, scarily so. Adjani’s ecstatic performance as a globetrotting stalker gone mad works in direct contrast to her director’s muted browns-and-greys historical aesthetics, so that all you can focus on is the immense power she wields as a screen presence. It was an incredible feat for the still-teenage actress, and it’s admittedly even more incredible that she somehow pushed her craft even further in Possession.

For his part, Truffaut is seemingly more preoccupied with the real-life historical spectacle of the story he’s telling than he is by the filmmaking mechanics of telling it. Stepping away from the more obvious visual & artistic trickery of his preceding film Day for Night, he instead reassures his audience with onscreen text, archival photographs, and vocalized diary excerpts that the events depicted are real things that happened to real people. The only overt trickery of the picture is hiding the full name of his subject from the audience, as the titular Adele H. is better known to the public as Adele Hugo, daughter of the famous French novelist Victor Hugo. As in the film’s narrative, the real-life Adele Hugo did travel to Canada & Barbados against her father’s commands to chase an unlikely romance with a fuckboy soldier who spurned her. It was a passionate, one-sided obsession that eventually drove her to the madhouse just as performed by Adjani in her first starting role – often expressed in the exact words of her personal letters & diary. Outside a couple double-exposure sequences in Adele’s sweaty nightmares, however, Truffaut never matches the mania of his subject in the film’s visual palette. He instead leaves that task entirely in Adjani’s scarily capable hands, which she uses to feverishly scribble endless love letters in her cramped Nova Scotian apartment instead of resting her mind with sleep.

Just in case the connection to Adjani’s now career-defining performance in Possession wasn’t already top-of-mind, Adele H. does include a brief scene in which the actor performs a manic episode against the brick walls of an urban tunnel – this time while being attacked by a wild dog. It’s just one of many jaw-dropping moments of ecstatic physical performance in the film, but it is still a visual reminder that Adjani’s one of the best to have ever performed that total breakdown routine in the history of the medium. Before Rowlands was the go-to citation for that manic extreme of the craft, I’m sure Catherine Deneuve’s performance in Repulsion made the publicity rounds in the same way. Maybe someday Elizabeth Moss’s work in titles like Queen of the Earth, The Invisible Man, and Her Smell will get its turn. For now, though, Isabelle Adjani is the reigning queen of melting down onscreen, and that icon status is well earned (in more films than one).

-Brandon Ledet 

Chunking Express (1994)

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I recently celebrated my birthday, and coincidentally, over the course of Chungking Express, so does the protagonist of the first half. And he’s a May baby, too! This was not an intentional viewing choice on my part, but it was a fun little accident, and since I, like all of Wong Kar-Wai’s protagonists, am a hardcore yearner, that wasn’t the only thing that aligned for me. 

Express is neatly divided into two halves, each narrative connected solely by the presence of the Mandarin Express fast-food bar located in Hong Kong’s Chungking Mansions, a seventeen-story building originally built as a residential complex but which ultimately mostly houses low-budget guest houses and shops. Our first protagonist, Chi-Moo (Takeshi Kaneshiro), is a police officer whose girlfriend, May, breaks up with him on April 1st, initially leading him to believe that she is joking. As the month wears on, he finds himself committing to a silly ritual of buying a can of pineapple from the local convenience store every day, each one with an expiration date of May 1st, his upcoming 25th birthday. When the month ends and May has yet to tell him that she was kidding, he eats all thirty cans in one night, then goes out drinking. While out, he meets a woman in a blonde wig (Brigitte Lin); unbeknownst to him, she is a professional criminal specializing in drug trafficking, whose most recent scheme has run aground as her newest recruits disappeared at the airport with her product and never appeared at their final destination. After he vomits up a prodigious amount of canned pineapple, the two retire to a hotel room where she finally sleeps after days on the run while he watches over her. 

They both disappear completely from the film after this as the narrative view shifts. Chi-Moo runs through his entire little black book on the payphone at the Mandarin Express, where the owner attempts to set him up with one of his employees, coincidentally also named May, with no success. Said proprietor also tries to make a date for another frequent visitor, a beat cop known only by his badge number, 663 (Tony Leung), with May, but when he walks by on his patrol after having been dumped by his flight attendant girlfriend (Valerie Chow), May has gone off on a vacation and relative Faye (Faye Wong) is covering for her in her absence. 663 is still too heartbroken about his recent relationship to notice that Faye is utterly smitten with him from the get-go. When his ex drops by with a letter for him along with his house keys, every employee of the Express reads the letter and gossips about its contents among themselves, with only Faye finding the deeper resonance in the words between two separated lovers. 663 initially refuses to take the letter, saying that he will simply get it another time, and this allows Faye the opportunity to, in true manic pixie dream girl fashion, start using his keys to let herself into his home and spruce up the place. Over time, the lovelorn 663 moves through his grief (in no small part because of her attempts to cheer him up) and becomes fascinated by this strange woman and her quirks: her forgetfulness, her attitude, and her eternal fascination with The Mamas and the Papas’ “California Dreamin’,” which plays approximately one hundred times throughout the film. She has her own dreams that will take her away from him, however, but that doesn’t mean that the time that they walked a path together wasn’t the catalyst that led them both to pursue something meaningful in their lives, and it also doesn’t mean that they’ll never walk the same path again. 

Wong’s filmography, at least the parts with which I’m familiar (mostly Happy Together and In the Mood for Love; I’ve seen 2046 but have no memory of it), is all about longing, almost entirely without any kind of physical intimacy. It’s love that exists in the brooding, in the shared looks, expressed in the lingering of presence and the acceptance of absence. Happy Together does open with a sex scene, which serves to express the once-easy intimacy of Po–Wing and Fai in comparison to the slow, backsliding dissolution of their relationship that plays out over the rest of the film. There’s nothing that explicit here, other than a brief scene of 663 and the stewardess in bed together before she takes off on one of her flights (possibly the last time they were together before a chance reunion at the same corner store where Chi-Moo buys all his pineapple, near the finale), and the director is once again exploring the yearn, even if it doesn’t initially appear to be headed in that direction. The film opens with a much more action-y style as we meet the Woman in the Wig and see her recruit several men to be her drug runners, then follows the process of them being outfitted by special tailors who create clothing designed with secret pockets and compartments as well as the creation of false documentation to allow them to travel. She takes the cadre to the airport and sees them off, then learns that she’s been double crossed and the drugs never reached their destination. She tries to extort the return of the drugs by kidnapping a child, ultimately giving up on this half-hearted attempt, which is where we leave her before we spend some time with Chi-Moo before their two stories collide. A lot of this opening action is shot using a sort of shutter effect that I assume was in vogue in action films of the time (I recently attempted to watch the 1999 Korean action flick Nowhere to Hide, which featured the same kind of photography to ramp up the action, although I couldn’t finish that one). 

This changes completely once the film pivots to its two leading yearners, Chi-Moo and (later) 663. Apparently, the script was not complete at the time that filming began, and the second segment about 663 was written in a single day, which might explain the abrupt bifurcation of the film into its two largely separate halves. As such, there’s not as much consistency throughout this one as there is in his other works that I’ve seen. They’re not unified narratively or even structurally and are instead linked solely by the emotions of Leung and Takeshi’s characters. This gives the film an effortless and breathless quality, one that wanders but does not meander. Where it most reminded me of this other work, however, was in its musical choices. As a period piece, In the Mood for Love featured a lot of classic jazz numbers, notably several performed by Nat King Cole (“You Belong To My Heart,” “Magic Is The Moonlight,” “Quizas, Quizas, Quizas,” and more), with the frequent presence of his album Cole Español serving to tell us something about the characters. Chow and Su are both Shanghainese expatriates living in the eighth decade of British rule of Hong Kong, and their blossoming (but unconsummated) romance being soundtracked by the American Cole’s album created for the Latin market creates a feeling of being untethered from any sense of place or identity but finding root in love, a language that transcends tongues. The use of “Happy Together” by The Turtles as the concluding track in the film that takes its name from the song is an ironic, or at least ambiguous, one. Po-Wing and Yiu-Fai are not happy together and have not been for a long time, and it’s apparent that they likely cannot be happy together, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t both fondly recall the (admittedly brief) times in which this was the case, and the clinging to the past is preventing either of them from moving on. 

Here, the omnipresence of “California Dreamin’” acts as Faye’s leitmotif, underlining her desire to get out and experience something more than working in her uncle’s food counter, while also expressing a melancholy about that kind of change. Notably, when she returns from her first year of being a flight attendant to visit the Mandarin Express, she finds 663 there performing renovations, as he has bought the place and is turning it into his own restaurant; while he works, he listens to The Mamas and the Papas just as she had when working the counter when he first met her. Her willingness to commit to something took her far from him, and the same temerity that she brought out in him has caused him to forge a new career and life that will anchor him to one spot. Maybe they were so different that it never could have worked. Maybe this reunion will have them find a way to compromise. We’ll never know; we can only imagine it, and I love Wong’s ongoing commitment to that kind of ambiguity. Also worth noting is that Faye Wong sings a cover of “Dreams” by The Cranberries in this one, and it’s simply beautiful. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Belle de Jour (1967)

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When writing about The Spiral Staircase, I mentioned that I was working on filling out some of the gaps in Douglas Brode’s Edge of Your Seat: The 100 Greatest Movie Thrillers. I have a few in the top twenty that I still hadn’t seen, so when deciding what to pick up at my local video store recently, I settled on Brode’s #17, Luis Buñuel’s 1967 film Belle de Jour. The title is a play on the French idiom “belle de nuit,” literally meaning beauty or lady of the night but colloquially meaning a prostitute. In Belle de Jour, Catherine Deneuve plays a woman whose repressed sexuality leads her to seeking employment with a madame, but only until 5:00pm each day, as she must get home before her husband returns from work. Hence, lady of the day. 

Séverine Serizy (Deneuve, fresh off of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg) is seemingly happily married to handsome doctor Pierre (Jean Sorel), but her inability to be intimate with him belies a deviant, vivid sexual fantasy life. On their anniversary, the two go to a ski town, where they run into Séverine’s friend Renée (Macha Méril) and her boyfriend, an acquaintance of Pierre’s named Henri Husson (Michel Piccoli), whom Pierre has no real interest in befriending and whom Séverine despises because of his constant leering at her. While the two women are out shopping, Renée reveals that another friend of theirs has recently started working as a prostitute, and Séverine is surprised to learn that whorehouses are still in operation in such a modern era. Later, Henri reveals to her the location of one such place, and out of compulsion and curiosity, Séverine finds herself there, meeting Madame Anaïs (Geneviève Page), who offers her employment. Séverine is the blonde employed alongside a redhead and a brunette also working for Anaïs, and after some initial hesitation, finds herself in demand and successful, until she finds herself entangled with the criminal Marcel (Pierre Clémenti), who refuses to accept her work/life balance, to disastrous results. 

I was disappointed with this one initially. The truth of the matter is that this isn’t really a thriller, and when you expect that going in, you should be prepared to be disappointed. Most contemporary reviews cite the film as an erotic romance, and it’s not really that, either; it’s much more surreal, and defies traditional classification. It’s not very romantic, and I didn’t find it particularly erotic either, although I understand that it probably is for some people. If you’ve somehow come to Swampflix to find out if you’re going to see some areolas in this movie, I can tell you now that the answer is “No.” Séverine’s fantasies (and there is some argument to be made as to which scenes are fantasies and which really “happened”) are of a sadomasochistic nature, largely about being bound and whipped, but it’s quite tame to the sensibilities of a modern viewer. As the film opens, Séverine and Pierre enjoy a nice countryside carriage ride, until he complains about her frigidity and has the coachmen pull the carriage over and drag her into the nearby woods, where he ties Séverine’s hands above her head and has the coachmen whip her, then tells them to have their way with her before Séverine suddenly awakens from her daydream. 

As I went into this with the notion that this was going to be a thriller, I was pre-emptively wincing at the wounds I expected to see appear on Deneuve’s bare back as she was whipped, but none appeared. That would ruin the fantasy, both for Séverine and for the audience members who are experiencing this thrill vicariously through her. But it also reveals something about her psychology, that she’s not really interested in intimacy, just into being forced into doing something. When Renée first tells her about their mutual friend’s sex work, they both shudder at the idea of not having a choice in whom they sleep with; Renée saying “It can be unpleasant enough with a man that you like,” but the shudder that runs down Séverine’s spine is different. She’s interested in what it would be like to have no choice, at least in the abstract. When it comes time to actually perform services for clients, what she imagined and the reality of the situation come crashing together, and it’s much less pleasant, especially when Henri appears at the bordello one day and insists that she give herself to him. It’s much less fun than she had hoped, even if it does open her up to finally sleeping with her long-suffering husband. 

This is far too surreal a picture to easily slot itself into a genre category. There’s no real suspense at play for most of it, as Séverine merely wanders through one escapade after another, with it being unclear just how much of it is happening only in her mind. The film is bookended by the aforementioned appearance of countryside carriage riding, as the image repeats while Séverine hears the bells on the horses and looks out her window and seems to see the carriage approaching up a country lane, despite the fact that what lies outside is an urban Parisian street. At another point in the film, a man credited as “The Duke” arrives via the same carriage (including the same coachmen as in her earlier daydreaming) and invites her to come to his home for some “work.” This turns out to be dressing in a sheer black veil that covers her entire body and lying in a coffin, where he enters and addresses her as his dear departed daughter before descending out of frame and, one implies, masturbating. There are some reviews I’ve read of this that question the reality of this sequence, which I interpret to be purely fantasy based on the reappearing coachmen, but I suppose it’s up to the individual viewer. Each of the johns that she meets is screwed up in one way or another. The world-famous gynecologist known only as “the professor” has specific demands for a scene in which the “Marquisse” whips him. One client shows up with a box that he shows the contents of to one of the other girls, which she rejects for use in their bedplay (we never learn what it is, but after his session with Séverine, there is a little blood on one of the towels in the room). Marcel, of course, is the worst, the brutish thug of a much more civilized-seeming mobster, who has a lean and hungry look to him that’s attractive despite his unkempt hygiene. He even has several gold teeth as the result of a fight, which he bears at Séverine like the Bond villain Jaws at one point. 

That surreality is what makes the film interesting, to those of whom it may be of interest. We learn nothing of Séverine’s backstory or history, with all that is revealed of her happening in two separate flashes under five seconds, one of which shows her receiving communion as a child and the other of which shows her being kissed inappropriately by an adult man. There’s also something interesting happening in the way that Henri is infatuated with Séverine and even all but sends her to Madame Anaïs, but as soon as he learns that she’s working there, his interest dries up. It reminded me of something I read of John Berger’s years ago, about sexism of an older era in which a man would paint an image of a nude woman and then “put a mirror in her hand and [call] the painting ‘Vanity.’” Henri desires the observable woman, with her lack of sexual interest and apparent virginity, but as soon as she is like the women that he can attain, he has nothing but disdain for her, and he goes from one extreme to the other without ever getting even the tiniest glimpse into her internal life. 

When returning the DVD to the video store after watching it, both of the clerks volunteering that evening asked me how I had liked it, with one of them noting that he had rented it before and then simply run out of time to watch it, while the other was disappointed to learn that I hadn’t been thrilled with it. The truth was, it simply wasn’t what I was expecting. In many ways, it is the quintessential European art film that cinephiles are often mocked for enjoying. For me, I think that I’ll be digesting this one for a long time to come, but can reasonably say that it wasn’t for me, and it’s certainly not a thriller in any meaningful way.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Beau Travail (1999)

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It’s no secret that I was no fan of Claire Denis’s High Life when I saw it nearly six years ago, but I had always heard the director’s name in conjunction with high praise for her work. Often foremost among those cited as her masterpieces is Beau Travail, a 1999 film loosely based on the (infamously unfinished) Herman Melville novel Billy Budd. And the people are right! Beau Travail is a ballet, a very simple story that plays out slowly over long tracking shots of desert topography and portraiture of stoic, unchanging faces, with very little dialogue. Instead, the narrative is composed almost entirely of internal monologue of Adjutant-Chef Galoup (Denis Lavant), as he recalls the last days he spent in Djibouti overseeing a division of the French Foreign Legion there, and the mistake that cost him his career. 

I’m going to relate to you the whole plot in this paragraph, because that’s not what’s important here, and there’s not much to it, really. In the desert, Galoup oversees a group of about fifteen Legionnaires. He has a heroic worship of his own superior, Commandant Bruno Forestier (Michel Subor), which may verge on the romantic. Galoup’s life takes a turn with the arrival of Gilles Sentain, a new young Legionnaire. Galoup takes an instant dislike to the newest member of the team, which is exacerbated when he perceives that Forestier has a fondness for Sentain. While in the field at an abandoned barracks, Galoup goads Sentain into striking him by excessively punishing another Legionnaire and kicking a canteen out of Sentain’s hands when the boy attempts to give water to the man being punished. Sentain’s own disciplinary action takes the form of being stranded in the desert and forced to walk back to camp, but Sentain’s compass has been tampered with, and he becomes lost and apparently dies. Although most assume that Sentain simply deserted, a common practice among Legionnaires, Forestier nonetheless sends Galoup back to France to face court martial and dismissal for his actions; back in Marseille, Galoup recollects the events that we have just witnessed while demonstrating that he cannot shake the habits of a soldier, and the film ends ambiguously as Galoup dances alone in an empty nightclub. 

Beau Travail is a film about ambiguity. We know next to nothing about Galoup’s past, so everything that we learn about him is delivered through his narration, which is clearly not always reliable. Discussing his relationship with Forestier first, it’s clear that Galoup is, or at least was, in love with him at some point in time, but my interpretation is that there probably was some kind of sexual relationship in the past in which Galoup was more emotionally invested. He narrates that the commandant never confided in him, but he does so while lovingly coaxing a memento: a bracelet inscribed Bruno. This aligns with my interpretation of the scene between Forestier and Sentain while the latter is on night watch (one of very few scenes in which Galoup is not present to witness what is otherwise a fairly straightforward first-person perspective on his part). Forestier seems flirty with the twenty-two-year-old and beautiful Sentain, from which I infer that Forestier occasionally latches onto young and handsome recruits, with Galoup having been one of his previous conquests/victims, with Galoup still harboring feelings for the commandant. 

None of this is explicit, however, and there’s a great deal left up to interpretation. Their relationship could very easily be the purely professional one that we actually witness onscreen, and it’s entirely possible that the scene in which Forestier coyly interacts with Sentain happened entirely in Galoup’s imagination. The departure from the “Galoup’s perspective” format could be implying this; even though he isn’t present in the scene, this is still his story, it’s just one that’s created by him rather than one that is being recalled. That’s another level of the film’s ambiguity, as much of it plays out as if what we’re seeing is the truth while what we’re hearing are Galoup’s internal rationalizations and judgments. In nothing that we see does Sentain do anything to earn Galoup’s scorn, we are merely told that Sentain was inordinately popular with the other Legionnaires, and we are told that Sentain goads Galoup. Yet there are other large sections of the film in which what we’re seeing feels more representational, most notably the various choreographed exercises that the Legionnaires do, glistening beneath the hot African sun. They are more dance than training, and there’s one sequence in which the group is doing a series of stretches which ends with all of them in a position that makes them appear dead, the camera winding about slowly to ensure we see the entire squad in a synchronized death pose. Are these scenes “real”? Why does Galoup go out one night in his uniform but is in his all-black civvies the next morning when he encounters the other Legionnaires? The reality being conveyed here isn’t important, the truth is, at least as far as what’s true for Galoup. 

As we catch up narratively to Galoup back home in Marseille, we see that the man may leave the military but the military does not leave the man. He irons his civilian clothing to a perfectly crisp press and in the penultimate scene makes his bed with the precision of man who’s faced inspection. Once this is complete, he sets his pistol next to the bed and lies down on it, the camera passing over his chest tattoo which reads “”Sert la bonne cause et meurt” (“Serve the good cause and die”) before finally closing in on a pulsing vein in his bicep that feels ominous, as if we are waiting for that movement to stop. Instead, the film cuts to Galoup in a nightclub. We know that he’s alone as he stands before a wall of diamond shaped mirrors, beveled at the edges, which we’ve seen a few times throughout the film, as through starts and fits, he dances alone to “Rhythm of the Night.” I thought that the mirrored wall was in the club in Djibouti, which would imply that this is a dream sequence, but is it? Or does Galoup just fill in the details with the familiar when his memory fails him? Did he kill himself, or is he finally just loosening up? I couldn’t tell you; I can only convey my interpretation, and it would be better for you to find this one and let it wash over you so that you can make your own judgments. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Quadrophenia (1979)

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I’ve never fully understood where Quadrophenia fits in the grand rock ‘n’ roll continuum. A love-letter to the Mod craze among UK rockers in the 1960s, it was made in a time when that fad’s clean-cut, tailored look had already been nostalgically reclaimed by British punk acts like The Damned. As a result, it’s difficult to tell whether some of the jerky, pogo-style dance moves the Mod kids pull in the film are period-accurate to 1960s rock shows, or if the punks filling out the crowd scenes were bringing some contemporary energy to the production that blurred those temporal boundaries. It’s just as likely the teenage reprobates of both eras happened to dance like that because they were on the same drugs—namely, a combination of cheap beer & stolen amphetamines—so it’s an impossible distinction to make. The project was strangely out of sync with itself since the point of conception, though, considering that it’s a bloated stadium-rock opera adapted from a concept album by The Who at their most overwrought, but it’s set in a time when The Who were a definitive force of ramshackle, no-frills rock ‘n’ roll. One of the most iconic scenes in the film features a Mods-only house party in which the entire crowd erupts into chaos when someone spins The Who’s proto-punk classic “My Generation” on the turntable, which is in disorienting aural contrast to the sleepier, sappier Who tunes that score the soundtrack proper. It’s a picture entirely out of time, evenly split between its setting and the era when it was made. That usually is the case with period pieces, but the ever-evolving trends & deviations of rock ‘n’ roll just makes the dissonance ring even louder than usual.

Perusing the extra features of the Criterion DVD copy of Quadrophenia I recently found at a Public Library liquidation sale, it seems that being out-of-sync with current rock ‘n’ roll trends was inherent to the Mod subculture from the start. Distinguished by their tailored suits, their rejection of early-50s rock ‘n’ roll, and their choice to ride motorized scooters instead of roadster motorbikes, Mods were in direct, violent opposition with the macho, leather-jacketed rockers that kept older rock traditions alive in the years before glam & punk changed everything. In addition to the usual talking-head interviews with the filmmakers, the Criterion discs include several French television news reports about these violent clashes, justifying the film’s third-act, beachside gang war with extratextual evidence that the two subcultures’ rumble was relatively credible to real-life events. However, what struck me most about those news reports was the culturally scattered, postmodern nature of their very existence. Here we have archived broadcasts from French journalists who are fascinated with the hard-edged lifestyle of British teens whose obsession with Italian fashion has spawned a newly mutated subspecies of American rock ‘n’ roll. The French reporters land a few zingers against Mod culture as a “new dandyism” that contextualizes it within older traditions of British counterculture. The postmodern multi-nationality of the phenomenon added an entirely new layer to rock ‘n’ roll cultural identity, though, whereas the motorcycle-riding rockers that the Mods clashed against were only one layer deep, idolizing American rock & fashion from earlier decades.

Appropriately, the strung-out protagonist who guides our tour through the Mods vs Rockers moment of the then-recent past is, himself, out of sync with the world around him. Phil Daniels stars as Jimmy Cooper, a pill-popping teenage Mod who can barely hold onto his entry-level mailroom job because he spends all of his nights sweating through his suits and jumping around to rock ‘n’ roll music with his dirtbag friends. Jimmy is constantly on the search for drugs he cannot find and cannot afford. He’s constantly crushing on a girl who’s only looking for a bit of fun, while constantly ignoring the flirtations of the other girl who actually wants him back. His desperation for Mod-scene notoriety (mostly so he can land his dream girl) only manifests in useless acts of teenage rebellion, like dragging his scooter through more uptight Brits’ flowerbeds, until he’s really given a chance to shine at a town-wide gang fight with rockers that ends in mass arrest. Only, when he’s released from jail, he’s found that his moment of fame was fleeting, his dream girl has already moved on, and the drugs are starting to weigh heavily on his fragile, hormone-addled psyche. In an early, telling scene he has a loud argument about music tastes with a rocker at the local baths (heads up for anyone who’d like to catch a glimpse of a young Ray Winstone’s cock & balls) that ends with the opposing Mod & rocker realizing that they were childhood friends, and there’s no substantial difference between them once stripped of their respective paraphernalia. The tragedy of the film is that Jimmy wants that subcultural distinction to signify a substantial difference between them; he relies on Mod-culture insignia to give his days & persona meaning, only to inevitably find it another empty frivolity, just like everything else in life.

Of course, Quadrophenia itself became a cultural touchstone to be disseminated in the great rock ‘n’ roll diaspora. The reviews & marketing for Jon Moritsugu’s 1994 punk-scene whatsit Mod Fuck Explosion reference West Side Story as the source of inspiration for its fictional gang war, but since the gangs in those films are the titular scooter-riding Mods vs. motorcycle-riding rock ‘n’ rollers, it’s a lot more likely Mortisugu was pulling directly (and cheekily) from The Who’s rock opera. So, there you have a snotty 90s-punk reiteration of a 70s-punk echo of a 60s-rock fad that split from 50s-rocker roots. It’s an out-of-sync rock cinema tradition you’ll find in other beloved period pieces like American Graffiti, Velvet Goldmine, and 24 Hour Party People — all precariously balanced between the eras they depict and the eras in which they were made. If there’s anything positive to glean from that temporal precarity, it’s the overall sense that rock ‘n’ roll never dies; it just tries on different silly outfits from time to time. The Mods’ outfits just happened to be sillier than most. I mean, who wears a tailored suit to a punk show?

-Brandon Ledet

Vision Quest (1985)

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The 1985 high school sports drama Vision Quest has exactly one attention-grabbing detail that argues for its continued cultural relevance four decades later: a mid-film Madonna concert. About halfway through his rise-to-local-notoriety story, the film’s high school wrestling hero (Matthew Modine) meets with his age-inappropriate romantic crush (Linda Florentino) at a dive bar where Madonna happens to be performing to a small crowd as if she were a punk act and not, in fact, an international pop star. At the time of casting & filming, Madonna was just one of many 80s pop acts included on the soundtrack to signal hip, with-it tastes to the teenage target demo: Journey, Dio, Berlin, Tangerine Dream, etc. By the time Vision Quest hit theaters, however, Madonna’s fame had exploded, and she was already a generational style-icon, prompting the film to be marketed under the alternate title Crazy for You in multiple countries outside the US. Italian distributors even featured her image on the retitled film’s poster, despite her commanding only two minutes or so of onscreen performance time. Madonna sings two songs in that brief sequence: a godawful tune I’ve never heard before called “Gambler” and the semi-titular hit “Crazy for You,” which later replays anytime the romantically conflicted wrestler gets in his feelings. Still, it was the notoriously cinephilic pop star’s first motion-picture appearance, which does afford it a lasting cultural significance.

Madonna aside, it’s worth noting that Vision Quest is a very good movie. It may walk & talk like a corny, cliché sports drama, but it finds surprising complexity & nuance in every character beat that elevates it above formulaic tripe. Modine’s troubled-young-man protagonist might think he’s struggling to get his body in shape to become a legendary high school wrestler, but he’s really struggling to get his mind in shape so that he doesn’t become a bully with an eating disorder. The 18-year-old kid is caught between two all-consuming pursuits: cutting weight so he can qualify to wrestle the county’s most intimidating competitor (the relatively unknown Frank Jasper) and losing his virginity to the 21-year-old drifter who’s temporarily staying in his family’s spare room (Florentino). Neither goal is especially high-stakes. The mutant teen he desperately wants to wrestle will lead to no championship trophies or financial scholarships; it’s an entirely arbitrary, self-imposed metric for greatness. Likewise, the mildly taboo Age Gap relationship he pursues with the drifter is not his only sexual or romantic opportunity (he is a sweetheart jock, after all), but he’s still so obsessed with the self-imposed goal that he starts to consider a professional career in gynecology so he can “be able to look inside women, to find the power they have over [him].” The only thing at stake in these pursuits are his own mind & body. Will he permanently harm himself in order to temporarily drop a couple weight classes for a wrestling match that ultimately doesn’t “matter”? Will he become a manipulative fuckboy in his frustrated yearning over the more sexually casual, mature drifter? These are not world-changing consequences, but they are life-changing ones.

As with all great genre films, it’s not what happens in Vision Quest that makes it stand out from its easiest comparisons; its greatness is all in the delivery. Modine does a great job playing a friendly, ambitious young man who’s in danger of becoming a dipshit if he allows his ambitions to overpower his friendliness. Most of his dialogue is delivered as shy muttering, which makes him a more convincingly authentic Movie Teen than most. Florentino conveys a laidback, detached sultriness as the (relatively) Older Woman archetype, a quality that her younger lover provocatively describes as exemplifying everything he likes about girls and everything he likes about guys. Even all of the obligatory gay-panic moments required of an 80s teen drama about male wrestlers are handled with surprising nuance & complexity, with Modine only describing himself feeling “a little freaked” by homosexual advances, not violently furious. More importantly, his older, grizzled coworker in a small hotel’s room service kitchen (J.C. Quinn) delivers a convincing argument that the climactic wrestling match does serve a greater communal purpose outside its importance to the teen’s self-worth. He describes sports as a divine transcendence of the human form, arguing that when an athlete can “lift himself, and the rest of us sad-assed human beings, up to a better place to be, if only for a minute […] it’s pretty goddamn glorious.” It’s such a great speech about the communal ritual of Sports that it doesn’t matter that the film ends on a hack freeze-frame image of the wrestler’s moment of personal triumph (or that Madonna’s prominence on the poster is a lie). It’s a conventional story told with great emotional impact.

-Brandon Ledet 

The Unbelievable Truth (1989)

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Hal Hartley’s The Unbelievable Truth is an interesting picture. Robert Burke plays Josh Hutton, a man who returns to his hometown after serving a prison sentence. The truth of what actually happened in the past is something that the film builds to while we in the audience hear various different versions of events passed around as gossip, but all retellings place the blame on Josh for the deaths of his girlfriend and her father. Said deceased are survived only by a young woman named Pearl (Julia McNeal), who works as a waitress in a diner alongside Jane (Edie Falco). Pearl is friends with our other lead, Audry (frequent Hartley collaborator Adrienne Shelly), a high school senior full of relatable angst about the presumed imminent end of the world in nuclear fire; as she says, “the human race never invented anything that it didn’t use.” This existential dread is a counterpoint to the Gen-X apathy of her peers, other than Pearl, whose own childhood tragedies have given her a resilience that tempers her. Josh reappears in town and quickly gets a job working for Audry’s mechanic father Vic (Christopher Cooke), who is frequently at odds with his daughter about her plans for the future. She’s been accepted to Harvard, but she and Vic constantly bargain over whether she will attend that university or the local community college, or if she will study literature or broadcasting, and what promises Vic has to make in order to get her to compromise. 

Audry and Josh meet and there is an immediate connection. Both are separated from the community around them, with her as the philosophically inclined old soul and him as the misunderstood loner with a troubled past who loves reading about history. At her graduation party, Vic is talked into paying for a portfolio of photographs for Audry by an agent, and although this initially seems to be nothing but a con, Audry finds work quickly and often. She’s upset that Josh didn’t come to the party, but she and Pearl spend some time together and Pearl admits that she thinks Josh is a nice man despite her family’s history with him and gives Audry the go-ahead to pursue him. Josh, for his part, lives ascetically, dressing all in black like Johnny Cash when he’s not in his mechanic overalls, living in his father’s abandoned house, and abstaining from drinking. This results in him being compared to a member of the cloth multiple times, as his celibacy prompts fellow mechanic Mike (Mark Bailey) to ask him, aghast, “like a priest?” and still later, when Josh asks that Audry not call him “Mr. Hutton,” she counters that she feels like she should call him “Reverend.” Vic isn’t happy to learn about this budding romance and forbids the two from seeing each other, once again bargaining with her about her future and what he’s willing to pay for and what he expects in return (namely that she’ll proceed to go to college as promised after her modeling gap year, and in return he won’t fire Josh). When Audry ends up in a jewelry ad that features her in the nude, Vic is convinced by Mike that Josh is reliable, and thus sends him into the city to bring Audry home. 

Released in 1989, The Unbelievable Truth reminds one in some ways of another alliteratively named director’s teenage romance angst film, Cameron Crowe’s Say Anything. Our main character is an oddball, like Lloyd Dobbler, except this time she’s a teenage girl, and what isolates her from her peer group is her resignation to her absolute faith that the apocalypse draws nigh. She’s precocious and bright, but her certainty about the uncertainty of the future means that the moment that she’s given the chance to live in the moment by making decent money as a model, she gets distracted from all of the gloom and doom; this is epitomized when she tells Pearl that she doesn’t even keep up with the news anymore. She’s the one who pursues Josh, not the other way around, and he really only seems to entertain the idea of entering into something romantic with her once she’s matured from experiencing more of the world outside of the suburbs that she’s always known. It’s unclear just how old Josh is, but Burke manages a way to convey both a world-weariness from his time in prison as well as a kind of innocence that he’s managed to maintain a hold on. Audry’s mother tells her a version of the story of Josh’s guilt and when Audry questions it, she says that the girl was too young to remember, but other dialogue implies that Audry was an infant at the time. One gets the feeling that more attention was paid to imagery than to those little details (or the dialogue for that matter). 

Another film that this one draws to mind is the 1990s Winona Ryder vehicle Reality Bites, as few other films lean so hard into Gen-X disaffection. The problem is that, when viewed by a modern audience, Reality Bites presents a main couple who both struggle with “selling out” into a lifestyle that is very appealing to anyone of the same age as the characters in every generation since. As Lindsay Ellis put it in one of her video essays years ago, everything is so much worse now, and, in the time since that essay’s release, there has been no further improvement in, uh, anything. Somehow, despite having the same sort of spoiled-for-choice opportunities, Audry remains likable and grounded, and we empathize with her early adulthood ennui and the altering states of being (a) panicked about preparing for a future and (b) resigned to the fact that there is no future. It may just be that Shelly is simply that likeable, like Lloyd Dobler and his boombox. 

Stylistically, there’s fun being had here. Having watched several of Hartley’s short films prior to sitting down to this one, I think I was prepared for this to be a film that would, in a scene in which Audry and Josh discuss their passions, be more focused on the images on screen than the dialogue. There are some great performances in scenes between the two, but they appear so sporadically, sprinkled in among scenes where the two monologue at each other with snippets of poetic-sounding but meaningless phrases. Half of these exist in order to provide a reason for some tableau that Hartley has created rather than because they provide further insight into character. This is a mixed bag. But Burke and Shelly sell it, even when it shouldn’t work, and that can also be owed to the presence of the mystery of Josh’s past helps keep the gears moving even when things start to feel like they’re running in place. 

Although nothing in the film made me laugh out loud, it has a decent sense of humor. Much of the repartee is pretty good, and it works with these actors. Cooke’s performance as Vic and all the ways that he deludes himself or gets talked into things make him more fun than his curmudgeonly nature would imply. There’s also a pretty good recurring bit where Audry’s ex-boyfriend Emmet (Gary Sauer) keeps physically attacking every man that he sees in Audry’s proximity, as he can’t believe that she would leave him for any other reason than that there is another man. There are interstitials to represent time passing (“A month, maybe two months later”) and as an interjection (“also,” “but”) which feel just irreverent enough for an indie like this. A lot of the jokes read as if they would come off a little too campy if the film weren’t taking itself mostly seriously. For example: 

Audry: Did you make love to Josh?”
Pearl: No, did you?
Audry: No.
Pearl: Why not?
Audry: I just got here.

On the page, there’s something about that which reads like a joke from Clue, but it’s delivered here in a way that elicits a smile but not quite a laugh. Perhaps the best bit, however, occurs when everyone converges on Josh’s house in the finale for various different reasons, converting the film into a bit of a farce for a while. Pearl has information that could help Josh, Audry has realized that Josh came to New York to look for her and has the wrong idea about her living situation, Vic seeks to confirm that Josh was able to get her back, and Mike is looking for Pearl. It’s fun, and the wrap-up from there is sweet. 

I’m not sure that I would recommend this to everyone. The back-and-forth can run on quite a bit sometimes, but it ultimately averages out to be a very lovely movie that will sit on a shelf in your mind and give you warm feelings for a long time to come. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Conformist (1970)

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When I think of movies about The Banality of Evil, I generally expect them to be a little, well, banal. The reason The Zone of Interest is such an effectively chilling picture, for instance, is that its visual patina and its editing rhythms are just as coldly impersonal as its Nazi ghouls. It’s framed as automated security-cam footage, documenting the domestic & bureaucratic rituals behind Nazi violence, while Holocaust victims ambiently scream in agony on the opposite side of the garden wall. Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1970 spy thriller The Conformist takes the opposite approach. The Italo-French co-production is mostly staged in cold, clinical spaces, but its minimalist mise-en-scène is more akin to the fine-art production design of Last Year at Marienbad than anything credibly bureaucratic. The women in its cast model gorgeous 1930s Euro fashions, while the men in their lives dress in full Old Hollywood noir costume, segmented by the graphic parallel lines of Venetian blinds. Driving cars are shot in a wide angle from street level, as if Bertolucci was the main inspiration for Beastie Boys music videos to follow. The rear-projection imagery of train rides are pure Old Hollywood magic, reaching more for pop-art abstraction than real-world novelty. There’s something outright perverse in making a movie about The Banality of Evil so aggressively stylish & beautiful. Somehow, though, that approach doesn’t even register as one of the top-five most perverse things about the picture.

If Bertolucci was trying to make a point by making his Banality of Evil treatise so achingly beautiful & cool (besides attempting to make a name for himself as an up-and-coming auteur), it’s that the Banality itself is contrary to basic human behavior. Our antihero protagonist Marcello Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant) is an undercover assassin struggling to complete his most recent mission because he falls in love with his target’s bisexual wife, likely because he recognizes a mutual queer sexuality in her that lingers in his own persona. However, as the title indicates, he spends his every waking moment suppressing anything about himself that could be read as morally deviant, mostly in response to the childhood trauma of being raised by mentally ill parents and being sexually assaulted by an adult stranger. Marcello volunteers to become an assassin-spy for Mussolini’s Italo-fascist regime, seeking to squash all moral deviancy in others’ behaviors instead of just focusing on his own. When a former professor & mentor (and current political target) accuses him of asserting his conformist moralism “through oppression,” he counters that he’s actually asserting it “through example,” which is so much stranger and more perverse. Fascists don’t usually buy into the restrictive morals they enforce on the masses, at least not behind closed doors. Clerici is the one true believer in fascist bullshit, seeking the ideal of normalcy in a world where it fundamentally can’t exist.

Clerici’s rigid, moralistic worldview is constantly subverted by the animalistic sexual desires & behaviors of every human being he comes into contact with, including himself. The main thrust of the story concerns a semi-requited love triangle with his friend-turned-target’s wife while she torments him by sexually pursuing his own wife, who is too blissfully ditzy to keep up with the dangerous game being played. The tensions & revelations of that sexual competition ultimately have no effect on his actions in the field, since he’s pathologically predisposed to do What He’s Supposed to Do. The only reason he married a woman he doesn’t love is because a man his age is supposed to be married. Likewise, there’s never really any question of whether he will follow through on violently betraying his former mentor; he loves following orders. The Conformist posits Evil Banality as a participatory choice.  It’s something that fascists consciously opt into, as opposed to getting swept up in the momentum of a political movement. Bertolucci undercuts any of the spy-thriller conventions of the story to instead dwell on how inhumanly strange that choice is, allowing editor Franco Arcalli to scramble the timeline with a disorienting, overlapping flashback structure. It’s ultimately a hyper-stylized character study of a deeply perverse man, one whose single-minded pursuit of normal human behavior makes him the most abnormal freak walking the planet. Meanwhile, everyone around him is just trying to enjoy a few orgasms before they die, which is the way things are supposed to be.

-Brandon Ledet