Welcome to Episode #227 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Hanna, James, Britnee and Brandon discuss a grab bag of movies about women who reinvent themselves with made-up identities, starting with the 1966 Lana Turner drama Madame X.
00:00 Welcome
01:31 Hot Frosty (2024) 05:25 Mother’s Instinct (2024) 07:33 Endless Love (1981) 11:22 My Old Ass (2024) 18:30 Out of the Blue (1980) 24:16 The 36th Chamber of Shaolin (1978)
31:00 Madame X (1966) 55:00 A Woman’s Face (1938) 1:12:22 Sleeping with the Enemy (1991) 1:30:07 The Last Seduction (1994)
Sean Baker’s time is here. After nailing down his gig-labor docufiction style in the 2004 food-delivery tragedy Take Out and then applying it to a long string of sex-industry dramas in the couple decades since, Baker has finally earned his moment in the prestige-circuit spotlight. Earlier breakthroughs like Tangerine& The Florida Project perfectly calibrated his caustically funny, soberingly traumatic storytelling style in his best work to date, but he emerged from those triumphs recognized as a name to watch rather than one of the modern greats. He’s been recalibrating in the years since, going full heel in his deliberately unlovable black comedy Red Rocket before face-turning to the opposite extreme in his latest work, Anora. Clearly, Baker has decided he wants audiences to love him again, and it’s impressive to see him swing so wildly in tone between his last two features without losing his voice. Anora is the feel-good sweet counterbalance to the feel-bad sour Sean Baker of Red Rocket. Both are equally funny & frantic, but only one is affable enough to set the filmmaker up for a Best-Picture Oscar run after taking home the top prize at Cannes. It’s his time.
The surprising thing about Anora’s critical success is that it’s such a dutiful continuation of the work Baker’s already been doing for years – just with an extra dash of sugar to help sweeten the bitter. Mikey Madison stars as the titular erotic dancer, another trapped-by-capitalism sex worker in a long tradition of Sean Baker anti-heroines dating at least as far back as 2012’s Starlet. Anora is a thorny, chaotic, unfiltered baddie whom the audience instantly loves for her faults, because she’s fun to be around. Like in Tangerine & The Florida Project, we meet her working customers in a high-stress but manageable profession, then follow her on an anarchic journey through her larger urban community, walking a tightrope between slapstick physical comedy & face-slap physical violence until she’s offered a moment of grace in the final beat. As the editor, Baker has worked out a well-timed rhythm for this story template through its many repetitions in previous works. He sweeps the audience up in the hedonistic romance of Anora’s Vegas-strip marriage to a big-spender Russian brat who offers a Cinderellic escape from the strip club circuit in exchange for helping secure a green card. The quick-edit montage of that fantasy then slows down to linger on its real-world fallout, investing increasingly long, painful stretches of time on Russian gangsters’ retribution for the young couple generating tabloid headlines that embarrass the brat’s oligarch father. The laughs continue to roll in, but the punchlines (and physical punches) get more brutal with each impact until it just isn’t fun anymore, as is the Sean Baker way.
There’s nothing especially revelatory about the Sean Baker formula in Anora. In the context of his filmography, it’s just more of the same (of a very good thing). However, the increased attention to his career-long project as an auteur has had its immediate benefits, not least of all in Baker’s collaboration with the local repertory series Gap Tooth Cinema (formerly known as Wildwood). When asked to program a screening for Gap Tooth as a primer for what he was aiming to achieve in Anora, Baker offered three titles as options: Fellini’s Oscar-winning sex worker drama Nights of Cabiria, the fish-out-of-water Eddie Murphy comedy Coming to America, and a second Italian sex-work story in 1960’s Adua and Her Friends. Gap Tooth ultimately selected Adua, the most obscure title of the trio and, more importantly, one of the very best titles they’ve screened to date. I don’t know that Sean Baker’s name would have come to mind had I discovered Adua and Her Friends in a different context, since it’s a much more formally polished picture than the anarchic comedies he’s become known for since he filmed Tangerine on an iPhone. The comparisons that more readily came to mind were Mildred Pierce, Volver, and The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. It’s a less recognizable title than any of those comparisons, but that’s the only way in which it’s lesser. It’s an incredibly stylish, sexy, tragic, and cool story of self-reinvented sex workers making do in late-50s Italy, one that speaks well to Baker’s genuine interest in his characters’ inner lives beyond what they symbolize as society’s economic casualties.
Adua and Her Friends is a darkly comic drama about a small crew of sex workers who are forcibly retired by the Merlin Law of 1958, which ceased the legal operation of all Italian brothels. Unsure how to get by without the only trade they have experience in, the women conspire to open a rural, roadside restaurant as a front for a new, illegal brothel they will run themselves. Only, after a few successful months of food service—depicted as being equally difficult as prostitution—they decide they’d rather “go straight” in their new business than convert it into an underground brothel. As you’d expect, the self-reinvented women’s lives as restaurateurs are upended by men from their past that refuse to let them start fresh, the same way Anora is blocked from upgrading her social position from escort to wife. Where Adua excels is in taking the time to flesh out the inner lives & conflicts of each woman in its main cast. Lolita is led astray by conmen who take advantage of her youthful naivete; Marilina struggles to reestablish a familial relationship with her estranged son; Milly hopes to leave her past behind and start over as a devoted housewife, Anora-style. Adua (Oscar-winner Simone Signoret) gets the first & final word in her struggle to establish a new career before she ages out of her livelihood, but the movie is an ensemble-cast melodrama at heart, asking you to love, laugh with, and weep for every woman at the roadside restaurant (and to hiss at the cads who selfishly ruin it all).
Much like in Baker’s films, the majority of Adua and Her Friends is a surprisingly good time, with plenty slapstick gags & irreverently bawdy jokes undercutting the hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold tropes typical to this subject. Like Anora, it’s a 2+ hour comedy with an emotionally devastating ending, one that carefully avoids making its titular sex worker a purely pitiable symbol of societal cruelty even while acknowledging that she’s backed into a pretty shitty corner. Adua and Anora can be plenty cruel themselves when it helps their day-to-day survival. That might be where the two films’ overlapping interests end, since Adua lounges in a much more relaxed hangout vibe than Anora, scored by repetitions of Santo & Johnny’s “Sleepwalk” rather than t.A.T.u.’s “All the Things She Said.” Adua and her friends loiter around their Italian villa, fanning themselves in a deep-focus tableau, while Anora is dragged around Vegas & NYC by Russian mobsters who (for the most part) don’t see her as a human being. There is one early sequence in Adua where a black-out drunken night is represented in choppy lost-time edits that may have been an influence on the rhythms of Anora’s first act, but otherwise I assume Baker was inspired less by the film’s formal style than he was by the characterizations of its main cast. The frank, sincere, humanizing approach to sex-worker portraiture in Adua and Her Friends speaks well to Sean Baker’s continued interest in sex-work as a cinematic subject and, although both were great, I feel like I learned more about his work through its presentation than I did by watching his latest film.
In the opening scene of Rungano Nyoni’s On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, a young woman dressed as Missy “Supa Dupa Fly” Elliott drives alone on an unlit Zambian highway, abruptly pausing to inspect a dead body in the road. Remaining in costume, she makes several nonchalant phone calls to family, notifying them that she has discovered the corpse of her Uncle Fred. No one seems to be in a particular rush to help, and she’s reluctantly roped into the petty concerns of her party-drunk father, her more belligerently drunk cousin, her absent mother, and a police force that can’t arrive until morning because their one vehicle is already in use. It’s only after Uncle Fred is scooped off the road in the morning hours that she can finally take off her comically oversized Missy Elliott costume and return to her regular self as the prodigal urbanite daughter, Shula (Susan Chardy). Uncle Fred is also stripped of his costume in those daylight hours, as the sins of his living days are revealed by stripping away the respectability afforded to all corpses at their own funeral. We quickly understand why Shula met Uncle Fred’s death with such an icy, deadpan detachment, and by then the joke isn’t funny anymore.
On Becoming a Guinea Fowl starts on a sharp streak of morbid humor, then gets increasingly nauseating the deeper it digs into the Patriarchal sins it unearths, which is also how I remember Nyoni’s debut, I Am Not a Witch. It’s a film about the value of a whisper network, likening its titular bird’s usefulness on African savannahs as a warning-signal for nearby animals that a predator is approaching to women who warn each other of a nearby sexual predator’s potential to harm. The problem, of course, is that guinea fowl’s usefulness to other animals does little to save their own hides, as they presumably squawk their way into being eaten while everyone else scurries away. We come to learn that Uncle Fred left many victims in his wake, notoriously preying on underage girls in his family & community with no consequences, since the advice his victims are given by their matron elders is “Don’t think about it, and don’t talk about it.” There’s no real way to hold the now-dead man accountable, but Shula becomes increasingly uncomfortable with the idea that his crimes against his own people should go undiscussed, and she subtly, gradually takes on the behaviors of a guinea fowl the longer his sham of a funeral drags on. Maybe she can be a useful warning to others about the dangers of men like Fred; or maybe her animal noises of protest will only separate her out as a target for more cruelty.
Besides the gender politics of Shula’s quiet resistance to her family’s loving memory of Uncle Fred, Guinea Fowl is most engaging as an alienating look at Zambian funeral rituals. Every aspect of Uncle Fred’s days-long funeral is seemingly designed to trigger Shula: her required presence, the women’s critique of each other’s crying techniques, the men outside who drink beer in wait of the women in the home to feed them after they perform the labor of mourning, the world-class victim-blaming of Uncle Fred’s teenage widow for failing to keep him alive, etc. Meanwhile, Shula’s relationship with reality unravels as she dissociates from the absurd celebration of such a wicked man. Her dreams & memories become increasingly intrusive, interrupting the flow of the narrative with images of her younger self observing Uncle Fred’s body, images of that body resurrected and covered in maxi pads, and vintage 1990s broadcasts of children’s television shows detailing the natural behaviors of the guinea fowl. Those intrusions call into question the real-world credibility of other details like the floodwater floors of a local university or the music-video pool party atmosphere of the local library. The film never fully tips into the fantasy realm, though; it just precariously teeters on the edge between worlds as Shula calculates what to do with her voice as one of Uncle Fred’s surviving victims.
On Becoming a Guinea Fowl locally premiered at this year’s New Orleans Film Festival, where it was initially met with the soft laughter of recognition until the room went coldly silent the more we all realized what kind of story we were watching. It’s an especially tough watch if you belong to a family that stubbornly ignores its worst members’ most heinous crimes for the sake of social politeness, which I assume accounts for just about everyone. And if it doesn’t, please know that I am jealous.
For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer and Alli discuss Charlie Kaufman’s writer’s-block anxiety thriller Adaptation (2002), starring Nicolas Cage & Meryl Streep.
One of my weaknesses as a critical thinker is that I’m pathetically vulnerable to enjoying movies about how great The Movies are, from nostalgic recreations of large-scale Old Hollywood spectacles in movies like Hail, Caesar!to comedic takes on scrappy D.I.Y. communal filmmaking in low-budget genre trash like One Cut of the Dead. I even choke up during those hokey little Magic of the Movies montages that everyone else complains about during Oscars broadcasts every year. The same goes for poems about poetry and rock songs about rocking out. The creation of art ranks highly among the few worthy things you can do with your brief time on this planet, so it deserves to be the subject of that art just as much as the few other go-to subjects of every other song, poem, and movie out there (mainly God, sex, and death). So, I’m less willing than most movie-obsessed cynics to roll my eyes when Oscar voters award top prizes to love-letter-to-cinema movies about The Movies. I totally understand the impulse. The cool, hip opinion to have is that Jean-Luc Godard’s poison-penned hate letters to cinema like The Image Book are much worthier of time and study than his intellectual frenemy François Truffaut’s magic-of-moviemaking dramedy Day for Night, because they are more challenging in their observation & interrogation of the medium. The thing is, though, that as intellectually lazy as it may be, it feels much better to celebrate than to challenge, especially when the subject is as wonderful as the art of the moving image. If my two choices as a cinephile are to be corny or self-loathing, I’m perfectly fine being corny.
Director François Truffaut stars in Day for Night as a François Truffaut-type director, lording over the film shoot of a mediocre-looking melodrama titled Meet Pamela. The metatextual joke of the movie is that there’s nothing as dramatic nor exciting in the narrative of Meet Pamela as the drama & excitement of its production. As the auteur du jour, Truffaut is responsible for guiding the decision-making of hundreds of cast & crew members, who bombard him with random, dissonant either/or questions as he attempts to funnel their chaotic input into a single, coherent picture. The bigger personalities he struggles to manage are, of course, his actors, who include Fellini collaborator Valentina Cortese as a has-been drunk who refuses to learn her cues and longtime Truffaut muse Jean-Pierre Léaud as a “spoiled brat who will not grow up,” always angling to go to the movies instead of making one. Newcomer chanteuse Dani also makes a star-making impact as the level-headed script girl who puts out the fires Truffaut himself does not notice, simply because she’s a true believer in the cause of Cinema. Explaining her passion for the medium above all else, she sweetly declares “I’d drop a guy for a film. I’d never drop a film for a guy.” True to the nature of real-life film production, most of the drama between these players occurs during the punishing rhythm of having to get multiple takes until a scene fully works or during the punishing boredom of time spent on set waiting around for those takes to be fully set up. It’s essentially an ensemble cast comedy set in a hyper-specific industry & locale, made by the people who know that industry better than anyone else in the world.
Where Day for Night becomes a transcendent piece of art in its own right (rather than just an appreciation for the transcendent nature of art) is in the sweeping montages when all of these chaotic personalities are overpowered by the momentum of the production, and everything fall exactly into place. The behind-the-camera busyness of the set is drowned out by heavy orchestration on the soundtrack, relaxing all tension & frustration with the stop-and-start repetition of filming a scene to instead ease into the flow of a shooting day where everything goes exactly right. Given how many different, opposing people it takes to make a professional movie, it’s a miracle every time one is completed, let alone is any good. Truffaut digs deep into the mechanics of how movies are made, to the point where it’s likely Day for Night was many people’s first instance of hearing the terms “headshots,” “pans,” “rushes,” and “reshoots” outside of the trades. You can tell that those practical details aren’t as interesting to him as the poetry that they produce, though, especially in scenes where he doesn’t bother hiding the shadow of the crane-shot camera crew shooting the fictional camera crew of the movie-within-the movie. He puts a lot more care & effort into displaying a reading list of film books on the great auteurs, proudly displaying names like Dreyer, Bergman, and Buñuel for the camera while romantic orchestrations swells. The only sequence where this mechanics-vs-poetry dynamic is flipped is the opener, where an extensive tracking shot full of life & wonder is revealed to be a movie-within-the-movie fake-out and is then broken down into individual, choreographed components through multiple takes. Otherwise, it works the other way around; the mechanics come before the poetry.
I can only think of two instances in Day for Night wherein Truffaut becomes noticeably cynical about his craft. The major one is in Léaud’s characterization as a petulant child who refuses to grow up, treating women as either caretakers or playthings depending on his scene-to-scene whims. It’s very much the same fuckboy posturing that he displays in The Mother and the Whore, and both instances feel like a knowing commentary on the sexual & moral immaturity of Léaud’s generation, since he had become a kind of living mascot for The French New Wave as soon as Truffaut first cast him in The 400 Blows. The other cynical note is a one-liner potshot at Hollywood as a competing movie industry, dismissing it as a playground “where kids try to live up to their famous parents.” If Hollywood was offended by that friendly jab, they didn’t show it in their adoring appreciation of Day for Night, which they awarded the 1975 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. In a way, the film is a major pioneer in the Magic of the Movies montages that have become an annual tradition for the ceremony’s television broadcasts, but with an obvious major difference. Those montages only celebrate The Movies when they achieve transcendent visual poetry (and box office profits), whereas Truffaut loves The Movies as they are, warts & all. You get the sense watching Day for Night that he genuinely enjoyed the chaos of wrangling brats, drunks, and freaks to make mediocre art in artificial locales; he loved making movies. That might seem like a shallow subject to rigorous academic cynics or to more narrative-focused moviegoers who are just “looking for a good story,” but it feels deeply spiritual & meaningful to me, a guy who also loves The Movies.
If you spend enough time on the Internet, you’ll find that the two biggest stories to result from the 2024 Summer Olympic Games in Paris were not of personal or athletic triumph. They were stories of spectacular, humanizing failure. I am, of course, referring to French athlete Anthony Ammirati’s pole-vaulting mishap when his Olympic dreams were thwarted by his massive dong, which knocked down the bar he was supposed to clear in an otherwise successful jump. I am also referring to new online microcelebrity Raygun, an Australian breakdancer who partially worked her way into the competition by earning her PhD in the “sport”. There were some legitimately impressive breakdancers who competed at the Olympics this year, but Raygun was not one of them. Her awkward, corny dance moves on that worldwide stage were comically embarrassing, epitomizing the instant cringe of watching white people participate in hip-hop with a little too much gusto. As funny as Raygun’s televised failure and the resulting memes have been in the past week, she’s also left a mark on The Culture in negative ways. It’s not difficult to imagine that the announced decision to exclude breaking from the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles was somewhat influenced by the worldwide mockery her performance attracted to the event, despite the athleticism of the dozens of talented dancers who competed beside her. She also set public opinion on white nerds’ enthusiasm for old-school hip-hop back decades, at least as far back as the Backpack Rap days of the early 2000s.
Thankfully, there’s an excellent counterbalance to Raygun’s breakdancing shenanigans currently making the theatrical rounds, rehabilitating some of that white nerd street cred. The new Irish music industry drama Kneecap details the rise to fame of the titular rap trio Kneecap, played by the group’s real-life members. Set during a recent push to have Ireland’s native language recognized by the occupying government of the United Kingdom as legitimate and politically protected, the film characterizes its Irish-speaking stars as both cultural activists and shameless hedonists. Because their public persona includes openly distributing & consuming hard drugs, they’re seen by fellow Irish speakers as a threat to the legitimacy of their shared Civil Rights cause. Kneecap may be partyboys at heart, but they’re just as dedicated to the mission as the advocates pushing for the Irish Language Act on television. They’re just doing it in dive bars and Spotify playlists instead, inspiring renewed interest and usage of the language by modernizing it through hip-hop. Both the group and the movie are clear-eyed in their political messaging, repeating the mantra “Every word of Irish spoken is a bullet fired for Irish freedom” as many times as it can be shoehorned into the dialogue. That’s about as legitimate of a case of white artists participating in old school hip-hop as you’re ever likely to find. It’s purposeful, and it’s genuine.
While the political messaging and the rags-to-slightly-nicer-rags story structure of Kneecap are fairly straightforward, director Rich Peppiatt at least finds ways to match the group’s messy, energetic songwriting in the film’s visual style. English translations of Irish rap lyrics appear onscreen in animated notebook scribbles. Drug-induced hallucinations are represented in extreme fish-eye lens framing and crude stop-motion puppetry. Michael Fassbender, playing one of the rappers’ political activist father, appears in a strobelit, dreamlike sequence so directly inspired by the liminal nightclub visions of Aftersun that it’s surprising when he returns alive just a couple scenes later. All of this frantic music video visual style is wrangled in by a guiding voice narration track, framing Kneecap as a revision of Trainspotting about how doing drugs with your friends will improve your life, not ruin it. That Trainspotting connection gets explicit when the band’s DJ dives headfirst into a garbage can to recover a lost strip of LSD, recalling Ewan McGregor flushing himself down a dive bar toilet. I don’t know that Kneecap is the most dramatically satisfying rise-to-fame story for D.I.Y. musicians suffering the remnants of British imperialism that I’ve seen in recent years; that honor likely belongs to either Gully Boy or We Are Ladyparts. It’s an exceptionally energetic one, though, and it’s got a great soundtrack to match.
Just in case the novelty of an Irish-language rap soundtrack or the effort to make the best Danny Boyle movie since 28 Days Later is not enough to draw an audience, Kneecap also mine some genuine dramatic tension from its relatively small cast. Michael Fassbender represents an older, more reserved way of undermining British oppression, continuing to participate in IRA resistance as a kind of ineffectual ghost. Simone Kirby is a scene-stealer as his estranged wife, struggling against her agoraphobia to mobilize the silent but powerful mothers behind the more vocal Irish rebels. The middle-aged DJ Próvaí is committed to the cause as well, but has to hide from his wife and school-faculty employers that he’s been publicly doing hard drugs with twentysomethings at rap concerts as part of his own political praxis. In one of the more surprising dramatic side plots, one Kneecap member grapples with the intoxicating eroticism of oppression, bringing his politics into the bedroom by having kinky roleplay sex with a local Brit who’s offended by his more inflammatory lyrics. Not all of Kneecap is a rap-soundtracked party fueled by raver drugs ordered over the internet. There’s actual substance and political intent behind its participation in hip-hop culture, which is more than you can say for poor Raygun’s brief moment of fame on the Olympic stage.
When I first moved to Austin, there were four different video rental locations that were still open, despite the fact that streaming was already nearly omnipresent at the time. There were two locations for I Luv Video and two for Vulcan Video, with both organizations consolidating into one storefront each by 2020 and both of them ultimately closing during the pandemic. In those days, my devotion was to Vulcan Video, even though the giant outdoor mural of Spock on their campus-adjacent “North Vulcan” location, which I saw when visiting the city before moving, was long gone by the time that they had been pushed out to North Loop Boulevard. Back then, I Luv Video’s website didn’t have a catalog search feature, while Vulcan did, and that won me over. Back when I wrote about every Dario Argento movie, every single one of those DVDs was rented from Vulcan North (except for Le cinque giornate, which was, and to my knowledge remains, only available on VHS). Within the past year, however, both Vulcan and ILV have returned in some form, with the collection of the former being donated to the Alamo Drafthouse and operating as “Vulcan” out of the Village location, while ILV is now known as We Luv Video and has set up shop in the exact location that was once Vulcan North. They recently had their first anniversary and threw a block party to celebrate, with VHS swapping and getting new members to sign up. I was won over by the pitch, and invited my friend to have a nineties movie night this week, wherein we would go to the video store to pick out a movie, order a pizza, and enjoy. One of the great things about having a local rental store again is the “Staff Picks” selection, and my companion was immediately drawn to Happy Together, Wong Kar-wai’s tender but turbulent 1997 drama that’s easily one of the best examples of New Queer Cinema.
Ho Po-Wing (Leslie Cheung) and Lai Yiu-Fai (Tony Leung) are a gay couple from Hong Kong who, hoping that a visit to Argentina will break the cycle of their constant break-ups and reconciliations. Po-Wing insists that they rent a car instead of taking a bus to visit the Iguaza Falls, which results in them getting lost and never making it to their destination. Their trip is marked by the acquisition of a lamp that creates a simulated image of a waterfall, which Fai keeps when he and Po-Wing break up once more because of the stress of their failed venture and the conflict that ensues. Lacking the funds to fly home, Fai takes up residence in a rundown motel in Buenos Aires, where he has a shoebox of a room and shares cooking facilities with all of the other residents, and he finds work as a doorman at a tango club. Po-Wing takes up a life as a sex worker, and Fai is forced to watch him entertain john after john at the club where he works. After the two of them argue and Fai confronts Po-Wing about spending all of their money and stranding them there, Po-Wing steals an expensive watch from one of his clients so that Fai can pawn it and go home but is badly beaten by the man over it. Po-Wing’s hands are badly injured, and he is forced to wear plaster bandages on them for an extended period, and Fai reluctantly becomes his caretaker.
Po-Wing makes his interest in resuming their affair clear—Fai notes that Po-Wing’s “Let’s start over” was a constant refrain over their rocky separations and reunions—but while Fai clearly still loves and cares for him, they do not become lovers again. Po-Wing’s attempts to climb into bed with Fai only alienate him, and his constant whining and demanding tell us a great deal about what their relationship was like, even before he became largely incapable of fending for himself. He forces Fai to go jogging with him in terrible weather despite his ex’s reluctance, and when Fai takes ill because of the weather, Po-Wing still demands that he cook for them. Of course, Fai is revealed to be no shrinking violet or victim either, as we see that he becomes intensely jealous; when Po-Wing goes to get cigarettes and isn’t home when Fai returns from work, Fai buys multiple cartons so that Po-Wing has no reason to leave. He even takes Po-Wing’s passport the first night that his former lover stays with him following his release from the hospital and hides it so that Po-Wing can’t leave him. It’s clear that they were always toxic for each other, but that they were also madly, passionately in love in a way that defies all logic and common sense and drives one to extreme highs that make the extreme lows seem worthwhile. And that love is still present, even if it’s so tainted by mutual bitterness at this point that there’s no way for them to walk the same path ever again.
Fai is fired from the tango bar when he attacks the man who beat Po-Wing and starts working at a Chinese restaurant. There, he befriends a young, handsome Taiwanese man named Chang (Chen Chang). Although Chang never expresses overt attraction to Fai, his affection is clear. Po-Wing becomes jealous after overhearing Chang in the background of one of his constant, demanding phone calls to Fai at work, and this, combined with Fai’s continuous refusal to return his passport, leads Po-Wing to move out when he is recovered from his injuries. Fai opens up to Chang about having left Hong Kong in disgrace due to stealing money from his employer, who was a friend of his father’s, and Chang tells Fai about his family’s food stall in the night market in Taipei. Chang eventually earns enough money to continue his travels and tells Fai he intends to travel to the southernmost tip of South America, where he has heard that one can release all their cares. He offers his tape recorder to Fai so he can carry his worries for him, but Fai can muster no words, only sobs. Fai starts to work nights in an abattoir so that he can get his body back on Hong Kong time and goes home, with Po-Wing breaking down upon realizing that Fai is really gone.
This is one of the most moving films that I have ever seen. I’ve never been in the kind of relationship that the film depicts, one in which one partner’s jealousy and control issues and the other’s learned helplessness and deliberate provocation of envy put them in constant conflict with one another, but I’ve been a teenager (and a twentysomething, and a thirtysomething) in love, the kind of love that’s so big and so loud that it takes up the whole room. Love immiserates as well as illuminates, love consumes as well as sustains, and love can craze as much as it can ground. Po-Wing and Fai’s relationship is one that can swing back and forth between Po-Wing’s mad desire for the physical intimacy of sharing a bed even if they don’t touch, with complete disregard for Fai’s boundaries or well-being, to Fai berating his former lover for his promiscuous ways (before later cruising in the same ways and in the same places after Chang leaves, noting in his internal monologue that all lonely people are the same, deep down) while making him a virtual prisoner, to the two of them slow dancing in the shared kitchen of Fai’s hostel, sweet and kind and perfect — but only for a moment.
The copy of this film that I watched was a grey market region-free DVD, and although the transfer was terrible (there are several scenes during the portion of the film where Fai is working in the restaurant wherein the subtitles are completely illegible against his white chef’s wear), it was nonetheless a beautiful movie. It’s a mood piece, wherein there are several long shots of urban decrepity punctuated by neon and headlights as well as very long shots of Iguaza Falls as we take in the majesty of the pouring, pulsing water, countless gallons and tons of the stuff moving at incomprehensible volume, churning with a power that can only be imagined and yet which pales in comparison to the raging waters that push and pull inside of Po–Wing and Fai. It’s powerful stuff, and worth tracking down.
I am by no means well studied in the broader history of German Expressionism, but I have seen a horror movie or two. When I think of the German Expressionist visual style, my mind immediately conjures up the fantastic, transportive images of titles like Nosferatu,M, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Man Who Laughs, The Hands of Orlac, Destiny, The Golem and, of course, Metropolis. Even the cultural impact of those films’ innovative directors & cinematographers emigrating to America has always been most immediately apparent in early Hollywood horrors like The Black Cat & Dracula, given their surrealistic production design and shadowy visual play. It was surprising, then, to find no supernatural dream logic in the once-lost German Expressionist drama Asphalt, which might account for the film’s relatively low name recognition in that field. In terms of narrative, Joe May’s tragic story of mismatched lovers feels more familiar to early Hollywood dramas about misbehaved women than it does to the nightmare-realm horrors more typically associated with German Expressionism. However, all of the ecstatic visual flourish associated with that film movement is in full swing, as the camera sways wildly in an attempt to capture the bustling urban chaos of Berlin, where its doomed love story is set. Its plot synopsis might sound like the German equivalent of early US films like A Fool There Was, The Red Kimona, Parisian Love, or A Woman of the World, but it’s way less restrained & stage-bound than any of those titles. It’s pure cinema, made by the people who established the language of that artform in its infancy.
Metropolis star Gustav Fröhlich plays a bumbling, naive cop who’s not quite streetwise enough to handle the streets of Berlin. Else Heller (doing her best Louise Brooks drag) plays the young man’s downfall: a cunning, compulsive thief he catches robbing a jewelry store when he should be directing traffic his first day on the job. The poor rube buys her sob story about needing to steal to survive, as she is perilously close to being evicted onto the harsh streets of Berlin. An unlikely romance blossoms between cop & criminal as his sympathy grows, until she can’t stand his naivety any longer and fully confesses her betrayal of trust. She does not, in fact, steal for survival. She steals because it’s thrilling to get away with taking home diamonds & furs. She steals for the fun of stealing. What ruins the fun is the way her flirty pickpocket lifestyle gets her new beau into steep trouble, both with the macho brutes of her past and with the strictly law-abiding members of his own family. The dramatic entertainment value of Asphalt is in watching a young, fashionable woman thieve, lie, and cheat in hedonistic excess, even if the morals of the era require it to eventually condemn her for crimes against morality. No matter how deplorable the femme fatale’s behavior is in the abstract, the movie takes obvious delight in watching her smoke cigarettes and smolder in a heated bathtub, treating herself to a life of luxury that she would be denied through any legal path. She might not steal to survive, exactly, but she does steal to make life worth surviving.
Asphalt intuitively takes for granted that crime is sexy & fun, so it gets to spend a lot of its time playing around with new, exciting ways to move the camera instead of complicating its central romantic dynamic. It opens with kaleidoscopic mirroring of Berlin street traffic and sweeping montages of the rain-slicked asphalt beneath those cars & feet. The camera is in constant motion, either evoking the mania of navigating a city’s cacophonous busyness in exterior scenes or taking inventory of individual objects & players on interior sets. It represents an end of an era for ecstatic, inventive German filmmaking, but there’s no solemn, settled maturity to its cinematography. It’s desperate to impress. Like Metropolis, a complete print of Asphalt was considered lost media for decades, until it pieced back together through archival discovery & recovery in the 1990s. Unlike Metropolis, it’s been largely forgotten to time a second time since that restoration. There just isn’t as much of a completionist streak among romance & crime film enjoyers the same way that horror & sci-fi freaks will seek out anything that falls into their genre of choice. I’m as guilty of that bias as anyone, having never heard of this film until a used DVD copy fell into my hands at the Minneapolis record store Electric Fetus. Meanwhile, I’ve actively sought out at least a dozen horror films from the German Expressionist era in my frantic search to guzzle down all things horror. It turns out they were making romantic dramas in that period too, just like in Hollywood (except way dreamier & prettier).
One venue in which enthusiastic moviegoing is still alive & well is the Outdoor Movie Night, especially the free, inflatable-screen showings of Family Friendly favorites like Coco or Moana. Those screenings are more of a community event than your typical, isolating trip to the cinema. Families spread out on picnic blankets, halfheartedly try to keep their kids in eyesight as they play around with new friends and, whenever bored enough, pay attention to the movie being projected. It’s cute. The Broadside offers that same kind of Outdoor Movie Night experience with a little more formal structure & focus, having built a Family Friend compound next to The Broad Theater for regular concerts & laid-back screenings. The recent Wildwood showing of 1980’s Carny made great use of that communal atmosphere. To play off the movie’s traveling-carnival setting, they invited face-painters, stilt-walkers, tarot readers, and cotton candy spinners as a pre-show warmup, concluding with local musician Brookiecita (of LSD Clownsystem) introducing the film over a slideshow of her own childhood photographs from growing up on the carnival circuit. There were indeed kids running around the grounds too, this time eating cotton candy and enjoying the “VIP room” of inflatable pools.
That Outdoor Movie Night atmosphere is worth noting here because Carny is absolutely not a Family Friendly affair. This is one of those teenage Jodie Foster roles that edge right up to the line of being too slimy to stomach without ever fully crossing it (see also: Taxi Driver, Foxes, The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane). Foster plays an underage waitress who’s bored with the tedium of small-town living, so she joins a traveling carnival on a whim after lusting after its most boisterous performer (Gary Busey in horrifying clown makeup). Struggling to establish her place in the carnival beyond her function as The Dunk Tank Clown’s girlfriend, she briefly auditions as one of the striptease dancers in the “hoochie coochie” tent. This decision lands the teenager in multiple compromising scenarios: modeling lingerie for hooting drunkards, getting body-slammed onto the stage by said drunkards, and eventually getting tied to a bed by a villainous goon who threatens to sexually assault her before her fellow carnies intervene. The worst part is that her much older boyfriend knows exactly how old she is (while she lies to everyone else about already being 18), and the safer, more appropriate job he eventually finds for her is still as sexual bait in one of the carnival-game booths – this time working marks for pocket change, which we see play out in a lengthy sequence of lesbian cruising.
All of this dangerous flirtation with Jodie Foster’s early cinematic persona as Teenage Jailbait is eased by the film always implying its sex scenes instead of fully illustrating them and by its characterization of her as a consenting participant in her own seduction & indoctrination. It’s also eased by the fact that Carny isn’t really about her seduction into the carny lifestyle at all. It’s more of a love story about the two best bros she gets between: Busey as the clown and musician Robbie Robertson as his “midway” hustler trailer-mate. Busey & Robertson love each other with furious devotion, often expressing their mutual affection in drunken acts of group sex with women they pick up on the road. It throws off their dynamic when Busey catches real feelings for Foster, then, and that goes double for when Robertson inevitably has sex with her too. Their seething jealousies & whispered bickering just outside of her earshot end up taking over the foreground of the movie while her own coming of age carny-life story fades into the background, so that it’s less of a love triangle than it is a tortured bromance. That helps steal some attention away from the situational leering at Foster’s body, but Carny still made for an intensely uncomfortable watch at times, especially in an Outdoor Movie Night setting.
Of course, discomfort was the intent. The movie opens with Busey smearing on his greasy clown paint before hopping into the dunk-tank cage, antagonizing every mark who strolls by like a screeching gorilla. It concludes with a classic hall-of-mirrors horror sequence in which the carnies plot to scare off local thugs who are shaking them down for obscene payouts, essentially borrowing its climax from Tod Browning’s 1930s cult classic Freaks. Despite those intentionally scary images and the amoral sexual politics of Foster’s seduction into the carny lifestyle, Brookiecita introduced the movie as a humanizing, empathetic portrayal of traveling carnival folk as a type of found family. Likewise, Robertson co-wrote, produced, and partially scored the picture based on his own experiences as a teenage carnival worker, fondly remembering his time in the business. Personally, I got my own “seedy underbelly of the carnival” crash course from Bikini Kill’s “Carnival,” not The Band’s “Life is a Carnival,” but I like to think I still got the message. In Carny, Robertson seemed to be acknowledging both the warmth of the carnival community when dealing with their own and the grimy, violent hucksterism they could stoop to when dealing with outsiders. In a way, that clash of familial warmth and carnival grime actually made it a perfect Outdoor Movie Night selection, the best one I’ve seen since The Broadside screened Demons with live prog-rock accompaniment.
Even more so than your Slow Cinema auteur of choice, Steven Soderbergh is the master of the mundane. He consistently makes tight, thrilling, wryly funny dispatches from the florescent-lit hell pits of American tedium. A 70min experiment in early-2000s digi cinematography and purposefully deflated genre payoffs, Bubble is a perfect illustration of that skill. Its vision of America is a complex labyrinth of small-town diners, factory breakrooms, and low-ceiling apartments. The doomed souls who navigate those mundane spaces all work multiple jobs for the privilege of getting paid minimum wage, wondering in their spare time what it might have been like if they had stuck it out for a full high school diploma. When jailed for a violent crime, they complain “It’s horrible in here,” but it’s so oppressively bland everywhere else that it’s questionable whether rotting in a concrete cell is any worse than being free to work their next shift. Even the murder that lands them there is bleakly, purposefully uninteresting.
I suppose there’s some novelty in what type of Midwest factory employs these small-town workers. Bubble was shot in a real, operational doll parts factory in Ohio, which makes for some horrific digital-video footage in early scenes. The mundanity of the world outside the assembly line quickly closes in, though. Loneliness & petty jealousies shared among three of the factory workers leads to one of their murders, with only one clear suspect and no real need to investigate. A deleted scene explains the psychology behind that act of violence like the Freudian denouement of Hitchcock’s Psycho, but Soderbergh removes even that morsel of narrative satisfaction from the final cut. He also undercuts the potential for dramatic excitement or emotion by casting non-actor locals to play the central parts, mumbling their semi-improvised lines through obvious shyness. Even the camera’s movements are pedestrian, often just swiveling on a stationary tri-pod like an oscillating security cam. It’s all very matter of fact, and the facts of the matter are all grim, grey gruel.
Handling the editing & cinematography himself under pseudonyms, Soderbergh seemed to be having fun playing around with the unpretentious tools of the new digital filmmaking era. He even got hands-on in Bubble‘s distribution strategy, striking a deal with the Mark Cuban-owned cable company HDNet to release the film simultaneously in theaters, on-demand, and on physical disc. His pitch was that hopefully audiences would be drawn to see the movie in theaters and, if they liked it, would pick up a physical copy for repeat viewings on the way home. Corporate theater chains were outraged at this disruption to the traditional theatrical window, but that day-and-date release strategy has obviously become more of a standard practice in recent years. Bubble was supposed to be the first of six HDNet releases with the same improvised-drama filming methods and unconventional home distribution schedules, but instead it flopped and mostly fell out of circulation. I had to find my DVD copy second-hand, and it only includes a Spanish-language subtitles track, so it likely traveled far to reach me.
Forever adaptable, Soderbergh has been doing just fine in the two decades since the Bubble debacle. If anything, he’s since moved on to making straight-to-HBO cheapies instead of straight-to-HDNet cheapies, which feels like a minor step up in prestige. He’s also had a few theatrical hits since then and has flirted with the idea of early retirement, only to discover that he’d rather be making movies no matter the scale in production or distribution. Bubble is not his most exciting, imaginative dispatch from the great mediocre American void (that would be Schizopolis), but it might be the most indicative example of his stripped-down, unfussy style. In most other cases where a career-shifting work from a major filmmaker had fallen out of distribution, it would be tempting to petition for a spiffy new digital restoration from a boutique Blu-ray label. In Bubble‘s case, it feels totally appropriate for it to be stuck in time on thrift-store DVDs. The only reason to reissue it, really, would be for a new director’s commentary track looking back on how the industry has changed in the past couple decades, since Soderbergh happens to be the master of those too.
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