Every movie is documentary. Whether or not the scene-to-scene narrative of a picture is a record of True Events (manipulated, as they all are, by the filmmakers’ selective curation), the picture itself is a record, a document of the past. This becomes more apparent the older the picture has aged, as its performers, locations, and cultural context are cyclically replaced in the real world but remain intact onscreen. That’s why it’s best not to get too hung up on genre boundaries when watching a picture like 1961’s The Exiles, which is presented as a documentary but is obviously driven by a semi-scripted narrative. Documenting one drunken night in the lives of the Indigenous rock n roll greasers of 1950s Los Angeles, it’s a record of a time, a place, a people, and a moment in pop culture that have since been replaced and would otherwise be forgotten. Which elements of the film qualify as documentary by definition of artistic medium are up for interpretation, but over time that distinction has mattered less & less.
Personally, I mostly receive the films’ clothes, locations, and voiceover narration as purely documentary in the genre sense. Everything else onscreen plays as a recognition of and participation in the inherent artifice of cinema. I believe the performers in the film are actual residents of the since-gentrified-into-oblivion neighborhood of Bunker Hill where they’re shown drinking, dancing, shouting, fighting, and just generally cutting up. They appear to typify a genuine subculture of Indigenous youth who left the rural isolation of their government-assigned reservations to live out a hedonistic rock ‘n roll fantasy lifestyle in the big city, passing around the same little scraps of money amongst themselves for shared swigs of booze. Their voiceover confessions about the never-ending cycle of getting drunk every single night with no particular plan or purpose feel bleakly sincere, while the onscreen illustration of that hedonism often feels more like reenactment in pantomime. It has a very similar approach to narrative as its recent docufiction successor Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets, except it’s shot as if it were a high-style Poverty Row noir.
The Exiles is factual but not exactly educational. Its aimless, loosely scripted drunkenness might read as a kind of road-to-ruin moral lesson about alcoholism, but there’s no clear momentum or consequence to drive that point home. Mostly, it’s just a slice-of-life document of one very specific community living out the Boomer rock ‘n roller fantasy of American Graffiti in real time, which to the sober eye can appear fashionably cool or hideously grotesque depending on the momentary vibes of the nonstop party. I most appreciated it as a low-budget D.I.Y. project that couldn’t afford luxuries like color film or on-set sync sound recordings but still had a keen eye for aesthetic & cultural detail, most strikingly in scenes where the Native American stereotypes of the Westerns playing on background TV & movie screens clashed with the matter-of-fact representation of the real-life youth centered here. At the same time, the way British filmmaker Kent Mackenzie opens the picture with historical photographs of Indigenous elders and never thinks to include mention of any specific tribe or nation now feels just as dusty as those Westerns did then. It’s very much a picture of its time, as all pictures are.
Confession: I periodically fell asleep during a recent theatrical screening of this film, and I had to rewatch the final 20 minutes at home to piece together what I had missed during a few long blinks. I’m not proud of this response to such a unique work. I’m only mentioning it to note that as cool as the cultural documentation & vintage rock ‘n roll aesthetics are, the presentation can be a little dry. I would usually apologize to anyone else who happened to be in that theater in case I snored during those mid-film disco naps, but I feel like after that guy got arrested for jacking it & nodding off duringLove Lies Bleeding, the bar has been lowered enough for me to get away with it; at least I didn’t wake up with my peener out. There are ways in which The Exiles‘s hands-off aimlessness decreases its value as filmic entertainment, but that approach is also exactly what makes it useful as an archival document, so I’m noting its patience-testing dryness less as a complaint than as an honest acknowledgement.
Sometime recently, I was telling a friend of mine (a fellow freak, if you will) a story that I had just read in an interview with one of Yukio Mishima’s former lovers. The person was a sex worker, and Mishima picked them up at a gay bar with the intention of having something longer term, but they ended up only meeting twice, because the sex worker was so disturbed by the scene that Mishima wanted. In essence, he didn’t want a partner; he wanted a witness, someone to watch as Mishima committed play-seppuku – complete with a false dagger and a red sash that took the place of Mishima’s entrails and blood. According to the account, Mishima came to complete erection and ejaculated at the time that he drew the false blade across his stomach, all without ever touching his genitals. I haven’t been able to find that interview again, but it crosses my mind often. Mishima was an awful man, but he’s nonetheless fascinating, and it’s an endless source of fascination to me whenever I stumble across some incel fascist on the internet who worships Mishima but is bigoted against queer people; it’s a truly fascinating compartmentalization of ideological conflicts. As a result of recounting that anecdote, there’s been a lot of Mishima talk in the friend group lately, which culminated in a recent screening of Paul Schrader’s 1985 biopic Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters.
The film, which features a score composed by Philip Glass (when his name appeared on screen, one of my friends declared “I knew it! He loves arpeggios!”) and which was executive produced by both Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas, is a true technical achievement. The narrative takes place in three different segments, some of which break down further into smaller sub-sections. There are the biographical sections, which include everything prior to the fateful day that Mishima attempted his coup (all in black & white) and the day of said sad little effort (in color). Although there is factual information in these sections—like the fact that Mishima was isolated from the rest of his family as a child by his grandmother, who forbade him from sport, sunlight, and playing with other boys—the film has very little interest in the elements that make up a traditional drama about a real person. This isn’t a biography of Mishima so much as it is a portrait of him, and it’s an expressionistic one at that.
Where this is most apparent is in the way that Schrader adapts, with extreme brevity, parts of three different Mishima novels. The first segment is based upon The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, which was loosely based upon the arson of the golden pavilion at Kinkaku-ji in Kyoto. In it, a boy named Mizoguchi, who is afflicted with a debilitating stammer, becomes an acolyte of the titular temple but comes to hate it and ultimately burns it down (this is an oversimplification of the plot, but so is the retelling in the film). The second segment is based loosely on one of the four characters who populate the novel Kyoko’s House, in which a young actor named Osamu agrees to sell himself to a woman who is part of the yakuza in exchange for the cancellation of his mother’s debts; he and the woman become lovers, and they begin to partake in sadomasochism that ultimately leads to both his death and hers. The third adapts part of Runaway Horses, a 1930s-set period piece about a young man named Isao who, trained in the samurai code by his father, resents the apparent Westernization and materialism of his community and nation, so he plots to assassinate several key government figures in order to halt the spread of capitalism and its influence upon Japan.
Although the biographical segments are shot in a more realistic style (the black & white “history” being filmed very traditionally, while the “day of the coup attempt” segments are all done with handheld cameras to add a kinetic energy to the proceedings), the narrative adaptation sections have a lovely artificiality. The room that Osuma and his lover share is a vaporwave lover’s nest in a black void, and Mizoguchi and his friend walk a constant path around a scale replica of the temple on stones that imply a path across a body of water that is no more than a painted floor. Isao and his friends plan their assassinations within another room in a void, but when their plans are stopped by the authorities, this is represented by all of the panels comprising the room’s walls being pulled outward and collapsing as police surround them from all sides. It’s a bold stylistic choice, but one that pays off, as these are the coolest and most interesting parts of the film, and as a metaphor for Mishima himself, it’s also very clever. Each of the men who populate these narratives represent some part of Mishima’s psyche. Pavilion’s Mizoguchi is obsessed with an ideal of beauty and longs to set it free just as Mishima was obsessed with the traditional Yamato-damashii (Japanese cultural traditions and values) and was willing to commit destructive acts to see it unshackled; Osuma represents Mishima’s devotion to his ideal, imperialist vision of Japan and his willingness to be hurt or even killed in a masochistic relationship with that vision; and Runaway Isao’s ultranationalism is Mishima to the core, down to the eerie way in which Mishima predicted (or perhaps announced) his death, as he and Isao share the same fate.
If you’re looking for a scholarly work about Yukio Mishima, this isn’t it. One of our friends (the same one who identified Glass’s arpeggios) asked if she would need to know anything about Mishima before watching the movie, and we told her “no” before the screening, but I’m not sure I’d say the same thing now. From a narrative perspective, having no knowledge about Mishima (and especially not knowing how he died) makes the ending more shocking and perhaps more powerful, but I’m also not sure how much one would get out of this if this was their first introduction to him. If anything, as the film does little to elaborate on the extent to which Mishima’s views were utterly fascistic, it could end up making him more of a figure of admiration for his life (which is, uh, bad) and not for his literature (which is fine, in my opinion). The man wrote a play entitled My Friend Hitler, after all, and although scholarship is split on whether it’s a fascist work or an anti-fascist one, I’m going to make Roland Barthes roll over in his grave a little on this one and say that, in this case, what we know of the author is relevant to interpretation of the text. On the whole, that’s a bit of a Paul Schrader specialty—the line between apologia and empathy is always fuzzy in his work—but it’s worth noting that his first choice was to adapt Forbidden Colors, arguably Mishima’s most overtly homosexual work, was rejected by the Mishima estate, which led to the inclusion of Kyoko’s Room instead, so the extent to which he was able to craft a fuller portrait of the man was undeniably curtailed.
The movie is vibrant, and, as an impressionistic telling of the life of a … let’s say “conflicted” writer, it’s beautiful and impressive. I’m not sure it’s a great movie, but it’s certainly a cool one, and it’s worth checking out if you have any interest in Mishima and his work.
“Nothing lasts, really. Neither happiness nor despair. Not even life lasts very long.”
All of the stills and promotional posters for David Lean’s 1945 adultery drama Brief Encounter had convinced me that it was going to be a noir, not a stately stage play adaptation. Having now seen the film in full, I’m not entirely sure I was wrong. Brief Encounter is a kind of classic noir where the inciting crime is an emotional affair instead of a heist or a murder. It has all of the stylistic markers of noir: the drastic camera angles, the haze of urban steam, a morally compromised lead recounting their crimes in a confessional narration track. The fact that there’s no actual crime to speak of does little to muddle that flirtation with the genre. When the potential adulterers develop their first inside joke it’s like watching them load a revolver. Each kiss is another bullet unloaded from its chamber. When they chain-smoke on empty city streets to calm their nerves, they act as if they’re on the lam, avoiding eye contact with city cops. The whole affair is just as thrillingly romantic as it is unavoidably doomed.
The opening shots of this lean, 86-minute stunner are of two commuter trains passing in opposite directions at a furious speed, their billows of steam settling into a wispy veil over the platform where our would-be lovers first meet. Later, the lovers are similarly veiled by the gauze of cigarette smoke under movie projector lights, in the cinema where they spend Thursday afternoons sitting in the tension of each other’s desire. Their entire affair carries the impermanence and impossibility of a dream, with both dreamers daring each other to make it real. Celia Johnson narrates their emotional crimes in flashback, looking for someone safe to confess to and eventually settling on an internal monologue to her doting but unexciting husband. In her months-long flirtation with Trevor Howard’s mysterious but gentlemanly doctor, she never gets a glimpse of his homelife with his wife, but we get the sense that it’s just as sweetly serene. Their entire relationship is based on the spark of excitement found in flirting with a stranger while waiting for their opposite-direction trains home, a romance that can only flourish in a liminal space. If they did leave their spouses for each other, they’d likely settle into the same warm but bland domestic routines; the spell would be broken.
Whether David Lean was knowingly playing with the tones & tropes of film noir here is unclear. Since the genre had not yet been fully codified or even named, it’s more likely that he simply framed an adulterous dalliance as if it were a legal crime instead of just a moral one, and the stylistic overtones of the era took care of the rest. Either way, it’s clear that Brief Encounter has endured as a major influence on modern filmmakers, from the moody high-style tension of Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love to the opening across-the-bar “What’s their deal?” speculation of Celine Song’s Past Lives. Because it’s such a dialogue heavy stage-to-screen production, a lot of its power is creditable to Johnson & Howard’s acting chops, especially in the physicality of their guilt-haunted faces. When Johnson reassures the audience, “I’m a happily married woman,” her body language tells a different story, and there’s similar complexity lurking behind every line delivery of her imagined confession. Still, Lean is a formidable third wheel, guiding this trainwreck romance from the director’s chair with such intensity that you can practically feel his hand tilting the frame. There’s no event or action I can point to that would help classify it as a thriller, but it is thrilling from start to end, with a final line of dialogue that’s more explosive than any stick of stolen dynamite.
The 1996 BBC Films production of Twelfth Night: Or What You Will is a mostly faithful staging of the classic Shakespeare comedy, directed by The Royal Shakespeare Company’s Trevor Nunn. It’s not the kind of MTV-era update to Shakespeare’s text that you’ll find in fellow 90s titles like 10 Things I Hate About You or My Own Private Idaho, which tried to Make the Bard Cool Again for a generation who mostly knew him through frustrating homework assignments. You wouldn’t know that from Twelfth Night‘s poster, though, which sold it as exactly that. Attempting to cash in on a recent string of mainstream gay comedies with themes of crossdressing & drag, 1996’s Twelfth Night was marketed with the tagline, “Before Priscilla crossed the desert, Wong Foo met Julie Newmar, and the Birdcage was unlocked, there was … Twelfth Night.” I assume most adults expecting a boundary-pushing gay farce based on that marketing would’ve found this film tame by comparison, as the queer sexual tension of the text isn’t updated or sensationalized for the 90s in any flashy, daring way. If nothing else, it’s somewhat surprising that Tromeo & Juliet is the 1996 Shakespeare update that includes a lesbian makeout session, given which one would’ve been supported by its source text.
I have to imagine, then, that this version of Twelfth Night was a little more subtle & subversive in its queer appeal. If the adult audience marketed to in that tagline were already well fed by the mainstream echoes of New Queer Cinema and the bratty teens of the time were looking for Shakespeare plays set in the halls of their high school (preferably starring Julia Styles), it’s the younger, more sheltered crowd who would’ve benefited most from the queer themes of Shakespeare’s play. It’s not hard to imagine a heavily policed gay preteen who wasn’t allowed to rent a copy of The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert sneaking Twelfth Night past their parents as a cultured, educational video store selection. 1996’s Twelfth Night seems ideally suited as a queer-awakening VHS rental for younger audiences who grew up watching titles like Ever After, The Secret Garden, and The Secret of Roan Inish in regular slumber party rotation or on solo lazy afternoons. Romeo+Juliet was the Shakespeare update with true Gay 90s™ flair; this one lets the confused-lust genderfuckery of the original play stand on its own without any post-MTV stylistic embellishments. It’s very warmly pleasant & endearing for that, and maybe even quietly transgressive depending on the parental censorship of your childhood household.
I won’t dare recount the plot of such a faithful adaptation of the original play here, at least not until this blog starts generating income as a SparkNotes subsidiary. All you need to know is that twins who make do as traveling entertainers are separated by shipwreck, presuming each other dead. Putting their twin-magic cabaret act to good use, the sister goes into hiding in male drag and quickly gets entangled in a queer love triangle with a man & woman who use her as a romantic surrogate, to the sexual confusion of everyone involved. Then, her near-identical twin brother shows up wearing the same dumb little wispy mustache, leading to a chaotic reset to normalcy at a heterosexual wedding, in classic farcical tradition. Before order is restored, though, there’s plenty of intense dwelling on the same-gender attraction stoked by the hiding-in-drag sitcom premise. Characters often breathe heavy as they lean in for a near-kiss – an exchange that reads gay whether it’s Viola-as-Cesario nearly kissing her male employer or Viola-as-Cesario nearly kissing her employer’s female crush. Other highlights include tender bathtub flirtation between bros and an opening-credits montage where Viola first gets into Cesario drag, with major emphasis put on her stuffing the crotch of her pants for accuracy. It’s not hard to imagine a young audience discovering things about themselves watching all of this gender play & queer desire onscreen, and it’s all presented under the guise of traditional, sophisticated theatre.
Presuming that you are no longer a sheltered 90s child depending on Blockbuster Video rentals to smuggle Gay Content into your family home, the best reason to watch the 1996 Twelfth Night at this point is the cast. Imogen Stubbs does a decent enough job in the central Cesario drag king role, in which (through Viola) she mostly equates being a man to being a Bugs Bunny level smartass. Ben Kingsley, Richard E. Grant, and Nigel Hawthorne are all formidable fools in the goofball periphery of the central conflict as well, along with what I can only presume are veterans of The Royal Shakespeare Company and of multi-episode arcs of Downton Abbey. The real draw in the cast, though, is a young Helena Bonham Carter, especially if you have any nostalgia for the era when her time machine got stuck in centuries past and she made a name for herself playing love interests in costume dramas (including an early starring role in director Trevor Nunn’s Lady Jane). While the film’s younger video store audiences experienced a queer awakening at home, HBC was experiencing a kind of goth awakening onscreen as Olivia, who’s introduced in mourning for her own deceased brother, which is what attracts Viola to her. She takes to black lace like no one before or since; it’s a marriage built to last longer than any among the story’s main players, so it’s romantic to think that it all started here.
It’s not something that comes up here a lot, but I go to a lot of live music shows. Although I’m reaching a point in my life where I’m often a decade or so older than the mode, I’ve never really found myself feeling like I had impostor syndrome until a couple of months ago, when I was at a show where a young woman was singing, accompanied solely by a male guitarist. This isn’t a statement about either’s talent—both were great—but there came a moment of intense realization on my part that I had heard all of the sentiments that were being laid before me before, and that I had in fact heard them many, many times. There’s nothing wrong with that; there’s room enough in the world for an infinite number of songs that feel like vulnerable diary entries and which rhyme “make-up” with “break up” with “wake up,” as long as there’s at least one person on the receiving end with whom the song connects, sonically and/or lyrically, and/or any other way that people connect with the art that they love. But I did realize that, perhaps, the time when that sung journal could connect with an older man like me had passed, no matter how much I was enjoying the show, when I was capable of wondering “Am I too old to be here?”
I was a bit worried about this, heading into Gasoline Rainbow. The film’s blurb read “With high school in the rearview, five teenagers from small-town Oregon decide to embark on one last adventure. Piling into a van with a busted taillight, their mission is to make it to a place they’ve never been—the Pacific coast.” I was intrigued, not least of all because the film is the first fully narrative feature directed by the Ross brothers, Bill (IV) and Turner, who had previously helmed Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets, but was worried that I might be too old to connect with the characters of Rainbow. Those fears were only further agitated when I saw the (at time of writing) only review on IMDb, which called the film “pretentious” and stated the “entire movies [sic] dialog [sic] between characters consists only of drunk teenagers talking.” Luckily, I needn’t have been concerned.
The above-cited synopsis is pretty clear. Five teenagers, recently graduated from high school in fictional Wiley, Oregon, set out to have one last big adventure together before adult life pulls them in different directions. Stealing the family’s dilapidated van in the middle of the night, Nichole Dukes picks up the rest of the crew: Tony Abuerto, Micah Bunch, Nathaly Garcia, and Makai Garza. After a tense moment when the van’s engine dies beneath the slow-blinking yellow light of an isolated intersection and it seems unlikely to restart, they are on their way. Unlike a lot of movies of this type, they have a destination: the coast. From there, the film falls neatly into a series of vignettes characterized by the people that they meet. The first is a woman working at a gas station; the quintet asks her if she knows of anywhere cool nearby that they can visit, and she hops into the van with them and directs them to an otherworldly place in the Alvord Desert, an eighty-four square mile barren in southeast Oregon. Afterward, when returning their guide back to where she lives now, they ask if she’s interested in joining them for the rest of the way. She talks about the traveling that she used to do when she was younger, though she doesn’t look much older than they do, and although she’s clearly tempted, she begs off and wishes them well on their way. The next person that they encounter is a guy walking a dark road at night, who emerges from the darkness into the lamp of their headlights like a ghost from the mist; he invites them to join him and some friends for some good old-fashioned countryside drinking by a fire, and they accept.
This turns into a fun time, and Makai in particular hits it off with a girl named Dallas, who ends up giving him a bracelet and telling him to meet her in a few days at “The End of the World,” a party happening near the coast so that he can return it to her there. After a night of drinking, smoking, and partying, the group wakes up in the field to find all other participants long gone, and when they climb back up to the road, they discover that the van has been stripped. They spend the next day on foot before arriving in another small town, where they are able to get some food and befriend a few locals and shoot some pool. They also meet two crust punks who teach them how to freight hop, and they make it all the way into Portland this way. While there, they meet and connect with a skateboarder, Micah’s cousin, and a couple of middle-aged fantasy-loving metalheads, all of whom function to allow the kids to reveal something of themselves, and to possibly reflect the kind of people that they could become.
This is a beautifully photographed movie of deep feeling that avoids the traps of treacly sentiment. It’s rare to see a movie that so accurately reflects that cold, bright, fried lung morning after feeling, and this one certainly does. It’s also one with that particular verisimilitude that runs bone-deep in fiction film that’s made by filmmakers who cut their teeth in documentary work. A lot of how much you’ll enjoy this film will depend on what your tolerance level is for hearing teenagers talk about themselves amongst themselves, and although I understand that can be a barrier for others, I feel that the unscripted, adlibbed feeling of the dialogue covers a lot of irritation. That negative review I quoted earlier isn’t wrong, per se, in the sense that I’ve met plenty of people who, when presented with this text, would interpret it the same way. I don’t think that the film wants us in the audience to think that these kids are having life-changing realizations about themselves that are supposed to blow the minds of viewers; this is a character study of five kids who have never seen what’s over the horizon. Even if their revelations about what’s outside of their bubble may seem shallow to us, it’s so that we can reevaluate what we take for granted through their eyes, not so that we are moved by their philosophical insight. And, for what it’s worth, they also learn that the world over the horizon isn’t always what it cracks up to be either; one of my favorite jokes in the movie is that the kids learn why everything smells like shit in Portland—because that’s just how cities smell.
The characters sell this one, honestly. That this is a story about misfits is an obvious statement; the gang even learns to trust their first friend on the road because she shows them her tattoo of the Misfits skull, which is almost too on the nose. One of the film’s major strengths is the way that it parses out little pieces of character that are revealed through dialogue. In a film that foregoes narrative devices like flashbacks in favor of a feeling of documentary realism, there’s no other way to get backstory, but it’s very well done here. Nathaly confides in another local girl that they meet in the town about her father’s recent deportation and not being sure what will happen to her now. Micah is caretaker to both of his younger siblings since his parents are both in rehab. Tony is directionless and feels that he has no other choice but to pursue a career in armed forces, which is the plight of a lot of Americans. As Makai tells the skateboarder (I want to say his name is Bernard, but I can’t find a single press kit that names anyone other than the kids), he was the only Black kid in the entire town. The film is also smart to let us know that there is conflict in the group, but to underplay it so that we don’t devote too much screen time to it and to underline the familial connection between them; for instance, the two girls are at one point pissed at Tony about something that he says offscreen, and the other two boys are hands-off. We never learn what it was that Tony said, and the only narrative contribution is that we see him looking over his shoulder at the girls as they shoot pool in the next scene, and by the next day, no one cares to bring it up again. It makes the road trip nature of the narrative have room to breathe.
Gasoline Rainbow is a picaresque, and we get a lot of pictures of life along the way, treated respectfully at all levels, which is also a nice touch. Each of the people that we meet along the way are people that you’ve probably met. My personal favorite is the Portlandian man living on the river with whom the group stays on the last night before The End of the World. He and every one of the friends that we meet wears a black metal band tee; he used to have hair down to his waist but keeps his head shaved after an accident with a piece of industrial machinery; his walls are adorned with Game of Thrones house banners; he makes breakfast to “The Shire” from the Lord of the Rings soundtrack; and he’s nothing but joyful that he gets to, in his own words, be their Tom Bombadil. I’ve known so many different variations on this guy that I couldn’t fully shake the feeling that I had met him before, too. I liked all of the people that we met along the way, in truth, even the crust punks, and appreciated the balance between them providing some genuinely good advice while encouraging the kids to just keep going without ever making them feel like they should turn back.
Taken on its own terms, this is a beauty, and a rare high-quality treat in its genre of contemporary coming-of-agers. There are a couple of moments where it gets a little hammy; the invocation of the word “family” in one of the kids’ voiceovers feels a bit heavy-handed, and I’m still conflicted about the film ending on seconds-long staring-to-camera close-ups of each character (its film-schooliness is apparent but it’s also very effective). If you get the chance to see this one in your market, I recommend it.
In the somber Brits-on-holiday drama How to Have Sex, a trio of teen besties spend a week getting wasted drunk at a Greek resort built to house teens getting wasted drunk. If they were teen boys in the early aughts, this would be a boneheaded boner comedy about virginal losers’ bumbling attempts to get laid for the first time among the Girls Gone Wild college crowd. Since they’re teen girls in a modern drama, that same mission to ditch their virginal status before the return flight home plays like a horror film. How to Have Sex dredged up some deeply unpleasant memories of my first couple years on my own at a binge-drinking “party college”, as well as more recent memories of being dragged out of the house by friends for a nightmarish stroll down Bourbon Street. It’s just as terrifying onscreen as it is in person, especially the longer you sit with how realistic it is to a lot of people’s first sexual experiences inside those neon-lit Hell pits. This is not just a film about the way alcohol violently fuels the flames of social pressure; it’s also a film about rape, even though everyone shows up eager to get each other in bed.
Mia McKenna-Bruce stars as our POV character, Taz, who travels to a MTV Spring Break-style hedonist resort with the sole intention of getting drunk and shedding her virginity. The resort comes with its own pre-planned parties & mating rituals designed to make that dream come true, mostly by getting the already horny hordes of kids so blotto on grain alcohol that they can’t remember whether or not they’ve actually, finally done it. There’s no room for authentic connection or intimate interaction within the cacophony of that DJ dance party dystopia, in which all the world’s a 24-hour nightclub. It would be easy, then, to script a physically violent rape between strangers there, but first time writer-director Molly Manning Walker instead scripts a more common, less sensational kind of sexual trauma. This is a story about the gradual erosion of consent by someone Taz knows. She vulnerably puts herself out there for consensual sex but is rejected; then she is isolated, pressured to consent to acts she’s uncomfortable with, and then physically overpowered by her abuser once her will is fully worn down. It’s tough to watch, mostly because it’s true to life.
In terms of recent erosion-of-consent stories about the gender politics of sexual assault, How to Have Sex is not nearly as feverishly overcharged as the service-industry thriller The Royal Hotel, nor as politically didactic as the porno-industry exposé Pleasure. It deliberately avoids glamorizing the allure of the nonstop nightclub atmosphere, sticking to the grating, real-world details of teens sloppily gobbling cheese fries & screeching karaoke instead of depicting the fantasy of the fabulous night they’re having in their heads. It might reframe the debaucherous mise-en-scène of a vintage Skins episode through clear-eyed sobriety of docu-fiction, but what it lacks in ecstatic cinematic style it more than makes up for in depth of character. Taz is a real person to us, not just a symbolic victim or a political mechanism. After her assault, she continues to think, feel, act, and react in ways that are authentic to real-life human behavior, which only amplifies the sinister inauthenticity of the world around her. McKenna-Bruce plays the part with heartbreaking sweetness & insecurity, while Walker surrounds her with just enough sense-memory detail to put the audience right back in her ankle-breaking heels. It’s a scarily vulnerable feeling.
The 1977 French coming-of-age drama Peppermint Soda is a lovely, densely detailed memoir of school age sisters’ adolescence in 1960s Paris. There’s nothing especially flashy or dramatic about its visual style or narrative except maybe in its choice of subject, since its matter-of-fact approach to the daily drama of young girls’ lives does feel ahead of its time. Rather, its frankness feels cutting edge for its time, when the world was still shocked by the confessional honesty of Judy Blume, to the point where it was just a couple character names away from being retitled Dieu, tu es là? C’est moi, Marguerite. Director Diane Kurys had never operated a camera before making Peppermint Soda but felt compelled to illustrate her childhood memories onscreen because there weren’t enough movies about teen girl adolescence being made in that era, when even the snobbier end of French cinema only made room for young boys’ coming-of-age stories like 400 Blows. That’s a difficult context to imagine when watching the film now, since stories of its kind are so prevalent that Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret recently got an official mainstream Hollywood adaptation just last year. While I was growing up, great girlhood nostalgia stories like Mermaids, My Girl andNow & Then, were holding more than their own against their male equivalents like The Sandlot & Stand By Me, so it seems Kurys won that particular battle in the culture war long before I saw caught up with her debut film.
Where Peppermint Soda excels, then, is in the specificity of Kurys’s childhood details; it’s a personal touch felt as soon as her opening title card dedicating the film, “For my sister, who still hasn’t returned my orange sweater.” Her and her sister’s avatars are a teenager & preteen in the film, just a few years but also a world apart due to the volatility of their ages. We watch them attend school and attempt to define themselves within various interpersonal relationships for one calendar year – navigating their parents’ divorce, their teachers’ abuses of power, and their friends’ erratic teenage behavior. Sometimes, the details of a scene are so specific to Kurys’s recollection of girlhood that they have to be pulled from personal memory, like when the younger girl awkwardly watches her older sister make out with a boy at a garage dance party. Sometimes, the details are broadly cultural, referencing 1960s political touchstones like the Kennedy assassination to mark the otherwise timeless story’s temporal locale. Whether the audience shares Kurys’s specific memory of growing up a girl in 1960s Paris is irrelevant, since there are universal aspects to childhood that translate to all cultural settings. When a classroom nerd absentmindedly chews the end of her ink pen until she stains her mouth with its erupting contents, I could immediately taste the blue metallic sludge from my own childhood memories. I was that exact kid once. We all were, or we all at least knew one.
Kurys was smart in making the most of her modest budget and D.I.Y. filmmaking skills, whether in selecting just the right vibrant-pattern 60s curtains or in supplementing the production budget by suggesting unfilmed scenes in still, staged vacation photos. Her eye for color & design is especially apparent in the gorgeous 2k digital scan of the film from a couple years back, wherein the saturation is cranked up in crisp detail. In that new presentation, her visual style feels like a precursor to modern production design obsessives like Wes Anderson, as most vintage French cinema does. In particular, there’s a teenage camping excursion that feels directly influential to the runaway romance of Moonrise Kingdom and its halfway-flippant dramatization of 1960s student protests was recently echoed in The French Dispatch. Around the time Anderson was promoting The French Dispatch, he even programmed Peppermint Soda as part of a screening series for the French Institute Alliance Francaise devoted to his “favorite French features.” That recommendation likely trumps anything I could say in the film’s favor in this format, so it’s safe to say that Peppermint Soda‘s poignancy & purpose has long outlasted whatever cultural fixation on teen-boy adolescence Kurys was initially attempting to counterbalance. It’s a casually wonderful film with plenty of authentic, lived-in detail, and in a way recent American titles like Are You There God?, and Diary of a Teenage Girl feel like they’re still catching up to it.
When Sean Baker’s career-high poverty drama The Florida Project locally premiered at New Orleans Film Fest in 2017, I was surprised that the screening included a Q&A with the movie’s producer, Shih-Ching Tsou. Although Tsou does not enjoy the same name recognition as her longtime creative partner, I immediately recognized her as the donut counter cashier from Baker’s previous picture – his breakout hit Tangerine. Listening to her talk about the creative & financial decisions behind The Florida Project‘s production made it clear she was a substantial player in the success of Baker’s directorial career, and that she had been his main collaborator since long before their movies received red-carpet film festival rollouts. A recent Criterion Collection restoration of Baker’s early, scrappy service industry drama Take Out highlighted the extent of their collaboration even more starkly. It’s the one instance where Shih-Ching Tsou was so involved in the daily filming of a project that she & Baker were listed as co-directors instead of being rigidly relegated to director & producer. It’s an interesting curio within the context of Baker’s career anyway, since it’s the only story I’ve seen him tell outside his usual pet subject of poverty-line sex work. Still, it’s even more interesting for the way it pushes what Tsou brings to her creative partnership with Baker to the forefront, since it was largely made with a two-person crew.
If it hadn’t been an early-style precursor to the greater things Baker & Tsou accomplished in Tangerine, The Florida Project, and Red Rocket, it’s unlikely Take Out would be remembered much at all. It’s a pretty straightforward cinema verité labor drama, most notable for its chump-change budget & documentary sensibilities. The most interest it might have to audiences unfamiliar with the trajectory of Sean Baker’s career is the authentic snapshot it captures of the daily operations of a Chinese food delivery kitchen in a post-9/11 NYC. Baker & Tsou spent weeks filming the front-of-house customer service & back-of-house food production of an authentic Chinese take-out counter before writing a sparse screenplay that could be staged in its sweaty, cramped walls. The customers at the counter are real New Yorkers waiting on their take-out orders; the customers who accept deliveries at their apartments were cast through Craigslist and improvised their interactions with the central, doomed delivery guy. Most importantly, the incredibly charismatic woman working the take-out counter, Wang-Thye “Big Sister” Lee, is documented performing her actual, natural work persona, providing enough priceless interactions with the real people of New York that it’s almost frustrating the movie wasn’t reworked as a full documentary instead of a mixed-media docudrama. Instead, Baker & Tsou reshaped these authentic transactions into a tidy, barebones crime drama, which likely helped land it the film festival distribution that kickstarted their career.
After harvesting enough B-roll of real-life kitchen drama, Tsou & Baker wrote a fictional drama about a food delivery worker’s frantic day-long scramble to repay borrowed cash, staged within the same restaurant. He has until the end of his shift to scrape together $800 in donations & tips or his debt to the gangsters who helped fund his US immigration will be doubled, a consequence they make brutally clear by hobbling his body with a hammer. This desperation pushes him to work grueling hours biking through a rainstorm, performing gratitude to shit-heel customers on what’s presumably the worst day of his life. Of course, it’s near impossible to get ahead on his own under those conditions, only picking up $1 here or $2 there in tips as the deadline quickly approaches. There’s no music underscoring the tension of this low-level crime drama, just the low hum of kitchen equipment and NYC rain. Although the story being told about the risks & pitfalls of undocumented immigration is a politically pointed one, it often feels a little forced & tidy compared to what’s otherwise such an authentic look at the daily lives of undocumented kitchen workers in major US cities. In the few movies they’ve made together since, Baker & Tsou have greatly improved the balance between those two impulses – pushing the fictional drama of their semi-documentary films to even more artificial extremes while simultaneously making them feel natural to the real-world environments they’re staged in. Take Out can’t help but feel like an early test run for greater work by comparison, but it’s still successful Independent Filmmaking on its own terms.
This early Tsou & Baker collaboration was made for $3,000 on rented mini-DV cameras in just one month’s time. Unlike the movie’s central characters and his co-director, Baker does not speak Mandarin Chinese, so he relied on Tsou to translate any improvised deviations from their script to help keep the rushed production on track. The handheld cameras frame the world they document & synthesize in a grotesque dinge, fixating on poverty-porn details like cockroach infestations, curled linoleum tiles, and the yellowed hues of fluorescent lights. Despite the uniform hideousness of low-budget digital filmmaking in that era, the food being served in the central kitchen location still looks damn good; the fried rice might read as electric green onscreen, but it’s topped with a visibly juicy half of chicken that’ll have you reaching for the pile of take-out menus in your own apartment. The equipment & financial limitations that shaped the production were obviously less than ideal, but they forced Tsou & Baker to work in cramped proximity in a way that solidified their joint filmmaking style that’s only led to increasingly greater work since. From the outside looking in, I get the sense that Tsou is still just as much of a driving force in their creative output as Baker, even though she doesn’t get onscreen credit as his co-director. At least, there’s nothing especially glaring about the filmmaking & economic ideas of Take Out that you won’t find in their more recent pictures; it’s just that now professional actors like Willem Dafoe deliver their dialogue instead of Craigslist randos, for better more than for worse.
There are plenty of legitimate things to complain about in the modern streaming era, from the exorbitant cost of subscribing to multiple services to the illusion of availability, which obscures the fact that most movies from before the 1990s are not currently available on any of those platforms. Those complaints do not apply to The People’s Streaming Service™, though. Tubi is the one beacon of hope in our streaming-era dystopia, offering a library of titles deep enough to rival cinema freaks’ fondly remembered video store days at the universally affordable price point of Free. All you have to put up with to access that library is frequent ad breaks, which can be jarring when watching high-brow classics like Un Chien Andalou but feels warmly familiar when watching the kind of schlock that pad out the late-night schedules of broadcast TV. For instance, I have a distinct memory of catching the final half-hour of the forgotten pro wrestling drama Below the Belt on a broadcast channel like MeTV after working a graveyard shift at a pub kitchen. I had no idea what I was watching or how I would ever get to see the rest of the picture, so I stayed awake through a few commercial breaks to soak up whatever scraps I could. About a decade later, Below the Belt is just sitting there on Tubi, out in the open, with fewer commercials and the same lack of fanfare. I can watch it start to end at any time. Our new streaming paradigm might be discouraging for people who grew up in households that could afford cable, but for those of us raised on service industry tips and antenna rods, there are some ways in which things have clearly gotten better.
It turns out watching Below the Belt in out-of-context scraps on broadcast TV was surprisingly true to how the movie plays in full. Filmed in 1974 but delayed for release until 1980, it has a similar troubled production history as the punk road trip drama Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains, which was also mostly remembered & rediscovered as a staple of late-night TV broadcasts. The same way The Fabulous Stains was shelved until it could be retooled for a post-MTV cash-in, Below the Belt was shelved until it could be marketed as a pro-wrestling knockoff of the massively popular Rocky series. It’s likely no coincidence that these two specific films were treated as low priorities for distributing & marketing, since they’re both women’s underdog stories set in creative industries run by men. The Fabulous Stains is about an all-girl punk band; Below the Belt is about women wrestlers working the regional circuit in the American South. The difference is that TheFabulous Stains‘ compromised form only becomes apparent in a last-second time jump that was clearly tacked on to cash-in on the rise of MTV. Below the Belt is an absolute mess throughout. This rise-to-regional-fame pro wrestling story has a convincing flair for low-budget melodrama, but it suffers from a crippling addiction to plot-summarizing montages that betrays its scrappy production history. There are tons of great raw footage & isolated scenes to work with (and many years of stagnation to work with them), but it still feels like the product of a panicked editing room. It’s as if they had a week to edit after five years of forgetting what they shot.
Actor-turned-psychologist Regina Baff stars as an unlikely recruit for the wrasslin’ business. She starts the film as a scrawny NYC diner waitress drowning under a mop of red curls, but she’s quickly scouted for her talent for brutality when she knees a coworker in the balls for sexually harassing her mid-shift. In the erotic thriller curio White Palace, that take-no-shit diner waitress scrappiness is rewarded with a months-long fuckfest with James Spader. In Below the Belt, it’s rewarded with a road trip to the American South, where she learns “the ropes” of the wrestling trade with a collection of jaded colleagues who’ve already seen it all. The story was “suggested by” the novel To Smithereens by Rosalyn Drexler who, appropriately enough, went on to write the novelization of Rocky under the pseudonym Julia Sorel. To Smithereens is a personal account of Drexler’s brief career as a wrestler in the 1950s, which helps explain the movie’s episodic, disconnected assemblage of wrasslin’ anecdotes. It’s not a story so much as it’s a collection of interesting characters, some of whom are played by real-life wrestlers, and the most memorable of whom is played by cult-cinema legend Shirley Stoler. Stoler only has a minor part as a road-weary wrassler with a handgun fetish, but she makes the most of it, screeching “Give me my gun back, you bitch!” in perfect camp pitch. The other MVP on the crew is R&B musician Billy Preston, whose increasingly loopy lyrics in his constant musical montage narration makes the whole movie feel maddeningly incomplete . . . in a mostly endearing way.
By the time the dozenth montage masks unintelligible wide-shot dialogue with song lyrics about “alligators in the chitlin trees,” “burly Birmingbama ham,” “taking baths in the sweet magnolia blossoms with the possums,” or whatever other Southern cliches Preston cooked up in a half-hour of studio time, it’s clear that Below the Belt was a compromised production. By the time the decreasingly credible, increasingly repetitive stock footage of the wrasslin’ crowds starts looking like it was shot on handheld super-8 cameras instead of professional equipment, the illusion of competence is fully broken. I was just as fascinated by the film in its full, fractured form as I was catching parts of it out of context on TV broadcast, though, simply because the retro fashions, characters, and mise-en-scène were so specific to a bygone era of regional professional wrestling. In that way, Below the Belt is more satisfying as a makeshift documentary than it is as a scene-to-scene drama, which means that I should make reading Drexler’s To Smithereens memoir a high priority this year. It’s perfect Tubi programming in either context, though, since the intrusion of commercial breaks can’t disrupt what’s already a chaotic narrative flow, and since the film is such an obscure curio that you’re grateful someone cared to host it in the first place (in HD, no less).
I know for a fact that there was a recent time when Marlene Dietrich’s numerous, star-making collaborations with director Josef von Sternberg were streaming on The Criterion Channel. I know this because I happened to watch one of the lesser titles from that collection, The Devil is a Woman, during that window. If I had known how difficult it would be to access the Dietrich/von Sternberg oeuvre just a few years later, I would’ve pushed myself to stream them all when I could, not just the one that jumped out at me because it had “Devil” in the title and was set during Carnival. Currently, none of von Sternberg’s collaborations with his sexual-anarchist muse are streaming on any online platform (legally, at least), which means you’re either coughing up $100 for Criterion’s DVD box set (The Blu-Ray discs are currently out of print) or you’re waiting patiently for them to return to their streaming platform some distant, wistful year. Well, I’ve unlocked a secret third option: buying used DVD copies of whatever Marlene Dietrich movies I happen to stumble across in thrift stores. Sure, I’ve still never seen Morocco or The Blue Angel—two of her most beloved collaborations with von Sternberg—but I’ve managed to pick up a few of their shared titles in the meantime to help me get through this unexpected streaming drought.
1932’s Blonde Venus finds von Sternberg in awe of Dietrich’s charisma . . . and her stockinged gams. She stars in this pre-Code adultery drama as a woman who is simply too fabulous to cut it as a housewife, too magnetic to not be onstage, so badass it’s criminal (in this case to her marriage’s peril). As flattering as von Sternberg’s movie is to Dietrich’s plentiful charms, he still dramatically puts her through the ringer. Blonde Venus opens with Dietrich and fellow, unnamed actresses skinny-dipping – their naked flesh just barely obscured by reflections on the surface of the water. They’re naturally peeped on by group of horny fuckboys, one of whom is smooth enough to talk Dietrich into a date after her next performance. Years later, she’s married to the galoot, raising their son, and worried that their family won’t be able to survive the financial burden of her sickly husband’s skyrocketing medical expenses. Of course, this leads her to return to the stage to earn quick cash (in a time when “dancer” effectively translated to “prostitute”), where she quickly is led astray by a young, wealthy, hunky Cary Grant who throws her marriage into a death spiral. Blonde Venus is extremely dated to 1930s sensibilities, by which I mean Dietrich’s stage numbers get real racist real quick, with her first performance featuring a gorilla suit and a bevy of buxom dancers in blackface. It’s dated in all the right ways too, though, laying on so many double-entendre line readings and horned-up “come hither” glances that you’re tempted to say von Sternberg has “The Lubitsch Touch“. Of course, he’s actually got his own touch, which mostly shows in the lighting’s gorgeous play with silhouettes & shadows and in the drama’s gloomy mood, which is something you won’t find in most of Lubitsch’s pre-Code sex comedies.
Shanghai Express, from the same year, doubles down on the gloomy drama, trapping Dietrich in a series of locked train cars where are no stages for the fräulein with the redrawn brow-lines to model sparkly outfits or sing cabaret. Instead of locking horns with a fellow horned-up cabaret dancer named Taxi (whom she insults in Blonde Venus by asking “Do you charge for the first mile?” in perfect ice-queen bitchiness), Dietrich is instead paired with an equally gorgeous & charismatic actress who genuinely poses a threat. Shanghai Express is a rolling cage match in which Dietrich & Anna May Wong are locked in tight quarters to compete for the title of most alluring femme fatale; I’m afraid Orientalism wins out in the end, but it’s still a beautiful fight. Like in Blonde Venus, things get real racist real quick, with every character casually tossing around the word “chinaman” and musing about the moral corruption of The East in practically every scene of dialogue (and with the villain appearing in yellowface to seal the deal). I very much understand the movie’s appeal to those who rank it highly in the Dietrich von Sternberg catalog, especially as a political thriller in which a train of innocent passengers are held hostage & tormented by corrupt Chinese officials in an increasingly tense stalling of their lives. The government corruption, moralist Christian hypocrisy, and opium trade maneuvers that drive the plot are all intriguing enough in this Dietrich von Sternberg bottle episode, but I just couldn’t get past the Orientalist stink of the premise & setting. As perfectly cast as she is, Anna May Wong is herself a victim of that racist streak, with her screentime greatly diminished in comparison to Dietrich, who stars as the infamous “coaster” (coastline sex worker) Shanghai Lily. Dietrich lands some great zingers about how “respectable people” are “dull” and how she & God are “not on speaking terms”, but they’d all be better served in a film where she’s a bawdy cabaret performer instead of an expatriate political refugee.
1931’s Dishonored splits the difference between Blonde Venus and Shanghai Express, combining the best parts of both films to achieve the highest highs of this thrift-store-purchase trio, despite having the lowest name recognition. Dietrich stars as a sex-worker musician and as a political agitator, using her alluring beauty & party-girl charms to infiltrate Russian forces as lady-spy X-27. Dishonored is the most visually showy von Sternberg film I’ve seen so far, layering shadows, dissolves, and foreground props in what could’ve been a very straightforward wartime espionage drama otherwise. It’s also got plenty of pre-Code shocks, most lovably in a rare Carnival sequence that credibly conveys the debauchery of the holiday (even more so than in The Devil is a Woman). It’s ideal TCM broadcast fodder all around, with lines of dialogue like “I suppose I’m no good, that’s all,” and “The more you cheat and the more you lie, the more exciting you become” registering as all-timers that should be just as iconic as “Here’s looking at you, kid” and “Of all the gin joints in all the world, she walks into mine.” It’s a bleak, bleak, bleak picture, even for its time – featuring two suicides in its opening half hour and concluding on an unflinchingly brutal execution. At the same time, von Sternberg leaves plenty of room for ribald joviality, with Dietrich joking about the difference between “serving her country” as a spy vs “serving her countrymen” as a streetwalker. Like in Shanghai Express, she doesn’t sing any cabaret numbers, but she does play plenty of piano, and her director is going so buck wild with his lingering dissolves and long-distance push-ins that you hardly have time to notice she’s not performing on a stage.
I cannot claim that Dishonored is the best of Marlene Dietrich’s collaborations with Josef von Sternberg, because I am working with an incomplete data set. I can only report that it’s the best of their collaborations that I currently have access to. It seems almost criminal that any of the seven films they made together wouldn’t be currently available to the public on a streaming service, but scarcity of access is a constant in any cinephile’s life. Unless you’re lucky enough to have the made-up, mythological resource of “disposable income”, it’s likely you’re used to having your film selections dictated by access points like library cards, video store rentals, thrift store purchases, and shared streaming-service passwords; I know they’re what drive the programming on this humble film blog, anyway. I’m committed to catching up with Morocco, The Blue Angel, and The Scarlet Empress the next time they’re conveniently available to me, but I will admit there was an unbeatable thrill to finding used copies of a few other blind spot titles in the Dietrich von Sternberg catalog to hold me over until then – especially since Dishonored & Blonde Venus ended up being such rewarding pre-Code dramas that might’ve felt more anonymous if I watched all seven movies at once.
Swampflix 