drama

Twelfth Night: Or What You Will (1996)

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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.

-Brandon Ledet

Gasoline Rainbow (2024)

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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. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

How to Have Sex (2024)

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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.

-Brandon Ledet

Peppermint Soda (1977)

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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 and Now & 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.

-Brandon Ledet

Take Out (2004)

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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.

-Brandon Ledet

Below the Belt (1980)

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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 The Fabulous 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). 

-Brandon Ledet

My Week with Marlene

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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.

-Brandon Ledet

Party Girl (1958)

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I’ve been hearing the term “dream ballet” tossed around with unusual frequency lately, due to that glamorous Old Hollywood indulgence enjoying a resurgence in the Oscar nominees Maestro & Barbie.  Both films feature an abrupt break from reality in which their male leads slip into a dream dimension to express their abstract emotional state through the art of balletic, interpretive dance – something much more common to the grand movie musicals of Hollywood’s Golden Era than to the overly cynical, logical filmmaking landscape we’re currently trudging through.  It shouldn’t have surprised me, then, that all of this “dream ballet” chatter was echoed in my recent thrift store Blu-ray purchase of the Old Hollywood classic Party Girl, which stops its real-world story of doomed lovers on a mobsters’ payroll in its tracks to indulge in a few escapist sequences of fantastical dance.  Where Party Girl‘s otherworldly dance numbers tripped me up, though, is in the way they subvert & pervert the most timelessly iconic dream ballet sequence in the Old Hollywood canon (the same one visually referenced in the “I’m Just Ken” dream ballet interlude of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie movie).  In Party Girl, dancer-turned-actress Cyd Charisse reworks her breakout performance in the dream ballet sequence from Singing in the Rain into a show girl strip tease.  The ethereal pinks & purples of Singing in the Rain‘s infinite studio set are retrofitted to the stage of a Prohibition-era Chicago gangster hangout called The Golden Rooster, and Charisse takes a moment in that otherworldly void to flirt with the camera instead of the audience in the room with her.  She’s initially costumed in a showgirl outfit with an eccentrically long train that flows behind her movements—until she removes it in classic burlesque tease—recalling the gorgeous white fabric that trailed her movements in Singing in the Rain.  It turns out her brief dance with Gene Kelley in that film was so instantly iconic that it was already being lovingly referenced just a few years later (decades before Ryan Gosling was even born).

Unfortunately, Party Girl peaks early with that balletic strip tease, and Charisse is given little to do off-stage, despite playing the titular moll.  She stars as 1930s Chicago showgirl Vicky Gaye, who earns extra cash between shows at The Golden Rooster by making paid appearances at mobster parties in private residences (a light, Hays Code-approved form of prostitution).  While working one of these pop-up speakeasy parties, she falls for the mobsters’ suave attorney, a “guardian angel for punks & gunmen” played by a disappointingly stiff Robert Taylor.  Their romance is a dully dignified one, with both parties pushing each other to get out of The Life even though they’re both on the same mobster’s payroll.  Courtroom debates, backroom negotiations, boat trips overseas, and medical crises ensue at a leisurely pace, occasionally interrupted by Tommy-gun fire & mildly salacious dance numbers.  Director Nicholas Ray brings the same eye for lurid beauty that elevates much more essential classics in his catalog like Johnny Guitar, especially in the way he puts the Metrocolor film processing to use in his splashes of gold & red.  Unfortunately, his flair for full-glam Old Hollywood magic is the wrong approach for noir, a genre that would’ve been much better suited for his scrappier early pictures like Rebel Without a Cause.  As a major studio noir, Party Girl is hopelessly bloated, something that’s apparent as soon as it widens the frame into CinemaScope.  It’s still beautiful nonetheless, whether it’s gawking at the vivid reds of a blood-filled bathtub or gawking at the glittering gold & pink sequins of Cyd Charisse’s dance costumes.  By the time she reappears onstage for a second dance break from reality in a leopard print gown, all of the energy of the picture has already bled out in one too many courtroom scenes, which are always death for late-period, major studio noir.

I don’t know that Cyd Charisse’s first big dance number in Party Girl technically counts as a dream ballet, since it’s narratively set up as a nightclub stage act instead of an expressionistic break from reality.  I do know that it’s referencing the go-to standard of dream ballet sequences, though, a connection to Singing in the Rain that’s made apparent enough by Charisse’s casting before it’s underlined in her costuming.  That dance routine also deliberately disregards the physical boundaries of its stage the same way Busby Berkeley used to in his own fantastical dance sequences, treating the camera as the audience POV instead of staying anchored to the extras seated in the room.  It’s the most alive Ray ever feels behind the camera, and it’s the one stretch of the film where Charisse’s screen presence feels irreplaceable.  I haven’t seen Maestro myself, nor am I likely to unprompted, but I can report that I was equally thrilled by the visual Singing in the Rain callback in Barbie‘s dream ballet sequence last summer.  In that moment, I felt the high-artifice movie magic of Old Hollywood return in full force, a sensibility echoed in the over-stylized set & costume design throughout Barbieland.  Hopefully, a third dream ballet sequence in a major motion picture will continue the trend after its repetition in Maestro; it’s one of the most genius tropes invented by the Hollywood dream machine, the kind of overwhelming sensory indulgence that inspires nerds with TCM & Criterion subscriptions to mutter “pure cinema” under our breath.

-Brandon Ledet

The Cranes are Flying (1957)

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Immediately after our viewing of Soy Cuba, my viewing companion started reading about the director, Mikhail Kalatozov, and discovered that he had also previously directed Letyat zhuravli (The Cranes are Flying), and that it had won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1958. We checked to see if it was on the Criterion streaming service and discovered that it was, and immediately made plans to watch it as soon as possible. Although it lacks some of the spectacular work that was present in Soy Cuba, the seeds for many of that film’s finest moments are on full display here, and this one is likewise worthy of revisiting for a modern audience. 

Boris (Aleksey Batalov) is a young Soviet factory worker with lofty ideals, deeply in love with Veronika (Tatiana Samoilova), whom he has nicknamed “Squirrel,” and he plans to marry her as soon as he can. Boris lives in a multi room apartment with his family: his grandmother, his father Fyodor (Vasili Merkuryev), and his cousins Mark (Aleksandr Shvorin) and Irina (Svetlana Kharitonova). Fyodor is a doctor and Irina is in training to enter the same profession, while Mark is a composer and piano player who is himself obsessed with Veronika. Boris and Veronika’s meetings are often delayed by his duties at the factory, which gives Mark the opportunity to try and ingratiate himself with his cousin’s betrothed, but Veronika soundly rejects him at every advance. When the Soviet Union enters WWII, many of Boris’s colleagues worry that they will be drafted, and there is much discussion about the possibility of receiving exemptions, and Veronika worries incessantly that Boris will be conscripted, unaware that her naive, doe-eyed love has already volunteered, alongside his friend Stepan (Valentin Zubkov). 

On the day before Veronika’s birthday, he is ordered to report for duty, and the two are unable to find each other in the crowd, prevented from saying a final goodbye. In his absence, things go from bad to worse for Veronika when her parents are killed in an air raid; she is taken in by Boris’s family, but this leaves her vulnerable to Mark’s machinations, and he forces himself upon her during another raid while the rest of the family is in hiding, then forces her to marry him. On the front, Boris is shot while saving a fellow soldier and declared missing. Veronika never gives up hope that he will return, however, even as she is trapped in a loveless marriage with Mark, evacuated to Siberia from Moscow as the enemy’s forces encroach, and made to endure the bitter lamentations of returning wounded who have more harsh words for the women who failed to wait for them than they do for the fascists that they fight. 

This movie is stunning. Samoilova is doing unprecedented work here as Veronika, from the first time that she sees the cranes flying over Moscow with Boris at her side, to the film’s bittersweet final moments when she sees them again after learning that Boris will not be returning home to her. This isn’t a spoiler—the film treats his death as an inevitability from the moment that we learn he has volunteered, and although there are a few moments in which it seems that there may be reason to hope, it is a foregone conclusion that he will not be coming home. The film knows it, the characters know it, and we know it, even as Veronika keeps hope alive in her heart for a reunion that will never come. 

This was, apparently, one of the first films within the USSR to treat the war as a tragedy and not a source of tremendous patriotic pride. Prior to this, all films that dealt with WWII did so in an overtly propagandistic way, with the films creating an image of a cheery populace without flaw, all working together in blissful harmony and without want or need. This was a lightning bolt of realism thrust into that industry, a film in which our heroes and our villains espouse the same political philosophies even if they enact very different systems of morality, showing both the mask that the USSR presented the west and the varied faces beneath it. Boris is lovable but he is also not only an obvious fool but dishonest, as evidenced not only by his immediately volunteering for the war effort but also when he lies straight to Veronika’s face about their plans for the immediate future, despite knowing he will not be able to fulfill any of it while he is out on the front lines. Mark is an utter cad, moving in on his cousin’s beloved even before he goes off to war and making every effort to take her for himself (up to and including an implied sexual assault) and resorting to bribery in order to receive a draft exemption—an action that also includes him using his respected uncle’s name without his knowledge and besmirching the man’s honor. Irina is likewise flawed. Her earliest scenes in the film show her belittling Boris for staying out late and sleeping in on his day off, despite the fact that he’s more exhausted from extended days of honest work than he is from catting around the city with Veronika; later, she treats Veronika like garbage for marrying Mark, even though it’s clear that she had little choice in the matter and Irina didn’t respect Boris in the first place. These are people, not propagandists. 

There’s something beautiful about the sense of impending doom here, and the way that it plays out in the visuals and the performances. Of particular note here are Fyodor and his mother, both of whom I completely adore. Grandmother (as she is credited) is weary with wisdom; unlike her naive grandson, she has seen wars before and she knows how the play out, and the knowing look in her eye when she learns that Boris is going to serve and she gazes into his face with the certain knowledge that this intimacy between them is now finite and has an expiration date is heartbreaking. On the day that Boris is to report, two women are sent to the family home bearing gifts from the Communist Party, and as they begin to recite the exhortation of Boris’s bravery and patriotism that they were sent to deliver, Fyodor interrupts them and finishes the last half of the speech for them. He’s heard it before, and too many times, and although he himself will later serve the effort in his capacity as surgeon and head of a medical facility, he knows that war is an ugly, inglorious thing in which young men die, not a call to some greater glory or honor. This, too, was unusual at the time, as the process of De-Stalinization had only really become state policy some half a decade before the film was made, and creating art that professed such a view of war prior to this could very well have been considered insidious or even treasonous. As Boris departs for the assembly grounds, Grandmother first shuts the door behind him as voices retreat down the stairs, only to rush back out onto the landing and call down to him; Fyodor admonishes her for her emotion, perhaps feeling some shame at his own emotional outburst and transferring that embarrassment to his mother, only to join her in their pre-emptive (but correct) grieving when she tells him that she just wanted to see Boris “one last time” (emphasis added). 

Visually, this is a masterpiece, even if it doesn’t reach the same heights that the director would later achieve in Soy Cuba. There’s nothing as breathtakingly awe-inspiring as that bus transition scene or the funeral march in the third segment of that narrative, but this is nonetheless a gorgeously shot film, and the abundance of epic tracking shots is already on full display, from the way that the camera follows Veronika through the throngs of people as she struggles to find Boris before he ships out, to the similar scene at the end when she searches for him amongst the returning soldiers at the train station in Moscow, to the way that the camera moves with perfect precision as it follows Boris on the front lines as he races for the safety of the tree line with his injured compatriot on his back. The most stunning may be the repeated images of characters climbing a mind-boggling amount of stairs—first, Boris climbs them because he cannot bear to leave Veronika’s building after they have spent the night walking the city together; later, he bounds up them in a surreally shot sequence wherein he returns home triumphantly and marries Veronika as he promised, a dream as he lays dying; still later, those stairs are all that remain of Veronika’s apartment building when she returns home from the subway shelter after an air raid as she ascends them rapidly, already knowing that her parents have been killed but needing to see for herself. And that’s not even getting into the other ways that this film uses visual language with such style and aplomb; the choice to have Mark pursue Veronika through the streets of the city in the same places and from the same angles as we earlier saw her walk with Boris is particularly inspired, as if he is taking even that from her and making it revolting.

There’s a real sense of modernity that Soy Cuba had that is missing here, it’s true. That film felt like it could have been made yesterday, while this one definitely feels more like a product of its decade, with many of the hallmarks thereof. Still, as someone who usually can’t stand war movies, this one is a beautiful film, and although I don’t really know what the other contenders were, I have no doubt that it deserved its Golden Palm win. If you were interested in watching both, I might suggest starting here and watching the later film afterward, but both are beautiful, noteworthy, and deserving of attention, either as a pair or in isolation. The Cranes are Flying is currently streaming on Criterion. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Teorema (1968)

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I’m going to tell you something you already know: the Gen-Z teens are really, really into Saltburn.  From the wealth class making TikTok tours of their mansions in honor of Barry Keoghan’s “Murder on the Dancefloor” nude ballet to the working-class slobs beneath them making cum-themed cocktails in honor of Jacob Elordi’s bathwater, it’s the one film from the past year that’s captured that entire generation’s horned-up imagination (despite Bottoms‘s efforts to best it).  Of course, that kind of youthful enthusiasm is always going to be met with equal gatekeeping cynicism from more seasoned film nerds.  A lot of the online rhetoric about Saltburn outside its ecstatic celebration on “MovieTok” expresses frustration that the teens & twentysomethings enjoying it haven’t yet seen real transgressive cinema, which makes them easily impressed by Emerald Fennell’s social media-friendly Eat the Rich thriller.  The most common chorus among older cynics is that Saltburn is just the toothless Gen-Z version of Talented Mr. Ripley, a comparison I even made when I first reviewed the film in December (calling it Mr. Ripley‘s “airport paperback mockbuster” equivalent).  I was mildly amused by Saltburn on first watch, but I’ve only become more endeared to it in the month since as Gen-Z’s horned-up adoration for it grows.  Maybe it is most of these kids’ first mildly horny, safely transgressive movie, but so what? We all have to start somewhere.  Back in 1999, I found my own erotic thriller training wheels in the equally timid Cruel Intentions, a film I still love to this day against my better judgement (after decades of having seen much better, hornier cinema of transgression). 

Despite my naive affection for Cruel Intentions, it took me 20 years to make time for its more sophisticated equivalent in Dangerous Liaisons, a film I did not watch until 2019.  Meanwhile, I liked Saltburn okay, and it only took me a few weeks to catch up with its own artsy, smartsy precursor.  Let’s call it personal progress, something that only comes with time.  I’m not speaking of The Talented Mr. Ripley in this instance, nor am I referring to Saltburn‘s second most cited influence, Brideshead Revisited.  Such pedestrian literature can no longer penetrate my jaded skull, which has been toughened by decades of chasing the high of my initial repeat viewings of Cruel Intentions and subsequent Placebo soundtrack singalongs in the Year of Our Dark Lord 1999.  No, my cinema addled brain turned instead to the great Italo provocateur Pier Paolo Pasolini, whose final film Salò tested the limits of my thirst for transgression just a few years after I first saw Cruel Intentions (and was also frequently cited by trolls on recent threads pushing Gen-Z Saltburn enjoyers to watch something genuinely dangerous & fucked up).  Devoted Pasolini scholars and Criterion Channel subscribers would likely be appalled to see his film Teorema contextualized as a Saltburn prototype, but I’m compelled to do so anyway, since the hyperbolic, nerdy gatekeeping around Fennell’s totally cromulent sophomore feature needs to be combated with fire.  Teorema is a much smarter, harsher, politically sharper social-climber thriller than Saltburn by practically every metric, so it might initially seem like an insult to present it in this comparative context, but since all it would really take is one TikTok video recommending it to Saltburn fans (Salties? Burnies? Tublickers?) for the film to find a younger, curious audience, I’m willing to risk the faux pas.

Terrence Stamp stars as a nameless young man who mysteriously appears at a bourgeois family home in 1960s Milan.  His arrival is announced via telegram, and he is introduced to the family’s social circle at a house party reception, but his origin and presence are treated as a supernatural phenomenon.  Without overt coercion or force, The Visitor methodically seduces each member of the household into an intimate sexual relationship.  Equally mesmerized by his saintly aura and by the bulge of his pants, everyone from the father figure to the live-in maid makes a sexual advance at the mysterious stranger, which he tenderly obliges with Christlike compassion for their individual plights & desires.  In Saltburn, that infiltration of the bourgeois household is a strictly conniving one, where the outsider weaponizes his sexual charisma as a way to distract from his scheming theft of the family’s inherited property.  In Teorema, it’s more like a visit from a ghost or angel, throwing the family’s “moral sense” and “personal confusion” into chaos without any aims for personal gain.  Then, a second telegram announces The Visitor’s departure, and he abruptly leaves the family to adjust to their new life post-orgasmic bliss – changed, unmoored, confounded.  Like the abrupt departure of Jacob Elordi’s character in Saltburn‘s third act, The Visitor’s absence leaves the family spiritually & emotionally hollowed.  They’ve been transformed by the experience and are unsure how to adjust to the new paradigm of their lives.  Only, in this case their transformations touch on divine transcendence rather than merely experiencing the emotionally stunted British equivalent of grief.

In interviews promoting the film, Pasolini described Teorema as both “a parable” and “an enigma.”  Anyone frustrated with Saltburn’s kiddie gloves approach to class politics would be much better served by this film’s engagement with the topic, especially by the time the father figure’s mourning after his angelic sex with The Visitor convinces him to relinquish his factory to a worker’s union as an attempt to dismantle the bourgeoisie.  Meanwhile, his son processes his own grief on canvas, suddenly transforming into a Picasso-esque painter; it’s a life pivot that feels both sympathetic to his sudden burst of inspiration and mocking of trust-fund artists who can afford to live phony peasant’s lives on their bourgeois family’s dime.  On the opposite end of the wealth scale, the family maid is transformed by her own sexual epiphany into a religious idol who can enact tactile miracles of God that even The Visitor seems incapable of.  Of course, most Tublicker youngsters slurping up Saltburn rewatches on their parents’ Amazon Prime accounts aren’t really in it for the class politics, which might be the one instance where Fennell has Pasolini beat.  Saltburn is much more sexually explicit than Teorema, which does include flashes of nudity (good news for anyone wanting a glimpse of Terrence Stamp’s scrotum) but largely keeps the runtime of its sex scenes to a minimum.  In the family’s most arousing transformation, the mother figure picks up the cruising habits of a gay man, soliciting young trade & roadside gigolos around rural Italy in an attempt to relive her carnal bliss with The Visitor.  It’s a satisfyingly salacious impulse in the narrative, but it’s just one angle on the story among many; by contrast, her daughter responds to the family’s loss by choosing to go catatonic, opting out of life entirely.

I do not mean to present this side-by-side comparison as a cheap echo of the “hydrogen bomb vs coughing baby” meme.  It’s clear enough that the bourgeois-estate-interrupted-by-chaotic-outsider premise shared by these two otherwise extremely different films is executed with much more spiritual & political heft in Pasolini’s film than in Fennell’s, to the point where I feel embarrassed even saying it.  If nothing else, Teorema includes images & events it refuses to explain to the audience (including the frequent interruption of the narrative by the shadows of passing clouds on a volcanic mountaintop where the story eventually concludes), whereas Saltburn begins and ends with plot-summarizing montages that overexplain what’s already a very simple, straightforward story.  The comparison is only useful, then, in pointing out how absurd it is that the two films should be held to the same standards.  Pedantic film nerds pointing out that Fennell’s film is neither as politically bold as Teorema nor as harshly transgressive as Salò aren’t helping any Gen-Z teens get enticed by the great works of Pasolini; they’re just making the kids defensive.  Do you know what might actually get them into Pasolini, though?  The popularity of Saltburn, even if it takes them 20 years to warm up to the idea of watching its higher brow equivalents.  Enough Film Twitter freaks and Letterboxd addicts have already pointed Tublickers in the direction of The Talented Mr. Ripley, a much more easily digestible precursor to their new pet favorite.  I can only hope this review will help bump up Teorema‘s SEO presence in that conversation, and they’ll eventually work their way up to this one too.  Either way, I’m just happy that they’re excited about any dirty movie; it’s a start, and it’s worth encouraging.

-Brandon Ledet