fantasy

The Beast (1975)

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I’ve watched a few disparate adaptations & reinterpretations of Beauty and the Beast in recent years, each with their own unique window into the dark magic of the fairy tale: the intensely sensual surrealism of the French version from 1946, the tactile storybook atmospherics of the Czech version from 1979, the Internet Age psychedelia of the animated Japanese version from 2021.  All of these retellings of the “tale as old as time” have, of course, touched on the hesitant attraction of an innocent young woman to a wounded, mysterious brute, but they also all ultimately focus more on the brute’s troubled past & cursed homelife than the inner life of the vulnerable beauty who loves him.  That’s where Walerian Borowczyk’s take on Beauty and the Beast finds new, forbidden territory worthy to explore (as a French adaptation from a Polish director, as long as we’re tracking geography).  A profane masterpiece of erotic menace & goofball social satire, Borowczyk’s perversion of the Beauty of the Beast template delves deeper into the monstrous extremes of women’s desire & pleasure than any other retelling I can name, to the point where the titular beast is merely a prop, a piece of furniture.  And wait until you see what the women do to the furniture!  The Beast is also singular its smutty eagerness to roll around in its own filth, an instinct that eventually pushes past the absurd into the sublime.  It’s the only version of this story I’ve seen that reasonably compares to the 1940s Cocteau film that defines so many adaptations’ basic visual language, mostly because both works were clearly made for abject perverts.

Technically, The Beast is not an adaptation of the 18th century fairy tale at all, at least not in terms of plot.  Like the recent anime version in Belle, Borowczyk’s film assumes the audience’s overfamiliarity with the source material, using its basic iconography for shorthand to push & warp its broader themes to new extremes.  This is still a story where a young, naive woman is married off to a cursed, wretched beast as a desperate financial ploy, with the deep sadness of their newly shared castle’s faded glory haunting their tentative romance.  And just in case you don’t catch his allusions to the fairy tale, Borowczyk hands the beast’s would-be bride a single red rose as a symbol of their delicate union.  It’s just that this is the kind of film where the young beauty mashes that rose into her clitoris as an unconventional masturbation tool, destroying it in lustful mania while entertaining a zoological ravishment fantasy that would make even the most jaded cinephile blush.  You’d think there’s nothing left that a Beauty and the Beast tale could do to surprise an audience, considering how many times it’s been retold & reshaped over the past few centuries.  The Beast dropped my jaw in shock in its very first frame, which zooms in on the textbook veterinary details of equine genital arousal.  The movie opens with relentless, repetitive images of erect horse cocks, fairly warning the audience that if you stick around long enough you will watch beasts fuck in intense biological detail.  You won’t find that kind of novelty in either of Disney’s retellings of the tale, but Borowczyk’s version has a way of distilling it down to its most essential, throbbing parts.

The beastly beau in this picture is the poorly socialized nephew of a decrepit French baron, living in a Grey Gardens style faded estate in the rot of long-lost wealth.  Hoping that a traditional Christian marriage will bring the mysteriously disgraced family back into the royal fold, they arrange for the ancient nobleman’s brother, a highly reputable Cardinal, to ordain his weirdo nephew’s union with a spritely British heiress.  Only, the heir to the estate is a hopeless loser, spending every waking moment in the stables overseeing an intensive horse-breeding program with a fervor that pushes beyond the practical to the disturbed.  Luckily, his wife-to-be is just as much of a shameless pervert, immediately matching the unholy, decadent vibe of the chateau with her own morbid sexual curiosity.  Since her beau is too socially obtuse to understand or reciprocate her enthusiasm, he leaves her sexually frustrated in the absurdly long wait for the Cardinal’s arrival, dead time that she fills with wet dreams of the estate’s sordid history.  There are superstitious rumors that a former lady of the house had mated with a cryptid beast who cyclically haunts the grounds every couple centuries, which is supposedly how the family was excommunicated from the Church in the first place.  The beauty sweatily reimagines this human-bestial coupling in extensive, graphic detail while furiously masturbating in her bridal nightgown until the poor cloth is ripped to shreds.  The horny, mythical beast of the past and the shy, grotesque beast of the present are eventually linked in a last-minute twist, but their connection is far less important than the perverted pleasures of the women who desire their touch (and thrusts).

Before The Beast devolves into full-on cryptid erotica, its value as a unique work gets lost among its many literary parallels, which extend far beyond the fairy tale it most overtly alludes to.  The long, pointless wait for the Cardinal’s arrival at the castle plays out as an existential joke, recalling surrealist works like The Exterminating Angel & Waiting for Godot.  There are also overt Buñuel parallels in its blasphemous mockery of the wealthy & religious ruling class as degenerate brutes, pushing its satire to de Sadist extremes but never fully matching the heightened Buñuelian humor at hand.  The centerpiece of the work really is the pornographic depictions of bestial fucking, then – starting with the horses, working up to more traditional onscreen heterosexual couplings, and then climaxing with the historical ravishment fantasy that swallows up most of the third act.  “Climax” is the only word you could really use to describe that payoff, too, since the humanoid wolverine who couples with an actual human being spurts semen by the bucketload for minutes on end as their tryst pushes beyond taste & reason.  A faux-classy harpsichord soundtrack keeps the mood lightly comical throughout this absurd display, and it concludes with a punchline in which the Cardinal, finally arrived, performs a grand, fingerwagging speech about the evils of bestiality & women’s libidos as if he were reading from a pre-prepared pamphlet.  In the end, it’s the women’s arousal & search for pleasure that registers as the film’s most blasphemous acts, even more so than its extensive depictions of their monstrous ravishment fantasies.  They’re greatly enjoying themselves, much to everyone else’s disgust & confusion, which remains a global movie censorship taboo to this day.

Borowczyk finds his own fairy tale visual language here with images that have no obvious connection to the Beauty and the Beast tale: a snail sliming its way across a lady’s sky-blue shoe; lurid flashes of red paint through hallway doors that slyly recall aroused genitals: pornographic close-ups on actual aroused genitals; etc.  As soon as his equivalent of Belle arrives on the estate taking dozens of dirty Polaroids of every perverted detail she can collect, it’s clear that he’s taking the story to new, distinct places.  Most Belles cower in fear of the erotic menace lurking in their new home castles, gradually warming up to the beast who stalks the grounds.  In this version, she’s so immediately fired up by the ugly erotic charge of the central pairing that it freaks out everyone around her, including the audience.  A half-century later, it remains a bold, hilarious, intensely alienating take on a story that’s continued to be told countless times since, but rarely with such gleeful prurience. 

-Brandon Ledet

Invincible (2001)

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“Why do I watch WrestleMania?  My answer is that the poet must not avert his eyes from what’s going on in the world.  In order to understand, you have to face it.”

“Our sense of the real world today is massively challenged; I include here reality television, breast enhancement, and the carefully choreographed, fake drama of WrestleMania, populated by larger-than-life characters with muscles that nature doesn’t normally provide us with and who take pleasure in telling everyone how unbelievably evil they are.”

“What is fascinating about WrestleMania is the stories around it: the dramas between the owner of the whole show and his son, who are feuding, and his wife in the wheelchair who is blind, and he is then showing up in the ring with girls who have huge, fake boobs, and he is fondling them.  This is almost sort of an ancient Greek drama – evil uninterrupted by commercials.”

These are just a choice few Werner Herzog quotes about the cultural & literary virtues of professional wrestling, pulled from the 2019 GQ listicle “Werner Herzog Cannot Stop Talking About WrestleMania” – a masterpiece of modern clickbait publication that I return to often.  Herzog was promoting his work as an actor on the Star Wars television series The Mandalorian around the time those various press junket quotes were assembled, a time when his familiarity as a household name was bridging the gap between art cinema snobs and their sworn enemies, “Disney Adults.”  His public perception has since been bifurcated in recent years, split between his well-earned designation as a world-class auteur and his more recent evolution into a Nic Cagian human meme who pontificates about supposedly low-brow subjects like WrestleMania & Ana Nicole Smith in a severe German accent.  Unlike Nic Cage, though, Herzog has not allowed his YouTube Era reputation as a human meme affect the tone or content of his work as a serious filmmaker, give or take a few over-the-top scenes in his collaboration with Cage in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call, New Orleans.  As often as you hear Herzog explain the grotesque poetry of reality TV & pro wrestling in interviews, it’s difficult to detect their influence on his actual work.  That is, unless you happen to be one of the few people who remember his 2001 historical fantasy drama Invincible, which presents an academic-level understanding of the historic origins of wrasslin’, as well as its modern mutation into mass, crass populist entertainment.

Invincible stars real-life strongman Jouko Ahola as historical strongman Zishe Breitbart, a young Jewish blacksmith from a small Polish village who grew to fame as “The Strongest Man in the World” in 1920s Germany.  Herzog takes a pro wrestling-style truthiness approach to the material, moving Breitbart’s story to the early stirrings of Nazi Germany a decade later, playing up the significance of his Jewish heritage in a heightened, more satisfying kayfabe version of his life’s story.  In the film, Breitbart enters the entertainment industry through the strongman circus acts that sparked pro wrestling as an artform.  He challenges a traveling strongman for prize money in what is supposed to be a rigged wrestling bout and easily defeats the brute in a Goliath vs Goliath matchup.  Word of his incredible strength quickly spreads, and he’s summoned to work as a regular stage act in a Berlin cabaret, ringmastered by a Nazi-friendly psychic played by Tim Roth.  Roth’s conman mystic is quick to use Breitbart’s Jewish heritage as a race-baiting point of division between the Nazi officers and Jewish citizens in the cabaret audience, which is perfectly in tune with how hot-topic political divisions are exploited for cheap heat in modern pro wrestling programs.  Breitbart is the underdog hero for the Jewish people, who feel increasingly hopeless as the Nazis rise to political power.  The carnie mystic MC is a hero to the Nazis, pretending to summon supernatural strength from The Dark Arts to overpower the strongman’s brute force (a “skill” he can sell as a war-winning weapon for Hitler’s army).  In truth, they’re working together as a scripted act, putting on a show to stoke their divided audience’s Us vs Them bloodlust; it’s wrestling in a nutshell.

Aesthetically, Invincible is worlds away from the reality-TV crassness of what Herzog refers to as “WrestleMania”.  In its best moments, there’s an ancient cinematic quality to the director’s visual storytelling, effectively remaking Bob Fosse’s Cabaret as if he were Tod Browning adapting a fairy tale.  In its worst moments, it plays like standard-issue Oscar bait of its era, bolstered by a prestige-desperate Hans Zimmer score that tells the audience exactly how to feel at every second of runtime.  Its Oscar chances were self-sabotaged by Herzog’s choice to have his European actors speak phonetic English in post-production dubs instead of performing naturally in their various native languages.  That might have been a deliberate attempt to evoke a Bressonian style of performance, but it just comes across as bizarre & confused, and only the established professional actors Tim Roth & Udo Kier come across as capable performers.  The camerawork can come across as bizarre & confused as well, alternating between a handheld documentary style and a Hollywood-schmaltz fantasy & artifice that attempts to (in Ross’s showman wording) “[articulate the audience’s] collective dreams”.  Its moments of visual lyricism make sense to me as a historically set fairy tale about Nazi obsession with mysticism clashing against a Freaks vs. The Reich style superhero.  They’re especially effective when Herzog gazes at the sea-life bodies of jellyfish & crabs as if he were a space alien considering their otherworldly beauty for the very first time.  He’s really good at articulating the uncanniness of everyday life & pop media in that way, which is how he’s gotten famous as an interviewee outside of art cinema circles.  It’s amusing, then, that he can’t convincingly translate that wonder with the world into an Oscar-friendly movie for normies; he’s too much of a genuine weirdo.

Around the time of Invincible, Herzog was essentially directing one feature film a year at a consistent pace, and he’s only gotten more prolific in the two decades since.  While some of his 2000s titles like Grizzly Man, Encounters at the End of the World, and the aforementioned Bad Lieutenant have endured with a certain cultural cachet, many like Invincible have fallen through the cultural cracks; they can’t all be stunners.  If you’re going to excavate this one Herzog title out of relative obscurity within that massive catalog, I do think it’s worth considering as a bizarre, failed attempt to reach for Awards Season prestige beyond the usual, routine boundaries of his critical accolades.  He has found wider public recognition in the years since, but mostly as a weirdo public persona (an extension of the first-person narration style he developed in his 2000s-era documentaries).  Invincible does recall one very specific aspect of that public persona, at least: his inability to stop talking about WrestleMania.  Whether that’s enough of a reason to dig this one particular discarded Herzog DVD out of the Goodwill pile is up to your completionist interest in his career, I guess, as well as your personal fascination with the Greek tragedy & grotesque poetry of wrasslin’ as an artform.

-Brandon Ledet

Apocalypse After: Films by Bertrand Mandico (1998 – 2018)

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Only two feature films into his career, I’m already comfortable thinking of Bertrand Mandico as my favorite working director, even though only his debut was a total stunner.  Mandico’s The Wild Boys is my favorite film released within my lifetime – a Bidgoodian wet nightmare about gender dysphoria and, ultimately, gender obliteration.  His follow-up, After Blue (Dirty Paradise), is more of a flippant prank, using the same sensory intoxication & erotic menace for a much sillier purpose: worshipping the almighty Kate Bush in the rubble of our fallen civilization.  Although it’s seemingly shot in a muted black & white that sidesteps the cosmic blues & purples that make his other features so vivid & vibrant, I’m dying to see his third feature, Conann, which appears to be a gender-subverted riff on the pulp fantasy character Conan the Barbarian. It’s going to take a while for that latest dispatch from Mandico’s id to reach American screens (it just premiered at Cannes this summer), so I decided to placate my curiosity as best as I could by digging into his back catalog of short films.  Altered Innocence has consistently been Mandico’s home distributor since the company’s inception; it’s even arguable that Mandico’s films have been a brand-defining cornerstone for the Vinegar Syndrome partner label, along with the similar dreamlike genre throwbacks of Knife+Heart director Yann Gonzalez.  Given that close affiliation, their publishing a collection of Mandico’s short films on a single Blu-ray disc, titled Apocalypse After, was a total no-brainer.  Given my own personal obsession with The Wild Boys, the only surprising thing is that I didn’t jump on this disc the second it was released last year.  I guess I needed to get worked up about a new feature from Mandico dangling just outside my reach to seek out his already-available shorts I hadn’t yet seen.  Well, that and if I immediately jumped on every new Altered Innocence release I wanted to see I’d struggle to pay my energy bill, and I wouldn’t be able to watch them anyway.

The titular short on this disc, “Apocalypse After (Ultra Pulpe)”, is a calling-card submersion in the subliminal perversions of cinema, consciously transforming “science fiction” into “science titillation” while shouting in frustration that the images still aren’t erotic enough for the director’s liking.  Longtime Mandico collaborator & muse Elina Löwensohn stars as the director’s avatar, an arthouse pornographer named Joy d’Amato (in cheeky reference to real-life pornographer Joe d’Amato).  Mandico’s films are full of sarcastic allusions to real-life artists he admires in this way: Kate Bush, Henry Darger, Jean Cocteau, Walerian Borowczyk, etc.  Curiously, he has yet to name-drop the three filmmakers he most reminds me of—Kenneth Anger, Guy Maddin, and James Bidgood—likely because their influence is already blatantly apparent in the text.  Joy d’Amato is more Bertrand Mandico than she is Joe d’Amato, though, shooting a live-action version of paperback sci-fi cover art with the same vintage porno sensibility you can find in all of Mandico’s recent work.  In a way, the film shoot setting positions “Apocalypse After” as Mandico’s Knife+Heart (a movie he acted in as a porno cinematographer), but it’s even less of a coherent, linear story and even more of an expression of its director’s fascinations & frustrations with his artform.  Dialogue that declares details of the film shoot “magnificently hideous” or complain, “It’s beautiful, but at the same time I don’t know what he means,” function as meta commentary on the achievements & shortcomings of Mandico’s art.  No dialogue feels more essential to the piece than an actor’s monologue recalling watching forbidden, adult films as a child – compelled & mesmerized by the images on the screen but too young to fully comprehend them.  Mandico has a way of turning pornographic indulgence into transcendent visual art, and even then he directs his avatar in Löwensohn to shout that the images are still not erotic enough.  Nothing ever could be.

The “Apocalypse After” short is a thematically cohesive but logically incoherent collection of all the stylistic flourishes & quirks sketched out in Mandico’s first two features: the plant life molestations of The Wild Boys, the hollow geode-face zombies of After Blue, and the practically achieved glamour that merges their aesthetics – gel lights, rear projections, body glitter, smoke, prosthetic nipples, etc.  The presentation of Mandico’s previous shorts on the Apocalypse After disc is strictly chronological, so you can watch the director arrive at that personal aesthetic over decades of obsessive tinkering.  Over three full hours of his two decades of short-form experiments, Mandico Heads get to watch the filth maestro develop his cosmic visual language in ten preceding works.  In that context, “After Apocalypse” is less of a jumbled collection of Mandico pet obsessions than it is a natural crescendo of a clear pattern in methodology.  His seemingly weird-for-weird’s sake indulgences become more recognizably thoughtful & designed in retrospect, the same way the “Magick Lantern Cycle” packaging of Kenneth Anger’s shorts makes “Lucifer Rising” feel like the most obvious place his art could lead him, not an out-of-nowhere novelty.  The Apocalypse After disc starts with Mandico imitating Jan Švankmajer’s stop-motion nightmares in antiqued sepia tone, then seeking the same ancient artifice in short-form magical realist dramas.  He hits a breakthrough mid-career with the mid-length film “Boro in the Box”, which playfully reimagines filmmaker Walerian Borowczyk’s life in the style of Au Hazard Balthazar (a prototype for the more recent Balthazar riff EO).  By the time Mandico returns to stop-motion in his post-“Boro” short “Living Still Life” (this time animating taxidermized animals), his style is distinctly of his own.  As a result, all of the essential Mandico bangers arrive late on the disc, after he finds his distinct voice as a filmmaker: the Cronenbergian colonoscopy sideshow act “Prehistoric Cabaret,” the fairy tale creature feature “Our Lady of Hormones,” the unlikely Enys Men sister film “Depressive Cop” and, of course, the aforementioned self-portrait in heat “Apocalypse After.”

There are certainly other current filmmakers whose every feature I anticipate with the same gusto as Mandico’s, namely Peter Strickland and Amanda Kramer. None in that unholy trio of perverts gets the critical respect they deserve as playful subverters of the artform.  The academic interest critics used to have in similarly perverse, cerebral genre filmmakers like Cronenberg, Lynch, and Jodorowsky has more recently shifted to formally muted & restrained works of slow cinema auteurs instead.  A lot of the leeway we used to give venerated genre freaks of the past hasn’t trickled down to the unvenerated genre freaks of today, at least not for anyone who hasn’t struck a distribution deal with A24.  Altered Innocence appears to be committed to the cause at least, offering a step-by-step study of Mandico’s work for anyone who cares to learn how he arrived at something as wildly baffling as The Wild Boys.  The only other comparable presentation of a current director’s shorts that I can name is the The Islands of Yann Gonzalez, which I will leave to your imagination what is covered and who handled the distro.

-Brandon Ledet

The Cow Who Sang a Song into the Future (2023)

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La vaca que cantó una canción hacia el futuro (The Cow Who Sang a Song into the Future) is a beautiful, entrancing film, the first feature from writer-director Francisca Alegria. Although most reviews of the film that I have seen draw attention to the film’s environmental themes and magical-realist atmosphere, I’ve seen very little discussion about the film’s presentation of family. One of the film’s inciting incidents is the dumping of industrial waste from a paper factory into the Cruces River, but what stands out the most to me is the way that the movie focuses on a different kind of toxic waste, and the way that it can pollute the very thing that gives us life. 

Magdalena (Mía Maestro) is a doctor living in a cold urban home, having put as much distance between herself and her rural upbringing as possible. When she receives a call from her brother Bernardo (Marcial Tagle) telling her that their dairy farmer father Enrique (Alfredo Castro) has suffered from a heart attack, she returns home with her two daughters, including teenaged Tomás (Enzo Ferrada), whose gender identity she does not respect. Upon arriving and performing her own medical inspection of her father, she is told that he did not have a standard heart attack, but that it was a sudden stress-induced health issue. Enrique, for his part, tells his children that he passed out after seeing their long-dead mother Cecilia (Leonor Varela) outside of a cell phone store. Magdalena does not believe him, of course, since she was the one who watched her mother commit suicide by tying herself to her motorcycle and driving into the river when she was a mere seven years old, but he’s absolutely correct; we in the audience saw Cecilia climb out of that same river, accompanied by a mournful him that seems to come from the dead fish surrounding her, in the film’s opening moments. But what brought her back, and why?

As a character study, this is a piece about a woman who has long embodied the worst aspects of her father but learns to represent the best parts of her mother. As with many texts containing magical realism, much is left up to the interpretation, but we first see her being harsh and cold with the people closest to her, first telling Tomás that, as long as she lives in Magdalena’s house, she is her “son.” Her brother’s feelings about her are clear from their first onscreen interaction; although Bernardo lovingly embraces his nieces, when Magdalena moves in to hug him, he waves her off, citing that he has been working and is too filthy to be touched. When they arrive at the farm, Magdalena sends Bernardo off to take care of the dairy “for once” while she attends to their father. In comparison to the lush verdancy of the countryside, her home in the city is sterile, and when nature intrudes (in the form of a spider in her bathroom window), she doesn’t attempt to coax it outside and close the window, but instead runs off for a can of insecticide, which she sprays into the air futilely when she returns to find that the spider is nowhere to be seen. 

All of these are elements that tie Magdalena to Enrique, who is likewise queerphobic, dismissive of his child, and sees the natural world as something that exists only to benefit human beings, diametrically opposed by civilization. Enrique also chides Bernardo for failing to take care of the dairy, even blaming him when their cows die despite their death being the direct result of Enrique’s refusal to listen to his son; his reaction to Bernardo’s insistence that they dig a new well for the cows shows that this is a recurring argument, but it’s that very lack of forethought that leads to the herd drinking from the poisoned river when they are overcome with thirst, essentially damning the dairy farm to close. When the tearful Bernardo brings this to his father’s attention, the older man calls his son a homophobic slur and degrades him. Magdalena has spent her life seeing things through her father’s myopic, cruel vision of the world, and her own family has suffered from his polluting influence as a result. That this traces itself back to her childhood is no surprise. Like her father, she has long seen her mother’s suicide as a sign of weakness due to not wanting to be a mother, as evidenced by all the times in her memory that her mother was absent while still alive. In truth, those absences were the fault of her father, who had Cecilia institutionalized multiple times because he could not control her. Luckily for her, learning this is epiphanic, and even if she is limited in her ability to heal the world, it’s not too late to heal her relationship with Tomás.

If you were wondering if there is an actual singing cow in this movie, then I regret to inform you that there is not … there are several. At the start of the film, what appears to be non-diegetic music plays as the shores of the Cruces give up hundreds of dead fish, with these images soundtracked by a mournful elegy about dying. After there are news reports that the toxic waste in the water has killed not only the fish but also the various water grasses and insects that sustain other animals in the ecosystem, which leave the area in search of other food resources. Finally, the cows drink the waters of the river and themselves succumb to the poison, but before they pass, they join their voices in a chorus, grieving for the calves that were taken from them so that they would continuously produce milk for the farm, and rejoicing that the pain that came from that separation, which they consider to be worse than death, will end soon. This has the potential to be unintentionally funny, especially in the odd occasional moment in which one of the cow “actors” is chewing cud almost in time to the song like something out of Mister Ed, but the sincerity of the moment manages to make it work despite the potential to be undermined. 

That separation between mother and child stands as a metaphor not just for the relationship between Magdalena and the long-dead mother whom she unconsciously resents, but also between Magdalena and her own elder daughter. When we first meet Tomás, she is in her bedroom, showing her beau an online newspaper clipping about Cecilia’s death, asking if the boy sees the resemblance between Tomás and her grandmother. Her self-actualization is blocked not only by her mother’s bigotry but also her disconnection from her roots, and her hunger for a connection drives her to seek out her resurrected grandmother and the two bond. The revived Cecilia is mute throughout the film, but there’s a magic to the way that these two women who share a familial bond but who have never met are able to form a connection without the need for words. A love that transcends speech reappears again at the end, when Tomás and her mother reunite, and even without words, it’s clear that the two of them have gained a better understanding of each other, in unvoiced acceptance. 

This is certainly one of the most moving films I’ve seen this year, as well as one of the most lyrical, beautifully composed, and haunting. It sets its mood and never alters course, hypnotic in its commitment to its themes. It should not be missed. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Arrietty (2010)

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It comes up here from time to time, but my favorite fictional thing is a story about tiny people in a normal sized world. I’ve talked about my childhood love of Honey I Shrunk the Kids and how that translated into a fondness for the (first two) Ant-Man movies, but a lot of it can be traced back to my utter absorption into one specific series of novels I read in my youth: The Borrowers, by Mary Norton. There’s nothing more magical to me than tiny beings using normal-sized objects in novel ways: the knight from a chess set as a kind of decorative bust; a watch, sans band, hung on a wall as a clock; a postage stamp framed as a piece of art. I never understood why those books were so much less well known than other fantasy novels of the same ilk, and I never could figure why Arrietty Clock, who was just about the coolest girl in the world, was less famous than Lucy Pevensie, Dorothy Gale, Pippi Longstocking, or Wendy Moira Angela Darling. There have been numerous adaptations over the years, but one of the best came out when I was too busy with grad school to take note of it, but I finally have, and it’s a delight. 

Arrietty was released in Japan in 2010 before seeing a U.K. release the following year and U.S. distribution through Disney in 2012, under the title The Secret World of Arrietty. I refuse to call it that (can you imagine if The Wizard of Oz was titled Dorothy’s Secret World or The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was called The Secret World of Lucy?), but I do want to list it here for those of you who will want to seek it out for your own enjoyment. I’ll also recommend that, since the film is available on HBOMax in both the original Japanese and the U.S. English version, that you check it out in its original language, in spite of my love for Carol Burnett, who voices the Haru equivalent in the English dub. I was particularly fascinated to see this adaptation, which sets the story in (seemingly) 1980s Japan rather than Edwardian England, as I’ve always thought of this as a quintessentially English story, like Mary Poppins or the Narnia series, and although the idea of updating the setting to the U.S. seems heretical to me, I knew the Studio Ghibli aesthetic would more than make up for any displacement. 

Arrietty is a fourteen-year-old girl who lives with her mother Homily and father Pod. The three of them are “borrowers”: humanoid beings of 4-5 inches in height, who live alongside and parallel to full-sized humans. The former survive by “borrowing” from the latter, whom they call “human beans,” keeping themselves hidden and their existence secret. As the story opens, Arrietty has finally reached an age when she is to be taken on her first borrowing expedition into the home of an older woman named Sadako, who lives with her housekeeper Haru and who has recently taken in her great nephew Shō, a boy roughly Arrietty’s age who suffers from a heart condition. In the novel, Arrietty’s family lived in the base of a clock (hence their surname there), but here, they live largely beneath the house in a beautifully detailed home of their own; they access the larger house through a series of secret holes that are accessible only to them because of their size, although the passageways between them require a bit of exploration and adventure to navigate, and vermin like rats pose a threat to them. Shō spotted Arrietty in the garden when he first arrived and is fascinated by her, and he startles her when she and her father are on one of their expeditions, causing her to drop a precious sugar cube, which the Borrowers are forced to forsake. Shō further attempts to befriend Arrietty, with whom he shares both a profound loneliness and a deep melancholy, as she is likely to be among the last of her kind and has never known anyone other than her parents, while he has spent his short life as an invalid with few friends and little hope for a future despite an upcoming operation. Despite his best intentions, however, their friendship endangers the Borrower family in ways that neither could have predicted. 

This is not a perfect translation of the novel(s), but it is a marvelous and lovely example of how to translate a denser text for the screen. Some changes are small; I already mentioned above that the family lives in a crawlspace rather than a mantel clock, but there are also character changes that shift the story subtlely, and not for the worse. Shō is much friendlier from the outset than the unnamed boy in the novel, who has a bit of the old British superiority complex despite having been raised mostly in India; that is completely removed here, as is the fact that he had little English literacy as a result of having lived abroad. In the novel, it is this fact and Arrietty’s willingness to read to him that helps the two to bond, while here, the things that he does for the Borrowers he does purely out of the goodness of his heart. There are also fewer Borrowers here and the Clock family’s isolation is more profound as a result; Pod mentions to his daughter that there used to be others of their kind elsewhere in the house but that they have either moved on or been killed. The Clock’s relatives like Uncle Hendreary (Pod’s brother) who are rumored to have moved to a nearby badger sett and the boy’s attempts to transmit letters between the two families are cut, which also adds to the textual richness of the questions regarding any other Borrowers out there in the world; until we meet feralish Borrower Spiller later in the film, we’re unsure whether Arrietty and her family are the last of her kind, deepening her kinship with Shō. This also eliminates a lot of the squabbling between the various Borrowers, which is a fun comedic element in the novels as they get into rather large rows for such tiny specimens but makes for a more concise narrative here. 

But what’s most impressive here, of course, are the visuals. The backdrops are painted with that lovely Ghibli precision, and the style lends itself well to creating the sumptuous verdancy of an ivy-draped garden from the perspective of a four-inch teenager. Because Arrietty and her family are so tiny, the idiosyncrasies of every teacup, sideboard, and wainscot are terrifically magnified, and all of it is lovingly rendered in gorgeous detail. Great attention is paid to smaller characteristics as well; in one scene, Homily pours tea for her family, and it comes out in (relatively) huge globs because of the surface tension of the water, a characteristic that carries over to the behavior of rain in a different beautifully animated section of the narrative. A glob of cheese on toast, likewise, does not flatten, but retains its bead-like shape. All of these details combine to make the film incredibly immersive, and it’s all the more to its benefit. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (2023)

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It hasn’t come up in a while, but I’m a big fan of author Haruki Murakami, having first read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle nearly twenty years ago and having devoured several other novels and short story collections in the years since; in fact, as I write this, I have a copy of his short story collection First Person Singular sitting next to my bed. As such, when I settled into the theater to see Master Gardener, I was pleasantly surprised to see that there was an upcoming screening of a new animated feature that would consolidate several of his short pieces into a single narrative. The common elements of the stories that make up the aforementioned Singular is that they are all from the point of view of an unnamed protagonist, none of whom are the same from piece to piece but all of whom are quintessentially Murakami. Not universally, but among them are people seeking missing cats, characters fascinated by wells, men who share Murakami’s interest in running, people who meticulously cook delicious-sounding meals from simple ingredients, lots of discussion about staying in shape by swimming at the local natatorium, detailed descriptions for the care and upkeep of vinyl records, and, above all, men who yearn. From the lowliest television fee collector’s son to the everyday salaryman to the reclusive artist, all of Murakami’s men yearn — for the lives that they might have lived, for the loves that they never had or that they had and lost, for meaning. I can’t say that it never would have occurred to me that any number of these men could have ever been the same man because, in a way, they were all always Murakami to me, even when they had names, various fractals of the man who has been the weaver of many of the images and ideas that have gotten stuck in the craw of my consciousness over the years. 

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is the great crossover between six different pieces of short fiction, familiar and unfamiliar, and was adapted, produced, directed, and scored by Pierre Földes, who has largely worked previously as a composer; I didn’t recognize his name, but his C.V. contains two melancholic films I recall from my teenage years: L.I.E. and 12 and Holding. The film establishes three major characters: Katagiri, a perpetually overworked and overlooked accountant who lives a lonely life as the result of his inability to bond with others; his colleague Komura, a younger man whose future with the company looks bleak and whose life is further rattled by the sudden departure of his wife Kyoko, who leaves him a note comparing life with him to living with a “chunk of air;” and Kyoko herself who, after several days of watching constant news coverage of the 2011 earthquake, packs her things and leaves. Although the film is divided into numbered chapters, the stories are not discrete but melded together, and done so inventively. Most notably, there is one story that was almost too familiar, an adaptation of the story “The Wind-up Bird and Tuesday’s Women,” which was initially published in 1986 in The New Yorker before appearing as the first story in the 1993 collection The Elephant Vanishes and which was later reworked into the first chapter of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which was published in 1994 in Japan and 1997 in the U.S. Ironically, this actually comprises the final section of the film, placing what has always been treated as an introduction as a conclusion instead. 

Set in 2011 in the wake of that year’s devastating earthquake in Tokyo, most of the narrative follows Komura, with the film opening on his married life to Kyoko at a time just when their marriage is falling apart; for days, she has been unresponsive in front of the TV, watching news coverage of the attempts to save trapped citizens. When Komura is at work, she leaves him, writing a note asking him not to contact her, to look for her cat, and that she is never coming back. This sets up two plot elements: a trip that Komura takes to visit his younger teenage cousin to accompany him for a hospital visit, and a second trip that Komura is encouraged to take by his co-worker Sasaki. The former is the title story from the Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman collection and was originally about an unnamed man who accompanies his cousin to the doctor and takes the opportunity to relate how he would accompany his best friend to visit his girlfriend after an operation and is largely focused on time, daydreams, and recollections; here, this narrative is recast as the story of how Komura and Kyoko met, putting her in the place of the ill girlfriend who settled for Komura when her boyfriend died, at least in this version. The second of these is largely the plot of “UFO in Kushiro,” the first story in after the quake and the story from which Komura’s name is drawn. In it, Komura travels to Kushiro at the behest of his friend to deliver a small, nondescript package, and there he is drawn in by his colleague’s sister Keiko and her friend Shimao, who tries to draw Komura out of his funk. Alongside these two journeys is an adaptation of “Super-Frog Saves Tokyo,” in which Katagiri (who, it should go without saying, had no connection to Komura in any of the source materials) is visited by a man-sized frog who requests the timid man’s moral support in Frog’s upcoming battle with Worm, the creature who caused the recent earthquake (in the story the January 1995 earthquake) and whose ongoing efforts threaten to fully reduce the city to rubble. Elsewhere, Kyoko relates the story of a strange offer she received on the night of her twentieth birthday, in a story (“Birthday Girl”) also taken from the Blind Willow collection. 

The animation here is unsettling, even when it’s not intended to be. Director Földes apparently filmed the whole thing as a live action “reference” and then covered the heads of the actors with 3D models, which were then traced and animated. Other people who exist in the background or in the space through which our main characters move are thus translucent against the solid background. It’s an image that calls to mind the way that children draw things: a table first, and then the objects on it, so that the table and the wallpaper shine through the phone and the lamp drawn over them, but here it’s not the mark of a child’s process of learning about object permanence and layering images but is instead an evocation of the ephemerality. Whether or not Katagiri’s interactions with Frog are real is left to the interpretation of the reader (or viewer, as is the case here), but this is a world that is haunted, where the people who are not interacted with are ghosts and wisps. I hesitate to call it ugly (although it is, at times) and instead will simply call it unique. That method, combined with the easy pace at which the film progresses, makes the whole thing seem dreamlike. I’m sure that there will be others for whom this feels like a slog, but the film picks up the pace as it progresses, and every part of it feels as if it’s crafted with care, even if the aesthetic is intentionally haphazard. Ironically, however, I think the people least likely to enjoy this may be Murakami fans. Not that the author’s readers are a toxic fandom who will hate this melting together of different stories, but because transforming these from prose to film necessitates the loss of much of the narration that creates the rhetorical space in which his literary mannerisms flourish. His dialogue is still here, however, as is his sense of what makes people “tick,” and I still think it’s well worth visiting for fans and novices alike.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Suzume (2023)

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It’s generally hackneyed for Western critics to compare any (or, in some egregious cases, all) modern anime directors to the legacy of Hayao Miyazaki, but it’s especially hackneyed to invoke that name when praising Makoto Shinkai, who’s been slapped with the ill-fitting label “The Next Miyazaki” at least since he made 5 Centimeters per Second two decades ago.  I am a little guilty of this hack behavior myself, having compared the way Shinkai lovingly illustrates the beauty of urban settings with the way Miyazaki illustrates the majesty of Nature – twice, when reviewing both his breakout hit Your Name. and its lesser loved follow-up Weathering with You.  And even though his latest film, Suzume, is partially set in the Japanese city of Miyazaki and features a direct shout-out to the Miyazaki-penned Whisper of the Heart, I really need to break the habit of typing that name every time a new Shinkai picture rolls through American cinemas.  We all do.

At this point, Shinkai’s closest comparison point might be someone who only occasionally dabbles in animation: Wes Anderson.  The 50-year-old industry long-timer has tripled down on his schtick so hard since Your Name. broke out in 2017 that his stubborn resistance to explore new visual or thematic territory has become endearingly stubborn in a distinctly Andersonian way.  I know exactly what I’m going to get from a Makoto Shinkai picture long before I buy a ticket and accompanying popcorn bucket: a supernatural romance between youngsters distanced by Japan’s urban/rural divide – their lives eventually united though fast-moving trains, widespread disaster, and the transformative power of love.  Shinkai’s non-existent lenses will “flair” across his CG-smoothed train rides and exquisitely detailed hand-drawn backdrops in the exact same way every single picture, and the only question, really, is what supernatural device he will use to keep his lovelorn teens apart.  He’s been so consistent in his recent output that he’s inspired his own crop of shameless imitators (as evidenced by other, lesser teen romances like Fireworks & I Want to Eat Your Pancreas) the same way that Wes Anderson’s retro, symmetrical wit inspired aggressively unwitty flicks like Garden State & Napoleon Dynamite.  The thing with both directors is that no matter how familiar & insular their respective filmmaking styles have become, they’re both still delivering vividly entertaining work every project.  I don’t know that Shinkai will ever match the soaring teen emotions of Your Name., but the artistry of his two triple-down follow-ups still coasts miles above most modern animation.  Like with Anderson, his work remains impressively gorgeous & earnest in the moment even if it’s no longer surprising or novel in the larger context of his career.

In this particular game of Makoto Shinkai Mad Libs, a rural teenager stumbles across a magical doorway guarded by a stone cat figurine that her touch brings to life.  When the impish cat-god scampers away, the unguarded door opens to unleash gigantic flaming tendrils from The Other Side that slam down on her unsuspecting hometown, threatening to destroy everything & everyone she knows in devastating earthquakes.  A college-age hunk she immediately crushes on teaches her how to close & lock this dangerous door, then joins forces with her to return the cat-god to its rightful station.  Only, the little feline prankster turns the hunk into a talking chair, which makes the heroic pair’s already awkward romance even more uneasy.  From there, Suzume and her wooden-chair beau chase the kitten around Japan, closing all the doorways to the afterlife that open without its protection along the way.  The wide-scale tragedy of the resulting earthquakes is treated seriously and is eventually tied to the 3/11 tsunami disaster that devastated Japan in 2011.  That historical context piles a lot of emotional heft onto the youngsters’ flirtatious relationship, but it’s also lightened by the physical awkwardness of their predicament.  In some ways turning the older boy into a talking chair makes him a less threatening object of desire for his teen-girl counterpart, but the movie still has cheeky fun in moments when he is visibly flustered that Suzume sits in his “lap.”  When she asks, vacantly, “Um, why are you a chair?” in perfect teenage aloofness, Shinkai is winking a signal that it’s okay to giggle at the outlandish premise.  Even so, the physical object the boy inhabits is eventually afforded its own emotional heft in Suzume’s backstory, so that his transformation is rooted in a tsukumogami Japanese folklore tradition instead of a LOL, So Random flippancy.  By the time Suzume crosses the gates of Hell to rescue her chair from the afterlife and defeat the flaming earthquake tendrils for good, there’s no question how seriously we’re supposed to take their relationship.

As easy as it is to become jaded about Shinkai’s tendency to repeat himself, there’s also no denying that he’s good at what he does.  By the film’s fiery emotional crescendo where Suzume is struggling to dislodge her new chair friend from his Arthurian stone prison while the world ends around them, it’s incredible how breezy the journey to get there felt in retrospect.  It’s as if you were so distracted by the frustrations of retrieving an escaped kitten that you didn’t even notice you opened the forbidden Hell door from Little Nemo’s Adventures in Slumberland during the frantic search (a formative film that I beg you not to scan its production credits, to spare me further self-inflicted accusations of hackiness).  Shinkai has a way of building to immense wonder & awe even if you start out assuming you’ve seen it all before, and I’m starting to hope he never changes course.  I want him to follow the Wes Anderson career path where every subsequent Makoto Shinkai movie will be the most Makoto Shinkaingest movie the world has ever seen.  May we all survive the disasters of climate change long enough to see his anime equivalent of The French Dispatch in 2032.

-Brandon Ledet

The Five Devils (2023)

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One of the major reasons I love film festivals is that they transform otherwise low-profile, niche-interest oddities into the hottest tickets in town.  I always find it a little silly when festival crowds fight for a seat to see a wide-release studio film just a few weeks before it’ll play at every suburban multiplex anyway, but I’m charmed when that enthusiasm trickles down the program to smaller titles that will otherwise play to empty arthouse auditoriums before dying a slow death on streaming.  I was sharply aware of that phenomenon when lining up to see the weirdo fantasy drama The Five Devils at this year’s Overlook Film Fest the same day that it was premiering at The Broad Theater just a few blocks away from my house.  The Five Devils is the exact kind of low-budget, high-ambition art film that I’m used to watching alone at The Broad (or even at the same downtown location of The Prytania where most of Overlook is staged), so it was heartwarming to queue up with a swarm of like-minded, enthusiastic freaks psyched to be bewildered by it in unison.  It shouldn’t be surprising that a local genre festival could draw a sizable crowd to see a title that’s already screening outside its downtown shopping mall locale, considering the self-selection process of an audience already receptive to what Overlook offers.  Still, it was wonderful to see an odd, alienating little movie like The Five Devils get treated like a Cultural Event, when outside of festivals that kind of buzzy Thursday-night premiere is strictly reserved for superhero sequels & Tom Cruise suicide missions.

The last time I saw a French time-travel drama about a little girl who meets the younger, more troubled version of her mother through an unexplained, magical-realist device, it was in a near-empty auditorium.  Petite Maman is a much more accommodating, crowd-pleasing version of that story template too, underplaying the supernatural immensity of its time-travel premise to instead focus on subtle moments of dramatic grace.  In contrast, The Five Devils is Petite Maman for sickos, which is why it’s so heartwarming that Overlook was able to scrape together a full crowd of sickos to bask in its abrasive, brain-rattling glory.  Calling its time traveling anti-hero a “little girl” is a little reductive.  She’s more of an untrained, irresponsible witch, one who uses her supernatural sense of smell to jar up homemade potions that distill the unique essence of her few loved ones so she can mentally revisit them at will through sense memory.  This lonely pastime gets out of control when she gets a hold of an elixir that allows her to astral-project into those memories, effectively time-travelling to her mother’s youth.  What she discovers while traveling via these jarred scents is that she hails from a complex lineage of similarly obsessive, volatile women – most notably the younger, brasher version of her mother and her mother’s secret high school lover.  From there, The Five Devils unravels to reveal an intensely fucked-up little time-travel family drama, one punctuated by wild jabs of style & emotion that you won’t find outside of buzzy festival line-ups, empty arthouse theaters and, eventually, public library DVD loans.

There are plenty of readymade reference points that might help define The Five Devils through comparison: the childhood time travel & poolside romance of Céline Sciamma’s Petite Maman & Water Lilies; the ecstatic gymnastic seizures of Ana Rose Holmer’s The Fits; Divine’s supernatural sniffer in John Water’s Polyester; etc.  Its wide range of vaguely familiar elements are reconfigured into such a uniquely high-style, high-drama mode of modern queer filmmaking that it can’t be cleanly categorized into any one long-running genre, though, except maybe to say that it makes for an incredibly uncomfortable Christmas film.  Similarly, I can’t pinpoint exactly what’s being conjured by its provocative title, since there are no literal devils in its narrative (which would more firmly push it into the horror territory covered by most of Overlook’s programming).  Are the five “devils” the five senses?  It certainly made me squirm under the sense of touch as the hard sequins of a gymnastic uniform scraped against freshly burnt flesh in its barnburner finale, but most of the story is dominated by smell.  Are they the four family members that crowd the small French household where the little scent-witch dwells, plus the one spurned & injured lover her parents left behind when they hooked up as teenagers?  Maybe. But no one among them is evil or villainous, exactly.  They all just indulge in messy, passionate human behavior, sometimes heighted by their unexplained supernatural powers.  Ultimately, I don’t actually want an answer to the question.  It’s just indicative of the rhetorical games of provocation & illogic that the film plays with the audience, and it’s often shocking how complex & emotional the results of those games can be.

To find the passionate cult audience it deserves, The Five Devils needs to be chopped up into easily digestible, memeable morsels the way similar crowd alienators like Midsommar, Tár, and Annette have in the recent past.  There’s plenty to work with there, from the striking visuals of young newcomer Sally Dramé huffing her collection of self-labeled scents to the total emotional breakdown of indie darling Adèle Exarchopoulos drunkenly slurring “Total Eclipse of the Heart” on a karaoke stage.  Hell, even I’m guilty of reducing it to something cuter & simpler than it is with my little “Petite Maman for sickos” quip.  In truth, it’s a very thorny, elusive work that’s difficult to market in any effective way without spoiling & overexplaining each of its dramatic twists.  That’s why it’s so great that festivals like Overlook & Cannes (where The Five Devils premiered) are able to drum up actual, real-life enthusiasm for a film this abrasively weird.  I love that I regularly get to see this kind of genre-defiant anomaly at The Prytania & The Broad, but it’s often a much quieter, lonelier experience.

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #169: Willow (1988) & Fairy Tales

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Welcome to Episode #169 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of fantasy films & fairy tales, starting with the 1988 Warwick Davis star-maker Willow.

00:00 Welcome

02:25 Vengeance (2022)
09:20 Barbarian (2022)
12:50 Seconds (1966)
17:05 Ghost in the Shell (1995)

22:05 Willow (1988)
44:30 The Singing Ringing Tree (1957)
1:02:17 Gretel & Hansel (2020)
1:17:17 Belle (2022)

You can stay up to date with our podcast by subscribing on SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, or TuneIn.

– The Podcast Crew

Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022)

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I’m not sure how George Miller’s new fantasy anthology fits into the modern world, but I’m also not sure that it’s trying to.  Three Thousand Years of Longing feels like a relic from the 1990s at the very latest, recalling a specific fantasy era ruled by the likes of Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett, Terry Gilliam, and likeminded Brits.  It conjures its magic through uncanny CGI that definitively pins it to the 2020s, but its story of a lonely white woman finding love with a Black djinn while shopping for knick-knacks in Istanbul feels out of step with modern politics, daring the audience to decry “Orientalism” or “magical negro” at every turn.  It’s worth keeping in mind that George Miller is an old man. He’s been working long enough to have contributed to this exact brand of matter-of-fact magic before it was vintage in both The Witches of Eastwick and Babe: Pig in the City.  It also helps that the story he tells here directly questions its place in modernity, ultimately deciding that it belongs in another time & realm.

Tilda Swinton stars as a professor of “narratology” who travels to Istanbul to perform an academic lecture on the power of storytelling.  While antique shopping in her off-time, she unwittingly unleashes a gigantic puff of smoke shaped like Idris Elba, who demands that she make three wishes so that he can be freed from his tiny, glass prison.  You would expect an anthology with that wraparound to include one cautionary-tale vignette per wish, but Three Thousand Years has many more stories to tell.  Because Swinton’s professor studies storytelling as an artform & cultural tradition, she’s very reluctant to make any of her three wishes, fully informed on the usual “monkey’s paw” irony of these scenarios.  Elba’s djinn recounts magical stories from his thousands of years in captivity to convince her that he is not a trickster set out to teach her morality lessons about selfishness or greed.  In hearing his lived-experience fairy tales, she realizes that the true reason she cannot make a wish is because she does not have a true “heart’s desire,” at least nothing that can compare to the passionate yearnings suffered by her new, eternally lovesick companion.

Three Thousand Years of Longing is at once George Miller’s Tale of Tales, Guillermo del Toro’s The Fall and, least convincingly, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Good Luck to You Leo Grande.  The vivid colors & eerie moods of the fantasy flashbacks are unimpeachable, even if their politics are questionable.  All that’s left to puzzle over, really, is the effectiveness of the wraparound, which is mostly an excuse for two talented actors to take turns narrating short stories in an illustrated audio book.  As a two-hander character study, Three Thousand Years is cute but frothy.  The djinn struggles to adapt to the electromagnetic cacophony of modern living, where magic and science clash in a constant, furious roar.  His new storytelling companion struggles with breaking out of her shell, with making herself vulnerable to desire, and with the ethics of conjuring magical powers in the realm of love.  There isn’t much room for that dynamic to deepen, though, since Miller understandably spends more time on the romance & fantasy of centuries past.  Maybe the power of storytelling isn’t so timeless after all; maybe our hearts & minds are too cluttered to fully incorporate the magic of the old world into the electronic buzzing of the new one.  Still, it’s a nice feeling to visit from time to time, a wonderful momentary escape.

-Brandon Ledet