Saturday, 15 January 2011
Friday, 14 January 2011
It’s fair to say that the internet isn’t exactly overloaded with Fabrice du Welz resources, and information on the forthcoming ‘Alleluia’ is sketchy at best – little more than a regurgitated press release.
Still, by way of rounding off this week’s mini-season, here’s a few places the du Welz fan (or even the interested newcomer) might want to visit:
There’s du Welz’s own MySpace page. And his IMDb page.
There are interviews on ‘Calvaire’ at Eat My Brains and Zeta Minor, as well as a review at Associated Content which examines the film in context of the backwoods survival sub-genre.
Du Welz discusses ‘Vinyan’ at FilmFour, Twitch and Onderhand.
And there’s a look ahead to ‘Alleluia’ at Anything Horror in an article title ‘The French Invasion Continues’, which also touches on upcoming projects by Pascal Laugier and Xavier Gens.
Thursday, 13 January 2011
This is a reappraisal of a review I originally posted in August last year. That piece was based on a single viewing of ‘Vinyan’ on FilmFour, interrupted by adverts, very late at night. I’ve since had the opportunity to watch it, in the proper aspect ratio, without interruptions and in the context of ‘A Wonderful Love’ and ‘Calvaire’.
It’s as brilliant and enigmatic as ‘Calvaire’ and if none of the dark humour of that film is present, then perhaps that’s only because of the subject matter. One thing I’m certain of: I can’t wait for du Welz’s next film.
‘Vinyan’ marks a progression – and a divergence – from ‘A Wonderful Love’ and ‘Calvaire’. In the former, Miss Lara believes a dying male stripper to be the partner she’s never had and blithely acts out their life together, seemingly blind to the simple fact that the guy sitting on her sofa has a fork in his throat and no vital signs. In the latter, Bartel believes a stranded lounge singer to be the wife who left him years ago and blithely acts out their life together, seemingly blind to the simple fact that the guy sitting opposite him for Christmas dinner is just that: a guy. A dude, a bloke, a fella. Adam’s apple; ability to write his name in the snow; Y chromosome present and correct.
The deeper connection between these two works – the wellspring from which both films draw their humour and their horror – is the utter conviction Miss Lara and Bartel have that their perspective isn’t just the right one but the only one.
In ‘Vinyan’, bereaved aid workers Paul and Jeanne Bellmer (Rufus Sewell and Emmanuelle Beart) believe that a blurry figure glimpsed briefly in a snippet of handheld camcorder footage is their son, lost in a tsunami, and risk everything – financially, emotionally and in terms of their sanity – to find him. Already things differ from ‘A Wonderful Love’ and ‘Calvaire’: those films dealt with loneliness; ‘Vinyan’ deals with grief.
Paul and Jeanne are at a fundraiser for a project to assist a village of abandoned children in Burma, when they see the footage in question. Their host is casually describing how the only way into the region was to pay for the services of a Triad boss, Thaksin Gao (Petch Osathanugrah), to escort him upriver, when Jeanne flips out. She is immediately convinced that one of the children, out of focus and not even facing the camera, is her son.
During the taxi ride home, Paul is sceptical and tries to reason with her. And here the second difference from du Welz’s previous works: a dissenter to the protagonist’s unshakeable convictions. A dissenter, yes; but a dissuader, no. Jeanne plunges into the criminal underworld to locate Gao. Paul, reluctantly and with increasing frustration, follows. Paying Gao an absurd amount, they set out on a journey that comes across as ‘Heart of Darkness’ by way of ‘Don’t Look Now’ with an ending that Ruggero Deodato is probably still kicking himself for not coming up with.
The pivotal scene synthesizes the film’s themes of loss, grief and desperation in a moment of visual poetry and unexpected calm (much of ‘Vinyan’, particularly in dealing with Paul and Jeanne’s fractured relationship, is pitched at a borderline hysterical level): on a moonlit beach, Gao and some of his colleagues release lanterns to into the sky, offerings to those who have died badly, whose souls cannot make the transition to the next world. They are called vinyan, he tells Jeanne: tormented and angry ghosts. Gao asks her to release a lantern. She replies that she doesn’t need to: her son is not dead; she’s convinced of it. Gao shakes his head. “For me,” he says. Fragile, paper-thin lanterns, ablaze with light, fill the sky above them, reflections dotting the ink-black water as they drift ever higher.
This introduces an enigma that, for me, defines the film. Whose troubled and malicious spirit does the title refer to? Is it Paul and Jeanne’s son? Or, allowing for Gao’s intimation that one’s spirit can be vinyan whilst one is still alive – perhaps in anticipation of a bad end (or, as is evident in Jeanne’s withdrawn and unhinged behaviour, because an agitation of the mind) – does it refer to Paul or Jeanne?
Or is the children, feral and disturbing and making the chavs in ‘Eden Lake’ look like a bunch of girl scouts, they encounter in the depths of the jungle, their faces painted and their laughter devoid of anything human?
As I said in the original article, which I’ve pretty much repeated wholesale for the last few paragraphs, I still think there are minor flaws: the hamfisted foley work that ensures car engines, rainfall, footsteps and noises of the jungle overwhelm the soundtrack in scene after scene so that entire screeds of dialogue are rendered difficult to hear or, in some instances, completely incomprehensible. This especially doesn’t help when Beart’s accent is so heavy that some of her line-readings are murky (she seemed to demonstrate a better facility in English language dialogue in, of all things, ‘Mission: Impossible’). The film’s first third in particular functions at the histrionic level mentioned earlier, although this does contrast well with Jeanne’s withdrawal into the crumbling façade of her own mind in the latter scenes.
However, these things bothered me less second time around. I wonder, also, if the exaggerated foley work and the histrionic performances were a deliberate aesthetic choice on du Welz’s part. Whether he intended them to emphasize Paul and Jeanne’s disconnection from the world around them (be it the , ahem, civilized world at the start of the film or the festering jungle at the end).
Benoit Debie’s cinematography is excellent, capturing a sense of alien-ness in the river and the landscape that’s almost Herzogian. Sewell, so often cast as a villain, proves that he can essay an everyman role very effectively. Beart makes an unlikeable character memorable. And Osathanugrah’s gets a man-of-the-match award: as the curiously sanguine gang boss, he steals every scene he’s in. Du Welz paces the film well, the feverish grip of Jeanne’s obsessive communicated with slam-bang intensity, dream sequences and hallucinations intermingling with the actuality of the Bellmers’ quest, a stomach-churning sense of something darkly inevitable waiting for them, and a jarring transition into grand guignol territory at the very end providing a not-entirely-unpredictable but still uncomfortable conclusion.
And then there’s that final shot.
‘Vinyan’ achieves an atmosphere of eerie dread, a fog-like sense of something unwholesome that drifts through the very celluloid of the film. It also achieves a slow and hypnotically awful depiction of a character’s mind folding in on itself under the weight of grief.
It’s as brilliant and enigmatic as ‘Calvaire’ and if none of the dark humour of that film is present, then perhaps that’s only because of the subject matter. One thing I’m certain of: I can’t wait for du Welz’s next film.
Wednesday, 12 January 2011
What I said yesterday about SPOILER ALERTS and how the kind of cinema Fabrice du Welz makes renders them kind of irrelevant? Well, same goes for today’s post.
‘A Wonderful Love’ is a about a male stripper who turns up at the home of an unhinged woman, ends up with a fork in his throat and is mistaken by her, during his death throes and in the immediate aftermath, as her new suitor, a man she cooks for, dotes on and goes to bed with.
‘Calvaire’ is about a singer, Marc Stevens (Laurent Lucas), who turns up at a run-down guest house owned by unhinged former comedian Bartel (Jackie Berroyer), is mistaken by Bartel for his long-absconded wife and ends up – … well, watch it and find out.
Marc makes his livelihood wearing a pantsuit and a cape, shaking his not-very-sexy thang for little old ladies at a retirement home and crooning his way through syrupy ballads. Despite the dearth of talent and/or personality – seriously: Simon Cowell would fucking demolish this guy – Marc’s something of the heart-throb: an octogenarian tries to get him interested in a little snu-snu in the film’s teeth-grittingly embarrassing opening scene; later, the retirement home’s matron (Brigitte Lahaie – yes, that Brigitte Lahaie) practically throws herself at him. The curiously sexless Marc snubs her overtures, gets in his van and heads off for a big Christmas bash he’s got himself invited to where he’s hoping to schmooze with record execs.
It’s probably no bad thing that Marc never makes it to the Christmas party: the humiliation he’d have suffered at the hands of the record execs would have been nigh on unwatchable. This, after all, is a guy edging in middle age, drives a crappy old van and whose choice of reading material includes Theresa Wassif’s ‘Cliff: A Celebration’.
He does, however, suffer a certain degree of humiliation (I’m using the expression “certain degree” ironically, by the way) at the hands of Bartel. Who, although clearly deranged, is easily the more likeable character. An aesthetic choice du Welz evidently intended from the get-go. In an interview included as one of the DVD’s special features, he states that his intent was to mix up the clichés of religion and the clichés of the horror movie; to subvert and provoke; to leave matters open to interpretation; and to set himself strictures within the genre: “no bimbo with big breasts, no music and most importantly no sympathy for the main character”. To make a horror film “without twist or payoff or boring stuff like that”.
Does he succeed? Oh, hell goddamn yeah!
‘Calvaire’ – a.k.a. ‘The Ordeal’, but the original title works better – starts out in immediately recognizable fashion as our, ahem, hero finds himself stuck in the backwoods after his van gives up the ghost. He encounters a strange type called Boris (Jean-Luc Couchard) who is desperately searching for a lost dog. Searching, in Boris’s understanding, consists of walk-running through the forest with his head hunched into his shoulders alternately shouting the missing pet’s name (Bella) and whimpering pitifully. Nonetheless, Boris agrees to escort Marc to Bartel’s guest house. Bartel behaves in an over-familiar manner towards Marc. He promises to work on Marc’s van, but deliberately procrastinates. His behaviour grows increasingly eccentric. Marc fills the time wandering the countryside. Bartel warns him against going into the village. Out walking, Marc happens upon a farm, where he witnesses something unsavoury going on in the barn. Something the RSPCA would take a very dim view of.
So far, so any-redneck-horror-movie-made-in-the-70s (and
It’s a scenario we’ve seen before. Many times. Short of Bartel plucking away at a banjo, bird-dogging his sister or calling Marc “boy”, the set-up couldn’t be more familiar. Which is exactly what du Welz wants you to think. Because what follows – for all that it contains a spattering of moments guaranteed to earn the approbation of the torture porn aficionado – is less a reworking of well-worn tropes than an abstraction and subversion of them.
In the film’s most daring, bravura and gloriously bonkers sequence, Bartel – shotgun slung over his shoulder – barges into the village pub (a grubby little place filled with burly and surly types) and warns all and sundry to stay away from his “wife”. After he departs, one of the regulars seats himself at the piano and pounds out something that sounds like the funeral march as if re-orchestrated by The Smiths. One great hulking brick shithouse of an individual stands up and starts rocking back and forth. Another fellow joins him. Soon all the drinkers have paired off and, facing each other, sway unsteadily, arms akimbo. It takes a while to realize they’re dancing.
In the interview, du Welz identifies this as the key scene: if you accept this scene, you can deal with what happens next. If not, you’re likely to pronounce the film “shit” and leave the movie theatre. The most low-key scene post-dance is Boris’s delighted reunion with his “puppy”, his beloved Bella. Bella’s a cow. Marc seems to be the only person cognizant of this fact. Bartel shares Boris’s high spirits and declares this another example of the miracle of Christmas, the first being the return of his “wife”.
Then the villagers turn up and the last stretch of ‘Calvaire’ comes on like ‘Deliverance’ and ‘Straw Dogs’ stuck in a blender with a pinch of ‘Taxi Driver’ thrown in (you’ll know what I mean the moment the overhead shot starts) and directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky. Only with a crucifixion scene and a deconstructive finale that leaves you feeling vaguely disconcerted. As if your perception of things has been temporarily skewed with no guarantee that you’ll entirely return to seeing the world the quite the same way as before.
‘Calvaire’ is enigmatic, horrifying and funny – often all at the same time.
Tuesday, 11 January 2011
The opening sequence of Fabrice du Welz’s deliciously twisted 20-minute short depicts hunched-shouldered middle-aged frump Miss Lara (Edith Lemerdy) making her way home through a bleak urban landscape of shadowy underpasses and featureless apartment blocks. A maze of grubby corridors leads to her equally grubby apartment. From a fridge that looks like it was last cleaned when dinosaurs were roaming the earth she takes a birthday cake and cuts herself a slice.
What happens next takes us into SPOILER ALERT territory (although du Welz makes films so unconcerned with traditional narrative conventions that the concept of spoilers really doesn’t impact on his work): a chap named Joe (Philippe Resimont) turns up “for the party” and, when he realizes that there are no guests, just the hostess, shrugs and gets down to business anyway. Business being a male stripper, in case you were wondering. Miss Lara gets rather hot under the collar and invites him to stay for birthday cake after he’s finished gyrating and making lewd gestures. Joe avers that he’d rather just get paid and in the ensuing contretemps Miss Lara stabs him in the throat with a dessert fork.
Miss Lara quickly rectifies this misunderstanding by simply ignoring the fact that Joe is a male stripper for hire with a fork sticking out of his neck, blood bubbling from his lips and the life slowly ebbing out of him, and happily conducts herself as if the two of them are playing house and it’s all very cosy. However, Miss Lara soon comes to believe that his ardour is cooling and, overlooking the fact that it’s because he’s dead, seeks relationship advice from her local butcher (Jackie Berroyer), and picks up an ox tongue from him while she’s there. The butcher advises that she and Joe need to “spice things up”, which Miss Lara takes to mean engaging a swinging couple, while his apprentice Adam (Jean-Luc Couchard) – an earnest young man with a John Merrick-style cranial deformity – unsubtly carries a torch for Miss Lara. Oh, and then there’s the small matter of building superintendents Mr Ottman (Alfred David) and Mr Fulci (Noel Godin) who want a word with Miss Lara about the smell emanating from her apartment.
‘A Wonderful Love’ is a viewing experience akin to watching an episode of a soap opera co-scripted by Mike Leigh and Eli Roth, co-directed by David Lynch and Gaspar Noe and mashed up in the editing room with the butcher’s shop scenes from ‘Delicatessen’. It’s also – and I didn’t expect this of du Welz based on my recollections of ‘Vinyan’ – pretty damned funny.
Most of the humour derives from Edith Lemerdy’s performance. She nails the character, gets the joke and delivers a strangely winsome charm even as she’s scaring the crap out of you. The whole thing is shot (by du Welz’s – thus far – regular DoP Benoit Debie) as a genre fan’s picture book. The angles, the edits, the pure look of the thing – there’s no doubt that ‘A Wonderful Love’ is the work of people with a deep, abiding and, best of all, irreverent passion for horror movies.
Tonally, the humour is more blatant (Mr Fulci indeed!) and the situations more self-evidently milked for their satirical potential than anywhere else in du Welz’s limited filmography. The humour in ‘Calvaire’ is darker and more organic, more intrinsic to character and setting. The humour in ‘Vinyan’ is non-existent. However, there are already elements of ‘Calvaire’ on display and even a hint, in a scene of sexual desperation that kills the morbid laughs like an ice cube down the back of the neck, of the powerful sense of loneliness and disenfranchisement that characterizes ‘Vinyan’.
‘A Wonderful Love’ is worth tracking down. It demonstrates that du Welz was already fully cognizant of his medium and well on the way to developing a thematic consistency. It’s sick, twisted and often guiltily funny.
But mainly sick. And twisted.
Monday, 10 January 2011
Last year, I reviewed Fabrice du Welz’s ‘Vinyan’. I found it “a very good film that only just falls short of greatness. There seem to be a lot of people out there who didn’t like it. But maybe that provides the measure of the film: it gets under the skin, lodges itself in the back of the mind and leaves a nasty little imprint on the memory.”
Du Welz’s debut feature ‘Calvaire’ arrived from LoveFilm at the weekend; one of the extra features was his short film ‘A Wonderful Love’. Details are sketchy and it doesn’t seem to have attracted much internet buzz as yet, but his next film ‘Alleluia’ is due to start shooting early this year. It’s been described as a road movie based on the true story of 1940s serial killers Martha beck and Raymond Fernandez, and is set to star Beatrice Dallé.
In anticipation, I’m declaring it du Welz week here on The Agitation of the Mind. I’ll be reviewing ‘A Wonderful Love’ tomorrow, ‘Calvaire’ on Wednesday and posting an overhauled version of my ‘Vinyan’ review. Friday will wrap up with some links and resources.
Join me. Expect things to get creepy.
Sunday, 9 January 2011
Feeling very much like a companion piece to ‘The Red Queen Kills Seven Times’, made a year later, ‘The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave’ also inhabits a world of aristocratic characters, gothic castles, madness and dark family secrets. Also like ‘TRQKST’, ‘TNECOotG’ flirts with the suggestion of supernatural goings on before settling down into a more traditional giallo format.
The first half of the film depicts the insular lifestyle of British nobleman Lord Alan Cunningham (Anthony Steffen), alone and undergoing an emotional breakdown in the sprawling family estate after the death of his flame-haired wife, the Evelyn of the title. Plagued by thought that Evelyn had been unfaithful to him, Lord Al integrates with the grieving process by way of picking up red-heads at strip clubs and other insalubrious venues, taking them back to his place and torturing and murdering them.
His personal physician Dr Timberlane (Giacomo Rossi-Stuart), who realizes that Lord Al is having “episodes” (but not to what extent!) warns him off red-heads but advises him to marry again. Which is kind of like advising an alcoholic to stay off the whisky but to keep his eye out in Oddbins for any decent offers on vodka.
When he’s not cruising for women, consulting with his doctor, hanging out with his cousin George (Enzo Tarascio) or paying off his groundsman Albert (Roberto Maldera) – who is also Evelyn’s brother – to keep quiet about his nocturnal activities, Lord Al is tormented by visions of his dead wife. At a séance, he spirit seems to appear but he faints clean away before things can progress.
Thus the first third or so of the film. Then Lord Al meets the voluptuous Gladys (Marina Malfatti) who is not a red-head (she’s blonde) and therefore avoids a nasty fate back at the castle. Quite the contrary, actually: Lord Al proposes to her. And so we come to the next part of the film, wherein his lordship decides to restore the castle, his helpful Aunt Agatha (Joan C. Davies) – yes, he has an aunt Agatha; by this point I was expecting Jeeves to put in an appearance and say something like, “I took the liberty, my lord, of putting the J&B on ice” – hires some staff, and he and Gladys move in together. Cue dead bodies, the disappearance of Evelyn’s corpse from the crypt, increasingly aggressive behaviour from Albert, and deeply suspicious behaviour from just about everybody else.
‘TNECOotG’ tests the patience a bit in its early stages, mainly because Lord Alan’s such an unlikeable character; also, there’s very little in the way of suspense. However, Miraglia exploits the longueurs of this section by sneakily seeding character traits and motivations inimical to the latter stage of the proceedings. And when he’s finally able to cut loose with the tense set-pieces, hellish storms and burgeoning body count, rest assured that it’s good, sick, cynical fun all the way. Red herrings, scheming relatives, and a welter of murders (including death by foxes, death by snakebite and death by poisoned champagne) – it’s like Agatha Christie on hallucinogenic substances.
The film is beautifully shot and the score’s decent. The ending is fairly guessable, even if the mechanics of it are worked out differently to what you might expect, and the last-reel exposition is kept mercifully succinct. Miraglia plays fair: all the clues are there and he doesn’t fob the audience off with something completely arbitrary (I’m looking at you, ‘Case of the Bloody Iris’). Where it loses points is in the performances: Steffen’s is one-note and that note wears thin very quickly; Tarascio and Rossi-Stuart are average; and all Malfatti’s given to do is flounce around in a series of diaphanous and cleavage-revealing outfits.
Arguably the best turn comes from Erika Blanc; unfortunately the script stashes her away for most of the running time.
Taken as something of a trial run for ‘TRQKST’, ‘TNECOotG’ is worth watching. As part of that small sub-set of gialli set in England, it’s arguably in the same league as ‘What Have You Done to Solange?’ and ‘All the Colors of the Dark’, even if it doesn’t quite hit the heights of, say, ‘A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin’.
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