Double Suicide (1969)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Double Suicide (1969) – M. Shinoda

This is Masahiro Shinoda’s high concept staging of a bunraku puppet show with actors instead of dolls (but retaining the figures in black who control everything).  The result is as highly stylized as you would imagine and starkly shot in high contrast black and white with Toru Takemitsu’s minimalist score aiding in the effect.  Based on a tale of doomed lovers by Chikamatsu (also a favourite of Mizoguchi’s), the plot sees Jihei the paper merchant and Koharu the courtesan drawn inexorably to the fate announced in the title of the film.  Even knowing what will happen, it is impossible to look away.  Jihei’s wife and two children are also dragged into the drama (as are his brother and her father).  Everybody is so wrong-headed but erotic compulsion cannot be denied.  The poor puppeteers in black can only look on in sympathy and horror (even as they occasionally assist the players); this adds another odd layer to the proceedings. The only other Shinoda film I’ve seen is Pale Flower (1964), a striking yakuza drama that is well worth your time.

 

  
Double Suicide (1969) [Trailer] from Art Theatre Guild on Vimeo.

Wake in Fright (1971)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Wake in Fright (1971) – T. Kotcheff

AKA Outback; This is one of those “horror” movies where a naïve, possibly too cocky, protagonist gets in over his head.  In this case, John Grant (played rather stiffly by Gary Bond) gets stuck in the Australian country town of Bundanyabba (called “The Yabba” for short) where everyone’s yer mate and happy to buy you a pot or a schooner. In fact, after Chips Rafferty introduces him to the local haunts, Grant finds himself on a non-stop treadmill of booze, gambling, proffered sex, and then drunken kangaroo hunting (with gruesome real footage).  As a viewer, you are as off-guard as Grant, not knowing whether these raucous Aussie blokes are up to no good or not.  Donald Pleasance adds to the sense of unease as a former outsider who has now given up everything for the delirium that pervades the Yabba.  Can Grant actually escape alive before he too succumbs to the wasted life?  The dusty outback looks great and there’s an Aussie authenticity here that just might scare you off from travelling outside the major metropolises.   

 

Smithereens (1982)

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Smithereens (1982) – S. Seidelman

NYC looks like shit in Susan Seidelman’s 1982 punk debut but it is the perfect milieu for the youth at loose ends that populate her story.  Most of them seem to have fled to the city to escape their home lives and to join like-minded others slumming it in the scene.  Wren wants badly to be cool and she manipulates and uses others to try to reach this goal and it doesn’t work well for her.  The film is her character study.  She falls in with nice guy Paul from Montana, who lives out of his van but she doesn’t treat him right, instead trying to curry the favour of punk rocker Eric (Richard Hell) who wants to hit the road to L.A.  The soundtrack by The Feelies (songs from Crazy Rhythms) is the perfect accompaniment to Wren’s travails and adds mood and depth in the ellipses between scenes.  The dialogue, though clearly scripted, takes on a naturalistic, almost Morrissey-Warhol sort of feel.  You feel you are there.  But where? In a world that no longer exists, dated, scrubbed clean, erased.  Nice to see this on the big screen at the Melbourne International Film Festival.

 

The Martian (2015)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

The Martian (2015) – R. Scott

Ridley Scott seems to know what he is doing.  He manages to guide this blockbuster on its safe journey, hitting all the necessary highs and lows and with the requisite smart-ass dialogue in tow.  In many ways, this story of an astronaut left behind on Mars (not a spoiler since this happens in the first 10 minutes) feels like a true story – but of course it’s not (and one wonders if NASA will ever get to attempt anything like manned voyages to Mars, given present and future budget problems).  Still it works as a faux replay of a story that we know will end well – it is just the process of getting to that happy ending that we need to watch.  Scott, aided immensely by Matt Damon (playing his usual average Joe), keeps the plot moving for more than two hours with intermittent crises and successes.  The rest of the cast play as a collective, trying to rescue him.  You can feel the problem-solving happening.  All the pieces fit together.  Even the familiar music used on the soundtrack takes on new relevance in this context (Bowie’s “Starman” and the closing “I Will Survive” which somehow remarkably references outer space in its opening lines).  The CGI is fine.  I was manipulated and I enjoyed it.

The Illusionist (2010)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

The Illusionist (2010) – S. Chomet

It’s another Jacques Tati feature come to life, even though the comic auteur himself died in 1982.  In actuality, he wrote the script (sometime after Mon Oncle) and his daughter asked animator Sylvain Chomet (who also did The Triplets of Bellville, 2003) to create the film, so that no live actor would end up playing her father.  Although not specifically M. Hulot, the Illusionist (named Tatischeff – Tati’s real name) gets into the same serene bungles, as he accommodates to the early 1960’s and the slow fade-out of the music-hall trade.  He isn’t alone in the seedy old hotel in Edinburgh where most of the film takes place – assorted clowns, ventriloquists, and acrobats also live there, feeling despair or seeking other ways to bring in money (Tatischeff moonlights in a garage).  All told, there is a wistful bittersweet air to the proceedings, not least because the illusionist is more-or-less adopted by a young girl (a cleaner at one of the venues he’s played at) who moves in with him and they develop a sweet wordless relationship that ends when it is time for her to move on and him to declare that magicians do not exist.  Oh but they do – not just in the form of Tati himself but also in the form of Chomet who has brought a thing of real beauty to the screen, hand-drawn but computer animated, subtly coloured in reds, greens, and browns, Miyazaki-like in the pleasure it takes in the environments that surround the action.  A wonderful tribute to the French legend and a contribution to his oeuvre (and to animation’s highlight reel) in its own right.