Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Strange Times, Strange Folks, Strange Places
I'm not sure why the red envelope selections became so extensively dark and psychologically heavy as of late. Neither David Cronenberg's Spider or Norwegian surrealist outing The Bothersome Man have worked out well for kicking back after dinner in the middle of winter, yet both are intriguing in how they deal with internal reality, one of the traditional landscapes of cinema rooted in German Expressionism and surrealistic experimentation.
Spider's structure is especially worth noting. Mr. Cleg (Ralph Fiennes arrives at a kind of horrid halfway house for long time institutionalized patients. It is alongside a canal across from a gasworks that makes awful noizes and is run by Lyn Redgrave as a passive agressive Big Nurse like character. He writes in spiderweb-like patterns in a diary which allows him to become a present and almost active observer in a series of childhood flashbacks with lots of psychotic twists that ultimately explain how he got to his currently creepy circumstances.
A few weeks back I wrote about how I was exceptionally impressed with Croneberg's Eastern Promises and A History of Violence. Spider is closer to his prior Naked Lunch or The Fly. Still, I wanted to take a chance with it. Spider was by no means a pleasant experience, but one so well executed it stands to be appreciated.
Andreas in the The Bothersome Man (Den Brysomme mannen) suffers more from interactions in an absurdist external world than a deeply embedded internal reality that Mr. Cleg has. Or is it his internal world, we're never quite sure. Essentially, dirctor Jens Lien has created a kind of mental/emotional experience like some kind of amusement ride.
After dropping onto a train track, ostensibly because he saw a couple in an over-the-top embrace, Andreas rides a bus that takes him to a desert where a welcome banner awaits him. He is then driven to a town where he is plugged into a job as an accountant among a bevy of Stepford like co-workers. Sometimes he pushes too far and is picked up by two guys in in gray industrial garb driven around in a silver Suzuki mini van where he dropped off to be in place of reset, as in a game of pinball. So the modern world is absurd. Is that the point of this exercise? Seeing this film gives me a similar response to a lot of Iron Curtain era Eastern European cinema I've seen: It makes me appreciate Bunuel even more. For me he is and always will be the definition of Surrealist cinema. A well-executed buffet must contain both flavors of light and dark, high-intended expression and low brow excursion. Like the weather, being more to the cold/wet side of the scale, its time to get things into balance.
posted by well-executed buffet at 7:31 PM
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