Dawn of the Dinkins: RANDOM ACTS OF VIOLENCE (2013), BLANK CITY (2010)

I came late to the party in Manhattan, but in 1992, moving in gradually via couch osmosis, it was still at least a party. The white boy funk thing was big - Spin Doctors, Blues Traveller, my band, the Mud -Wetlands, New Music Cafe, Tramp's, Nightingale's, most closed or sold. It didn't matter, we never went in - you could drink on the street if your had a brown paper bag around it. So I've seen it all happen, on the curbs. You read my 2011 piece, Manhattan Sinking Like a Rock, wherein I admonished the average New Yorker for letting all our lovely sleaze disappear. I predicted a time when the city shall be sleazy and crime-ridden once more, to allow cheap rents, and flourishing arts.
Man, was I wrong. This is where money goes to regroup and get its second wind. No one is taking the accursed city down into the artistic abyss anymore, not without a grant, you know, to cover the insurance.

Godard homage indicated by pose and striped shirt

Ashley Cahill feels as I do about NYC and he's done something about. A Brit filmmaker who has lived in NYC for most of his life (but keeps a posh accent trimmed and burning), Cahill looks like a weird cross between Seth Meyers and Beck, but he's made a fauxcumentary where he kills random citizenry in order to set the fuse on what he hopes will be a rent-lowering, Summer of Sam-style fear-upping art-blooming crime wave. The film's had more than a few titles, CHARM, for example, but here it's RANDOM ACTS OF VIOLENCE and its on Netflix Streaming with one of those ubiquitous torture porn-looking covers. You have to look really close to see the blood around his mouth is the NYC skyline. If you share my mistrust of all the healthiness NYC is touting these days, you should look that close.

Celebrity friends should always be displayed proudly.

Godard and Truffaut T-shirts

scenebomber

It's one of those first person meta-documentary violence commentary films ala MAN BITES DOG (or Wayne Gail's film about Mickey and Mallory Knox), with Cahill as Malcolm, a slightly more homicidal version of, presumably, himself. Since both he and his character are Godard-hip and so able to use the low budget and stolen shot approach as contextual meta commentary beyond just the subject (the film is dedicated to Sam Fuller). And though he never says so outright, he clearly shares my dislike of the second-guessing anxiety that sabotages so many homicidal comedies, i.e. the need to have Winona Ryder feel bad when she kills teens in HEATHERS, or just putting them into comas for SEX AND DEATH 101 (see "Why Can't We All Just Morally Compromise?); or to have Dexter only kill other serial killers. You know, they're afraid to get all Alex and his 3 Droogs-level challenging to our limits of audience identification. They want to be Scorsese but are afraid of Tommy DeVito. But once Malcolm does his first random stabbing you know he's not fucking around.

From the first, when he stops addressing the camera in his blithe discourse on the greatness of 70s NYC (when it beat out Detroit as "the murder capital of the world") when someone answers the random door he's been knocking on, we expect some kind of standard pre-arranged greeting (wherein a camera is already inside waiting for him as per so many reality shows). Instead, he races in, grabs the unlucky inhabitant and stabs her repeatedly and rapidly, without any drama or Bernard Hermann scissor music; the effect is chilling. He's suddenly moved faster than the camera man and become a real threat. We're just not expecting it and its genuinely shocking. Even though we know it's not 'real' per se it's hard not to shiver. So many faux-que-mentaries have tried to get to this spot, only to pull back like little pussies. But Cahill dives in, and ignores our ashen complexions.

Your reaction will probably be centered around your own neighborhood; to me the suburbs are far scarier at night than the city --there's usually at least three doors and dozens of ground floor single pane windows that even a child could break into out in suburbs. In NYC we have deadbolts on thick metal doors, and only one possible entry window (the one above the fire escape), and that has bars -all leftover from the 60s-70s crime era. But if your buzzer goes off or there's a knock on the door while you're watching this film, it could be quite scary, and going to theaters has become the last bastion of social vulnerability. When Malcolm garrotes a guy for texting in what looks like the Anthology Film Archives' downstairs screening room it's fun to imagine seeing the film there and realizing you forgot your turn your phone off. Even if it's a bit unnerving, one must applaud the filmmaker's full commitment to the tenets of starting a crime wave even as, as is always the way, he turns on his director, and quirky girl friend friend, and even his own French girlfriend when she objects to his SYMPATHY FOR LADY VENGEANCE-style birthday present. Well that's to be expected. What's not expected is the deader-than-deadpan approach that never trivializes the violence Malcolm commits while never judging it either, so we end up in a very unique zone in that it's the opposite of HEATHERS' hypocritical inference that we're all so impressionable we need a pretty girl's buzzkill morals to remind us killing our high school enemies isn't "cool."

Jamie Frey (of the Brooklyn What?) left

But even if our sense of identification is pushed to HENRY or RICHARD III extremes, we trust Cahill because he's so openly homicidal he shatters walls well past the 'fourth' and beyond the metatextual infinite. The phrasing Cahill incorporates into his speech conveys a deep absorption of GODFATHER 2 ("you gonna help me with these things I gotta do, or what?"), TAXI DRIVER, GOODFELLAS, and BREATHLESS. He's in the zone, and I applaud how much that zone ties into film fans' sweeping rejection of banal reality and I can't help myself for applauding Cahill's brazen ballsiness - a near Don Quixote-esque quest to exhume the twitchy corpse of New York's badass past, to go all MS. 45 on SEX INTHE CITY. Like all great quests, it's doomed to backfire, but then again NYC hasn't ever been the same, not once in its 390 year history. It's like a mutating geographical variation of THE THING. Any chance to shape its mutant rapid evolution to our liking has long since gone - it's just too big to frighten.

Vince Gallo!

BLANK CITY (2010) is a real documentary about the time and place Cahill longs to return to, specifically NYC's underground 70s scene. Full of exquisite glimpses into the early 8 and 16mm films of the artsty downtown druggie enclaves centered around CBGB's, Max's Kansas City, Tompkins Square Park and the Alphabet City shooting galleries. The age of youtube, Final Cut, and digital video put an end to the uniqueness of the scene. When we used to project 8mm and 16mm films on white walls or sheets for gathered friends and/or family members, each showing was a one-time event, special in the way no amount of today's day Skyy Vodka sponsorship and gift bags can equal. And the kids then had more drugs -they could afford them living in $10 a month loft apartments with ten other people. So with ample footage from the original films (by people like Amos Poe and Richard Kern) and talking heads like Lydia Lunch, Steve Buscemi, Thurston Moore, John Waters, Deborah Harry, and various members of various punk bands, it's better than being there, I'm sure - at least smell-wise, and has a good sense of humor about the poverty-enforced ingenuity of these early filmmakers. I especially loved the snippets of ROME 78 - a re-enactment of the fall of an empire as filmed on the sly around the City's more Roman-esque landmarks --so while a kid in a toga dies in the Central Park fountain, tourists walk by; a coliseum scene occurs in front of the Bronx Zoo lion cage, etc. It's the kind of gutsy shot stealing that makes New York City great!

ROME 78 - John Lurie (bottom)

It's that kind of poverty-is-the-mother-of-invention ingenuity that makes these film clips impressive and invaluable, and the scene's inclusiveness is impressive (a coordinated effort merged the downtown punks with the uptown African American WILD STYLE graffiti artists, dancers and street poets) as is the proletarian mix of thick New York accents, kids kicked out of their working class Bronx neighborhoods for being gay or fleeing their midwestern nowheresville hometowns like MIDNIGHT COWBOY, the idea that if you're literate, young, and hot you can never be considered homeless in a land where everyone takes care of everyone else and the class system is part of what's being rebelled against.

But then money and the eighties led to skyrocketing rents, which meant big real estate investments, which meant the need to protect those investments, which meant Republican mayors, so gradually, especially with the incursion of Giuliani in 1994, the herald of zero tolerance smoking, the abolition of the 'brown bag' drink, and the Cabaret Law that Kevin Bacon fought successfully in FOOTLOOSE in the 80s but we lost in the 'real life' of the New York streets; the crackdowns on the drugs in the club scene, the rise of swing dancing and my own near death over and over from alcoholism. I blame Giuliani for all of it. We could use a man like Ed Koch again.

Lydia Lunch

Shooting your own shit is so easy now it's hard to warrant a film festival at all, hard to motivate people to go find some shady address and sit on the concrete floor for three house when the movie you're showing them is a mere click away on the home screen - but back then if you had a projector and a camera you could make a movie on Monday and show it to a waiting crowd that weekend, since everyone knew everyone else and half the people were squatters, and half the people were in the movie anyway, it would just happen. Huge crowds packed into abandoned buildings. I used to love that! Showing my movies to a big audience was great, but Youtube has made public screenings too unreliable - there's no word of mouth anymore because word of mouth itself has vanished, and posting invites to Facebook is so easy that there are now so many options none of them end up being anything interesting. Man, I remember when shit was still immediate, urgent, vital - you know, like with Friendster. 

I left the red loading circle in, for art's sake

POST SCRIPT - There's this other documentary on Netflix, WE CAUSE SCENES: THE RISE OF IMPROV EVERYWHERE (2013), about a group of NYC hipsters who do big flash mob-ish pranks and I'm a little jealous of their huge turnouts, which would seem to contradict all I've said here, except for the whole rule-following aspect and I've never been good at highly organized 'spontaneity' - it's fine for some people but the New Yorker embodied by Cahill in RANDOM ACTS or the filmmakers in BLANK CITY might think it's just cult conformity in a new package.

safe for mainstream consumption

I can respect the original gaggle of dudes involved in the 'sudden improv' concept, but the idea that whole masses of people want to join up and be led into safe, happy flash mob style stuff makes me realize that cigarettes are essential to true revolution (and I say this as part of Shelley Jackson's SKIN project). It kind of lacks the 'everyone's in charge' freedom of similar movements (as in the Merry Pranksters or the Cockettes or Diggers) that relied on chaos and true freedom of the sort impossible without very strong psychedelics and tobacco. The idea that sober people eagerly participate in chances to get told what to do in order to 'break away' from the social reality makes no sense. This is how ideas like the Diggers morphed into cults like the People's Temple, and how the Rolling Stone mossed, and how Times Square became 'family-friendly.'

Thank god there's one artist who will never break that seal. Abel Ferrara, where is MARY and GO-GO TALES?

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SUSPIRIA for Men... ONLY GOD FORGIVES (2013)

Lately when I meditate all that happens is my unconscious/anima rummages through forbidden memory drawers, exposing afresh long-buried shames as far back as ninth grade gym class. I'm all cool about it, of course--"oh thank you ma'am, for saving these precious memories"--and I believe once I accept them she's going to just toss 'em out. But I doubt she will, 'cuz my unconscious is a bitch, yo. Still, nothing like the one pulling Julian (Ryan Gosling) apart in Nicolas Winding Refn's career-sabotaging follow-up to his career-making DRIVE, ONLY GOD FORGIVES.

Yeah, but She doesn't, Blanche!

The tale of an Oedipus complex writ large by white people across the dirty expanses of Bangkok, it's almost more of a Jim Jarmusch-meets-David Lynch in an Argento hotel bar horror film than a standard Asian action-revenge thriller.

Then again, everything is a Jim Jarmusch-meets-David Lynch in an Argento hotel bar horror film for Sweden's dark lord of the Seijun Suzuki-esque macho melt-down post-modernist gangster genre, Nicolas Winding Refn, and GOD is his special love letter to those Angelica film snobs who saw his earlier films DRIVE and VALHALLA RISING and said "very good, Sven, but maybe slow it down a bit. Maybe don't have a protagonist who's such a chatterbox." There has to be one such film snob... somewhere. Maybe it's even me, for I'm keenly aware (since I'm Swedish) that to stand out from the legions of 'corrupt but honorable cop vs. redeemable but doomed Oedipussy' Asian vengeance-athons loitering sullenly along the blighted "Dark Foreign Revenge Thriller" avenues of Netflix, Refn has to import his own brand of ice and snow onto the eternally wet floors of le Bangkok Dangereuse. We Swedes know that Thai swordsman cops can out swing us, so we have to out-stare them and more importantly be willing to die without blinking.

No, please, don't get up

Critics haven't been kind to ONLY GOD FORGIVES, though some have been maybe too kind and maybe they shouldn't be. It practically begs for a beat-down, craves it like William Devane's masochistic ex-POW in ROLLING THUNDER. It promises to not even fight back, just proffer its hands for good severing (or garbage disposal grind). But for a film with such ornate and original visual style it sure is shy about saying anything or making a move, unless it's to judge misogynist ex-pats for slapping frightened little Bangkok sex workers. There's some bizarre sinthom going with hands, and the fear of losing them, as in if I stick my hand into this stripper's inner gates of paradise, will I ever get it back, or just pull out a stump? In a land of bare knuckle boxing and grim black dragon wallpaper, Gosling's hand bravely goes where only Jessica Harper doesn't fear to tread.

From Top: Suspiria / Only God Forgives

And there's this thing with brother Billy who is so mad about Bangkok dads pimping their daughters he kills one, or something, and some weird karaoke-singing cop lets the dad kill Billy, then cuts off the guy's hand right to punish him for that right when Julian (Ryan Gosling, apparently now the Michael Fassbender to Refn's Steve McQueen) is getting his hands tied in a lap dance, and imagining his hand cut off by the same cop. Dude, it's all connected. So the next week (or hour- there's no sense of time on the Bangkok streets) brings in on her sky chariot the brassy Clytemnestra of a devouring Mother with a typically Lady McBeth-ish streak of not thinking her dark deeds through to the end (brilliantly essayed by Kristen Scott Thomas), who has an incestuous love-hate bond with Julian, and who we learn eventually-- if our TV is on loud enough and there's no traffic outside our window to mask their fetid whispers---once ordered her boy to beat his father to death with his bare hands. And he did. You know how hands are...

But all that stuff is minor. It reminds me of my own small short films in a way, because there's no time for a plot so it all has to be delivered on the sly in expository fragments. No one leaves or arrives, they just appear in one of the many dark red-lit Chinese serpent dragon wallpapered rooms like clients at the bordello of the unconscious. When the mom lets down her hair she has a silk dress that both blends and stands out against the wallpaper. It's presumably a rose on the front but looks more like a bullet hole showing the place Julian burst out of (and where we will rather grotesquely return in the final act). She demands to know why her son hasn't killed the guy who killed his brother, when he mentions the dead son killed a sixteen year old girl she snaps "well I'm sure he had his reasons."

This old broad is a real pisser.

The film's been compared to the westerns of Sergio Leone, but in Leone all those long stares were connected to hands hovering over holsters. Clint Eastwood and his confederates didn't look at their gun or even aim it, or even blink, just stared then WHAM, one or more guys died. Hitchcock had that line about how the only difference between comedy and suspense at breakfast is that only we know a bomb's under the table in the latter, but in Leone everyone knows everyone else has a bomb under the table, and that gives their every move meaning; they don't take their eyes off each other even as they pour the coffee, with one hand, super..... slowly. For GOD, Refn takes the coffee away, the table, the eyes, even. If it's not suspense at least it's the first violent masculine deconstruction to feminize the macho staring contest, and dissociate vengeance from the minds of tortured heroes. Now instead of being about facing death it's about Sleeping Beauty, with Gosling spending the whole movie in a glass case, waiting for God's samurai sword to cleave him free of both that outer shell, and the inner too, so the nothing trapped within him can rise rise rise.

There's a great piece comparing the film with Lynch's FIRE WALK WITH ME over on Very Aware, with a Refn interview, wherein he says: the original concept for the film was to make a movie about a man who wants to fight God."

Note the austere white Great Wall image behind him, a more logocentric version of Julian's twisted dark red wallpaper, setting off a contrast that's about far more than good vs. evil, or right vs. wrong

Hey, I know about that! That's why I love Ahab so much, and all my college poetry was about it, like my classic "The Bug that Would Swat God" - but in my case it was drunken bravado and feeling inspired by Gregory Peck's twisted oratory (see here, shipmates). Here it's less about wanting to fight God and more about doing it just to get your awful mother off your back.

And then there's the "villain," the cop in the white collar doesn't just kill people without a show of torture, hand slicing offery, etc. And for all his swift brutal gestures Julian is not much of a fighter. The mom, and our own action film expectations, lead us to believe that once he's given the signal, Julian is going to be as lethal as Clint Eastwood in the climax of UNFORGIVEN. He's going to be like Popeye given the 101 proof spinach. But instead he gets beaten down... by a middle-aged balding Thai cop! That's like Sly Stallone losing a fight to Burgess Meredith, and Refn knows we'll feel that way and Julian's losing seems somehow on purpose, to piss off his mom, and us by extension, to subvert our expectations. Of course Ahab is going to lose in his battle with the white whale. That's kind of the whole point. The only time we can control our destiny is when we deliberately pick a fight with something we know will destroy us.

It seems absurd that mom should be so eager for vengeance that she'd go up against a supernatural cop like this, but without her around to shake things up everyone would still be sitting where we left them, motionless, like a flock of ventriloquist dummies after their owners have all gone to bed. Refn's out to do more with his dolly than deliver a mere Asian revenge thriller; he's gone way past a Seijun Suzuki deconstruction like BRANDED TO KILL and exposed the hideous mom-hating apron string hacker inner child of Ryan Gosling's new Action Figure persona.

It helps to learn that Refn shot in chronological order and kind of winged it for large stretches, with Ryan Gosling and Thomas both having lots of input and collaboration in their characters outcomes, and genius DP Larry Smith (who worked with Refn on BRONSON) had a hand in things, too. There's a feeling that comes across when submitting to that kind of spontaneity, Godardesque perhaps, but more open-ended, in the moment, from second to second, but the drawback is it seldom builds to any satisfying catharsis or ending. It's like that stare of the Leone gunfighter with his hand over his gun has widened and lasts the entire film, and then no gun is drawn. And there are no hands left to pull a trigger. The first credit at the end is to announce the film is dedicated to Alejandro Jodorowsky, which is pretty steep company. The man is a God himself, a shaman first class, and tellingly has much armless and/or handless characters, especially in Santa Sangre.

from top: Only God Forgives, Santa Sangre

All we know is Julian was pretty twisted before all this revenge got started but he quickly loses it thereafter, while watching his stripper cry jeweled tears behind the strings of a crystal bird house corner he hears some laughter at the other end of the club. They could be laughing at anything but Julian thinks they're laughing at him. Next thing you know he's smashing a glass in one of their faces and dragging him around by his upper palette. Dude, that's paranoid!

From top: Only God Forgives,The Fighter, Only God Forgives, Buffalo 66, The Fighter

So paranoid in fact it reminds me of two other movies about bruised masculinity: BUFFALO 66, THE FIGHTER, and Refn's best movie so far, VALHALLA RISING (very similar ending).  Gosling's cobra stillness isn't as strange as it was in DRIVE, since everyone else is on the same slow down drug (that stuff they sell in DREDD, maybe), since everyone suffers from it, a Sergio Leone-like slow-mo Xanax meltdown ensues. The great music by Cliff Martinez even becomes Angelo Badalamenti at times (the music from TWIN PEAKS was supposedly what Refn cut the film to), linking it as a kind of sequel to THE FIGHTER if Mickey Ward and his ma set up shop at a fight club down in Thailand, and she left to do various deals, but she still flies in like an avenging angel when son Dicky the crackhead is killed. Meanwhile there's some BUFFALO 66 meets THE WRESTLER nonsense as Julian's favorite crying stripper, who gives the drowsiest lap dances in history, is supposed to wear a dress and meet the foulmouthed Madea of a mom. Interesting too that the dead son is named Billy, and had a huge, enormous cock (according to the mom) as we all know Vince Gallo does (see THE BROWN BUNNY, but feel free to FF).

And it's clear Billy and Julian both have some seriously warped misogyny going on with women as a result of the mom and as in BUFFALO 66, the tableaux like setups inside the strip club run by the former member of the Buffalo Bills, which is like a beautiful Lynchian circle of hell where no one seems to move, anchored by a grotesque shirtless fat guy with a bow tie on, swilling booze and flanked by slow-mo bouncing strippers. The Billy in both films skulks around the periphery of these slow motion druggy sex dens, forever denied the presumed pleasures of full psychic abandon. Both have way too many mother issues to permit anything approaching even a feint at that sort of enjoyment. They can only abduct, kill, and be cruel to, women who seem weaker and more submissive somehow, to vicariously relive their primal scene in an attempt to rewritezzzzzz --eh? I nodded off.... or did I? Did I miss anything? No --they're all still just staring. Perfect.

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Screw any Man under 30: ARIZONA DREAM (1993, dir. Emir Kusturica)

"Why must you screw any man under 30?"
"Because it's normal... in Papua New Guinea!"

The above lines of dialogue give you some insight into the hysterical weirdness of Serbian filmmaker Emir Kusturica's first English language film, ARIZONA DREAM (1993). Don't let it get confused with other ARIZONA movies, or quirky ensemble films too numerous to name (BENNY AND JOON springs to mind, but I've never seen it). Yes, it's got a post-structuralist's fascination with desert roadside attractions, and yes it's got a whimsical voiceover (from Depp) and whimsy involving Eskimos, a hypnotist sled dog; a fish with two eyes on the same side of his face, a balloon; an airplane propeller mounted to the chandelier for a ceiling fan; Depp acting like a chicken "buck buck buckcock!"; fish swimming through the sky whenever someone dies; ambulances going up to the moon; pet turtles at the dinner table, but none of it done in a corny 'faux-centric" way like a Sundance workshop "about family... about hope"  nor is it done in an 'aren't common folk delightful?' Capra style. Instead this has enough 'hysterics' to land it amongst films like Zulawski's 1985  L'AMOR BRAQUE (my piece here) or 80's Godard like DETECTIVE and CODE NAME: CARMEN. In short, it's genuinely nuts, not nuts-lite.

The story unfolds with nature conservationist Depp being lured by brother Vince Gallo out to Arizona to attend his uncle's wedding. Jerry Lewis is the uncle, a car dealer with a thing for pink Cadillacs. He's marrying--wait for it--noted supermodel Paulina Porizkova! So far so good. Yet that whole set-up is dropped once Lili Taylor as a rich heiress and Faye Dunaway as her hot mess stepmom show up at the dealership and Depp and Gallo start falling all over themselves like the Marx Brothers over Thelma Todd. Depp quickly moves in to the ladies' remote Arizona mansion, to shag Dunaway and help her realize her dream of building a fantasmastical flying machine. Kudos to any film where Faye Dunaway out crazies Jerry Lewis (I generally cringe watching Lewis' schtick, but he's restrained and excellent here).

Fans of Vincent Gallo should note there's early signs of his BROWN BUNNY austerity, when he performs the crop dusting scene from Hitchcock's NORTH BY NORTHWEST at a talent show. Later during a pivotal scene of bedroom hopping upstairs, Gallo is down on the couch, watching GODFATHER II and reciting the whole Fredo bit "Don't you think I'm smaht?!" These scenes, immortal as they come, seems to be metaphors for middle America to the European cinephile mind, a place of endless expanse and emotional voidness, where space, time, and family cease to have any meaning, and we find ourselves hiding and dodging and hiding like a scarecrow at an airport. Gallo also quotes the Cowardly Lion ("I didn't bite hm!") and dances around when things get weird, which they do.

Lili Taylor has perhaps never looked sexier or seemed more relaxed, as the stepdaughter, even as she commits bungee jumping pseudo-suicide, and dreams of coming back as a turtle, but--like Lewis--she lets Dunaway--sexy cougar-style in country frock, pale denim jacket and beauty contest hair-- out-crazy her. The cast clearly has affection for each other and the chops to improv and ham it up without moving out of character or grandstanding. Thanks to his endless Tim Burton movies, Depp's quirkiness isn't quite as fresh as it may have been back in 1993, but Kusturica is no Burton, and the film never loses its giddy, mystical edge. Actors tend to talk a lot about the friends and collaborative energy they experienced on the set of whatever film they're plugging, but here none of that friendly collaboration feels like it needs to be mentioned. It's there, for real, so there's no need to talk about it. Let the Iggy Pop songs on the soundtrack (written by Kusturica for the film) tell what needs telling, and leave it at that.

After this, Kusturica would make his definitive politico-black comedy UNDERGROUND (1995) and you can see some of the ideas in that later film born in DREAM's scattered, hypertextual framework. Long unavailable on DVD or VHS, it's a delight to find ARIZONA DREAM on Netflix streaming! Fans of acid cinema are obliged to, if not plunge, at least wade tentatively in... before it vanishes into the fishnet ether from which it came.

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Hey Betty Blue, Come Blow Your Mind!

Beatrice Dalle: few other women have created such affectionately crazy characters. And I don't mean affectionately crazy like rom-com Sandra Bullock tangled up in wedding dress crazy, I mean batshit tear your jugular vein out with her teeth while on top of you in bed crazy. That she can make such terrifying characters affectionate attests to her charisma and fearlessness; she's like Asia Argento's SCARLET DIVA with a mild case of rabies; she's what Courtney Love thinks she is but isn't; she's hot the way only genuine (check on Dalle's private life in the UK Telegraph) insanity can be hot; she's the hot female version of Robert Mitchum in CAPE FEAR or Brando in STREETCAR; she's berserk so you don't have to be.

She's played many roles but there's three unforgettable movies that define her screen persona:  BETTY BLUE (1986), TROUBLE EVERY DAY (2001) and INSIDE (2007). Taken together they form a loose, unofficial 21 year trilogy of taboo-busting French cinema wherein our heroine evolves from troubled uninhibited full-frontal waif (BLUE) to batshit cannibal nymphomaniac (TROUBLE) to full-on female Michael Meyers / Jason unstoppable Kali womb ripper (INSIDE). BLUE kind of retro-actively launched the whole 'quirky comi-tragedy with casual nudity" French genre; TROUBLE took the always popular vampire myth to its bloody extreme end; and INSIDE fit the torture-porn mold of the late 00s, and the character threads left unresolved in BETTY BLUE got resolved through INSIDE, the way RED kind of wound up the threads of WHITE and BLUE in Krzysztof Kieslowski's Three Colors trilogy. And what a hell of a journey because, you see, this actress needs no makeup our double to be terrifying: she's got those teeth!

One thing our own Hollywood heroines never seem to have is scary teeth. This sad truth compromised the rawness of Rob Zombie's DEVIL'S REJECTS (2007) for example, with its scuzzy Manson family cannibals flashing top notch orthodontistry. In America our teeth are either perfect or godawful based on our parent's health plans or lack thereof--the have-braces and have-nots; the rich get even their minor imperfections sealed over and whitened while the poor can only watch in the mirror as their incisors and bicuspids overlap and twist sideways. In countries with socialized medicine however, such as France and England, the collapse of first rate dentistry in favor of a universal median produces a uniformity of neither very good nor horrendously bad teeth. Dalle's are definitely in this ballpark, not hideous but certainly lupine... and she is a truly brave actress and sexpot for not wanting to hide them (as say, Anna Karina and Jane Birkin used to) and for using them as a counterpoint to her stunning sexuality. Their dark crooked contours shine in all the H.R. Giger glory in TROUBLE, where they reminded me at times of the creature in ALIEN; hers are the castrating incisors that squeamish big-talk no-guts films like TEETH and HARD CANDY boast of but are scared to deliver, even on deserving pedophiles and rapists. Dalle doesn't need a reason to kill or castrate: It just comes naturally and her crazy sexual frenzy in TROUBLE EVERY DAY is truly terrifying and sexy at the same time, and puts the softcore sleaze of BASIC INSTINCT's ice pick murders to shame.

I came the long way around to BETTY BLUE in the early 1991, rented it on chick advice, was wary about subtitles since they were hard to read on VHS (sometimes they were just cut halfway off by the bottom of the screen, remember?) But - a strong gin and tonic and 20 minutes past the credits I fell 'in love' with the film, and after hitting my third or fourth drink of the morning, I was ready to fight to defend it, but of course no one was there to fight with me. Still it was like I had fallen in love with a person, a person who couldn't walk straight or uncross her eyes, maybe, but if anyone made a wise crack I'd belt them in her honor. Roger Ebert, for example, missed the point and thus decided everyone else missed the point, not him! Here's what he wrote about the film on Christmas Day in 1986:

Reviews have been written debating the movie's view of madness, of feminism, of the travail of the artist. They all miss the point. "Betty Blue" is a movie about Beatrice Dalle's boobs and behind, and everything else is just what happens in between the scenes where she displays them.

Oh Jeeze, Roger! That's a bit like saying "People say VERTIGO is about obsession, madness, and castration anxiety, but it's really about Jimmy Stewart driving around San Francisco, and everything else is just what happens at places he drives to." Oh Roger, your insecure patriarchal need to shoot the lesbians at the end of BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS is suddenly laid as bare as those 'boobs and behind' (even his word choice gives him away). See? I'm still fighting to defend it.

It was, I realized, the first subtitled foreign language film I really 'loved.' PERSONA and LA DOLCE VITA were both close seconds, but my love for them was like an undergrad English student's love for Shakespeare: trepidatious, intimidated, a hair out of my element. If they were girlfriends, PERSONA would be that aloof beauty you end up heartbroken alone in your room over as she wanders off into the rainy dark to kill herself and wont let you follow. DOLCE is that party girl who stays up all the time doing coke and is ultimately, once you get past the glitter, shallow and manic-depressive with Catholic guilt, maybe even still a virgin. BETTY on the other hand is the sexy girl you shack up with one drunk night and a week goes by before you realize she hasn't left, even to get her things, and by the time you notice and try to stop fucking long enough to think of an excuse why she needs to leave you realize she's clinging to you like a python and you're too hooked on her hotness to even resist when she strangles you. Unlike play-it-safe inside the lines Ebert some of us like to have our lives destroyed by unstable hot messes! What else are they for?

 

As her patient lover, the maintenance man, aspiring writer and part-time house painter Zorg, Jean-Hugues Anglade in the film can't go unmentioned. He's no mere 'beard' the way he would later become when strugglin' with English as a French cop in films like MAXIMUM RISK (1996) or as the default boyfriend for LA FEMME NIKITA (1990), by which time the shaggy edges of his role in BETTY had worn off, or else been shorn by producers and directors who didn't understand the importance of his Serge Gainsbourg-ishness. But here he's perfect as a drunken writer who loves his manic muse to the point where he can only shrug every time she goes ballistic and starts smashing the furniture and torching buildings. Zorg's mellow acceptance taught me not to interfere or judge when a hot mess girlfriend goes postal on another man, or piece of property. His Parisian "what can I do?" shrug makes us mad when we're ugly American tourists trying to get directions to the Louvre, but in the context of dealing with psycho girlfriends, well, it's genius. I mention him because it's the lack of an Anglade in the later Dalle films that would signify the madness: Zorg would know when to walk away, know when to run, know when to commit to a sanitarium. Without him, Dalle ran amok. 

Like SPECIES later, BETTY BLUE was one of the films I would watch over and over and yet never see all the way to the end, either stopping or passing out beforehand. The only time I ever got to the end was when I was too drunk or half-asleep to change the channel. The soapy taste of sacrifice and CUCKOO'S NEST regret seemed tacked on, but the reason it worked was because the giddy joy that came before, when the pair hook up with a similar nutsy, drunk couple, Lisa (Consuelo De Haviland) and Eddy (Gerard Darmon) and spend many a fun night doing 'tequila rapidos' and dancing and singing and joking about Alpha Romeos in silk kimonos (below, opening the kimonos).

This kind of 'letting go' is something that seems uniquely French. Americans never seem to get this loose unless it's just the boys or the girls or a sleazy 'mixed party' stereotype like the scene with Jane and her friend bringing boors back from the bar in COMING HOME, or that drab New Years celebration in FOREST GUMP. Here the vibe isn't lewd like an American salesman out of town or sad like some Antonioni orgy. This quartet have already had sex, a lot of it. They're just happy to have another couple to celebrate with. The sex is lived: Dalle's 'behind' deglamourized by a pair of ugly loose silk women's underwear, Anglade nakedly trying to hammer apart a couch with a lit cigarette, this is neither the airbrushed buffness of late night softcore but a beautiful offhand slacker eroticism. Zorg and Betty are a couple that would never sit still for the slow seductions of Rohmer, but rather plunge through the world like crazy screaming brakes-off banshees, but not like the abstraction of Godard or the hopelessness of Truffaut or the airlessness of Araki but rather the acceptance and in-the-moment-beauty and camaraderie of Howard Hawks or Nicholas Ray.

 

BLUE divides a joyful freedom and acceptance first half with a long downward spiral second half, an arc that informed in a slew of late 90's and early 00's movies like BOOGIE NIGHTS (1997), TRAINSPOTTING (1996), MONSTER (2003), IT'S ALL GONE, PETE TONG (2004); and REQUIEM FOR A DREAM (2000), all very open about the highs and lows of drug use --that fast white light upward blast of the first Friday night MDMA-twinkle you've been waiting your whole life for followed by a long slow downward death spiral that ends with crying in the office bathroom on Tuesday morning. In BETTY BLUE, tragedy strikes when Eddy's mom dies suddenly and Zorg and Betty take over said mom's piano store in a far-off beach town. It's there they play a beautiful little motif on a pair of pianos that seems like they just tossed it off on the spot but it lingers in the mind and sums up the sense of loss that comes when we realize we'll never get that joy we felt with the tequila rapidos back again. 

If you were drinking the way I was, or just maudlin and 23 in a time before widespread Prozac usage, it was the ultimate sorrow, 1990-1992 - the nights of fun with Eddy and Lisa were gone. The band broke up and college was over and there were no jobs. The feeling was like you just got accepted by the cool kids after years of painful loserdom and sobesky-hood-- and then everyone graduated and went home -- you swing in the sweaty withdrawal symptom wind with your mom knocking on your door asking for a urine sample. 

 

It's that sweet remembrance of things past that suffuses the rest of BETTY BLUE, and lingers on in Claire Denis' TROUBLE EVERY DAY, a glacial, mostly nonverbal film that offers no sense of joy or belonging, only the terror of imagining your own human carnal lust leading you to a grisly agonizing doom, the fate of being ripped apart by a maniacal lover. Such grisly potential forces us as viewers into weird moral positions, like a game of Twister devised by a coked-up pope, as the slow and relentless tug of sexual desire drags lonely people to their deaths via a very long, snaking chain tied to a dropping anchor.

TROUBLE fulfills the promise of CAT PEOPLE which told of a race of humans who would turn into black leopards after making love and could turn human again only after taking a life. However in Paul Schrader's 1982 version, these killings were kind of tepid; the sex was over before the transformation so it came off a bit tame (the panther strikes while the victim is lolling around in a post-coitus haze). None of that waiting around for Denis! The way Dalle continues to obliviously whisper and coo in her now dead lovers' ears for example, links to her a real cat lady, the type tries to keep toying and torturing their lifeless prey long after its dead. Such scenes are few and far between, such scenes make producers uncomfortable because they threaten the safety of their model of the cinemagoer as one already dead and presumed therefore impervious to attack; as if the image and the eye are tectonic plates and the idea of cinema is to promise contact yet prevent any actual buckling or triggering of a massive modernist earthquake. In true post-cinematic Asia Argento / Samara fashion, Dalle's sexuality causes the simulacratic melt-down bubble, wherein the covetous eye is torn out in a fit of enjoyment that transcends all textual boundaries.

Variously dismissed, panned or gushed over by the few who've seen it, TROUBLE never really explains itself. We deduce that Vince Gallo is a chemist of the WEREWOLF OF LONDON / Henry Hull variety, tracking down a rare plant extract cure for his malady. This malady is unnamed, but clearly causes an increasingly unbearable urge to devour during sex. Denis cuts back and forth between Dalle's LET THE RIGHT ONE IN-style handler and Gallo on his honeymoon in a Paris hotel, where his stalker-killer lust is focused not on his wife but on the cute hotel maid who comes in every day to make the bed. Dalle has devolved farther along in the disease, to where she can barely talk and spends each night breaking out of the prison her handler keeps her in, each night heading to the same lonesome stretch of road where truckers apparently pull over for sex, and are soon pulled to pieces.

Gallo and Dalle-- it's gradually revealed through incidental conversations--once had kind of a thing for each other while doing research together in Africa (where they presumably found the plant, thus linking this film to GANJA AND HESS!) and as their paths look like they will intersect we brace ourselves for what the Netflix liner notes erroneously refer to as a joint killing-spree. There are however ingenious moments like Gallo and his bride hanging out atop Notre Dame, whose spires covered in gargoyles bear a passing resemblance to both Gallo (his weird eyes) and Dalle (her demonic teeth). I'm not going to start getting into the whole reptilian conspiracy thing (read up on it here!) but Denis' thoughtful inclusion of these images brings a kind of Antonioni-esque post-modern amnesia to the events. We don't need plot exposition because we know the story and all its variations. In not laying out lots of expository dialogue, Denis--like Antonioni--allows the associations and timeless miasmatude' to form as it will. 

I wont spoil the particulars, but the key moment, the grisly highlight, is the sex/devouring scene of Dalle's with a horny neighbor kid who breaks into her locked room, and of course gets far more than he bargained for. Shots of the kids' accomplice downstairs waiting nervously for him, hearing the muffled screams of agony and his ambiguous reaction, reminded me a lot of a key scene, quite similar, in the original I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE. And hey, that's a good thing. TROUBLE EVERY DAY has got a bad rap as being disgusting and dull, but I think, again, its this squeamishness critics have with seeing hot girls castrate their prey. I get grossed out by a lot of things, but for some reason I find female-on-male sexual mutilation to be quite positive, maybe as there's so much violence done in the other direction, I'm a big one for balance... and anyway, it's the fuckin' movies! 

Inside (2007)

Last in the trilogy is one of those 'one wild night' horror films that seem to unfold in real time: INSIDE tells the story of a pregnant woman (Alysson Paradis) living in a ROSEMARY'S BABY style bubble of patronizing patriarchal infantalization that gets busted open, literally figuratively and metatextually, by Beatrice Dalle's covetous vengeance-seeker. As I wrote in 2008:

"The Netflix liner notes say that in INSIDE, Beatrice Dalle "relentlessly pursues the pregnant Sarah, determined to perform a grisly brand of C-section." I think the "grisly brand" is key here, as it implies there is a non-grisly brand. The patronizing treatment expectant mother Alysson Paradis receives from her mom, the hospital, and her distracted married man boss sets the bar of pro-life patriarchal oppression to high right from the start. There's a refreshing lack of "sanctity of motherhood" posing, which has become so ingrained in the contemporary American cinema. With this disillusioning, we are made to realize that all c-sections are grisly; birth is a cruel and nasty business which no amount of drugs, sanitary surfaces and hospital hooplah can deny. INSIDE gets to the meat of the matter, with humor and a fine sense of real time pacing.

Made only five years after TROUBLE EVERY DAY, Dalle's beauty has 'faded' more than a bit. She's no Isabelle Huppert or Isabelle Adjani--two actresses who will probably stay hot into their 80s, but so what? While both Adjani and Huppert can play super fierce and fucked-up women when the role demands, our Beatrice Dalle is something else entirely-- she is that fucked-up fierce, and if art imitates life you could take her three films as something like a portrait of supersexy evil genius insanity in the making. Hers is the evolution of a hottie nymph  from bi-polar slugger losing her shit over not being able to have a baby (BLUE); to sympathetic cannibal (TROUBLE), to a completely unsympathetic monster out to take a baby for herself, right out of another woman's womb. But is it a tragedy, or a triumph? Doesn't being the monster mean you--and you alone, get to not be afraid of the dark?

Now, the ideas on display in INSIDE were, I thought at the time, just a crazy French sensationalists' morbid imagination. But as the Investigative Discovery TV show Deadly Women has taught me, it's happened quite a few times in real life. In fact it happened in 2007, the same year as INSIDE came out! Sacre bleu!! Crimes like these prove when push comes to shove, women can be just as crazy sick as men anytime, even sicker. Of course here at Acidemic we call that a victory. Why? because again, at least in the context of our discussion, it's movies! No one is really getting killed by Dalle, and after all, by the end of the trilogy, Betty Blue gets what she wanted--a child.

By turns tragic, comic, sexy, horrifying and terribly sad, this loose trilogy of BETTY BLUE, TROUBLE EVERY DAY, and INSIDE form a grand and very French salute to dangerous women. In all three films Dalle's madness is triumphant; she remains unconquered by patriarchy's desperate chokeholds. Even if she's burned alive, electroshocked, stabbed, strangled, or smothered, she still wins, one way or the other. No wonder Dalle is such an icon! She appeals to the cultured European melancholic degenerate in us all, the one who sees not wisely but too far, and knows that sex and death are so close to one another along the fault lines of existence as to be inseparable; step too close to the crack and you find yourself caught in the thin slice of ground between their gaping fissures and nowhere to go but down into the crevasse. How, after all, can you go back to safe distances now that you've been so close? How could you live? To desire sex but fear death, or vice versa is to live an anxious lie, what Buddhists call samsara. Dalle is way past samsara. As a persona, an icon, she dwells in the harrowing truth beyond the wobbly front tricycle wheel of life; she's the bubble gum card fluttering in its spokes; her terrible teeth are our deliverance from the mundane irrelevance of man.

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