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Review: A Film Trilogy by Ingmar Bergman on Criterion Blu-ray
Bergman's Trilogy of Faith is a watershed moment of transition both in the filmmaker's career and in world cinema.4.5
The subject of Ingmar Bergman's self-designated Trilogy of Faith is nominally the absence of God in everyday life—a classical theological conundrum, perhaps, but it's one that Bergman's films suggest is made more acute by the distinctly modern threats of nuclear apocalypse, world war, and general social anomie. But the uniting theme of this trilogy may as well be the impossibility of intimate heterosexual relationships, as in each of these films the bonds that tie men and women together snap under pressure, or are already irreparably shattered.
In the first film, 1961's Through a Glass Darkly, Harriet Andersson gives a harrowing performance as Karin, a young woman whose mental health is in decline. At her family vacation home in northern Sweden with her father, David (Gunnar Björnstrand), her teenaged brother, Minus (Lars Passgård), and her husband, Martin (Max von Sydow), Karin hears voices coming through the crack-ridden walls of a neglected attic room. In nearly silent, expressionistic sequence, Bergman evokes her simultaneous anguish and ecstasy as she experiences a kind of perverse rapture in the empty room. The film never visualizes Karin's hallucinations, but it suggests their intensity by stylizing the room as a space of starkly contrasting lights and darks, the haunting glow coming from a single window seemingly not affecting the utter blackness of the splintered walls.
Meanwhile, the men in Karin's life prove unable to humanely cope with her condition. She confesses to Minus her horrifying, sexually tinged fantasies of God visiting her in the form of a spider, and the sexually confused Minus becomes infatuated with her. David, a novelist, keeps his distance in part because of the guilt he feels for exploiting Karin's illness, using it as the basis for a (highly eroticized) character in the book he's writing. Karin discovers that even her bookish, outwardly sensitive husband has been keeping the true scope of her diagnosis from her, maintaining a diary in which he clinically logs the progress of her disease. Bergman's bleak look at domestic life is shot through with suppressed and displaced sexual desire, a deconstruction of the family unit whose Freudian overtones are accentuated by the way the betrayal of the father is tantamount to the discovery of a malicious, sexually threatening god.
Bergman moved from Freud to Sartre, from anguished expressionism to dire asceticism, with 1963's Winter Light, in which a doubt-plagued Lutheran minister, Tomas (Björnstrand), finds himself unable to offer solace to Jonas Persson (von Sydow), a member of his dwindling congregation for whom global nuclear proliferation has inspired intense existential panic. Persson commits suicide later the same afternoon, and Tomas must grapple not only with his own encroaching lack of faith, but not having provided the man with effective counsel. The image of a spider-as-God recurs—it's now Persson's image of a silent, creeping, and indifferent omnipotence that Tomas finds he must reconcile himself to.
Also in Winter Light, though, the dissolution of the bond between man and God manifests itself in a disturbance of the relations between men and women. Tomas's crisis of faith is rooted in the death of his wife some years ago, since which time he's been ardently cared for by his childhood friend, Märta (Ingrid Thulin). Märta is a local teacher who attends Tomas's services despite her professed atheism, and whose unconditional love represents to Tomas a dual threat: Accepting it would mean not only moving past his wife's death, but finally accepting that love is possible in the absence of God.
Winter Light captures the powerlessness of religion in a world overseen by an uncaring, de-anthropomorphized god, with Bergman's lingering shots of listless churchgoers and a bored organist, lit by the pale sun of a brief winter's afternoon, almost tending toward comedy of the absurd. Though the film isn't without a sense of humor, it's difficult to call it a comedy, particularly given its sober portrayal of utter helplessness, as well as the climactic confrontation between Märta and Tomas, in which Tomas hurls invective at the caring schoolteacher—not despite her abiding love for him, but because of it. Winter Light proves to be the strongest of these three classic films: Märta and Tomas are the trilogy's most fully realized characters, much more than ciphers for a theological dialectic, and the film's pared-down style puts the keenly felt performances by Björnstrand and Thulin at the center.
Bergman, of course, deserves much credit as a director of actors. The Silence, with its loose, meandering story, depends on commanding performances from Thulin and Gunnel Lindblom as Ester and Anna, a pair of sisters lodging in a hotel in an unnamed, presumably Eastern European country on the eve of war. In a classic modernist alienation device, Bergman doesn't bother with a reason that the two sisters should be visiting the country; nor does he translate the smatterings of foreign dialogue we hear from natives throughout the film. True to the title, characters in the film are largely silent or unintelligible, and the hotel, seen through the eyes of Anna's young son, Johan (Jörgen Lindström), takes on qualities of a magical labyrinth.
There's little direct conversation about God or religion in The Silence, but contextualized with the two previous films, it's easy to see the film continuing the dissolution of the world and family that began in Through a Glass Darkly. A totally absent God leads to a splintered narrative, and a splintered family: Johan's father is pointedly absent from the film, and a conflict between the sickly Ester and the beautiful Anne, based in sexual jealously and envy over Johan's affections, leads to a schism between the sisters. In the stylistic evolution from the first film to the third, we can also see the Bergman who would direct 1966's arthouse classic Persona emerging. The Silence isn't only more avowedly modernist than the previous films in its intentional obscurity and penchant for the bizarre and alienating, but it also brings Bergman's interest in women's interior lives to the fore, for better and for worse.
The film would be notorious (and unexpectedly successful) upon its release for its frank depiction of female sexuality. What seemed scandalous and groundbreaking in 1963, however, often feels tame and fetishizing today. For one, Ester's infamous masturbation scene, in which she appears to bring herself to climax in about four seconds, is laughably unrealistic, and watching the eroticized conflict between the sisters play out seems more like observing an alien species' unhealthy sexual relations rather than gaining insight into female desire.
Nevertheless, The Silence is a landmark in early-'60s European cinema, clearly in conversation with the innovations in the representation of time, space, and cognition being undertaken around the same time by filmmakers such as Alain Renais, Agnés Varda, and Michelangelo Antonioni. Bergman's three films constitute a liminal trilogy, bridging not only two epochal worldviews, but also two styles of European filmmaking, arriving at a freer experimentation with narrative form. It's logical, though, that the most compelling of these films remains Winter Light—the one whose story and style positions it just on the precipice of this dual transition—as it captures best the perpetual crisis that modernity has made of the present.
The transfers are derived from new 2K scans of each film, which exhibit marked improvements upon earlier home-video releases. These improvements are most readily apparent in Winter Light, whose use of bright, diffused light was washed out on the 2003 DVD. Here, the detail captured by Sven Nykvist's cinematography is easier to appreciate, giving the anomalous shots of wooden crosses and altars in the austere Lutheran cathedral more inherent visual interest, without sacrificing the bleakness connoted by the uniformly lit space. The other two films make more use of high-contrast lighting, reproduced on the Blu-rays with stable blacks and an utter lack of visual artifacts. The sound for each film is based on remastered versions of the original 35mm soundtracks. The most striking aspect of the films that the remastered soundtracks bring to bear is, appropriately, their silence. Bergman's sparing use of music, his methodical deployment of environmental sounds, and his emphasis on direct, piercing dialogue is more apparent on these tracks, which are free of hisses or pops.
Criterion's re-release of this 2003 box set includes an entire fourth film: Vilgot Sjöman's Ingmar Bergman Makes a Movie, a documentary for Swedish television about the making of Winter Light. The film's extended interviews with Bergman and Sven Nykvist, and in particular the pair's discussion of their meticulous studies of how afternoon light is diffused in the space of a cathedral, add dimensions to second viewings of Winter Light.
The set compensates for its lack of commentary tracks with two introductions for each film: one by film scholar Peter Cowie, and another by Bergman himself, recorded at his home on the island of Fårö island in 2003. Cowie's detailed introductions are particularly adept at providing biographical background to Bergman's musings on religion. Bergman's are comparatively brief, but there's an inherent interest in watching the now-deceased octogenarian lounging in his private theater, discussing decades-old masterpieces. Also on the discs are archival interviews with Björnstrand, Andersson, and Nykvist, new to this edition of the trilogy. In all, the extras on the Blu-ray discs present a much more robust offering than on the 2003 release.
The booklet features an insightful analysis of the films as a "philosophical reduction" of religious certainty by film scholar Catherine Wheatley, as well as "God Said Nothing," a brief excerpt from Bergman's autobiography. While these new pieces are welcome, oddly missing are the three essays, by Cowie, Leo Braudy, and Peter Mathews, included on the 2003 release.
Bergman's Trilogy of Faith, a watershed moment of transition both in the filmmaker's career and in world cinema, gets faithful treatment from the Criterion Collection.
Cast: Harriet Andersson, Max von Sydow, Gunnar Björnstrand, Lars Passgård, Ingrid Thulin, Gunnel Lindblom, Allan Edwall, Kolbjörn Knudsen, Olof Thunberg, Elsa Ebbesen, Eddie Axberg, Jörgen Lindström, Birger Malmsten, Håkan Jahnberg, Eduardo Gutiérrez and the Eduardinis Director: Ingmar Bergman Screenwriter: Ingmar Bergman Distributor: The Criterion Collection Running Time: 266 min Rating: NR Year: 1961 – 1963 Release Date: June 4, 2019 Buy: Video
Blu-ray Review: Clint Eastwood's High Plains Drifter on KL Studio Classics
Kino outfits one of Eastwood's bleakest westerns with a sturdy transfer that honors its savage beauty.3.5
Clint Eastwood's High Plains Drifter, his first western as a director, has the sort of elementally simple narrative that propelled Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars, as well as genre hallmarks such as Fred Zimmerman's High Noon and George Stevens's Shane. The story involves that old chestnut in which a mysterious man (Eastwood) rides into some town and helps its people prepare to do battle with bandits. Yet the bitterness lurking between the cracks of Shane and High Noon has been profoundly amplified here, as the townspeople are venal, greedy cowards who're regarded by the drifter with a contempt that verges on the biblical. Next to High Plains Drifter, Eastwood's midcareer masterpiece Unforgiven is sentimental, and hell, this film might even make Akira Kurosawa's merciless Yojimbo, the wellspring for the modern American western, blush. Yojimbo punctured its Darwinian nihilism with joyous black comedy, while High Plains Drifter is funny in a more dread-inducing key, offering a lingering visit in purgatory while revealing notions of "society" to be a sham.
Early in High Plains Drifter, Eastwood establishes the film's stark terms with a scene that's perhaps more shocking now than it was in 1973. The drifter rides into the mining town of Lago and is harassed by a trio of toughs who're used to having the run of things. After casually killing them with the skill and aplomb of Eastwood's Man With No Name from Leone's "Dollars" trilogy, the drifter runs into Callie (Marianna Hill), an attractive woman who picks an argument with him seemingly for the attention, which spurs the drifter to drag her into a nearby barn and rape her. The abruptness of this scene is chilling, and, yes, Eastwood maintains a certain macho ambiguity as to whether or not Callie "enjoyed" it as a reprise from coupling with the local beta males, though the action itself is terse, brutal, and unglamorized. Even more unnerving is the townspeople's indifference to Callie's violation, though we soon learn they have a habit of allowing atrocity to flower for their own convenience.
It's hard to imagine any star now who'd be as willing to confront the disturbing implications of their "image" as strenuously as Eastwood does in High Plains Drifter, which elaborates on the eroticized heartlessness that he previously mined in Don Siegel's The Beguiled. The drifter's callousness is never soft-soaped, as this character suggests the apotheosis of the resentment that drives various Eastwood heroes who are constantly tasked with saving people who can't stick up for themselves and—worse—have no gratitude for the services provided.
In scene after scene, the drifter degrades and exploits a town with a history of ceding power to maniacs, and Eastwood, a blossoming directorial talent at the height of his on-screen magnetism, uncomfortably makes room for the audience to enjoy these humiliations. We respond to his iconic authority, envisioning perhaps that we would be "him" in such a scenario, even if most of us would be among the lambs. Which is to say that High Plains Drifter honors and explodes the sicko pleasure of the vigilante film, which allows us to pretend that we're the alpha and thusly indulge the alpha's sense of superiority over what are, ironically, more accurate representations of ourselves. The film could be a libertarian's dream, which is fascinating given Eastwood's own conservative politics.
Yet Eastwood's politics have rarely gone unchallenged in his films. High Plains Drifter periodically enjoys a superhuman loner's power, which is expressed via bold imagery that evokes Leone's aesthetic, only with a tinge of gothic neuroses. Yet this film also rues this community's weakness as a perversion of democratic ideals. The drifter is an avenging angel, perhaps literally, who treats oppressed people such as Native Americans honorably, and who's haunted by flashbacks of a marshal being beaten to death by a trio of outlaws with bullwhips.
This is among the most disturbing sequences of Eastwood's career, as the town's citizens watch the murder with paralyzed awe while shrouded in darkness as the whips crack into the air like gun blasts. One is primed to consider the legend of the dozens of people who watched Kitty Genovese as she was raped and murdered in New York City in 1964, an incident that has inspired many works, such as Harlan Ellison's short story "The Whimpering of Whipped Dogs." We are led to wonder, especially by the film's final image, if the drifter is this marshal returned to even the ledgers—a suggestion that's intensified by a perverse meta twist: The marshal is played by Buddy Van Horn, one of Eastwood's most famous stunt doubles.
The film's horror element is teasingly evocative, emphasized mostly via the sheen of Bruce Surtees's otherworldly cinematography. Lago is positioned along and often above a large body of water that reflects the sky, subtly proffering the illusion that the town itself is in the clouds, a notion of heavenly paradise that the drifter destroys when he assumes control and orders the townspeople to paint every building a deep, dark red. This red town cuts to the truth of the lonely brutality of western settlement in general, and could've sprung out one of Roger Corman's most surreal productions, particularly The Masque of the Red Death.
When the gang that killed the marshal returns to find this hellscape, its members are brutally dispatched before the drifter rides off into a desert that shimmers with primordial, hallucinatory heat. Unforgiven was said to challenge various valedictory motifs of the western and the revenge narrative, but it essentially allows us to like Eastwood's character and to feel that delayed closure and justice have been achieved. High Plains Drifter is a more bitter brew, suggesting that violence begets violence indiscriminately, due to authority that's derived from the acquiescence of populations who'd rather be comfortable than righteous.
The image here can be a bit murky and soft on occasion, especially in interior shots, which is admittedly at least partially in keeping with the film's aesthetic. Colors are terrific though—with the infernal reds, aquatic blues, and hot whites especially standing out—while the exteriors and facial and fabric details are sharp, with appealing levels of grain. Meanwhile, the 2.0 Master Audio track is rich and very nuanced, lending particular, disturbing body and vitality to the violent scenes, though the small sounds are also pristinely rendered.
In his audio commentary, filmmaker and writer Alex Cox astutely observes the various similarities and differences between High Plains Drifter and the films of Italian maestros like Sergio Leone and Sergio Corbucci. Cox also celebrates the film's superb sense of location, as High Plains Drifter is set in a western town that was built out of scratch, including functional interiors in many of the buildings. Instead of cutting from a picturesque location to an obvious set, Clint Eastwood and cinematographer Bruce Surtees frequently capture interiors and exteriors simultaneously, tightening claustrophobia as well as our impression of "knowing" this town. Mining his own filmmaking experience, Cox also talks of scenes he might've snipped or of the interior images he finds to be underlit, despite his obvious reverence for the film. In general, this is an enjoyable commentary, which allows room for many cross-references to Eastwood's blossoming stock company. In new interviews, actors Marianna Hill, Mitchell Ryan, and William O'Connell speak of their various experiences working with Eastwood, all describing him as an erudite and unpretentious artist who trusts his actors and keeps them on their toes with his famous preference for single takes. An archive promo and trailers for other vintage Eastwood productions round out a slim yet engaging supplements package.
Kino Lorber outfits High Plains Drifter, one of Clint Eastwood's bleakest westerns, with a sturdy transfer that honors its savage beauty.
Cast: Clint Eastwood, Verna Bloom, Mariana Hill, Billy Curtis, Mitchell Ryan, Jack Ging, Stefan Gierasch, Ted Hartley, Geoffrey Lewis, Dan Vadis, Anthony James, Walter Barnes Director: Clint Eastwood Screenwriter: Ernest Tidyman Distributor: Kino Lorber Running Time: 105 min Rating: R Year: 1973 Release Date: October 27, 2020 Buy: Video
Review: John Sturges's Joe Kidd on Kino Lorber Studio Classics Blu-ray
Joe Kidd ambles onto Blu-ray with an exemplary transfer and a couple of interesting extras.3.5
On the face of it, bringing together John Sturges, who had helmed top-shelf westerns like Bad Day at Black Rock and The Magnificent Seven, and iconic star Clint Eastwood, fresh off his directorial debut Play Misty for Me, would seem like a match made in genre heaven. But 1972's Joe Kidd definitely provides a test case for the auteur theory. Because Eastwood, whose production company Malpaso was behind the film, was calling the shots behind the scenes, not to mention assembling a crackerjack crew who would go on to work with him again on his first western as a director, the following year's High Plains Drifter. Unsurprisingly, this tug of war for control of Joe Kidd led to persistent tensions on the set, no doubt accounting for the alternating currents of slam-bang action and a draggy feeling of lassitude that run throughout the film.
It's apparent from the opening scenes that Eastwood, as Joe Kidd, is trying to add a new wrinkle to his steely-eyed persona. We first meet Kidd in jail, doing time for poaching on Native American land in the small town of Sinola, New Mexico, and resembling nothing so much as a country bumpkin with his ill-fitting bowler hat and half-sprung celluloid collar. But this is far from a comedic turn for Eastwood. We soon discover that Kidd is a former bounty hunter turned moderately successful rancher. And from brief flashes of violence early on—like the way he nonchalantly tosses a man down a flight of stairs by his belt buckle—we surmise that he's still more than capable of sudden action. But the film rather perversely keeps placing him in one situation after another that defer that action until the final half hour.
As scripted by Elmore Leonard, the storyline involves a posse, led by wealthy and ruthless landowner Frank Harlan (Robert Duvall), who recruit Kidd to track down renegade bandito and wannabe revolutionary land reformer Luis Chama (John Saxon). Along the way, Harlan takes advantage of every opportunity to display how inflexible and downright brutal he can be, aided in no small measure by a trio of cronies armed with newfangled weaponry like a long-range rifle and an automatic Mauser pistol. These technological advantages allow them to kill with impunity from a great distance, and the film demonstrates their cold-blooded efficiency in ways that are reminiscent of other westerns like Edwin Sherin's Valdez Is Coming, which was based on a story by Leonard, and Don Medford's grim and ultraviolent The Hunting Party.
Ostensibly the underdogs that the audience would ordinarily be rooting for, Chama and his band show themselves to be prone to gratuitous acts of cruelty, like tying a man to a post with barbed wire, proving little better than Harlan and his thugs when balanced on the scales of conventional morality. Chama, for his part, is an egomaniacal messianic type, content to sacrifice the lives of innocent peasants so long as it ensures his own continued existence. This makes his abrupt about-face so difficult to believe, when, out of nowhere, he decides to accept Kidd's advice about turning himself over to the representatives of law and order whose authority he so vehemently (and, arguably, correctly) questioned earlier in the film.
That very notion of "justice for all" figures prominently in Joe Kidd's climax. Just after the surreal sight of a locomotive crashing through several buildings, the final showdown between Kidd and Frank takes place in the very courtroom where the former was arraigned earlier in the film. Now Kidd occupies the judge's chair, gun rather than gavel in hand. Sentence is passed with a single shot. Ultimately, Sturges's film argues not in favor of self-interested establishment justice, nor the rights of a hardscrabble bunch of radicalized peasants, but instead for the justice of the six-shooter in the hands of a righteous man, neatly aligning Joe Kiss with Eastwood's previous film, Don Siegel's vigilante apologia Dirty Harry.
Kino's 1080p transfer of Joe Kidd looks terrific, capturing Bruce Surtees's evocative cinematography in all its painterly, magic-hour glory. Colors are bright and densely saturated, flesh tones lifelike, and grain levels well-managed. The image reveals some real depth and excellent contrast. Kino use a two-channel Master Audio track that's clean and clear, and places significant emphasis on Lalo Schifrin's unfortunately rather middling score.
Filmmaker and author Alex Cox provides an authoritative commentary, albeit one that starts off a bit slow and seems on occasion out of sync with the on-screen events. Cox touches on the location shooting at Old Tucson and Lone Pine, California; the talented constellation of crew members that Clint Eastwood would work with again on his directorial projects; elements that Cox feels don't particularly work in the film's favor; and lots of comparisons between Joe Kidd and other westerns foreign and domestic. He's particular astute when pointing out visual and narrative links to Sergio Corbucci's masterful Italian western The Great Silence, including a tidbit about how Fox held up the film's American release so that Eastwood could both direct and star in a remake that never actually happened. In an on-camera interview, actor Don Stroud discusses getting the role in Joe Kidd after working with Eastwood on Don Siegel's Coogan's Bluff, the fractious relationship between director John Sturges and Eastwood, working with other cast and crew members, and filming his unusual death scene.
Joe Kidd ambles onto Blu-ray with an exemplary transfer and a couple of interesting extras.
Cast: Clint Eastwood, Robert Duvall, John Saxon, Don Stroud, Stella Garcia, James Wainwright, Paul Koslo, Gregory Walcott Director: John Sturges Screenwriter: Elmore Leonard Distributor: Kino Lorber Running Time: 88 min Rating: PG Year: 1972 Release Date: October 27, 2020 Buy: Video
Review: Daughters of Darkness Gets 4K UHD Uplift from Blue Underground
Daughters of Darkness gets a significant facelift from Blue Underground alongside a smattering of new extras.4.5
The lifeblood of marriage was all but drained by the time Slovakia's sullen vampires reached it in the early 1970s. Not that the bloodsuckers were the only ones targeting matrimony. Harry Kümel's sapphic, Eurotrash vampire drama Daughters of Darkness has less in common with the likes of Vampyros Lesbos than it does with Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Score, to name two great and, to be more direct, intensely homophiliac debasements of the sanctity of heterosexual newlywed-lock. Although, inversely proportional to Radley Metzger's tour de foreplay Score, Daughters of Darkness kicks off with its hottest act of carnal pleasure, and as it turns out, it's the requisite first post-nuptial screw shared by man and wife, Stefan and Valerie (played by John Karlen and Daniele Ouimet in full, hirstute The Joy of Sex glory).
But all is clearly not well in paradise, because their post-coital banter sees the two admitting that they don't really love each other, perhaps half in jest, but certainly no less than half. Their lack of love makes them perfect for marriage, they conclude, and their perfectly imperfect union makes them an attractive target for the dissolute doings of Countess Elizabeth Bathory (an infallibly elegant Delphine Seyrig), the only other guest of note at the Belgian hotel at which Stefan and Valerie are spending their honeymoon. The countess wastes little time driving a wedge between the two, in what at first appears to be her own licentious way of killing the boredom of being moneyed enough to have one's vacations stretch long into the off-season. It's not long before the hotel's concierge recognizes Bathory's face, unchanged from how it was three decades prior. And then the morning-edition headlines start ringing the alarms about serial killings in nearby Bruges, and the countess's traveling companion, Ilona (Andrea Rau), starts pulling grotesque poses outside the young couple's bedroom window.
Kümel's eroticism is far too methodical to ever tip over into the hysterical prurience that marks most of the other films that Daughters of Darkness would likely be compared to in retrospect. The lesbian overtones are strong but stingy, as though female-female lip-locks were to be used as sparingly as saffron. One wonders if he held himself back owing to Seyrig's participation, just as one can't fail to see lesbianism as preferable to whatever the violently AC/DC playboy Stefan's got going on the side. (The film's most shocking horror isn't an act of bloodletting, but the long deferred reveal as to who Stefan's mother really is and why he's afraid to introduce his blushing bride to her face.) Whatever the cost for artsploitation perverts' future enjoyment, Kümel's impulse to remain on the waning edge of eroticism turns what could've been another cheap thrill into a genuinely unsettling examination of the human race's most happily sanctioned form of vampirism: man-woman couplings.
In short, a revelation, especially for those who own Blue Underground's 2011 Blu-ray, on which the black levels are so strong that they sometimes threaten to swallow up the rest of the screen with them. No more, as the 4K restoration practically reinvents Daughters of Darkness right out the gate as rosy-faced Stefan and Valerie screw on the night train to Belgium, their compartment bathed in warm, naturalistic hues. The image is remarkably sharp across the board, which also means that there's plenty of film noise, especially noticeable on the actors' faces and especially light backgrounds, which won't be a concern for anyone who likes being reminded of a time when all films were shot on celluloid. The English 5.1 DTS HD, which is preferable to the mono French dub, also consistently proves its might, especially when François de Roubaix's superlative score fills the soundtrack.
Most of the extras here have been carried over from Blue Underground's prior Blu-ray and DVD editions, including the self-serious and esoteric commentary featuring director Harry Kümel and a second with actor John Karlen and journalist David Del Valle that verges on proving Kümel's apparent reservations about heterosexual masculinity entirely justified. You've got to love an actor who all but thanks the gay community for worshipping him and, in the same minute, licks his lips over his female co-stars, wishing he could go back and kiss them all over again. Not that Kümel and co-writer and co-producer Pierre Drouot prove much better when, as they're taking a camera crew on a tour of the hotel locations where they shot Daughters of Darkness, they take pot shots at Danielle Ouimet's allegedly robust measurements. Both Ouimet and Liza Minnelli look-alike Andrea Rou get a word in, and it's a little saddening that the late Delphine Seyrig didn't end up getting the same chance. All this chauvinism gets balanced by the inclusion of a third commentary featuring critic Kat Ellinger, whose enthusiasm for the film (and its restoration) is infectious from the start. Ellinger spent a decade writing Devil's Advocates: Daughters of Darkness, and the knowledge that she brings to her commentary is enriched by conversations she had with Kümel at various points. No inclusion of Vicente Aranda's The Blood Spattered Bride this time around, but de Roubaix's score is included on its own separate disc. Finally, this three-disc set comes with a collectible booklet that includes a new essay by former Fangoria editor-in-chief Michael Gingold.
Making its 4K UHD debut, Daughters of Darkness gets a significant facelift from Blue Underground alongside a smattering of new extras.
Cast: Delphine Seyrig, Danielle Ouimet, John Karlen, Andrea Rau Director: Harry Kümel Screenwriter: Pierre Drouot, Jean Ferry, Harry Kümel Distributor: Blue Underground Running Time: 100 min Rating: NR Year: 1971 Release Date: October 27, 2020 Buy: Video
Blu-ray Review: Henry King's The Gunfighter on the Criterion Collection
This disc sheds light on an underrated, mournful western that anticipated the genre's revisionism roughly a decade later.4
The protagonist of Henry King's The Gunfighter will seem familiar to audiences of the revisionist westerns that surfaced in the late 1950s and flourished in the '60s and '70s. Loosely based on Old West outlaw Johnny Ringo, Gregory Peck's Jimmy Ringo is a legendary killer with a gun that's said to be as fast as Wyatt Earp's, yet he's beyond taking pleasure in such stature. He's a solitary and regretful man in his mid-30s and carries the weight of his reputation in his anguished angular frame. In the film's opening, we see Ringo kill a young hotshot looking to make a name for himself, and whom Ringo gives multiple chances to walk away. We keep hearing of how violent Ringo once was, yet what we see is a likable, tentative, assured person who desperately wishes to be left alone. And this contrast—between what we hear and what we see of Ringo—is intensified immeasurably by Peck's performance.
Seen today, The Gunfighter has an incongruous element that many of its revisionist offspring lack. One may expect to see Warren Oates or Robert Ryan in the role of a taciturn, melancholy outlaw, as Peck is popularly associated with characters who embody a bedrock of shaman-like decency. But like the unduly sentimentalized James Stewart, Peck was willing to toy with this persona, which wasn't cemented in 1950 at the time of The Gunfighter's release. By this point, Peck had given what's still his riskiest performance as the horny villain in King Vidor's hallucinatory 1946 film Duel in the Sun, and had mined subtler forms of sexual obsession in Alfred Hitchcock's The Paradine Case the following year. Which is to say that Peck as a killer may have been less startling for audiences seeing The Gunfighter for the first time in 1950.
Regardless of context, Peck doesn't even attempt to conjure the evil of an iconic killer, as his Jimmy Ringo is refined and unruffled, seemingly untouched by violence, and this disjunction is the point here. King's film is a tall tale—or, more accurately, a resonant celebrity myth constructed by a person who no longer wishes to play it. The relationships between Ringo and the residents of a town called Cayenne, where he holes up for a morning, suggest a parallel for how modern icons are both empowered and entrapped by their disciples. Ringo's failure to look the part of the killer, which triggers much of the violence that occurs in The Gunfighter, mirrors how many of us expect our favorite athletes, actors, and singers to be more than mere people. The film understands such an expectation to be a dangerous kind of dehumanization.
King and screenwriters William Bowers and William Sowers, working from a story co-written by filmmaker André De Toth, cannily physicalize the notion of entrapment by celebrity throughout. Ringo hides out in a saloon from various fans, as well from enemies looking to kill him, in order to avenge either nonexistent sleights or incidents that weren't Ringo's fault. And all the while, King and cinematographer Arthur C. Miller accentuate the vastness of the saloon while vividly establishing the spatial relationships between the bar and the surrounding buildings, imparting the sense that Ringo could get plugged anytime from anywhere.
The claustrophobia of the setting and the compact time period recall subsequent modernist western prototypes such as Fred Zimmerman's High Noon and Delmer Daves's 3:10 to Yuma. King also savors intimate moments of small-town American life, detailing, say, the specifics of shopping for potatoes and onions, or of the day-to-day trials faced by Marshal Mark Strett (Millard Mitchell), who has a relationship with Ringo that evokes the one between William Holden and Robert Ryan's characters in Sam Peckinpah's seminal The Wild Bunch. The film's supporting characters indicate a flawed yet vibrant society that Ringo has divorced himself from via violence, while his long moments of thoughtfulness suggest atonement.
Yet Ringo's ironic decency isn't without sentimentality. The Gunfighter is highly critical of the young guns looking to bring down Ringo, while the protagonist himself, who once lived this sort of life, is uncriticized and unexamined—accepted by the filmmakers wholly as a doomed member of the reformed. If Ringo had shown even a trace of the crazy swagger that was said to once drive him—the kind of swagger that Michael Bien gave to a much different conception of the character in George P. Cosmatos's 1993 western Tombstone—the film would have more bite. Think also of Clint Eastwood's Will Munny in Unforgiven, or of the general air of hopelessness and viciousness that drives De Toth's later, somewhat similarly plotted Day of the Outlaw. However, Peck communicates a supreme, restrained longing that quietly envelopes the film, imbuing it with a haunting, confessional grandeur. Like many postwar noirs, The Gunfighter is about a man who already knows he's a ghost.
Per the disc's liner notes, this 4K restoration was undertaken by the Twentieth Century Fox Restoration Department in 2015. The image here is spotless: pristine and healthy, with sharp whites and rich, weighty blacks. This clarity particularly emphasizes the stature of Arthur C. Miller's gorgeous deep-focus cinematography, which suggests the work of Gregg Toland. The disc's single sound track, in English LPCM 1.0, is correspondingly nuanced, intensifying the film's influential use of diegetic sounds to establish location and magnify suspense.
Two superb new supplements discuss the careers of director Henry King and editor Barbara McLean. Filmmaker, writer, and archivist Gina Telaroli offers an overview of King's life, claiming that he was underrated because he lacked the flash of such contemporaries as John Ford and Raoul Walsh. Telaroli portrays King as a humble man and astute collaborator who was fascinated with the internal functioning of specific communities, such as a fair in State Fair, the military in 12 O'Clock High, and the western town of this film. Intriguingly, Telaroli compares King to documentarian Frederick Wiseman, perhaps the most famous portraitist of social infrastructure. Meanwhile, film historian J.E. Smyth charts the influence of McLean, who worked closely with King on several productions and was prized by studio head Daryl Zanuck as an auteur in her own right. McLean rose through the studio system and became so influential that she would sit on sets and tell directors when they needed to shoot more coverage for her cut, which often included working with the sound elements as well.
Nineteen-fifty was a big year for McLean, who not only edited The Gunfighter, which Smyth analyzes in exhilarating detail, but also Joseph L. Mankiewicz's All About Eve, which illustrated her gift for balancing spectacle with performance. McLean's accomplishments are incredible for anyone, let alone a woman working in a male-dominated industry in 1950, though Smyth pushes back against this perception, reminding us of the enormous role that women played in the shaping of classic Hollywood. Two archive supplements allow us to hear from the subjects themselves: audio excerpts of McLean, from 1970, and King, from 1971, from interviews that were both conducted by historian Thomas R. Stempel for the AFI's Oral History Collection. These interviews offer more context about each filmmaker's career and their work within the studio system. Rounding out a slim but noteworthy package is a booklet featuring K. Austin Collins's essay "You Can't Go Home Again," which beautifully contextualizes The Gunfighter's melancholia within the framework of postwar America.
With this characteristically beautiful disc, Criterion sheds light on an underrated, mournful western that anticipated the genre's revisionism roughly a decade later.
Cast: Gregory Peck, Helen Westcott, Millard Mitchell, Jean Parker, Karl Malden, Skip Homeier, Anthony Ross, Verna Felton, Ellen Corby, Richard Jaeckel Director: Henry King Screenwriter: William Bowers, William Sellers Distributor: The Criterion Collection Running Time: 84 min Rating: NR Year: 1950 Release Date: October 20, 2020 Buy: Video
Review: Solid Metal Nightmares: The Films of Shinya Tsukamoto on Arrow Blu-ray
This impeccable box set allows you to follow the development of one of contemporary Japanese cinema's true visionaries.5
Since he first emerged on the international film scene with 1989's Tetsuo: The Iron Man, Shinya Tsukamoto has evolved one of the most distinctive bodies of work within contemporary Japanese cinema. What's more, he's something of a one-man band—acting in, writing, directing, editing, and production designing his films. Arrow Video's impressively compiled Solid Metal Nightmares: The Films of Shinya Tsukamoto contains eight feature films and two shorts, roughly half of Tsukamoto's output over the last 30-plus years. The set provides an ideal opportunity to trace the emergence and development of the filmmaker's key themes and visual motifs.
Though the individual surface textures of the films included in this box set may vary from, to take just one example, the harsh alienating cityscapes of his early films to some of the more bucolically inclined latter-day works, there are a few thematic constants that run like a scarlet thread throughout Tsukamoto's filmography. There's the ubiquitous emotional triangle (love, per se, not necessarily factoring into events), often with the focus on a strong, catalyzing woman caught between two very different men; an abiding interest in perverse, or at any rate extremely fetishistic, forms of eroticism; and a fixation on the human body, prone as it is to endless varieties of usually disturbing metamorphosis, in fraught relationship with its immediate environment.
Tetsuo: The Iron Man suggests the love child of a David Lynch and David Cronenberg film, combined with a little of Jan Švankmajer's scrapheap stop-motion animation. The emphasis on the beauty of decay, not to mention the backdrop of a post-industrial heavy metal wasteland, could've been lifted straight from Lynch's Eraserhead, while the progressive fusion of flesh and metal that Tetsuo's nameless salaryman (Tomorô Taguchi) undergoes can be traced back to the biomechanical gun that James Woods pulls out of his gut in Cronenberg's Videodrome. But the ultra-stylish deployment of these tropes is Tsukamoto's own, epitomized by his razor-stropped editing techniques, set to the propulsive post-punk soundtrack of Chu Ishikawa, who went on to score most of Tsukamoto's subsequent films.
The film's eroticism is pronounced, starting with a round of sweaty sex between the protagonist and his girlfriend (Kei Fujiwara), followed by a surreal dream sequence where she sodomizes him with an immense serpentine strap-on, much to his chagrin. Things get even weirder in the final scenes when the wholly transformed salaryman is wooed by the "metal fetishist" (Tsukamoto) into complete bodily fusion. What emerges from their mating is a hybrid man-machine, resembling nothing so much as a giant cock rolling along abandoned Tokyo thoroughfares, as the duo promise to reduce the universe to dust and decay.
Tetsuo II: Body Hammer, from 1992, expands on the original in a number of ways. Gone is the high-contrast monochrome, traded in for full-color film stock that brings out the blues and grays of the modern and more prominently featured Tokyo cityscape. The cast has also been expanded from the central trio—here configured as two brothers (Taguchi and Tsukamoto) and one of their wives (Nobu Kanaoka)—to include a mad scientist (Torauemon Utazawa) and a pair of thyroidal weightlifting skinheads (Hideaki Tezuka and Tomoo Asada). And this time around the male leads are given something of a backstory involving childhood trauma and amnesia. When the repressed memory is finally recovered, it yields Body Hammer's one real fetishistic flourish: an act of simulated fellatio, playing on that old gun-equals-penis metaphorical chestnut, that turns suddenly and gruesomely mind-blowing. Where the first film concluded with homo-eroticized destructiveness, the sequel proffers the reinstitution of the nuclear family, albeit against a backdrop of utter devastation.
Tokyo Fist, from 1995, begins by opposing Tsuda (Tsukamoto), another stereotypical salaryman, and his former schoolfriend, Kojima (Kôji Tsukamoto), who's now a professional boxer. At first, the juxtaposition between the two types is clear-cut, but as the film progresses, and Tsuda takes up amateur boxing, Tsukamoto effectively blurs the boundaries between the two. At the same time, Tsuda's fiancé, Hizuru (Kahori Fujii), explores radical body modification through tattooing and inserting metal rods into her flesh—in an obvious callback to the Tetsuo films. Tokyo Fist is Tsukamoto's Raging Bull, where the body (especially the human face) does penance through its transformation into raw meat.
With its tale of a bereft loner out to score a gun and then some payback, 1998's Bullet Ballet openly invokes another Martin Scorsese film: Taxi Driver. But Tsukamoto ultimately takes the film in a completely unexpected direction, teaming up his version of "God's Lonely Man" (Tsukamoto) with a youth gang whose members, at first, seems to spend most of their free time kicking the shit out of him. What slowly emerges in an idiosyncratic spin on Taxi Driver's notion of the generation gap, with the older man trying to save misguided youth from themselves. But, for Tsukamoto, age and experience only count for so much. Mostly it means you're more proficient at coldly blowing away your competition.
A Snake of June, from 2002, is one of Tsukamoto's most radical productions. It's also his most flagrantly fetishistic. The setup is more or less straightforward, in keeping with your average Japanese pink film: Shutterbug and voyeur Iguchi (Tsukamoto) blackmails a neglected housewife, Rinko (Asuka Kurosawa), into some very public displays of exhibitionism. But about halfway through the script flips, and the timeframe alters, going back over events from the POV of Rinko's husband, Shigehiko (Yûji Kôtari). Then, in its final act, the film shifts gears again into a surreal conflation of all three viewpoints, where time and place seem to come unmoored. Whatever exactly transpires, the film ends with Tsukamoto's most unambiguous embrace of the married couple as a desiring machine geared for mutual gratification.
Where most of Tsukamoto's earlier films had been concerned with acquiring self-knowledge through the process of transformation, 2004's Vital explores techniques of stripping away as a means to wisdom and existential acceptance. Suffering amnesia as the result of a car crash that killed his girlfriend, medical student Hiroshi (Tadanobu Asano) discovers that the body currently on his dissecting table belongs to her. The film suggests that Hiroshi's recollection of his relationship with Ryôko (Nami Tsukamoto) increases the deeper he delves into her innards. Of course, this being a Tsukamoto film, Hiroshi is at the same time engaged in a sadomasochistic relationship with straight-A student Ikumi (Kiki) that involves erotic asphyxiation. The film's final images are a memory of nature's verdant glory. But trying to decode precisely whose memory it is gives the ending the perfect note of ambiguity.
Suggesting a distaff spin on Fight Club, 2011's Kotoko uses Tsukamoto's disorienting editing techniques to put us squarely inside the headspace of the title character (Cocco), who suffers from schizoid visions of aggressive doppelgangers. Despite this description, the film plays for long stretches as a demented romantic comedy, after Kotoko meets famed novelist Seitaro Tanaka (Tsukamoto). Not surprisingly, their relationship consists of her plunging forks into Seitaro's hands and beating him to a bloody pulp, for which he seems genuinely grateful. But when this regimen has her feeling whole again, Seitaro picks up and leaves (it's implied that he's only interested in her so long as she's sick). Both Kotoko and the film soon spiral downward into one of Tsukamoto's most heartbreaking final scenes.
Killing, from 2018, is a gory exercise in turning the conventions of the samurai film against themselves. There's no glory or honor to be found anywhere in this tale of an older samurai, Sawamura (Tsukamoto), recruiting a younger man, Mokunoshin (Sosuke Ikematsu), to go off and fight for their kind in the imperial city of Edo. Rather than Akira Kurosawa, Killing is closer to Harold Pinter in its free-floating air of menace, and Samuel Beckett in its sense of utter stasis, since Sawamura and Mokunoshin never quite manage to leave the small farming village where the film is set. In Vital, the wonders of the natural world imparted a sense of pastoral calm and forbearance. But in Killing, nature is impassive, indifferent—a green world that only serves all the better to set off those prodigious gouts of arterial spray.
There's little information about source materials in the set's accompanying book, other than the bald disclaimer: "HD transfers provided by the Nikkatsu Corporation." Luckily, the films collected here look excellent overall, certainly several noticeable steps above previous DVD releases. There are only two relatively minor caveats: A Snake of June displays some persistent distortion at the top and/or bottom of the frame, and the SD video origins of Haze (not to mention its murky lighting schemes) leave the transfer looking noisier than usual. The films are all provided with Master Audio tracks that range from mono to 5.1 surround, all of which do fine by the films' percussive sound design and evocative scores from Chu Ishikawa, which run the musical gamut in style from hardcore industrial to synth-heavy prog rock.
Packed inside the slipcase for Solid Metal Nightmares: The Films of Shinya Tsukamoto alongside the four individual jewel cases is a double-sided, foldout poster with newly commissioned cover art on one side and fresh artwork for Tetsuo: The Iron Man on the other. There's also a nicely illustrated hardcover book with typically incisive essays from Kat Ellinger and Jasper Sharp on certain overarching aspects of Tsukamoto's filmography.
All 10 films come with commentary tracks from Tom Mes, who literally wrote the book on Tsukamoto's films: 2005's Iron Man: The Cinema of Shinya Tsukamoto. The tracks were recorded chronologically, as Mes often points out, making it all the easier to track the development of (as well as variations on) some of the filmmaker's predominant visual motifs and thematic preoccupations. Not surprisingly, Mes is deeply versed in all things Tsukamoto, and delivers his comments in a low-key, occasionally humorous style.
Jasper Sharp's visual essay "An Assault on the Senses" lays the groundwork for an appreciation of Tsukamoto's themes and techniques. Extensive archival interviews with Tsukamoto cover all the films, including one from earlier this year that spans his entire career. He remains a perceptive explicator of his own work, touching on aspects of his life and filmmaking from early childhood fears to his unabashed love of celluloid as a medium. Finally, there are archival behind-the-scenes featurettes for A Snake of June, Vital, and Haze, as well as the requisite trailers, image galleries, and even some music videos.
Arrow Video's impeccable box set allows you to follow the development of one of contemporary Japanese cinema's true visionaries.
Cast: Shinya Tsukamoto, Tomorô Taguchi, Kei Fujiwara, Nobu Kanaoka, Torauemon Utazawa, Hideaki Tezuka, Tomoo Asada, Kahori Fujii, Kôji Tsukamoto, Kirina Mano, Tatsuya Nakamura, Takahiro Murase, Asuka Kurosawa, Yûji Kôtari, Tadanobu Asano, Nami Tsukamoto, Kiki, Cocco, Yu Aoi, Sosuke Ikematsu Director: Shinya Tsukamoto Screenwriter: Shinya Tsukamoto, Cocco Distributor: Arrow Video Running Time: 754 min Rating: NR Year: 1987 - 2018 Release Date: May 26, 2020 Buy: Video
Review: Sidney J. Furie's The Ipcress File on KL Studio Classics Blu-ray
Kino's release of Furie's seminal spy film boasts a strong A/V presentation and an abundance of fascinating extras.4
From the opening staccato notes of John Barry's lilting score, so redolent of his music for the early Bond films, Sidney J. Furie's The Ipcress File is very much in conversation with the spy franchise that rose to pop-cultural prominence in the early 1960s. Along with Barry, producer Harry Saltzman and editor Peter Hunt also joined in on this new endeavor after working on the first several 007 films, with the initial directive of making a low-budget knockoff. But Furie and cinematographer Otto Heller had other ideas, making a highly stylized, moody, and deliberately paced spy thriller that strives for an artful deconstruction of the Bond-iverse.
In attempting to bring a gritty realism and distinctly middle-class flavor to the milieu of international spycraft, The Ipcress File directly counters the more fantastical elements of the Bond series and deglamorizes the life and work of an intrepid, continent-hopping secret agent. When the film's hero, Harry Palmer (Michael Caine), awakens blurry-eyed, putting on his thick pair of glasses before going about his mundane morning tasks, he feels very much like an ordinary bloke. He's not the kind of guy who will turn heads as he walks by and, aside from a knowingly ridiculous shot where a female agent, Jean (Sue Lloyed), gazes excitedly down at his crotch as he stuffs his gun into his pants, Palmer's sexual prowess is a non-factor—particularly compared to Sean Connery's Bond, whose carnal appetites are ever threatening to burst through the surface of his cool demeanor.
At one point in the film, Harry is described by his boss, Major Dalby (Nigel Green), as "insubordinate, insolent, and a trickster, perhaps with criminal tendencies." But Caine's performance is so muted, his face rarely changing from a placid expression, that he comes across more as aloof and unflappable than the cad that Dalby describes. The man wouldn't be out of a place in the minimalist noir world of Jean-Pierre Melville, but the absurd, convoluted story of The Ipcress File, complete with a high-tech MacGuffin, and its high stylization couldn't be further from Melville's stripped-down aesthetic approach to the crime film.
Nary a shot in Furie's film goes without a canted camera angle or a busy mise-en-scène with objects deliberately obfuscating that action on screen. This is a handsomely shot film, and it's a clever touch on the part of the filmmakers to make it seem as if the camera is often hidden from view, as if the audience were spying on the action. But the use of such techniques is simply too imprudent, with off-kilter shots being deployed with equal aplomb in lighthearted romantic scenes and the more suspenseful sequences, where they feel more organic.
The Ipcress File's narrative also feels a bit at odds with the filmmakers' intentions. When the film is focused on Harry as he goes about the legwork of tracking down a missing British scientist (Aubrey Richards) or sussing out a potential mole in his office, it's firmly grounded in the workaday life of a secret agent. But as the larger, overarching elements of the plot take center stage, namely the revelation of the meaning behind "IPCRESS," the film veers into the similarly ludicrous terrain of your average Bond caper. In the end, The Ipcress File abandons its more low-key, nuts-and-bolts depiction of spycraft, and as such morphs from the pure antithesis of a 007 romp into something far closer to a self-serious send-up.
Kino's transfer of a 2K restoration boasts a sharp, richly detailed image with color balancing that stays true to the film's mostly drab color scheme, while still presenting a fairly high dynamic range of colors and strong black levels that help to emphasize cinematographer Otto Heller's moody lighting. Grain levels are consistently solid and even, helping to retain much of the texture and depth of the original 35mm. The lossless audio is crisp and clear, revealing the depth of the mix in the film's few fight sequences and in John Barry's wonderful score.
Kino has gone the extra mile with the features on this disc. The first of two commentary tracks consists of a newly recorded and lively discussion between film historians Troy Howarth and Daniel Kremer, who profess their fondness for the film and make a compelling case for the value of director Sidney J. Furie's lesser known work, like Leather Boys. The conversation also covers the film's attempts to function as a deglamorized reaction to the early James Bond films and offers insight into the visual style employed by Furie and cinematographer Otto Heller, whose work here influenced the great Vittorio Storraro. On the second commentary track, Furie and editor Peter Hunt cover the film's production issues, particularly the tensions between Furie and producer Harry Saltzman and the odd circumstances of the film's editing process, which led Hunt to essentially have final cut before Furie ever saw the final product.
In an entertaining 20-minute archival interview, Michael Caine talks about his outrageous first day on the set when Furie burnt a copy of the script in front of him, deciding to have the film rewritten as they shot. He also recalls how he met Saltzman, who signed the actor to his first big movie contract after seeing him in Cy Endfield's Zulu. Caine goes on to recount several amusing stories about the cantankerous producer, including how the two of them decided to come up with the most boring name they could think of for the film's protagonist. The disc also comes with an interview with production designer Ken Adams, who describes the lengthy location scouting process, and a short Trailers from Hell segment focusing on the film's score.
Kino Lorber's release of Sidney J. Furie's seminal British spy film boasts a strong A/V presentation and an abundance of fascinating extras.
Cast: Michael Caine, Nigel Green, Guy Doleman, Sue Lloyd, Gordon Jackson, Aubrey Richards, Frank Gatliff, Thomas Baptiste, Freda Bamford, Anthony Blackshaw Director: Sidney J. Furie Screenwriter: Bill Canaway, James Doran Distributor: Kino Lorber Running Time: 109 min Rating: NR Year: 1965 Release Date: October 27, 2020 Buy: Video
Blu-ray Review: Bong Joon-ho's Parasite on the Criterion Collection
Bong historic international breakthrough receives a superlative Blu-ray package from Criterion.4
The first film Bong Joon-ho has made in 10 years that's set entirely in his native South Korea, Parasite finds the eccentric, genre-driven auteur scaling back the high-concept ambitions of his prior two films, the post-apocalyptic Snowpiercer and the globe-trotting ecological fable Okja, in favor of examining a close-knit family dynamic that's reminiscent of the one at the center of The Host, Bong's 2007 breakout monster flick. Except this time the monster isn't some amphibious abomination that results from extreme genetic mutation, but the insidious forces of class and capital that divide a society's people.
In a cramped apartment, a family of four are sent into a panic when the WiFi network they've been pirating goes offline. Ki-jung (Park So-dam) and her brother, Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik), scurry about as their father, Ki-taek (Song Kang-ho), instructs them to try holding their phones up to the ceiling, and to stand in every nook and cranny of their home until they find a new connection. All the while, Chung-sook (Jang Hye-jin) bemoans her husband's laziness and prods him to find work. But it's Ki-woo who pulls his family out of their impoverished life, when he gets an opportunity to tutor Da-hye (Jung Ziso), daughter of the rich Park family.
Parasite essentially puts an absurdist spin on both the concept behind Hirokazu Kore-eda's sentimental Shoplifters from last year and the bitter class commentary that underpins Nagisa Oshima's 1969 film Boy. Bong positions Ki-taek and his family as grifters so adept at pulling off cons as a unit that they successfully convince the Parks to bring them all into their employ, in one capacity or another. Ki-jung becomes an "arts therapy" teacher for the Park clan's precocious young son, Da-song (Jung Hyeon-jun), and, later, the rich family's driver and nanny are pushed out of their jobs through elaborate scandals manufactured by the poor family, in order to install Ki-taek and Moon-gwang, respectively, into those roles.
Bong pulls off a neat trick by insinuating that the parasite of his film's title must be Ki-taek's family; after all, they certainly live off the "host" to which they've attached themselves. But in typical fashion, Bong starts to lace Parasite with all sorts of complications that begin to challenge the audience's perceptions—left turns and big reveals that not only bring new layers to the film's social commentary, but also develop the characters and their attendant psychologies, which encompass the psychic toll of shame, lack of empathy, and deception.
The twists in this narrative also activate some of Bong's more inspired and sociopolitically loaded visual ideas. At one point in the film, the slum village where Ki-taek and his family live is devastated by a massive flood during a night of severe weather. Meanwhile, in the upper-class neighborhood where the Park clan lives, a backyard camping trip is ruined by rain. The particular layout of one unexpected setting, which sees members of the lower class literally occupying a space below the rich, doubles as an ingenious metaphor for class subjugation. Remarkably, Bong even finds room for a commentary on Korean peninsula relations.
The only thing that keeps Parasite just slightly below the tier of Bong's best work, namely The Host and his underrated and similarly themed 2000 debut film, Barking Dogs Never Bite, is the overstuffed pile-up of incident that occurs toward the end. This is frequently an issue for Bong's films (both Snowpiercer and Okja climax with busy and disorientating action set pieces that lose sight of their characters in the process), and here it manifests in a boldly gruesome scene of violence that's undercut by a lengthy and rather contrived denouement.
Ultimately, Bong's excoriating indictment of South Korea's dehumanizing social culture isn't far removed from that of Lee Chang-dong's Burning, but he mounts it with a dazzling control of genre conventions that he continues to seamlessly bend to his absurd comic rhythms. Parasite also reinstates the emotional core that's been missing from Bong's recent work, and even feigns a concise narrative structure. It's the kind of bold and uncompromising work that confirms why Bong is one of our most exciting auteurs, for how his sociocultural criticisms can be so biting, so pungent, when they're imbued with such great focus and sense of intent.
The transfer on this Criterion edition remains faithful to Parasite's theatrical exhibition, boasting sharp detail and vibrant color; the subtle visual and textural delights nestled within Bong Joon-ho's stark compositions are perfectly preserved throughout. A second disc includes the film's black-and-white version, but not unlike the similar retooling that Mad Max: Fury Road received, color is such a spectacularly rendered, carefully considered element of the original cut that this version feels superfluous. The soundtrack on both cuts is as enveloping as the film's visual schema, calling particular attention to the retro sci-fi aspects of Jung Jae-il's eerie, theremin-filled score while keeping dialogue and ambient effects clear in the mix.
With the film already available on 4K, the appeal of this Blu-ray release comes down to its extras, and on that front it certainly delivers. For one, the commentary track announces itself as a deep dive right of the gate, with Bong and critic Tony Rayns swiftly tying elements of Parasite to the director's prior films and explaining the symbolism buried in minutiae of characterization and design. Interviews are included with crew members, including editor Yang Jinmo and cinematographer Hong Kyung-pyo, who notes how he crafted the film's look by making wide-angle lenses that didn't distort the dimensions of the image. Bong himself has a lively discussion with critic Darcy Paquet, who changes things up for the press campaign-beleaguered director by using free-associative prompts to let him dictate the flow of the conversation. Bong and fellow South Korean auteur Park Chan-wook discuss the legacy of the New Korean Cinema movement, while footage from Parasite's Cannes premiere and a Master Class lecture with Bong are also included. Storyboard comparisons with the final film demonstrate the director's carefully mapped planning, and a booklet essay by critic Inkoo Kang that unpacks the film as the culmination of its maker's career.
Bong Joon-ho's historic international breakthrough receives a superlative Blu-ray package, though it inadvertently calls attention to Criterion's slowness in pivoting to UHD.
Cast: Song Kang-ho, Choi Woo-shik, Lee Sun-kyun, Park So-dam, Cho Yeo-jeong, Lee Jung-eun, Jang Hye-jin, Jung Ziso, Jung Hyeon-jun Director: Bong Joon-ho Screenwriter: Bong Joon-ho, Han Jin-won Distributor: The Criterion Collection Running Time: 131 min Rating: NR Year: 2019 Buy: Video, Soundtrack
Blu-ray Review: Stephen Frears's The Hit on the Criterion Collection
The Hit is an enigmatic, existential fable about crime and punishment.3.5
An unconventional British gangster film from director Stephen Frears, The Hit largely avoids the usual trappings of the genre—in particular, the penchant for ultraviolence on display in roughly contemporary films like The Krays—opting instead for a thoughtful, even philosophical, character study. For one thing, mob informer Willie Parker (Terence Stamp), actually reads. For another, he attempts to live his life according to the implications and complications suggested by these books. Not only that, but his books serve as plot points both major, providing the existential and metaphysical themes that crop up later in the film, and minor, as in his extensive collection of books, which come in handy as projectiles in an early scene where a gang of youths attempt to abduct him. Talk about your Foucauldian "power-knowledge."
Employing a series of sinuous mobile crane and tracking shots, often combined with wide-angle lenses for some fashionable distortion, the film's prologue, set in the early 1970s, succinctly lays out the requisite backstory: From his safe house, we follow informer Parker into the courtroom, where his testimony against leading mob bosses clinches his subsequent fate. Then, out of nowhere, the accused gangsters break out into an impromptu rendition of "We'll Meet Again," a moment that surreally blends menace and mirth.
The film then flashes forward 10 years, shifting location to a remote, desolate Spanish village. Parker is captured and handed over to two British hit men, who constitute your somewhat stereotypically mismatched pair: experienced, hardened killer Braddock (John Hurt) and overeager tyro Myron (Tim Roth). At one point, Braddock uses a photo of Stamp taken from his role in Poor Cow for the purposes of identification, leading Frears to joke in the commentary included on this disc that he'd got there years before Steven Soderbergh's The Limey.
A battle of wills and wits ensues: Parker attempts to play the hit men off one another, suggesting to Braddock that Myron's inexperience makes him unreliable and then planting the notion with Myron that Braddock is losing his nerve. All the while, a young Spanish woman (Laura del Sol), taken hostage along the way, simply tries to stay alive. As the foursome make their way toward a rendezvous in Paris, both Braddock and Myron have occasion to inquire after Parker's apparent lack of concern over his inevitable fate. He replies that he's had plenty of time to ponder and claims to have eventually reached a sense of acceptance. This existential quietude comes, at least in part, from his extensive reading. An earlier scene showed him acquiring a book that, judging from its Spanish title, might well be a copy of Italian poet and novelist Cesare Pavese's diary The Business of Living. Pavese, who committed suicide in 1950, emphasized throughout his writings man's inherent isolation and alienation, and frequently treated the motif of betrayal—themes that are just as germane to Frears's film.
As the characters near the French border, Parker recounts the legend of Roland and Olivier making their suicidal stand against the Saracens during the Battle of Roncevaux Pass in the Pyrenees, which they are just then traversing. The chivalrous Roland represents a code of honor and conduct that stands in pointed contrast to the actions and activities of the British gangsters. The film's central scene, a terse confrontation between Braddock and Parker, takes place in a forest at night. (Scenes late in the film provide in juxtaposition a verdant, fecund nature against the scorched and arid desert of earlier ones.) The ineluctable topic is death. Parker opines: "It's just a moment. We're here. Then we're not here. We're somewhere else…maybe. And it's as natural as breathing. Why should we be scared?"
Is it all a ruse? Does Parker, in fact, harbor some grand scheme for liberation? The film's conclusion suggests that Parker has attained his hard-won resignation only by envisioning a timeline. When his death is still remote, set for a certain day, and expected to come in a certain manner, he remains calm. But when things change, he breaks down. Calm and philosophical restraint go out the window, so to speak. The desperate, craven urge to live overwhelms, and it's a shock to the characters, just as much as it to the audience.
In the The Hit's memorable final scene, Braddock attempts to cross the border into France disguised as a backpacker. But Spanish police, who we've seen previously dogging the gangsters' trail, intervene and corner him in a lamp store, chasing him down amid a myriad light fixtures. The resultant contrast between abundant light and incipient darkness, as Braddock faces his own certain demise, makes for a truly compelling final flourish.
The Criterion Collection's 2K restoration looks terrific, a serious step up from their already pretty solid 2009 DVD release, which went out of print years ago. Colors are brighter and more deeply saturated, which especially pays off in later scenes set among the verdant wilderness. Grain levels are well-managed and flesh tones lifelike. The LPCM mono track is clean and clear, nicely conveying composer Paco de Lucia's surprisingly menacing flamenco score, not to mention the clangorous title theme from Eric Clapton.
Criterion ports over the slim-pickings bonus materials from their earlier DVD release. The commentary track is an expertly blended mosaic of input from director Stephen Frears and screenwriter Peter Prince (playing off each other nicely), editor Mick Audsley, and actors Tim Roth and the late, lamented John Hurt (all of whom fly solo). It's an eminently worthwhile track that covers a lot of ground, from the philosophy of shot selection and film editing to a near-death experience when Tim Roth (who couldn't drive) decided to test his skills with Hurt and Terence Stamp in the backseat. There's a 1988 episode of TV series Parkinson One to One featuring Stamp, who discusses his working-class Cockney roots, finding fame, becoming the face of 1960s Swinging London, and trying to put the moves on Rita Hayworth. Stamp comes across as a funny, introspective sort, and it's a delightful 37 minutes. Finally, there's a foldout booklet with an essay from Graham Fuller, who contextualizes The Hit as a British gangster film, a road movie, and a philosophical character study.
Stephen Frears's The Hit, which receives a fine 2K upgrade but no new bonus materials from Criterion, is an enigmatic, existential fable about crime and punishment.
Cast: John Hurt, Tim Roth, Laura del Sol, Terence Stamp, Bill Hunter, Fernando Rey, Jim Broadbent Director: Stephen Frears Screenwriter: Peter Prince Distributor: The Criterion Collection Running Time: 98 min Rating: R Year: 1984 Release Date: October 20, 2020 Buy: Video
Review: Darren Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream on Lionsgate 4K Ultra HD
Aronofsky's influential hellride of a film gets a sturdy 4K upgrade and a few new extras that extol its technical merits.4
Most viewers feel that Darren Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream is either a gut-wrenching, formally adventurous masterpiece or an ugly, flashy piece of empty-headed propaganda. Thing is, both camps are sort of right. Aronofsky's sophomore feature is undeniably accomplished, fully realized in its single-minded, fearless intensity, but it's also, quite frankly, pretty melodramatic and dumb. Requiem for a Dream is an uncompromised, relentless descent into hell with just one thing on its mind: Drugs are really, really bad for you.
Requiem for a Dream is also the film that firmly established Aronofsky as a primarily visual filmmaker. His 1998 feature-length debut, Pi, was stylish but empty; later, he would elevate The Fountain's philosophical hooey through sheer operatic force of will and The Wrestler's solid but rote script through an expressive and soulful appropriation of the Dardenne brothers' close-up tracking shots. If those later films are more successful than this one, it's because their material could be elevated by style. In Requiem for a Dream, there's nothing going on but style, and ultimately, that just isn't enough.
For a while, though, it almost is. Requiem for a Dream's first 30 minutes are some kind of tour de force, exploding out of the gate as the expression of a unique cinematic voice and introducing the stylistic techniques that structure the entirety of the film. Establishing Requiem for a Dream's parallel editing schema, Aronofsky and editor Jay Rabinowitz cut between its central characters—Sara Goldfarb (Ellen Burstyn), her junkie son, Harry (Jared Leto), and Harry's best buddy, Tyrone (Marlon Wayans), and girlfriend, Marion (Jennifer Connelly)—and their respective drugs of choice: heroin and ecstasy for Harry and Tyrone, heroin and cocaine for Marion, and sugar, television, and, eventually, amphetamines for Sara.
Utilizing an entire stable of visual tricks, from split-screens to slow- and fast-motion to rhythmically repeated inserts, these early moments are an exciting and purely cinematic experience. One scene, in which a moment of tenderness between Harry and Marion is presented through split-screened close-ups, may be the finest sequence of Aronofsky's career, exquisitely expressing the characters' intimacy as well as their fundamental distance.
Taking place over the course of one year, structured into four chapters tied to the seasons, the film starts bleakly and just gets bleaker, and as it progresses these stylistic decisions start to feel more and more oppressive. This is obviously by design, but there are only so many times you can show the effect of cocaine through fast motion or mental deterioration through fish-eye lenses before the techniques start to feel less expressive than lazy and obvious—crutches for a filmmaker who used up his entire bag of tricks in the first 30 minutes.
Narratively, as Requiem for a Dream spirals toward its nightmarish finale, things start to get so melodramatically awful for the characters that the film starts to seem like a modern-day equivalent to Reefer Madness, never so much as in the ugly way it introduces the character of a black drug dealer, Big Tim (Keith David), solely to exploit audience disgust at seeing a white woman taken advantage of by a black man. And no matter how relentlessly upsetting and effective Requiem for a Dream's climax is—and it is effective, a self-contained masterpiece of aggressive cross-cutting and sound design—by that point it's almost impossible to shake the image of Aronofsky as a gym coach hysterically lecturing his class on the dangers of drug use. Sorry, but this reviewer got enough of that in high school.
Lionsgate Home Entertainment's 2009 Blu-ray release boasted a strong image and even stronger audio. Its only egregious flaw was the occasionally soft edge, which isn't evident on either the Blu-ray or 4K Ultra HD disc included with this new release. The grain level is consistent and cinematic throughout, with the 4K exhibiting stronger color saturation and more accurate skin tones. The film's relentless sound editing and Clint Mansell's remarkable score is perfectly presented, never sacrificing the clarity of the dialogue.
The two commentary tracks, one featuring director Darren Aronofsky and the other cinematographer Matthew Libatique, have been ported over from the prior standard-definition and Blu-ray editions of Requiem for a Dream. Aronofsky's remains the most engaging of the two, as its enriched by his recollections of growing up in Brooklyn, among other things, while Libatique's is good listening for anyone fascinated by the film's technical attributes. Four new special features are included on the 4K and all of them make clear that Requiem for a Dream would not have been possible without Pi. In a 16-minute conversation, Ellen Burstyn remembers watching Aronofsky's debut feature and it convincing her that "he's an artist" and how she carried her experience of playing Mary Tyrone in Long Day's Journey into Night into her role here. Clint Mansell discusses moving to New York, meeting Aronofsky, working on Pi, and the genre influences and disparate sonic elements of his score for Requiem for a Dream. Elsewhere, Dr. Bruce Isaacs, author of The Art of Pure Cinema and Toward a New Film Aesthetic, lavishes coolly hyperbolic praise on the film's style. The extras are rounded out by five minutes of behind-the-scenes footage.
On the occasion of its 20th anniversary, Darren Aronofsky's influential hellride of a film gets a sturdy 4K upgrade and a few new extras that extol its technical merits.
Cast: Ellen Burstyn, Jared Leto, Jennifer Connelly, Marlon Wayans, Christopher McDonald, Mark Margolis, Louise Lasser, Marcia Jean Kurtz, Sean Gullette, Keith David, Dylan Baker Director: Darren Aronofsky Screenwriter: Hubert Selby Jr., Darren Aronofsky Distributor: Lionsgate Home Entertainment Running Time: 102 min Rating: R Year: 2000 Release Date: October 13, 2020 Buy: Video
Review: Helmut Käutner's Black Gravel on KL Studio Classics Blu-ray
Black Gravel is a bleak yet vital interrogation of West Germany's struggles after World War II.4
We often hear little about the German films made between Leni Riefenstahl's propaganda films for the Nazi Party and the works of the New German Cinema of the late '60s, almost as if the German film industry were at a standstill during that time. But during and after World War II, the industry was churning out the escapist Heimatfilm—literally, homeland film—even after nearly all of its most talented directors had fled to the United States and France.
One of the few great filmmakers not affiliated with the Nazi Party to remain in Germany was Helmut Käutner, whose melodramas shot during WWI, such as Romance in a Minor Key and Under the Bridges, have an emotional sensitivity and fluid camerawork that recalls his compatriot Max Ophüls's work. But because of Käutner's suspect decision to continue working in his homeland throughout the '40s—or, perhaps, his inability to leave—his films received little fanfare outside of Germany, aside from European film festivals.
Once Käutner was out from under the censorial thumb of Adolf Hilter and Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Party's minister of propaganda, he sought to make amends, expressing his disdain for Nazism and directly addressing Germany's recent transgressions through films such as Seven Journeys (the first German film released after WWII) and, later, Black Gravel, a savagely bleak portrait of a wholly corrupt Germany that's yet to come to terms with its wartime legacy. Set in Sohnen, a small village where a U.S. military base was recently built, the latter film conveys the palpable sense of despair and disassociation felt by many Germans, who, at the time, were coping with critical shortages of food and material items. It's an unscrupulous environment whose pervasive depravity is reminiscent of Shohei Imamura's Pigs and Battleships, also released in 1961 and which similarly depicts a country in a self-inflicted state of moral decay, forced to endure the ramifications of an ongoing U.S. military presence in the wake of WWII.
In Black Gravel, nothing is in more abundant supply than the countless vices indulged at one of Sohnen's bars, which doubles as a bordello and caters to German locals and American military personnel alike. Tensions between the two nationalities are unsurprisingly high, but it's the infighting between the Germans, who are involved in everything from pimping to embezzlement, that causes the most damage in Käutner's intense crime drama.
Following the exploits of a truck driver, Robert (Helmut Wildt), involved in a scam to steal a couple of loads of the gravel he delivers each week, the film presents Germany as being stuck in a purgatorial state of recovery. The titular substance takes on a literal, material function in regards to reconstruction, specifically the building of a road around the air force base. But it also serves as a potent metaphor for the volatile state of post-war Germany.
The notion of hiding from one's sins is a recurring motif throughout, and is often symbolically attached to the town's giant gravel pit, which doubles as a makeshift burial ground. Early on, Robert tosses a dog, who was accidentally killed by a coworker, into the gravel pit for an unceremonious burial. This same pit is also used as the grave for a couple who Robert accidentally kills with his truck later in the film. In both cases, although the murder was unintentional, the attempts to escape blame and consequences are very much deliberate.
Käutner's damning film sees a nation of people unwilling or unable to confront their history of violence—a notion further complicated when the owner of the aforementioned dog, Inge (Ingmar Zeisberg), is revealed to be a past lover of Robert's. Where Robert is keen to resume their affair as if nothing happened in the intervening years, Inge dreams of moving to Canada with her American husband and leaving Germany forever behind.
These two opposing impulses—one to return to "glory days" and the other to flee—drive many of the characters' behaviors, yet both point to an inability to confront the reasons behind the German peoples' current state of absolute moral bankruptcy. In dressing this conflict, and an overwhelming sense of paranoia and entrapment, up in the tropes of a thriller, Käutner exhibits his mastery of atmosphere and mood, but the complex social commentary of Black Gravel offers a raw and eye-opening look at Germany at a time when its cinema mostly ignored reality and its true national history was often deliberately kept secret.
For this Blu-ray, Kino has transferred both the uncensored "premiere" version of the film and the slightly shorter, censored "distribution" cut, sourcing a print of the premiere version that was preserved by the Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Foundation in 2016. As the original camera negative was used for most of this preservation, the results are quite impressive, with a high contrast ratio and sharp image that's consistently rich in detail. Scratches are evident from time to time, but the damage is relatively minor and typically visible for only a few seconds at a time. The distribution version is a tad washed out compared to the premiere cut, which, as houses the commentary track included on the disc, is effectively presented as the definitive version. The 16-bit audio track is suitably clear, with clean dialogue throughout.
On his commentary track, German film critic Olaf Möller provides a comprehensive yet accessible analysis of post-WWII cinema in Germany. He highlights the importance of Helmut Käutner's films in West Germany in the mid-20th century and traces the rise and fall of the Heimatfilm, which eventually led to a resurgence of crime films like Black Gravel in the late 1950s and early '60s. Möller also details the controversy surrounding the film based on charges of anti-Semitism that led to one scene being cut for distribution. He clarifies that many Jewish groups disagreed with claims made against the film, as the scene in question clearly aims to sympathize with the former concentration camp prisoner after a racial slur is hurled in his direction. There are occasional dips in the conversation, but this is an indispensable commentary for anyone remotely interested in post-war German films.
Black Gravel is a bleak yet vital interrogation of West Germany's struggles after World War II, and Kino's Region 1 Blu-ray is one of the year's essential releases.
Cast: Helmut Wildt, Ingmar Zeisberg, Hans Cossy, Wolfgang Büttner, Anita Höfer, Heinrich Trimbur, Peter Nestler, Edeltraut Elsner Director: Helmut Käutner Screenwriter: Helmut Käutner, Walter Ulbrich Distributor: Kino Lorber Running Time: 114 min Rating: NR Year: 1961 Release Date: September 1, 2020 Buy: Video
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