THE ZONE

To put it simply, I adore this film. I adore the moody electronic score, I adore Dante Spinotti’s ridiculously colourful cinematography and I adore the way that Michael Mann lines up his shots. However, what I particularly love about this film is the way that it treats the character of Hannibal Lecter as a painstakingly-repressed dark side rather than a scenery-chewing panto dame:

 When Graham visits Lecktor in the hospital, we are told it is because he is hoping to rekindle the creative fires that allow him to project himself into the mind of a killer. However, rather than simply visiting Lecktor in the hospital, Graham reaches out to the disgraced psychiatrist in the hope that his superior understanding of human nature might shed some new light on the case. This act of deference to Lecktor’s superior expertise is deeply troubling when considered alongside Mann’s cinematic blurring of the line between psychologist and psychopath. Indeed, by having Graham turn to Lecktor as part of his own creative process, Mann seems to be suggesting the existence of a symbiotic relationship between the two men. In fact, one could interpret the scene as a sort of vision quest in which the creatively frustrated Graham turns to his painstakingly repressed dark side in order to unblock the empathic powers that will allow him to solve the case.

Mann’s take on Lecter is particularly fascinating as this film was adapted from Thomas Harris’s novel Red Dragon (1981) before Harris even wrote The Silence of the Lambs. In other words, this is a vision of Red Dragon that is completely untainted by the decision to reinvent Lecter as some kind of brain-eating antihero. Released on an absolutely flawless Bluray that makes it look like a brand new film, this re-issue offers an excellent opportunity to rediscover one of the best and most under-rated psychological thrillers of all time.

THE ZONE

The film presents itself partly as a genre spoof and partly as an earnest exercise in splatterpunk excess.  Unfortunately, like many recent American attempts at producing a high-budget exploitation film, the film winds up feeling forced and spread too thinly.  In my review I explain why this should be:

Back in the late 1950s, filmmakers like Roger Corman realised that there was good money to be made in pandering to youthful audiences. This insight spawned a business model whereby young directors were given small pots of money and instructed to go off and produce something sensational and titillating that might appeal to people from their age group. This business model proved remarkably effective and fueled not just the craze for drive-in movies but also the kinds of exploitation film that played in grind-house cinemas all over America. Given that these filmmakers frequently operated with very little guidance beyond the need to ramp up the sex and violence whilst remaining under budget, exploitation filmmaking rapidly became a sort of Darwinian swamp in which ambitious directors experimented with new techniques in the hope that their films would out-compete those of their contemporaries. However, as with all evolutionary processes, exploitation film produced far more failures than it did successes meaning that for every John Carpenter and Dario Argento there were dozens of Uwe Bolls.

Fast-forward 30 years and the kids who grew up watching exploitation films became the cigar-chomping producers who handed out pots of money. Mindful of the market for nostalgia, these producers green-lit a series of high profile projects designed to tap into the market for exploitation-style filmmaking. Cue the emergence of films such as Quentin Tarantino’s Deathproof (2007), Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror (2007), Sam Raimi’s Drag Me To Hell (2009), Patrick Lussier’s Drive Angry (2011), and the entire back catalogue of Neveldine/ Taylor. Though not without its artistic and commercial successes, this grind-house revival suffers for the fact that most of its excesses come not a desperate need to do something radically different in order to stretch a budget and capture an audience but from a deliberate attempt to parody or recapture the insane experiments of the past.

Part of the joy of watching exploitation films lies in their sheer unpredictability. Exploitation filmmakers are so desperate to find an audience that they will do anything to capture our attention and this can produce some really memorable cinematic moments. However, when the director is provided with a lavish budget in order to intentionally recapture that feeling of desperate experimentation, the results invariably feel forced and stage-managed like some grim party where everyone is so desperate to have a good and crazy time that the excess of good will completely smothers all spontaneity and freedom. Technically flawed and way, way, way too long for what is essentially a two joke film, Yakuza Weapon is disappointingly dull.

FilmJuice

The film tells the story of a mother and child that are placed in a witness relocation programme after their abusive husband and father is sent to prison. Intensely nervous and over-protective, Anna refuses to allow her son to sleep in her own bed until she purchases a baby monitor that allows her to hear him sleep. However, once the monitor is plugged in it begins picking up horrific sounds of abuse coming from another device in the same apartment block. Assisted by Helge, a man whose status as the son of an overprotective mother allows him to understand the woman’s desire to protect her son, Anna begins investigating the source of the noises only for her entire life to begin unraveling.

At the heart of Babycall is the complex, unhealthy but ultimately humanising relationship between Helge and Anna. Fresh from her success as the original cinematic Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Noomi Rapace offers us a veneer of faceless maternal anxiety that slowly peels away, revealing more and more humanity as Anna becomes more and more detached from reality. Similarly impressive is Joner who manages to find strength, courage and likeability in a character whose life has been defined by a cowardly willingness to apologise for the actions of a monstrous and tyrannical parent. These twin performances, though entertaining to watch in their own right, provide a sound human basis for what could all too easily have been a directionless attack on abusive parenting. The power of Babycall lies not in the decision to confront the issue of abusive parenting but rather in the capacity to make these types of parent appear sympathetic. Indeed, we feel for Anna because she is afraid and because she loves her son but when that love produces individuals as broken as Helge, we have to ask whether maternal love is really the unambiguously positive thing we have always assumed it to be.

Flawlessly paced, psychologically compelling and full of brilliant twists and turns, Babycall is not only a fantastic psychological thriller, it is also a very brave film indeed. Without wanting to give too much away, it might be worth seeing Philippe Claudel’s I’ve Loved You So Long (2008) before you see Babycall as both films tread quite similar ground (albeit in very different ways).

People with an interest in well-executed psychological thrillers might also want to check out Sletaune’s previous film Next Door (2005), which I reviewed over here.

FilmJuice

Question: Nic Cage plays a flaming skeleton on a motorbike in a film directed by the guys behind Gamer (2009) and Crank 2: High Voltage (2006), what is not to like? Answer: The script. Much like Justin Lin’s Fast Five (2011), Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance is just a few jokes and few decent plot points away from being a really brilliant action film. Without a decent script, the film is simply an inordinately silly and entertaining action romp featuring some brilliant cinematography and some genuinely revolutionary use of 3D:

Most 3D techniques operate by either creating an illusion of depth, or creating the illusion that something on screen is jutting out into the cinema. 3D films create these illusions by forcing your eyes to focus on two different things at the same time, which is why watching 3D films can be a headache-inducing experience. While Neveldine/Taylor make good use of ‘traditional’ 3D effects, they also set out to push the limits of 3D by intentionally recreating those moments where the 3D techniques break down and your brain rebels, forcing you to look away from the screen in disgust. The result is a series of sequences that are both deeply unsettling and entirely appropriate given the context and subject matter. Think of the way in which Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible (2002) used brown notes and violent camera work to induce feelings of unease and you will get some idea of how visceral an experience Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance can be.

Lacking decent dialogue, compelling story-telling or engaging characters, Ghost Rider 2 is almost an art house flick in that its primary pleasures are visual and cinematic rather than narrative. Fans of ground-breaking cinematography and silliness will lap this up, those seeking a more traditional comic book movie may well find themselves shifting in their seats.

The novel begins with Japanese high-society celebrating the accomplishments of Toshiko Tomura. These celebrations initially seem warm and heart-felt but it soon becomes evident that while Japan’s cultural elites are proud of Tomura’s native talent, they are also wary of it. The problem is that, while the novel begins with Toshiko Tomura enjoying all of the success associated with writing a commercially successful and critically acclaimed first novel, her recent success follows hot on the heels of similar successes in the worlds of acting and graphic design. In other words, Toshiko Tomura has tried her hand at a number of different artistic disciplines and has mastered them all before the age of thirty. When seen through the eyes of people who have devoted their entire lives to a single artistic discipline such talent is not merely enviable, it is downright terrifying. Nobody should be able to enter a film and master it immediately and absolutely nobody should be able to re-invent themselves so thoroughly and so successfully.

Sensing a potential scandal and the chance to suck up to Japanese high-society, a sleazy investigative reporter named Aokusa begins to follow Tomura around. Once Aokusa latches on to Tomura, it is not long before he has fallen in love with her and, once he has fallen in love with her, it is not long before he has become obsessed with understanding what makes her tick. After stumbling across what it is that Tomura does when in the privacy of her own home, Aukusa blackmails the writer into telling him her story.

The story that Tomura tells is structured as a series of flashbacks to earlier periods in her life. Each flashback follows the same pattern: A naïve Tomura enters a particular field and latches onto the most talented and well-respected practitioner of that particular art form. Before long, the target of Tomura’s affections is head-over-heels in love with her and Tomura is rapidly acquiring all of their skills. Then, just as the victim readies what will be their greatest work of art, Tomura emerges from their shadow and beats them to the punch by publishing a work that is absolutely identical to the work the victim was planning despite it having been created by Tomura. Obsessed with feelings of betrayal, the victim then destroys themselves either through an ill-conceived act of vengeance or by attempting to get their own work published thereby inviting everyone to see them as little more than a vulgar plagiarist.

Initially, Tezuka uses the journalist to explore the idea that Tomura is nothing more than a play-actor who owes her success to a form of highly evolved pre-emptive plagiarism. However, once Tomura leaves the relative safety of the art world for careers in politics, terrorism, crime and high-finance it rapidly becomes clear that she is doing far more than simply beating her teachers to the punch. However, what it is that she actually does remains something of a mystery as, despite featuring on nearly every single page of the novel, Tomura cannot really be said to be the book’s protagonist. Indeed, the plot of The Book of Human Insects is built around a series of contests between Tomura and the unsympathetic, misogynistic but highly skilled men who attempt to both possess and understand her. However, while Tezuka makes sure that Tomura’s true nature remains frustratingly out of reach, her unsympathetic male opponents are so easy to read that it is almost impossible not to wind up empathising with them. After all, like us, they are fallible humans trying to make sense of a character who is never anything less than alien.

By expecting us to empathise with a bunch of villainous misogynists, Tezuka is casting a critical eye over the nature of human relationships. Indeed, the title of The Book of Human Insects invites us to look upon the novel’s characters as a set of biological specimens, some of which are easier to identify than others. For example, when Tomura ties herself to an ambitious executive, we quickly join Tomura in recognising the man’s obsession with high-stakes gambling and his tendency to see all of life’s challenges in precisely those terms. Like all of the male characters, this executive is relatively easy to understand because, though his desires are hateful, ugly and misogynistic, they are at least recognisably human. By making these unpleasant characters easy to understand and emphasising the similarities between their desire to pigeon-hole Tomura and our desire to understand her, Tezuka places us in the position of unpleasant reactionaries who would rob something of its potential by seeking to render it comprehensible. The idea that Tomura might somehow be harmed by becoming comprehensible is what lies behind the anguished scene where she rebels against categorisation on the grounds that she is still a larva, something in the process of becoming.

Though Tezuka never provides us with any definitive answers as to what Tomura’s final form might be, he does raise two interesting possibilities:

Firstly, Tezuka raises the possibility that Tomura’s capacity for re-invention might mask some inner essence that has either remained hidden from view or been overlooked amidst all of the re-inventions. If correct, this theory would suggest that Tomura’s constant re-invention is nothing more than a process of trial-and-error whereby Tomura tries on different identities before choosing the correct one.

Secondly, Tezuka also raises the possibility that Tomura’s true nature might very well be that of perpetual change and re-invention. If correct, this theory would account for why it is that we find it easier to empathise with the hideous men who litter Tomura’s life rather than Tomura herself. Indeed, much like Tomura’s men, we are creatures with fixed natures and to gaze upon the mercurial and the protean is to gaze on something that is as hideous and alien as it is alluring.

At the beginning of this essay I referred to the character of Tomura as being “Mr Ripley-like”. This is a reference to the character of Tom Ripley who appears in a series of novels by Patricia Highsmith as well as the films Purple Noon (1960), The American Friend (1977), The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), Ripley’s Game (2002) and Ripley Under Ground (2005). The similarities between Ripley’s capacity for imitation and Tomura’s capacity for radical re-invention and psychological absorption are what lie behind my suggestion that The Book of Human Insects might be read as a psychological thriller. Indeed, one of the defining characteristics of a psychological thriller is the presence of a mystery grounded in human psychology. At its most crude, this mystery can take the form of an FBI agent who pieces together a psychotic delusion in order to trap a serial killer as in Thomas Harris’s early Hannibal Lecter novels or, at its most sophisticated, Barbara Vine’s exploration of why a prim and moralistic woman would stoop to murder in A Dark-Adapted Eye (1986).

The Book of Human Insects can be read as a psychological thriller and its depth and pacing ensure that it works brilliantly when seen as such. However, a more rewarding interpretation of this manga is to take it as a critique of post-War Japanese society.

September 2 1945 did not only bring the end of the Second World War, it also saw the end of an Imperialist phase of Japanese history that began with the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Aside from overturning the last Shogun of Japan’s Edo period, the Meiji Restoration also attempted to catapult Japan onto the global stage by having the historically isolationist country assume a more imperialistic and expansionistic attitude towards the outside world. As well as modernising Japan’s industrial infrastructure and massively expanding its military capacity, the oligarchs of the Meiji government promoted a form of cultural chauvinism so intense that it would eventually lead Japan to feel a degree of kinship with the Fascist powers of Europe. When Japanese foreign minister Mamoru Shigemitsu and General Yoshijiro Umezu signed the Japanese Instrument of Surrender on the deck of the USS Missouri, they were not just closing the books on the Empire of Japan, they were also calling time on a sense of national identity that stretched all the way back to the days of the Samurai.

As well as unprecedented levels of economic growth and a deluge of democratic and liberal reforms to the Japanese state, the American occupation of Japan also brought a profound sense of cultural confusion: If Japan could not fulfil its destiny by becoming one of the world’s great Imperial powers then what was to become of it? As people and institutions struggled to re-invent themselves, their growing identity crisis found a voice in what is now seen as one of the great golden ages of cinematic history. If you want to see a culture struggling to come to terms with foreign influences then look no further than the grubby Americanisation of Japan’s underworld as depicted in films such as Shohei Imamura’s Pigs & Battleships (1961) and Kenji Mizoguchi’s Street of Shame (1956). Similarly, Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story (1953) feature a sad acceptance of the inevitability of change while his Late Autumn (1960) transforms that sadness into optimism as that-which-once-was is gently replaced by that-which-will-be.

Manga itself can also be seen as a by-product of Japan’s post-War identity crisis as while we may now think of manga and anime as being quintessentially Japanese, the ‘Big Eye’ style that Tezuka pioneered is actually based upon American cartoon characters such as Betty Boop and Disney’s Bambi. Sensing a tension between manga’s Japanese character and the fact that its roots are in the popular culture of an invading power, Tezuka created The Book of Human Insects in order to address his nation’s identity crisis. This identity crisis would have been obvious to Tezuka who, born in 1928, would have seen an entire generation of Japanese people grow up and reach their prime in the shadow of American occupation. However, while previous generations of young Japanese people could find comfort in the history and values of a Japanese Empire that stretched all the way back to the feudal era, the post-War generation found themselves trapped between the discredited values of their parents and the decidedly alien (and occasionally oppressive) teachings of American liberal democracy. The sense of identity crisis engendered by the remodelling of Japanese institutions begged the question as to whether Japan was still Japanese.

The character of Toshiko Tomura is Tezuka’s attempt to determine the real essence of 1970s Japanese culture. Indeed, much like the economically resurgent Japan of the Cold War, Tomura makes her way in the world by absorbing the skills of others to the point where her expertise surpasses theirs. Tomura’s ability to systematically surpass the skills of her masters represents the fact that post-War Japan was a much more effective liberal capitalist democracy than America whose economy struggled until the deregulations of the 1980s. However, while 1970s Japan enjoyed both immense cultural vitality and explosive economic growth, its success appeared hollow to those elements who felt that liberal democracy was not the Japanese way.  By exploring the possibility that Tomura might have a hidden inner character or that her true nature might very well be that of constant re-invention, Tezuka is raising the possibility that Japan too might possess a nature founded on principles of constant change and re-invention.

The metaphorical nature of The Book of Human Insects is also evident from Tezuka’s style of art. Those used to the more uniform Big Eye style of contemporary manga might fall into the trap of seeing Tezuka’s artwork as primitive or overly cartoonish. However, look beyond the rubber-legged foreground characters and you will find not only extraordinarily detailed and ‘realistic’ backdrops but a capacity to change modes of composition to denote the manga equivalent of dream sequences and moments of heightened reality. Consider, for example, Tezuka’s use of traditional cartoon iconography in this seduction:

As well as the pinpoint realism of this attempt to locate the action:

And compare them to the twisted realism of Tezuka’s attempt to capture the essence of jazz in visual form:

Consider these three very different series of images together and you will get a taste of Tezuka’s artistic sophistication and his tendency to lapse into more and more ‘cartoonish’ styles to denote either heightened reality or increasing unreality.

By populating his novel with images of cartoonish characters in realistic landscapes, Tezuka is underlining their metaphorical nature. These characters, Tezuka seems to be suggesting, are not real… they are simply attempts to force ideas into a human form and project them onto the real world. By ensuring that the ‘real’ elements of his artwork are Japanese while the design of the ‘unreal’ characters is grounded in the aesthetics of American popular culture, Tezuka is forcing us to confront the identity crisis that looms over Toshiko Tamura as a character, manga as a form and Japan as a society. Every panel and every word of The Book of Human Insects cries out with a desperate need for a fixed sense of identity and a legitimate place in the world. The unease we feel upon being confronted by the character of Tomura is the same unease we feel when confronted by anything postmodern. Much like the men in Tomura’s life, we work hard at fitting ourselves into neatly ordered boxes and Tomura’s protean nature serves as an eerie and unwelcome reminder of how arbitrary and artificial those boxes can be. The truth is that we are all like Toshiko Tomura but she appears alien because she is willing to accept that there is no real Toshiko Tomura, there is only the boundless possibility of what Toshiko Tomura can become.

THE ZONE

Incorrectly marketed as the world’s first work of erotic 3D cinema, Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy is a film that never quite manages to achieve the levels of inspired oddness that make for a decent cult following. Instead, the film has a few nice moments (including an intersexual vampire lifting cartwheels with her 8 foot-long prehensile penis) that ultimately wind up getting lost amidst a lot of puerile sniggering and some deeply unpleasant misogynistic sadism.

Right from the off, Sex And Zen 3D suffers from translation problems as British culture tends not to cope too well with attempts to combine sex with comedy. While most British people will happily acknowledge the fact that sex – as an activity – can sometimes be very funny, attempts to capture that comedy on screen generally do not fare too well, as ridicule was traditionally one of the means through which matters pertaining to sexuality was repressed. For example, while a case can be made for seeing the Carry On films as agents of social change, one could just as easily say that they helped to reinforce taboos about the human body by presenting sex as a laughing matter. 3D Sex And Zen‘s tendency to move between (rather un-stimulating) eroticism and childish humour is not only unsettling, it is also fiercely reminiscent of the jarring tonal shifts common to the kind of campy Bavarian softcore porn films that were made in the 1960s and 1970s and screened on British cable TV in the early-to-mid 1990s. Sex And Zen 3D ultimately fails as a film because its jokes are unfunny and its erotic content is nothing more than boobies and thrusting bottoms, but the constant shifting between these two registers makes for an experience which, I suspect; would translate better for people from cultures where laughter was not used to drain sex of its power.

I hate to say this but, watching 3-D Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy actually made me want to read some Laurel K. Hamilton as while Hamilton writes with all the style and insight of a someone with a pick-axe embedded in their skull, she at least knows how to mine the sweet spot between titillation, repulsion and transgression.

Much like Dick Maas’s anti-clerical Saint, Rare Exports draws much of its humour and all of its horror from confronting children’s stories with the eyes of an adult. As with Maas’s take on the story of Saint Nicholas, Helander’s take on the more familiar story of Santa Claus finds something distinctly unsettling in the idea of an immortal being who hangs around children. Given the gimmicky nature of the subject matter, it would have been easy for Rare Exports to get away with being cheap and shoddy but instead, the project boasted quite a lavish budget that made it all the way to the screen thanks to some wonderful cinematography and a script that knows when to place tongue in cheek and when to allow the surreal horror of Santa Claus to speak for itself:

Rare Exports [repeatedly] toys with the idea of arrested development. Indeed, the head of the multinational corporation that are trying to unearth Santa is a man who dresses and acts in a manner that suggests that adulthood does not necessarily become him. Aside from spending an absolute fortune trying to meet the real Santa, the man also hands out a set of safety precautions in order to prevent his men from being seen as ‘bad boys’. These precautions include statements such as ‘no swearing’ and ‘no drinking’, precisely the kinds of rules that adults apply to their children. By attempting to ensure that his workmen are seen as ‘good boys’, the foreign businessman is effectively trying to envelop them in the same state of arrested development as him.

Regrettably underused, this character is fiercely reminiscent of both the collector character from Toy Story 2 (1999), and Michael Jackson, in that all three give off an image of adulthood that is just far-enough out of alignment to set people’s teeth on edge. Although Rare Exports never delves into the capitalist’s motivations, it is clear that there is something very wrong with a man who would destroy a mountain, risk dozens and lives and spend a fortune in order to meet Santa. The childlike glee displayed by the capitalist when he first encounters the reindeer herders’ old man is beautifully unclean; the way he strokes the old man’s filthy and matter beard speaks of a profoundly broken form of humanity.

Lovely, wrong and distinctly Finnish.

THE ZONE

Between Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954) and Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1976) there are no shortage of works that use vampires as a means of engaging with such existentialist themes as loneliness, alienation and self-loathing. Indeed, the rather individualistic idea that people out there are somehow less alive and therefore different to us also features in zombie films like Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead (2004) and Ruben Fleischer’s Zombieland (2009). Beating a critically acclaimed path to this already well-frequented watering hole is Stake Land, a film that combines the post-apocalyptic seriousness of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) with the post-apocalyptic silliness of Kevin Costner’s The Postman (1997) with all the problems this entails:

Though never all that original or overflowing with important things to say, Stake Land could have been an interesting addition to the tradition that uses elements of art house cinema to revitalise tired old horror tropes. Similarly, it could have been a harmless action movie in which a stone-cold badass leads a group of people through a vampire-infested post-apocalyptic landscape. However, by attempting to be both things at once, Stake Land succeeds at being neither. This is a slow, ponderous, underpowered and ludicrously pompous film that comes nowhere close to adding up to the sum of its parts.

Disappointing to say the least.

Then something peculiar happened. The economic forces that once promised universal wealth and happiness suddenly began to cough and stutter as skyscrapers collapsed in downtown New York. Shaken and traumatised, the American people demanded that American blood be avenged ten-fold but the wars this sentiment created produced nothing but trouble. There was no revenge or glory, there was only a bottomless sea of moral ambiguity and America was rapidly running out of beach. Denied the cathartic closure of a ‘good war’, the American people retreated into their dream of cosy consumerism but the events of September 11 were nothing but a grim foreshadowing of the economic collapses to come. September 11 messed up a few buildings but the credit crunch destroyed an entire way of life. Suddenly, the long balmy evening of eternal economic growth was cut short and, for the first time in generations, Americans were less well off than their parents. Not only that but working seemed not to help as millions of Americans worked multiple jobs but still struggled to hang on to their homes. To this day, many Americans spend all day working and yet feed themselves and their families from soup kitchens.

After a series of brutal kicks to the abdomen, the American dream lies bleeding and gasping for breath but when people look around for help or guidance they find a political class that is constitutionally incapable of recognising a problem. With millions unemployed and an entire generation of young people being shovelled onto the scrap heap of history, the American media and political elites seem more worried about the president’s religion and nationality while public discourse has devolved to the point where it amounts to nothing more than a pair of cowardly tribes who shout insults across the battlefield without ever ordering a charge. Something is profoundly wrong with the American way of life and yet neither American politicians nor American journalists seem prepared to acknowledge it. To admit fear and worry would be too un-American and so the people of America hunker down and wait with anxieties unaddressed and uneased.

Jeff Nichols’ psychological thriller Take Shelter is a brave attempt at confronting the fears that grip American society. It is a film about the reality of living scared and the problems that come from failing to address these all-pervasive feelings of dread.

Curtis LaForche (Michael Shannon) is ostentatiously American. Husband to the beautiful Samantha (Jessica Chastain) and father to the deaf Hannah (Tova Stewart), he lives in a fly-over state where he works construction, goes to church and attends Lions’ Club dinners.  In fact, he’s so American that he has an American flag on his hardhat. Curtis’s life seems to be going pretty well but suddenly he starts to have nightmares.

In many ways, Take Shelter is an extended riff on Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965) where the onset of madness was explored by creating a degree of ambiguity around the images seen on screen. Polanski recreated the fractured mind in cinematic form by continuously shifting between the world of facts and the world of his protagonist’s delusions. While some delusions were obviously false (as in the case of the wall that erupts with hands), others were a good deal more real (as in the case of the man who breaks into her apartment and tries to rape her). What made this ambiguity so unsettling was the fact that it served to place the audience in a similar position to the film’s protagonist in that they could no longer tell where reality ended and delusion began. Take Shelter pursues a similar line of attack by blurring the boundaries of Curtis’s nightmares.

Curtis’s dreams invariably begin with scenes of mundane domesticity. Because these early moments are so normal, the boundary between dream and reality is blurred and it is only when the dream begins to spiral off into fantastical imagery that we can safely identify what we see on screen as the content of Curtis’s dreams. However, having presented the world of dreams as similar to the world of the real at the opening of his dream sequences, Nichols then reverses the trick by allowing the world of dreams to bleed back into the world of facts at the end of the sequences. He does this by ending every dream with the image of Curtis experiencing a seizure. While these images unambiguously situate us back in the real world, the seizures are so upsetting to watch that they effectively carry the tension and unpleasantness of the dream world back into the real world. With the horror of nightmares refusing to dissipate even in the light of day, Curtis finds himself increasingly convinced that, as in his dreams, the cosy domesticity of his real life could erupt into horror at any minute.

Take Shelter further complicates the techniques deployed in Repulsion by presenting Curtis’s problem as a blurring of the boundaries not between reality and delusion but between mundane reality, fantastical reality and the possibility that he is actually following his mother’s path into schizophrenia. Thus Curtis finds himself trapped between the need to get a hold of himself, the need to seek psychiatric help and the need to dig an enormous fallout shelter in order to protect his family.

Nichols further complicates matters by presenting Curtis’s fears as pointedly metaphorical. There’s a wonderful scene where Curtis visits his bank manager in order to apply for the unsecured loan that will allow him to build a fallout shelter in his back yard. Far from eager to take Curtis’s business, the bank manager reminds him that these are not good times to go into debt and that he will have to re-mortgage his house in order to pay for the construction of the shelter. Thus Curtis’s fears become self-fulfilling as the encroaching terror of the credit crunch forces Curtis to dangerously over-extend himself, thereby making his fears more likely to come true. The sense that Curtis is opening up a world of economic woe is then paid off in a scene where Jessica Chastain’s Sam learns the extent of Curtis’s folly and channels all of her rage, fear and disappointment into a single resounding slap. Take Shelter is not just a film about American attempts to cope with fear, it is also an attempt to demonstrate how a culture of fear can effectively re-shape reality to the point where your greatest fears really can come true.

In Take Shelter, Jeff Nichols has created a film that takes the uncannily ambiguous ontology of films like Repulsion and takes the ambiguity to the next level. Indeed, watching Take Shelter one is never clear of where one’s focus should sit. The film works equally well as a horror film, a family drama, a postmodern head-fuck and an elaborate political allegory and much of the narrative revolves around Nichols attempts to move between all of these ontological registers in a distinctly disorienting fashion. The ending of the film is particularly striking in this respect as Nichols guides us through at least three separate endings designed to repeatedly pull to rug from beneath any attempt to pin down not only where reality ends and dreams begin but also how we should apprehend the film. By the time the credits roll, the only thing that is certain is that something is heading towards the family and that reason, retreat, escape and delusion are all equally valid and equally flawed reactions to what is effectively the end of the world. Take Shelter captures the spirit of madness and fear by presenting us with a cinematic world that defies easy analysis in terms of truth, fiction, delusion and metaphor.  When nothing is neither true nor false, how can one decide how to act? The answer is that we cannot and this is the state that America is currently in.

THE ZONE

There is something decidedly odd about the fact that Empire of Passion netted Oshima an award for best director at Cannes. Indeed, while the film is wonderfully atmospheric and elegantly composed, it is ultimately nothing more than a genre piece in which an adulterous couple are hounded into madness by what they perceive to be an avenging spirit.  In my review, I suggest that the award may well have been given out not for Empire of Passion but for In The Realm of The Senses, the hugely controversial and sexually graphic film that Oshima made prior to this one.

Such trifles aside, Empire of Passion remains a hugely compelling exploration of the mechanics of desire, self-censure and social oppression. Indeed, one of the most striking things about this ghost story is that the ghost never actually cries out for vengeance. In fact, all the ghost wants to do is continue to work as a rickshaw driver. Rather than coming from the ghost, the couple’s slide into madness is caused by their refusal to accept what it is that they have done and why it is that they did it:

Empire Of Passion lends itself beautifully to a Freudian interpretation because it articulates not only the individual’s reticence to accept their hidden desires but also the problem of living as a person who does accept that they have certain needs and desires. Indeed, while Seki and Toyoji seem genuinely horrified by the intensity of the desire that their tryst unlocks, the real meat of the film lies in the characters’ refusal to own up to those desires and incorporate them into their personalities.

A thoroughly excellent film