Category / Psychological Thrillers

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Plein Soleil (1960)

pleinsoleil10A little while ago, I was planning on writing a book about psychological thrillers. I thought it might have been a good idea because I wanted to read a book about psychological thrillers but nobody appeared to have written one. While the project was eventually dissolved by the dawning realisation that nobody would publish a book about psychological thrillers written by me, my attempt to pull together a list of great psychological thrillers brought me into contact with Rene Clement’s Plein Soleil. Based on Patricia Highsmith’s classic existential novel The Talented Mr Ripley, Plein Soleil struck me as a fascinating misprision… a failure to comprehend the original intent of a work that nonetheless produced something of considerable beauty. FilmJuice have my review of Plein Soleil, which is now available in the UK for the first time in altogether too long.

Set in the strange demimonde created by wealthy American socialites slumming it in Italian hotels, Plein Soleil tells of a penniless young man who attaches himself to a much wealthier man with a far more forceful personality. In Highsmith’s original text, the relationship between Ripley and his prey is a sort of existential magnetism, a void that attempts to fill itself by consuming a much more substantial person. Intriguingly, Clement and Delon present Ripley not as an existential void but as a sort of unquenchable hunger… a man with nothing who wants everything and who will stop at nothing in order to get it. Indeed, even Anthony Minghella’s stylistically dull adaptation of the book presented Ripley as a sexless figure whereas Delon’s Ripley is all about Marie Laforet’s fragrant Marge:

Delon’s Ripley is an absolute masterpiece, a creature of malign and yet unfettered grace, the male libido chiselled into marble and made socially acceptable by the strategic use of smart haircuts and tailor-made suits. Think Bond unhitched from Queen and Country.

Another thing that struck me since filing the review is that Plein Soleil has a very similar setting and cast of characters to Antonioni’s now burdensomely-canonical L’Avventura; both are about beautiful people in a beautiful place and both films use that beauty to highlight the beautiful people’s complete lack of interiority. In L’Avventura, the mediterranean is a dull grey slate dotted with jet black protuberances while that of Clement is a washed-out nightmare where only the most brutal and beautiful fear to tread.

Re-visiting Plein Soleil was a real treat that only continues to confirm my feeling that Anthony Minghella’s Oscar-nominated and BAFTA-winning Talented Mr Ripley is actually the weakest of all the Ripley films while Clement’s adaptation and Liliana Cavani’s take on Ripley’s Game remain sadly under-rated.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – In The House (2012)

ITHFilmJuice have my review of François Ozon’s In The House.

The film is set in a devastatingly modernist French high school where a bitter failed writer grinds out a living teaching French literature to teenagers who can barely read or write. Suddenly, the teacher’s gloom is lifted when one of his students hands in an astonishingly dry and sarcastic appraisal of a middle-class home he recently visited. His interest captured, the teacher encourages the boy’s talent and soon every piece of homework becomes another wry take-down of middle-class life. What makes this film interesting is that, rather than focusing upon the emotional connection between failed writer and ambitious student (YOU’RE THE MAN NOW, DOG!), the film uses the relationship as a metaphor for the creative process as the student is effectively writing for an audience of one who gives him detailed feedback on what he wants to see in the next chapter. Brilliantly, the teacher’s requests that the student alter his plot results in the student doing things that directly impact the teacher’s life forcing the audience to suffer for their vicarious literary joy.

One way of looking at In The House is to say that it features a more restrained approach to the shaggy postmodernism of Charlie Kaufman. For example, as with Being John Malkovich, the characters in this film blur the lines between the real and the fictional. Similarly, as with Synecdoche New York, the entirety of In The House feels like an intentionally doomed attempt at capturing the entire creative process in a single unwieldy metaphor. The problem is that Kaufman realises that the cleverness of postmodernism is inherently less satisfying than the emotional payload of a sweeping narrative arc and so he builds these huge metaphorical structures in an effort to replace emotional closure with a sense of wonder. Ozon’s comparative restraint means that, unlike many of Kaufman’s projects, In The House works as a proper story right up until the end but it seems entirely reasonable to suggest that ending the film on a flight of postmodern fantasy would have been more effective than Ozon’s discontented trudge.

I’ve recently read two quite interesting books that attempt to deal with the issue of ironic detachment from the emotional manipulations of narrative. David Thomson’s typically shaggy and typically wonderful book on the history of film The Big Screen finds him deeply troubled by the way in which the rise of advertising appears to have somehow compromised the relationship between work and audience. Prior to TV and Radio, people would submit themselves to a particular narrative and stay with it till the end. Now, they find themselves jostled out of the flow by adverts… tiny self-contained stories injected into the flow of a film or TV programme but designed to sell rather than move or entertain. After combing through the history of cinema, the book ends with Thomson experimentally watching a film backwards:

You also discover what a sweet, artificial thing story is. That is not a mocking of narrative, simply a revelation that story is just a series of tricks or steps, a mechanism, not too hard to guess in advance, and as systematic and serviceable as, say, a staircase — and as logical and mathematical. A story is something made and made up; it is a disguise of life, artfully and kindly done, but not life. It is lifelike. And stories are so artful, so manufactured, that they might as easily run backwards or forward

This vision of narrative as a system of emotional control also runs through Douglas Rushkoff’s recent (and not quite wonderful) book Present Shock. Rushkoff argues that the world around us does often makes very little sense as decades of advertising have encouraged us to find ways of protecting ourselves from stories that would manipulate our emotions:

Aristotle was the first, but certainly not the last, to identify the main parts of this kind of story, and he analyzed them as if he were a hacker reverse-engineering the function of a computer program. The story mechanics he discovered are very important for us to understand, as they are still in use by governments, corporations, religions, and educators today as they attempt to teach us and influence our behaviors. They are all the more important for the way they have ceased to work on members of a society who have gained the ability to resist their spell.

While I am still in the process of digesting a lot of these ideas, I think there is a lot of meat on the bones of the idea that a lot of contemporary culture is post-postmodern in the sense that it is built with an explicit aim of overcoming the air of ironic detachment that postmodernism has encouraged us to adopt. Kaufman in particular is quite an interesting figure as all of his films begin in the real world, deconstruct the real world and end with mad flights of fantasy. I think Kaufman does this because he realises that a) neat narrative arcs are at least as ‘false’ as CGI fantasias and b) CGI fantasias are probably a more reliable way of having an impact on an audience than a happy or a tragic ending.

by Jonathan M

Detachment (2011) by Tony Kaye

detachmentBack in the 1990s, Tony Kaye seemed destined for great things. After cutting his teeth on a series of award-winning music videos including “Runaway Train” by Soul Asylum, Kaye took the step up to the big leagues and signed on to direct American History X, a film that humanised a pair of skinheads and blamed American middle-class culture for their descent into violent racism. However, while the film’s power and insight have become only more evident with the passage of time, American History X very nearly ended Kaye’s career as the studio’s indifference to his first cut lead to a very public PR battle in which Kaye bemoaned his treatment in a series of full-page adverts in the Hollywood press. His reputation effectively ruined, Kaye returned to music videos until his 2006 abortion documentary Lake of Fire paved the way for another shot at feature-length cinematic narratives. Like American History X and Kaye himself, Detachment is an unsettling and ambiguous film that assaults contemporary morals with a fury so intense, grandiose and ill-disciplined that it feels less like an argument for or against something than it does a howl of rage at the universe itself.

Much of the critical indifference to Detachment can be explained by its initial similarity to both John N. Smith’s Dangerous Minds and Ramon Menendez’s Stand and Deliver. However, despite telling of a new teacher arriving in a failing inner city school, Detachment is neither a critique of the American school system nor a heart-warming tale of academic triumph over economic adversity. Instead, Detachment picks a fight with the human condition itself.

Continue reading →

by Jonathan M

Millennium Actress (2001) by Satoshi Kon

millennium_actressKon’s magnificent debut Perfect Blue used animation to project the audience into the troubled psychological hinterlands of a woman who is attempting to reinvent herself as a serious actress. Kon’s second film, Millennium Actress uses a similar set of themes and techniques but rather than focussing on the painful process of becoming an actress, the film looks back over the life and career of a woman who managed to become precisely what the world of film required of her.

Millennium Actress opens on a director and cameraman making their sweaty way up a large hill. At the top of the hill is a house. Inside the house is a reclusive and long-retired actress based upon the legendary Setsuko Hara (who unexpectedly retired in the same year that the director Yasujiro Ozu died). Once the actress begins talking, Kon removes us from reality and positions us alongside the camera crew inside the woman’s memory. However, as the actress speaks, the world of the film shifts from memories of her childhood to memories of her life on set as a child actress and finally to memories of the roles she played on films. “What are we shooting?” asks the cameraman as samurai clash; cities burn and youthful actresses wring their hands in melodramatic lamentations. Good question.

Initially, Millennium Actress feels like a journey into senility. Ronald Reagan reportedly confused the things he had done on film with the things he had done in reality and the film’s movement between memories of making films and memories of film suggests a similar form of confusion. However, as the film progresses and the boundaries between films begin to dissolve, a pattern begins to emerge: each of the actress’s roles drew upon the realities of her life at the time of filming. Thus, by revisiting each of the roles the actress played, the camera crew are witnesses to the emotional beats of the actresses’ life. The further the film progresses, the older the actress becomes, the quicker she ages and the more her life comes to resemble a head long rush towards the grave. While the film’s opening acts sometimes feel like an elaborate but hollow technical exercise, the conclusion weaves all of these disconnected threads into the magnificent tapestry of a life in film.

Much like Paul Schrader’s biopic Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, Millennium Actress explores not only the importance of the creative process in the lives of creative people, but also the way in which these very public displays of emotion forge a bond between the audience and the artist. Kon brilliantly explores the nature of this relationship by having the director insert himself into the memories of the actress in order to serve as her protector and guardian of the sacred flame. Aside from keeping the actress’s flights of fantasy on track, the director also directs her attention to the areas of her life that he finds most interesting suggesting that, far from being passive, fans can have a good deal of control over the lives of their idols.

Though undeniably a touching tribute to the enduring power of film, Kon’s film suggests that the relationship between performer and audience is actually a good deal more complex and problematic than we might otherwise believe. Indeed, despite being a central figure in the lives of millions of people, the actress never quite got to live her own life on her own terms. Great emotions flowed through her and back towards her but they never really belonged to her… they were never entirely private… never entirely personal.

In a sense, Millennium Actress is the perfect response to Perfect Blue as it answers that film’s un-posed question: Why would someone want to put themselves through the dehumanising and humiliating process of becoming an actor? Because to be is to be perceived and to feel is to be felt.

by Jonathan M

Secret Defense (1998) by Jacques Rivette

secret-defenseDirected by Jacques Rivette (one of the big beasts of the French Nouvelle Vague) Secret Defense is best understood as a sort of inside-out psychological thriller. What I mean by this is that while most psychological thrillers use the language of film to convey what it feels like to be in a particular psychological state, Rivette’s film looks beyond what the characters are feeling and focuses instead upon the insane realities of what it is they are doing.

The film opens as research scientist Sylvie (Sandrine Bonnaire) is approached by her younger brother Paul (Gregoire Colin). Obviously troubled, Paul presents Sylvie with photographic evidence suggesting that the charismatic and ambitious Walser (Jerzy Radziwilowicz) might have been involved in the death of their powerful father. Initially dismissive of her brother’s conspiracy theories, Sylvie soon becomes worried that Paul might be planning to do something stupid and so decides to ‘save’ her brother by travelling across the country in order to kill Walser herself.

At this, point, most directors would have used either the relationship between the siblings or their historic links to Walser as a means of exploring Sylvie’s character and explaining her decision to seek revenge on her brother’s behalf. However, rather than following this well-trodden path, Rivette devotes twenty minutes of the film to a largely dialogue-free train journey during which Sylvie sleeps, tries on sunglasses, changes trains and gets drunk. The sheer crushing boredom of this section beautifully demonstrates the depths of Sylvie’s madness and obsession whilst keeping her actual emotional state firmly at arm’s length. Indeed, the reason Secret Defense runs to a colossal 170 minutes is that each of the film’s revelations comes only after a succession of missed phone-calls, awkwardly silent breakfasts, gloomy afternoons spent sitting around, and seductions embarked upon solely to give the characters an excuse to not talk to each other. In fact, this cycle of avoidance, confrontation and acceptance repeats itself endlessly throughout the film but without much insight ever being gained.

The point of the film is that it takes considerable time and energy to both keep and reveal family secrets. Much like the intelligence services alluded to by the film’s title, Sylvie works hard to break through a wall of silence and once that wall is finally breached she pointedly refuses to reveal the family’s secret to her troubled younger brother. There’s simply too much at stake and he wouldn’t understand anyway.

By focussing upon the characters’ actions rather than their exact motivations, Rivette emphasises not only the irrationality of the characters’ actions but also the social nature of many psychological states. When Walser finally lets Sylvie in on the family secret, Sylvie lashes out at her mother and then immediately forgives her; it is as though she has passed through a veil from one world into another where secrecy and even murder make perfect sense. Thus, the decision to keep the characters at arms’ length results in a truly devastating psychological truth: all human behaviour seems irrational and insane when deprived of its cultural and psychological context.

by Jonathan M

Two Films You Should See – Stalker and Perfect Blue

PerfectBluestalker-film-poster-tarkovsky

This year, FilmJuice have decided to compile a list of a hundred films that everyone should see. I was lucky enough to kick-off the series this week with my two selections: Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker and Satoshi Kon’s Perfect Blue.

Unlike Western science fiction films that use spectacular action sequences and fast-paced narratives to excite and entertain their audiences, Stalker uses a combination of extraordinary visual richness and extreme narrative simplicity to coax its audience into a mood of thoughtful curiosity. To call Stalker a ‘boring’ film is both technically correct and completely misleading as the lack of complex plot and distracting characters is a deliberate move designed to force the audience to reflect upon what it is they are actually seeing. Having placed the audience in a state of engaged curiosity, Tarkovsky engineers the cinematic equivalent of a spiritual experience.

My reading of Stalker is somewhat different to the one I put forward back in 2009 but I think the two are broadly compatible.

The brilliance of Perfect Blue lies not just in its ability to handle the dovetailing realities of a disturbed mind in a manner that is both poised and extremely rigorous, it also uses these fragmented realities to critique a cultural environment that is extremely resistant to re-invention and experimentation. This is a film about how society dehumanises and destabilises those women who refuse to stay in the box allotted them by the men who would control their lives.

I have not written about Perfect Blue before but it remains one of my very favourite films.  The rape scene I discuss is triggery as fuck for obvious reasons but I think it remains one of the most brutally ambivalent cinematic sequences every produced. Horrific, self-aware and even more horrific because of its self-awareness.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – In Your Hands (2010)

Videovista has my review of Lola Doillon’s In Your Hands, a French drama starring Kristin Scott Thomas.

I think that In Your Hands is trying to be about quite an interesting question, namely whether loneliness creates a sense of desperation that blinds people to the human failings of the people who lift them out of loneliness. The film seems to explore this idea by having a socially isolated surgeon (Scott Thomas) be kidnapped by the husband (Pio Marmai) of a woman who died on her operating table. Initially, the dynamic is pretty generic as the surgeon reveals herself to be uninterested in human suffering to the point of being completely unwilling to recognise her role in the woman’s death, let alone apologise for it. However, as the film progresses and we learn more about the character, it transpires that the husband is also socially isolated and his relationship with the surgeon is actually the only one he has.  Sounds interesting, right? The problem is that the text of the film does almost nothing to support this reading:

The problem with the film’s central theme of alienation is that it is impossible to determine whether it is something that exists in the text of the film or whether it is something that I have made up out sheer boredom. Are we supposed to attend to the fact that neither of the characters have any friends or is their lack of social connection simply the product of weak characterisation and sloppy world building? Despite being only 80 minutes long, the film contains no context for the events surrounding the kidnapping, meaning that the characters begin and end the film as impenetrable cyphers. To make matters worse, having teased the audience with the idea that kidnapper and victim might have fallen for each other because that relationship was the only one they had, Doillon refuses to either acknowledge this interpretation of events or develop the insight in any meaningful way.

As I explain in the review, post-War art house cinema has developed a style of storytelling that presents us with an ambiguous set of events and then steps back and allows us the space to make sense of these events for ourselves.  This is why art house film is so slow: those moments of people peering off into the distance are there to give you some space in which to think. The problem with this approach is that many directors have come to rely upon audience participation to the point where they no longer both to present you with any well-drawn ambiguities… they simply show you some stuff happening and then retreat into beautiful cinematography in the hope that you will invent some thematic context that makes sense of the images on the screen. An excellent example of this type of filmmaking is Eugene Green’s The Portuguese Nun, a film so boring and pretentious that it left me wanting to wring the director’s neck when I reviewed it for FilmJuice:

If one were being particularly charitable one might attempt to argue that the film constitutes some kind of meditation on the affected and staged nature of film as a medium but if Green is indeed trying to present an argument then his ideas are either insufficiently clear or insufficiently substantial to support a 127-minute film.

Much like The Portuguese Nun, In Your Hands does contain some ideas but these ideas are so insubstantial and evasively presented that they barely constitute ideas at all. This is homeopathic cinema: while an idea may once have been near the production process, that idea has now been so thoroughly diluted that its presence in the film is now largely the product of the audience’s imagination.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – The Woman in the Fifth (2011)

VideoVista have my review of Pawel Pawlikovski’s The Woman in the Fifth. Based on a novel by Douglas Kennedy, the film is a meditation on the costs and benefits of artistic creativity. Grounded firmly in the old trope of a sensitive and broken man who is only saved by the love of a good woman, the film presents its central character with a choice between a woman who makes him creative but also insane and a woman who makes him happy but only at the expense of his capacity to write.

I have two main problems with this film. The first is that the vision of creativity the film proposes is based entirely upon an almost ludicrously self-indulgent and melodramatic vision of the creative process. Many gifted artists produce great work without lapsing into either madness, violence or depression. Frankly, seeing these psychological problems as an inevitable by-product of the creative process is nothing more than palliative bullshit put about by people who really need to start taking responsibility for their own mental health. Being an artist does not make it okay for you to be a complete prick.  The second problem is that while Pawlikovski’s direction is entirely watchable, it is also desperately boring. Seriously… what is going on in art house filmmaking? when did it all become so fucking boring?

We are currently undergoing the greatest economic and social crisis since the Great Depression and the political decisions made today will shape the future of entire continents for generations to come. Given that the world is now continuously shifting beneath our feet and that our democratic institutions are positively crying out for an intelligent electorate that can understand and engage with the issues confronting them, do we really need another film about a novelist who is struggling with writer’s block? Do we really need another French film in which a bunch of listless Parisians tumble in and out of bed with one another? Do we really need another film in which a terminally passive and unattractive male protagonist somehow finds himself at the centre of a vortex of redemptive totty? The answer to all of these questions is a resounding ‘No!’

As I said in my piece about this year’s Cannes film festival, European art house cinema is rapidly becoming stale. A decaying boy’s club dominated by a shrinking clade of middle-aged white guys, both its ideas and its language are in desperate need of renewal and The Woman in the Fifth is yet further proof of the scene’s increasing creative sterility. Did we need another film about a novelist with writer’s block? FUCK NO! Nor do we need another polite little film directed by a middle-aged European white guy. Pawel Pawlikovski is not a bad director by any stretch of the imagination but he is a director who is part of the problem. Pawlikovski’s early works including Dostoevsky’s Travels and Tripping with Zhirinovsky were deeply personal reflections of a youth lived under Communist rule. However, as Pawlikovski freely admits in the Blu-ray’s extras, he has decided to set aside the things that made him unique as a director in order to churn out the same old derivative francophilic shit as every other art house director. Clearly… this shit needs to stop.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Total Recall (1990)

FilmJuice have my review of Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall. The review is of the freshly released and genuinely fantastic Blu-ray release of the film and it ties in quite nicely with this recent piece I also wrote for FilmJuice about the films of Paul Verhoeven.

The first thing that struck me about this film was how violent and sexually explicit it is by the standards of contemporary big budget filmmaking. Indeed, the likes of Michael Bay will frequently include women draped decoratively across motorbikes or ascending stairs but the actual sexual content of their films is practically non-existent. The reason for this is two-fold: A) These big budget films have absolutely immense budgets and in order to maximise their profitability, they need to be accessible to as wide an audience as possible. Hence the death of the ’18’ rated action film that dominated much of my childhood. B) The target demographic for most contemporary action films is teenaged boys whose sexual experience is usually limited to ogling and giggling… so whenever Bay has an actress bend over but not actually have sex with anyone, he is attempting to position his film in the sexual universe of horny teenaged boys. Compared to contemporary action films, Total Recall comes across as not only quite explicit but also quite surprisingly adult… particularly strange is the weird sexual energy that fizzes between the characters of Schwarzenegger and Stone as they beat each other up and pretend to be married:

One particularly wonderful element of the film is the relationship between Schwarzenegger’s violently bulging everyman and Sharon Stone’s pouting secret agent. Indeed, Stone plays the roll of a woman who is either a loving wife to Schwarzenegger or deep-cover operative assigned to keep him under surveillance lest his secret identity as a Martian freedom fighter begin to reassert itself. Rather than pitting these two personae against each other and musing as to which is the ‘real’ one, Verhoeven simply runs them together meaning that Stone’s character comes across as a lovingly traitorous wife who wants to kill her husband and have sex with him, quite possibly at the same time. Victims of actual domestic abuse might squirm as Schwarzenegger and Stone flit between flirting and kicking each other across the room but Verhoeven fully embraces the tension and presents it almost as a form of sadomasochistic play. Tellingly, when Schwarzenegger decides that he can no longer trust his wife, Stone’s character makes one last attempt to win him over by offering to let him tie her up. Verhoeven’s bizarre sexualisation of domestic abuse is both intensely unsettling and utterly compelling.

Total Recall is an excellent film and this Blu-ray edition does it proud.  Definitely worth revisiting and re-appraising.

by Jonathan M

The Films of Paul Verhoeven

FilmJuice have just uploaded a piece I wrote for them about the films of Paul Verhoeven, director of Robocop, Total Recall, Showgirls and Basic Instinct.

Regular readers of this site will know that I have a marked fondness for unpopular blockbuster directors like Neveldine/Taylor, Michael Bay and Zac Snyder. Part of what drives my fondness for these directors is their willingness to set aside human values in pursuit of absolute spectacle. All of these directors use violence and action to entertain their audiences but they also use sexuality and fascistic imagery in a way that many directors are reluctant to do. My view on these directors is that one cannot defend Big Dumb Blockbusters like Avengers or Spiderman whilst turning one’s nose up at films like Transformers 3. Summer blockbusters are in the business of pushing buttons and to have your buttons pushed is an inherently dehumanising process. The difference between directors like Bay and directors like Spielberg is that Bay is completely unapologetic about what it is that he does. He makes films for the sweaty masturbating homunculus in all of us:

When people talk about blockbuster action movies, their minds naturally gravitate to the works of sexless man-children such as Peter Jackson, Stephen Spielberg and George Lucas. The reason for this strange cognitive bias is that most people feel ashamed about watching big dumb action movies and so they need their violence to be not only bloodless but also presented in terms of absolute moral simplicity. Spielberg always cuts to the heroic working-class dad because cinema audiences need to know that their yearning for cinematic carnage does not make them a bad person. Similarly, George Lucas can neither shoot nor write a love scene because you can’t have people falling in love and then shooting each other in the face. That simply would not do.

My take on Paul Verhoeven is that he is a transitional figure in the history of blockbuster filmmaking as he spent the late 80s and early 90s building up mainstream audiences’ tolerance for sex. Without Verhoeven, people would never have gone to see Snyder’s Watchmen or Bay’s Transformers.