13 FOR HALLOWEEN #4: The Baby’s Room

‘Films to Keep You Awake’ was a 2006 Spanish TV project that showcased the work of six established genre directors. Akin to the American show ‘Masters of Horror’, but with feature-length running times and arguably better production values, the films easily transcend the small screen. No surprise when you consider the talent involved: Jaume Balaguero, Narcisco Ibanez Serrador, Mateo Gil, Enrique Urbizu, Paco Plaza and Alex de la Iglesia. Balaguero and Plaza co-directed ‘[REC]’, with Plaza helming the sequels; Gil co-wrote ‘Tesis’ and ‘Open Your Eyes’ for Alejandro Amenabar before striking out as a director; Urbizu made the taut revenge thriller ‘Box 507’; Serrador is probably still best known for ‘Who Can Kill a Child?’, one of the jewels in the crown of last year’s Winter of Discontent season; and if Agitation fave de la Iglesia needs an introduction then you simply haven’t been paying attention.

Although there’s not one dud amongst the half dozen films – even Balaguero’s derivative ‘To Let’ delivers tension aplenty – it’s de la Iglesia’s ‘The Baby’s Room’ that emerges, by a short head, as the standout. I’d probably pick Plaza’s ‘A Christmas Tale’ as its closest in terms of atmosphere and directorial verve … and with the season of goodwill just a couple of months away, keep an eye out for it as part of this year’s Winter of Discontent.

The set-up is simple: sports writer Juan (Jaiver Guiterrez), his wife Sonia (Leonor Watling) and their infant son have moved into a big old house in a reputable neighbourhood and stretched themselves to the limit in terms of mortgage and renovation work. Juan’s snobbish but well-meaning sister visits and drops off a box full of hand-me-downs, including a baby monitor. With their child occupying a room separate from theirs, Juan and Sonia agree that this is at least useful. One night Juan wakes up, glances at the monitor and sees a stranger sitting beside their child’s cot.

A simple shot, in grainy black-and-white, the stranger’s eyes rendered glaringly inhuman by the poor resolution. A simple shot – no editing tricks, no dramatic motif on the soundtrack, no immediate cut to the child’s room – and yet brutally effective. I don’t have children, I don’t want children, hell I don’t even like kids that much, but that shot just fucks me up in a way that so many horror films try to do but fail. You don’t need to be a father to feel the fear.

As anybody would, Juan goes pelting hell-for-leather into the baby’s room. Empty. Cold comfort. He calls the police. As anybody would. The attending detective is sympathetic, but with no physical evidence of an intruder and no locks forced, there’s nothing he can do. Already, de la Iglesia pitches his film in utterly realistic terms. Juan behaves exactly as a real person, not a movie character, would. The detective responds with the bland pragmatism of an actual career cop. Sonia responds with the terrified maternal instinct of a new mother. The translation of Juan’s experience to his workplace (he’s distracted; he misses deadlines) is met with the bullish indifference that any real-life boss would evince.

It might seem like a vacuous comment, but the simple expedient of characters acting like real people rather than ciphers in the service of a join-the-dots scripts is something to be praised. De la Iglesia’s genius is that he never deviates from this; even when Juan seeks the advice of agoraphobic fellow journo Domingo (Sancho Garcia) on the supernatural phenomenon he’s experienced, the script paints Domingo not as the incarcerated idiot savant of preternatural exposition a la Craig Fairbrass in ‘White Noise: The Light’, but an informed intellectual who seeks to rationalise. Hence a measured and challenging discussion based around the Schrödinger’s cat paradox.

Pretty impressive, but de la Iglesia ramps up the drama by counterpointing Juan’s investigation into the haunting with Sonia’s increasing concerns about his mental state. The situation swiftly escalates to the point at which Sonia doesn’t feel safe around him and decamps, with the child, to their parents. In a Hollywood production, this would be the point at which the audience’s emotional involvement would be considered non-incentivized (hey, the kid’s safe, where’s the threat?) but de la Iglesia is only just getting started.

Very quickly, Juan arrives at a means of recording the supernatural forces at work in his house. Looking back at the estate agent’s records, he discovers the property has been sold five times in three years. The why is pretty much a given at this point. Then de la Iglesia flips the whole thing on its head. So many haunted house movies are bound up in something terrible that happened a long time ago. What de la Iglesia trades in is something quite different and by the time Juan figures it out, Sonia and their child are on their way back. 

‘The Baby’s Room’ takes the idea of a haunting, plays with it until the audience are secure in what’s happening, and then pulls the rug. And the thing is, when you watch it a second time, all the pointers are there, the philosophical noodlings between Juan and Domingo are freighted with implication, and the denouement is horribly inevitable.

Just as the most effective horror movies tease you with deliverance only to abandon you to the unspeakable, ‘The Baby’s Room’ intellectualises and unfurls exposition and never once cheats on its own very specific rules, then takes you to a place that was always inescapable.

SUMMER OF SATAN: The Day of the Beast

Alex de la Iglesia made an inventive if somewhat frenzied debut with the sci-fi satire ‘Accion Mutante’. Rough and ready and with its set-pieces belying its budget, nonetheless the talent behind the film was evident.

His follow-up, again a genre film and again satirical in tone (at least in its early stages), proved that de la Iglesia was a filmmaker with full confidence in the medium and a wicked sense of the irreverent. The genre this time was horror.

‘The Day of the Beast’ begins with mild-mannered and very nervous priest, Father Curo (Alex Angulo) consulting his superior. He has cracked a code hidden in an abstruse text and determined that the son of the devil is to be born on Christmas Eve – a date just days hence. He confesses that he is now about to leave the church and commence sinning like it’s going out of style. By sinning he will be able to broker a pact with Satan (price: his soul) and thus discover the location of the Adversary’s birth. And then, hopefully, prevent it.

Curo’s superior warns him that the Evil One will attempt to foil him at every turn. Curo turns to take his leave. A massive fresco of the cross detaches itself from the church wall and flattens Curo’s compadre. De la Iglesia stages it as pure slapstick, a comic-book start to the movie that’s underlined by the graphic novel style title credit, a crucifix, a shadow and the silhouetted figure of the devil featuring prominently in the design.

For maybe half an hour or so, de la Iglesia keeps things simmering away at this level: Curo, determined to become a great sinner, curses a dying man and lifts his wallet while he’s meant to be giving absolution; refuses to behave charitably to a beggar; steals someone’s luggage; and blunders into a record shop specializing in heavy metal in search of the devil’s music. Said establishment is managed by Jose Maria (Santiago Segura), whose crotchety mother runs the grubby boarding house at which Cura ends up.

As an unlikely friendship develops between priest and metalhead, the latter points the former in the direction of TV celebrity, supposed medium and 100% charlatan Cavan (Armando De Razza) as a possible candidate to expedite Curo’s contact with Beelzebub. Curo seizes on the idea far too eagerly and what ensues is a melange of home invasion, proto-torture porn (Curo’s exposition speech, punctuate with whacks of a golf club to the forcibly restrained Cavan’s kneecaps is considerably funnier than it has any right to be), slapstick comedy (events are interrupted by the arrival of Cavan’s buxom girlfriend – played by Maria Grazia Cucinotta, a woman with an hourglass figure and a décolletage like a photo-finish in a zeppelin race) and Satanic shenanigans.

The ritual Curo and Jose Maria compel Cavan to undertake (which, apparently, was a genuine Satanic ritual – now there’s a commitment to the Method) proves all too successful and Curo and co. flee the powers of darkness.

This is where ‘Day of the Beast’ changes gear and I don’t want to go into much more detail. If you’ve not seen the film, I don’t want to spoil how subtly the tonal shift of the second half is effected. I’ll just observe that things get darker and more genuinely horrific the more the focus shifts from the gothic to the socio-political. The cinema of Spain, from the rediscovery of artistic freedom of speech in the mid-70s through to the emergence of genre-savvy talents like de la Iglesia in the 90s, is a cinema still informed by the shadow of Franco. Fascism and the arrogance of class is an important factor in the latter stages of ‘Day of the Beast’. The absurdist humour remains (even taking on a wistful tinge in the closing scene), but the aesthetic is darker and the effect more cutting, more bruising more acidic after the ritual.

Conjure something up, de la Iglesia seems to be suggesting, and its shadow remains. ‘The Day of the Beast’ is deceptively entertaining; its subtext breaks ground by the end and hits you like a sledgehammer. It’s a textbook example of laughter in the dark – the laughter is nervous and the darkness is pitch black.

800 Bullets

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: films with numbers in the title / In category: 7 of 10 / Overall: 64 of 100

Carlos (Luis Castro) is a young boy whose businesswoman mother Laura (Carmen Maura) is more interested in lining up a deal for a theme park with an American conglomerate than spending any time with her son. Carlos’s father, a stuntman, died in an accident, the circumstances behind which Laura refuses to talk about, years before. When Carlos’s paternal grandmother tells him that her estranged husband Julian (Sancho Gracia) still works as a stuntman in Almeria, Carlos’s imagination is piqued.

On the pretext of attending a ski-ing holiday with school, Carlos (armed with his mother’s credit card) sets out to Almeria to find his grandfather – a man, he is told, who once worked with Clint Eastwood, George C. Scott and Raquel Welch. He fetches up at “Texas Hollywood” expecting it to be a still thriving film studio. What he finds instead is a crumbling wild west theme park at which Julian leads a ragtag group of wannabes, has-beens and never-were’s through their paces putting on shows for ever smaller groups of tourists.

Seeing beyond the shabbiness and Julian’s sometimes-friendly-sometimes-not rivalry with Cheyene (Angel de Anges) – as well as their shared disaffection with theme park owner and local mayor Don Mariano (Ramon Berea) – Carlos’s eyes are opened by their free-living, hard-drinking, rabble-rousing lifestyle. Bar room brawls? Check. Whoring? Check. Bad behaviour? Check. A huge raised middle finger to social norms and authority figures? Check check checkity check!

Naturally, when Laura finds him gone – and figures out very quickly when he’s ended up – the shit hits the fan. Not content with interrupting Julian’s wild west show and publically tearing him a new arsehole in front of the biggest crowd he’s played to in years, she responds to her business partner Scott (Eusebio Poncela)’s news that the theme park deal could be scuppered because the proposed site is off the market, by targeting Texas Hollywood. Suddenly out of work, enraged at Laura’s pettiness and facing his own guilt over his son’s death, Julian trades in his blanks for the 800 bullets of the title and takes the law into his own hands.

Alex de la Iglesia’s contemporary western is one of the most playful works in his filmography. It’s not quite as slapstick as ‘Accion Mutante’, but it has a wistful sense of nostalgia and a shabbily good-natured humanity which that film lacks. It’s also cynical and racy enough that the proceedings never get bogged down with sentiment. Take the scene where the proverbial hooker with the heart of gold Sandra (Yoima Valdes) catches Carlos peeking at a couple making out and decides to, ahem, give him his first lesson … a Hollywood director would have yelled “cut” before the scene had even begun. De la Iglesia, however, delivers a vignette that’s as touching as it is daring, never exploitative but beautifully observed.

‘800 Bullets’ moves effortlessly between perfectly nuanced moments of low-key character-driven drama and all-out comedic set-pieces. Early scenes deal out a melange of western movie clichés with the casual élan of a Mississippi riverboat gambler dealing cards. Later, de la Iglesia has huge fun incorporating these same tropes into a contemporary narrative. Flavio Martinez Labiano’s cinematography is widescreen poetry writ large, while Roque Baños’s soundtrack evokes every spaghetti western you’ve ever seen (the opening credits kick off to a blatantly cheeky steal from Ennio Morricone’s most famous theme).

A serious point threads through the frivolity. De la Iglesia captures a sense of society changing, the old ways becoming redundant and men outliving their times that is reminiscent of Peckinpah. A shot of a digger demolishing the gallows pole that’s one of the theme park’s attractions has a parallel in the earthmover crashing through Junior’s boyhood home in Peckinpah’s ‘Junior Bonner’.

De la Iglesia plays with the imagery and conventions of the western, but it’s plain to see he has a great love and respect for the genre. ‘800 Bullets’ is an exhilarating, often uproariously funny ode to the western in particular and the love of movies in general. Highly and unreservedly recommended.

The Oxford Murders

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: impulse buys / In category: 3 of 10 / Overall: 24 of 100


Why buy?

It was £3.00 (about $4.85).

And?

I’d enjoyed Guillermo Martinez’s novel – a short, highly readable and cleverly constructed mystery.

And?

A good cast, including the voluptuously appealing Leonor Watling.

The expectation

A cerebral murder mystery enlivened by a darkly European aesthetic and some classy performances.

The actuality

On paper, this had real potential: an intellectual murder mystery predicated on logic puzzles and the question of whether an absolute truth can ever be established; a shoal of red herrings; a double-bluff finale; an appealing young American actor paired up with a heavyweight British thesp; and a director (Alex de la Iglesia) who’s proved himself in diverse genres (horror, comedy, drama) and can generally be relied on to bring a touch of the macabre to the proceedings.

The end product, though, is infuriating. Nothing quite gels. Whereas Elijah Wood turns in a thoughtful, often understated performance as Martin, an earnest young student hoping to gain the mentorship of respected academic Arthur Seldom (John Hurt), and Leonor Watling proves luscious and sparky as Lorna, the nurse he gets involved with, the other acting performances are all over the place.

John Hurt lightly seasons the scenery and proceeds to chew with relish. Jim Carter, sporting a Colonel Blimp style moustache, hams it up as a police inspector so dim-witted he makes your average giallo copper look like Sherlock Holmes. A bizarrely cast Dominique Pinon seems to be in another film entirely, Anna Massey veers into Mrs Rochester territory and Burn Gorman, as a fellow student in competition with Martin, plays all his scenes as if locked into a stare-it-out contest.

Then there’s the demented cameo by Alex Cox. Yes, that Alex Cox. His character is an obsessive researcher who stumbles on a pattern of answers to logic problems given by educationally substandard test subjects. Realising upon interviewing them that their decidedly left-of-centre reasoning demonstrates an internal logic equal to that of a conventional or even intellectually brilliant response, his determination to further his studies in this area – to unearth some new and radical perspective on the human mind – leads him to the company of the insane and irreparable damage to his own capacity for reason.

It’s a powerhouse sequence: Cox gives it his all, while de la Iglesia, for the first and only time in the movie, really cuts loose in terms of imagery, immediacy and intensity. The pisser is, it turns out to be one of an inordinate number of red herrings. Granted, red herrings are part and parcel of the traditional murder mystery, but here they’re packed in like, er, sardines. Often inelegantly. Example: a scene in which a police psychologist speculates that the murderer is a repressed homosexual cuts to a scene where a minor character, drunk and with a chip on his shoulder, starts shouting, “I’m going to come out of the closet and arse-fuck the lot of you.” Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.

Indeed, with the film’s reliance on many archetypes of the genre (something the novel uses well, because it riffs on the literary form of the whodunnit in a way that’s pretty much impossible to translate to film), its pretentions to intellectualism and the Oxford setting, it’s hard not to imagine the ghost of Inspector Morse floating around in the background. And once that thought’s in your head, it’s hard to shake the notion that watching an episode of ‘Morse’ would constitute two hours better spent.

Still, ‘The Oxford Murders’ emerges as reasonably entertaining, the lovely Leonor is easy on the eye and there’s a sting in the tale that ensures the dreaming spires don’t get too dreamy. It’s average enough that there’s nothing to get excited about, yet accomplished enough that a harsher review would be bad sportsmanship.

Good buy/bad buy?

There’s probably another viewing in it, but ultimately this should have been a rental, not a purchase.

Auld acquaintance/new acquaintance: 2010 on The Agitation of the Mind

First and foremost, Happy New Year to everyone who reads this blog.

Last month's Peckinpah tribute was the biggest project I've undertaken on The Agitation of the Mind, but incredibly rewarding. It's the second retrospective I've undertaken, following an on-off consideration of Andrei Tarkovsky's filmography which spanned August - November 2009.

Now my thoughts are turning to another retrospective, maybe mid-year. But who? Running through a list of some of my favourite directors - Werner Herzog, Powell & Pressburger, the Coen brothers, Pedro Almodovar, Martin Scorsese, Michael Mann, Dario Argento, Luis Bunuel, Don Siegel, Raoul Walsh, Quentin Tarantino, John Carpenter, Hayao Miyazaki, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Luchino Visconti, Francis Ford Coppola, David Lynch, Sergio Leone, Stanley Kubrick, Steven Soderbergh, Takeshi Kitano and probably about two dozen others whom I'll kick myself for omitting five minutes after I post this - I realised that I've already written about at least one of their films, if not a whole bunch of them. The point of a retrospective is a chronological journey through an entire filmography.

I nixed some directors for either having such an extensive filmography (Woody Allen, Sidney Lumet) that between my LoveFilm account and my limited budget for DVD acquisitions it would take me the whole of this year to work my way through them, or such a variable output in terms of quality control that the pleasure of acquainting or reacquainting myself with a couple of outright great movies doesn't quite compensate for journeyman work proliferating elsewhere on the CV.

There were only really three directors of whom I have any degree of knowledge that fit the bill: fabulists Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Tim Burton, and occasional realist/occasional poetic-realist Neil Jordan. A couple of not-so-great entries on Jordan's filmography, but on the whole a filmmaker whose career it would be interesting to take a good, in-depth look at.

Then it occurred to me to throw the remit open to directors whose ouevre I'm not overly familiar with, but have seen enough of to convince me that there will be some degree of consistency. Alex de la Iglesia, whose 'Day of the Beast' and 'Perdita Durango' I remember loving when I first saw them at Nottingham's Broadway Cinema, and who recently contributed 'The Baby's Room' to a series of six tales of the supernatural made for Spanish TV and boasting superior production values, was an immediate choice. Chan-wook Park wasn't far behind - the 'Vengeance' trilogy and 'I'm a Cyborg But That's OK' are all superb. I've only seen two movies by F. Gary Gray - 'Set it Off' and 'Be Cool' - but both of them contained enough, well, cool to convince me that even if it means sitting through the critically mauled 'Law Abiding Citizen', Gray's a director worth watching.

I've seen nothing of Mira Nair's work beyond 'Monsoon Wedding', but damn if that film isn't good enough to make me want to correct this. True, 'Amelia' looks like flagrant Oscar-bait but who cares? A Mira Nair retrospective guarantees at least one modern classic as well as a good excuse to watch 'Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love' without my wife considering me a fully-paid-up member of the dirty raincoat brigade.

So, merrily appropriating an interactive/ask-the-audience approach used by Tim at Antagony & Ecstasy last year, the shortlist of Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Tim Burton, Neil Jordan, Alex de la Iglesia, Chan-wook Park, F. Gary Gray and Mira Nair is now the subject of the sidebar poll to the left. I'm leaving it open for three months, after which I'll clear my LoveFilm queue, prioritise the winner's filmography and whoever you the public decide upon will get the retrospective treatment beginning mid-2010.

In the meantime, I've let things slip on the Personal Faves front so I'll be working my way through the remainder of that list over the next few months. I've neglected the Hellraisers series - a celebration of the films of Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Peter O'Toole and Oliver Reed, inspired by Robert Sellers' splendidly scurrilous book of the same name - so amends will be made there, as well. Shots on the Blog, my summertime celebration of crime cinema which replaces the sadly now defunct festival that Broadway used to run, will return in July. Finally, in honour of my one and only - but, boy, do I mean it - New Year Resolution (get a new job and get the hell out of the place I'm currently working), I'll be launching a new series: Work Sucks, an overview of films which tell the truth about how utterly crap earning a living can be.

So: plenty of movies to get stuck into. Just give me a few days to recuperate from the Hogmanay hangover and the 30,000 words I expended during the Peckinpah tribute and it'll be full steam ahead on The Agitation of the Mind.