Suave v Mauve

ELEVATOR TO THE GALLOWS LOUIS MALLE 1958



A B&W sheen adorns Malle’s feature debut so crisply, cleanly and faintly, the film seems wrapped in silver gauze. Or maybe that’s the post-one-a.m. fairy dust settling in for the night at the corners of my eye sockets. Either way, this Elevator carried my sticky ass like a dream-cloud through 1.5 hours of gorgeous Gallic style and street smarts with enough patience to let me stay awake for it all. (Can’t say as much for my travelin’ companions…) At times out-Melvilling the dude himself, Malle’s proto-New Wave noir handles criminal logistics, ex.angst, menace, and rhythm all with equal, how you say, a-plomb.

After performing the perfect murder of sultry Florence’s husband, cool + collected killer Julien(1) hastily hustles back into his office hi-rise to undo a forehead-slappingly obvious and overlooked clue only to be trapped in the elevator on the way up. The torturous liftian purgatory of the corporate world, Julien’s impenetrable elevator suspends him between earthly freedom below and Catholic absolution—or at least concealment—above. It’s also a shitty alibi. When two sexy teens in love steal his running auto left on the street and take it on the lamb, convincing Moreau that Julien has fled with another dame as they whip by her in a coffee shop, you know this shit has to go bad. Malle cops James M. Cain riffing Shakespeare and by the end everyone incriminates everyone so hard Hope starts to look like a faded, rotting, Disney reel from the early 30s deemed too corny for the masses.

If icy French cigarette-kinda flicks aren’t normally your bag though, I should mention that Miles ‘diddy’ Davis does the soundtrack. Convinced?


1. That’s Jeanne Moreau, a cheeky Jean Wall, and Maurice Ronet respectively.


Where’d I See It?
MY ‘LIVING’ ROOM [chi-town]



INDIA MATRI BHUMI ROBERTO ROSSELLINI 1959



On the opposite end of the (hardly) color(ed) spectrum exists Rossellini’s recently (almost) restored, re-released, rediscovered, reappraised ‘masterwork’ India…, which looks about as crude as that eye crust I mentioned in the above spew. I got a glimpse of a screen capture on the internets that implies the film should be full-color (see! above!), if not quite of the Peter Maxian ‘quality.’ This recent overhaul of a purportedly tattered film however, is sticky as dog vomit and just as murky. Visually speaking, a good part of the really light stuff is completely washed out to shallow blanco and the rest is either dusty lavender or a couple shades of mustard. (Stone-ground for the curious.)

To sum plots, I heard it starts off with a really cheesy narrated travelogue bit summarizing something ‘r Other as the camera flies over Bombay. But I missed that part, somewhat on purpose, and jumped right into the (mostly) fiction. Mostly because it’s presented as documentary but I guess the director gave the actors lines and parts and scenes even though (I think) they were mostly living and doing in their normal environs. So here’s the line-up:

1. Young man works as an elephant handler. Picks up local hottie.
2. 30something dad slaves at an open pit moving rocks. Watches a corpse get incinerated. Speaks poeticism. Yells at wife in film’s funniest sequence.
3. Stubborn codger vs. ravenous tiger.
4. Cute monkey’s master dies. Said simian moves to city for a new scene.

There’s some really nice fluidity between the transitions of these four parts and all stories seem to contain some kind of cohesive logic (besides the obvious Man & Nature theme) but damned if I missed the narrative “morphing” that the Chi-town Reader’s Rosenbaum was flogging. There’s a beautiful kind of flow and pull going on though, that’s for sure.

Referring back to the previous debate, in the end, the film kind of seems like neither fic nor doc. It plays exactly like a film world, just like a good film should. Not so much documentation as hallucination then…due in no small part to the aid of a ferociously dirty soundtrack. Birdcalls smother drumbeats become dying baby cries hump monkey legs yelp thick fucking jungle noise all over the place. U C? And the theater (scusa, theatre) played it loud too. Damn surprised there weren’t any walkouts. I mean, the film is one of those enigmatic ones. And fuck, ‘not much happens.’

But it’s cool, because there are a million good scenes, like when all of the elephant handlers wash out all the pachyderms’ wrinkles or the vultures circle the dead man or the tiger prowls around looking like Shere Khan with a bone to pick. It shouldn’t all Be so magical, but somehow it Is.

The sound's thick and crunchy and that’s how it looks too. It doesn’t even matter that it’s in India or that it’s shot by a Frenchie. Could be, someone scraped the back of your lungs and performed a really cool puppet show behind the gooey screen? You wouldn’t know the difference.

If you happen to live in a ‘major’ city, this will likely come your way and you should probably catch it. Just so you know.


Where’d I See It?
CHOPIN THEATRE [chi-town]

The Bats Have Left The Bell Tower

SOMBRE PHILIPPE GRANDRIEUX 1998



No doubt, the first 5-10 minutes are absolute balls filmmaking. Fever dreaming, life in hell, terribly original homemade horror. Grandrieux uses the camera as an actual third character, an unreliable narrator, provocateur, and rapist. It looks dark and shabby and nakedly video. It's ugly, plain n simple. When not puppeteering for children, our protagonist moonlights as a serial killer with an interest in prostitutes. It's cold and psychologically bereft of insight. It's nearly perfect.

Cue the emaciated remains of Elina Lowensohn as an unsinkable redeemer-love object, and the film spreads its seems to reveal a soupy mix of utterly conventional sympathetic killer plot constantly interrupted by out-of-focus visual experimentation. Even Grandrieux's dedication to darkness wanes as the film plods on. Literally, the initial unrelenting murkiness is traded for a painfully eclectic variety of visual schema. Metaphorically, theme and tone gradually turn reflective, associative, psychological, intimate, and character-focused, as the horribly base mad-hell avant-porn of the film's first breaths is rendered predictably human and conflicted by the end. In short, horror is described, not exploited. A shame.

It doesn't help that the film is an absolute mess, over-filled with an amateur's ideas and as easily seduced by cheap "artsy" camera tricks as by any sense of coherent rhythm. I can't help but feel that for all the narrative "ambiguity" and visual flair, the effect is of an overall less experimental film. Upon finishing it I was reminded of how much greater was Lars Von Trier's overlooked The Element of Crime--a postmodern crime film equally as enthralled with its own motivations--for establishing a cruel consistency and letting it subvert itself, rather than yank the viewer every which way and call it a maze.

After too long in this murky hall of mirrors, one starts to see stars: Gaspar Noe fakes Dogme 95 in a mash-up of Bruno Dumont fucking Stan Brakhage to the tune of credit card commercial parodies and bad pop anglais.
And nary a blink is blunk when Grandrieux lamely re-re-appropriates Bauhaus' "Bela Lugosi's Dead" (1) for an epic post-club scene reminiscent of badly lit and under-rehearsed Blair Witch-era Cassavetes. But excessive referentiality is hardly this film's original sin, as allusions are only there if you will them. Sombre only looks like bits of so much better cinema because it commits to nothing but a constant flurry of nearly good-to-great ideas.

All of this is not to say that bits and pieces won't stick with most viewers. There's so much attempted here that at least some of it is jarringly effective. Eye-rolling scenes of true idiocy rub shoulders with disarming half-genius. And thankfully casual brutality remains throughout the film as unpredictable as it is constant. At the very least, there's real promise on display, and Sombre is certainly worth a look. More rewarding, I hope, should be the only film Grandrieux directed since, 2002's La Vie Nouvelle.

In the school of narrative ellipses unfortunately, the end product of this film is more Lynne Ramsay than Claire Denis. Or mostly milk. No chocolat.


1. A song far more memorably abused in the opening epileptic fit of Tony Scott's icy vampire debut, The Hunger.