Foreign Film February: The Ear (1970)

the ear

I’ve been a little slack in my Foreign Film February watching. It seems like I’m always slack these days in whatever I’ve decided is the movie theme of the month. I still like the idea of the themes, but some days (most days) I like to watch whatever I’m in the mood for.

I do love foreign language films, but they can be difficult to watch. I don’t mean difficult thematically or that the style is obtuse or whatever (though that can be true), butthe act of reading subtitles creates extra work. Normally, I don’t mind that little bit of work, but increasingly my eyes are going bad. I used to have excellent eyesight but as I get older that is less and less true. These days they are dry and tired. That little extra work of reading what I’m watching is sometimes just too much. When I watch a film at the end of a day I want to relax, to rest, not have to give my eyes a workout.

Weekends are better and this is when I watched The Ear. It is a Czechoslovakian film that was made in 1970 but was banned by the Communists until the Iron Curtain fell in 1989. It was part of the Czechoslovakian New Wave, and I realize I don’t think I’ve seen any of those films. I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen a movie from Czechoslovakia. This is why I love Foreign Film February.

A married couple, Anna (Jirina Bohdalová) and Ludvik (Radoslav Brzobohatý) return home from a political party to find their gate unlocked and their front door open. The power is out and the phone doesn’t work.

Ludvik becomes increasingly convinced he is about to be purged by the government. He is a mid-level bureaucrat and in flashback, we see that his boss and several others were disappeared at the party. His wife, drunk and belligerent, continually speaks loudly about things she ought to keep quiet about.

It is well known by everybody that the government is listening. The omnipresent “Ear” has been placed in various rooms in everybody’s house. Rumors abound about it. They say that they won’t listen to you in the bathroom or the kitchen (but they love to listen to what you do in the bedroom).

They see men standing outside the house across the street. Ludvik begins flushing notes he took at various meetings. Things that might not look good to the new administration. When the toilet clogs he burns them, destroying his toilet seat in the process.

As the night rolls on the tensions increase. As do the cracks in their marriage. It is clear they haven’t been happy in a long time. Anna doesn’t seem to understand how serious it all is. She yells at the ear and continues drinking. Ludvik is convinced he’s going to prison or worse.

Reminiscent of 1984, The Conversation, and even Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf, The Ear is an intense, meticulously crafted bit of paranoia. The stark black-and-white photography increases the fear by not allowing any warmth in. In the flashback sequences, we often get POV shots from Ludvik’s perspective which increases the paranoia as really we’re seeing what he sees from his memory, and he’s increasingly convinced things are as bad as can be.

It ends almost ironically. I won’t spoil it, but it is a slap of reality as to how truly insane totalitarian governments can be.

Foreign Film February: Battleship Potemkin (1925)

battleship potemkin

There are some films that loom so large in a cinephile’s imagination that they are almost impossible to watch. These are films that have been so well-praised, that are so influential, so important that they sometimes seem less like movies than cinematic gods.

Or something. I’m getting a little carried away with my bloviations. Battleship Potemkin is considered one of the greatest movies ever made. It is famed for its use of editing, creating montages to elicit an emotional response. Director Sergei Eisenstein believed that you could juxtapose two unrelated images and create an entirely new idea. What he did in Battleship Potemkin was revolutionary and those techniques are still used today.

The “Odessa Steps” sequence is one of the most influential scenes in all of cinema. It has been paid homage to, and outright stolen from, and parodied countless times. I first heard about it from Brian DePalma’s film The Untouchables which has a very similar sequence involving a baby carriage on some steps.

All of this hung over my head years before I ever watched it. I put off watching it because its reputation was too great, its influence too wide for me to ever be able to sit down and take it all in.

To be honest, I really just thought it was going to be dull. I’m learning to appreciate silent films, but it is a struggle.

Turns out Battleship Potemkin is a real banger. It is fast-paced, full of incident and action, and an utterly enjoyable watch.

It is about a historical event in which some sailors revolted against the officers of the ship and took it over. They then port in Odessa where the citizens celebrate the liberation of the ship and bring them food, all before being slaughtered by the Army. It was an important part of the 1905 Revolution and the film was made as a bit of propaganda celebrating the 20th anniversary of the event.

It is propaganda. It is utterly designed to make you side with the revolution and ultimately the Communist State. I find that modern reviews of the film ultimately fall on where one’s political views are. None of that matters to me. It is a magnificent, wonderful film with never a dull moment. It is a movie I’d show to people who have never seen a silent movie.

Foreign Film February: Fox And His Friends (1975)

fox and his friends

Rainer Werner Fassbinder was a German screenwriter, dramatist, actor, and director. He was one of the driving forces of the New German Cinema. He reminds me a bit of Lou Reed as he was prolific in his art, a counter-cultural icon, and an absolute terror in his life.

He is just as known for his incredible amount of output (in his short 37 years of life he wrote/directed some 40 films plus plays and television series) as for his bountiful drug use, alcohol consumption, and sexual liaisons. That’s not to mention his controlling, abusive relationships with just about everyone.

His films run the gamut from experimental art-house fare, to ribald comedies, and confrontational crime thrillers, but he is most known for a series of elegantly styled, incredibly tender melodramas made in the vein of those old Douglas Sirk films. It’s like how Lou Reed could make both Metal Machine Music and “Pale Blue Eyes.”

Not all of his films are great, or even particularly good. I’ve not seen all of them, only a small portion really, but I’ve seen most of his “important” works. I added to that stack just the other day with Fox and His Friends.

Fassbinder also stars in this one as Franz Bieberkopf an uneducated, working class gay man. He begins the film working as Fox the Talking Head in a low-rent circus. When the owner of the circus is arrested on charges of tax evasion Franze starts hustling. He picks up Karlheinz Böhm a wealthy, sophisticated art dealer. Before their tryst Franz makes Max stop off and purchase a lottery ticket. Franze buys a lottery ticket every week and he’s just sure he’ll win this time.

In fact he does win this time, a whopping 500,000 Deutche Marks. When Max’s friend Eugen (Peter Chatel) learns of this windfall he immediately goes from berating Max for introducting Franz into their group of friends to turning Franz into is lover.

Eugen is handsome, well educated, and sophisticated, but he’s also broke. His father’s paper company has hit hard times and if they don’t do something fast it will go bust.

Pretty quickly we realize (though Franz doesn’t) that Eugen is only interested in Franz for his money. He cajoles Franz into letting his company borrow 100,000 Marks, then gets him to buy an expensive apartment and furnish it with expensive things. Meanwhile when they go out in public Eugen is constnatly berating Franz for his lack of education and unsophistication.

You don’t have to have a crystal ball to know how it will all end. Fassbinder wasn’t a great actor, but he gives Franz a deep meloncholy. It is as if he knows that Eugen is taking advantage of him, but at first he doesn’t care because it is giving him access to something he’s never had before – status – and then he doesn’t know how to get out of it.

A couple of times Franz tries to assert himself, he thinks he has an ace in his hand, but always Eugen outsmarts him, and makes him feel even less.

All of this is good. But what I find fascinating about the film is it is a snapshot into a certain type of gay culture, specifically from 1970s Germany, but perhaps universally, that I don’t have access to. As a straight man who grew up in a rural, deeply conservative part of America that culture simply did not exist in my circles. There may have been a gay underground in Tulsa when I was growing up in the late 1980s/early 1990s but I certainly didn’t know about it.

Even now when my social circles have broadened, I’m not a part of any gay scene. I’m not really a part of any straight scene. Or any scene, really. I could use a friend.

So finding this scene detailed is interesting to me. Its like watching any old movie that has a lot of exteriors in a city. You get a snapshot of what was like at that specific time.

The characters are explicitly gay in the film, something surpriisng from a Germany film from the 1970s. It was controvesial at the time. It would be controversial if it was released in America today. But interestingly nobody inside the film makes a big deal about their sexuality. True, it mostly takes place inside gay bars, gay bathhouses and the like, but still there isn’t a hing of homophobia anywhere.

Fox and His Friends isn’t my favorite Fassbinder film, but it is an interesting one and a fascinating time capsule.

Foreign Film February: The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967)

young girls of rochefort poster

Jaques Demy was one of the great French directors. He was an instrumental part of the French New Wave. Early in his career, he wrote and directed two back-to-back musicals, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), and The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967). They are considered essential classics. Some many months ago my wife wanted to watch The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and so we did.

I didn’t love it.

I like musicals, more or less, but they aren’t my favorite. That’s not a genre I turn to all that often. I once tried to make musicals my theme of the month and I only watched about three of them.

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is a type of musical that has very little dialogue. Almost everything is sung. I’m not a lyrics guy so musicals are always a little problematic in that I tend to miss plot points when they are sung. When everything is sung I get lost pretty quickly. That’s apparently even true when they sing in French and there are subtitles.

But also there weren’t any showstoppers. The music was nice but there wasn’t a single song that left me humming after it was over. There was no “Oh What a Beautiful Mornin'” or “Sit Down You’re Rocking the Boat” or whatever.

It was a perfectly fine film, but I’m not sure what all the fuss is about.

When my wife wanted to watch The Young Girls of Rochefort I was none too excited, but I relented because I love her and I enjoy watching films with her.

I liked this one a lot better. There is quite a bit of actual dialogue which allowed me to follow the story more closely. The story itself is more interesting to me. It is light and frothy and a delight. It follows two sisters (real-life siblings Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Dorléac) as they look for love in the titular coastal town of France. Little do they know their true love is closer than they think.

Much like Umbrellas, The Young Girls of Rochefort is full of bright, pastel colors, and the costumes are very 1960s and very beautiful. It feels like this one is full of real songs too. Songs you’ll leave the theater singing. It also has Gene Kelly who is always a delight.

Loads of people love The Umbrellas of Cherbourg so I probably need to revisit it at some point. I suspect knowing what I’m getting into will help me enjoy its charms more. But for now I tip my hat to The Young Girls of Rochefort and delight in it fully.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: House (1977)

house poster

Steven Spielberg’s Jaws was a massive worldwide hit in 1975. Naturally, studios from all over tried to find ways to replicate that success. The Japanese studio Toho was no exception and they hired Nobuhiko Obayashi to write something Jaws-like. What he came up with was one of the strangest, incomprehensible films I’ve ever seen.

The basic plot, if you want to call it that, is actually pretty simple. A teenaged girl nick-named Gorgeous (Kimiko Ikegami) (most of the characters in this film have goofy names like Kung Fu, Fantasy, and Sweet) invites several of her friends to spend summer vacation at her Aunt’s (Yōko Minamida) house. Strange things begin happening almost immediately once they arrive. It seems the house is haunted.

But any type of plot outline will do nothing to explain just how completely nuts this film is. Criterion describes it by saying that it’s like if an episode of Scooby Doo were directed by Mario Bava. I’d add that it’s a psychedelic cartoon turned into a live-action nightmare.

There is a floating head that bites one girl in the butt checks, a piano that eats people, an evil cat, a murderous futon, and so much more. The sets’ backdrops are gorgeous and intentionally designed to call attention to their fakeness. Obayashi uses fisheye lenses, superimposed images, freeze-frames, matte paintings, periodical animation, and every other cinematic trick at his disposal.

It feels both thrown together and tightly scripted. It is more comedic than horrifying, and more bizarre than thematically satisfying, but it truly is a film worth watching.

It is one of those films I’ve been hearing about for ages. The Criterion Collection got ahold of it a few years back and it’s been talked about ever since. But for one reason or another, I kept putting off watching it. I like weird films but I feel like I need to be in the mood for them, and I rarely feel like I’m really in the mood. But I needed a foreign language horror film and was struggling to find something so I put it on.

I’m so glad I did.

Foreign Film February: Smiles of a Summer Night (1955)

smiles of a summer night

Several years ago, probably during one of their semi-annual 50% off sales, I bought the Criterion Collection’s big boxed set of Ingmar Bergman’s movies. Ingmar Bergman is a titan of cinema. He’s widely considered one of the world’s greatest film directors, having helmed many of the greatest movies ever made.

His films are intellectual, somber, sometimes experimental, and almost always challenging. He made movies about life and death, spirituality, and religion (he made an entire trilogy from the Silence of God). As such his films are often difficult to watch. I love many of his films and yet this boxed set has set on my shelf mostly gathering dust. Bergman films are a bit like “Dark Stars” from 1969 – infinitely rewarding, but you’ve got to be in the right head space and you’ve definitely got to pay attention to what they are trying to do.

Since it is Foreign Film February I knew I wanted to watch a Bergman (I think I said the same thing last year and didn’t manage to do it). The Criterion set doesn’t present the films chronologically, but rather as one might if you were creating a film festival for the director’s works. Previously, I randomly picked films out of the collection to watch but this time I decided to begin at the beginning, the Collection’s “Opening Night” selection, Smiles of a Summer Night (1955).

Smiles was made at a difficult time in Bergman’s life. His previous two films had not done well and the studio essentially told him if his next film wasn’t a success he was done. His personal life was in turmoil and, according to the liner notes included in the Criterion set, he decided he was either going to make a new film or commit suicide.

So, Ingmar Bergman, a director famed for his sober, austere films about the meaning of life, during one of the lowest points in his life made a light comedy.

And honest-to-God it is funny.

When I read Bergman had made a comedy I figured it would be more like Shakespearian comedies, meaning that it wasn’t a tragedy – that it didn’t end in the death of everybody. But no, it is a laugh-out-loud, full of clever wordplay and incident comedy.

It is a comedy of manners. It reminded me of the works of Moliere or Oscar Wilde or some other writer I studied in school and have long since forgotten.

The dialogue is clever and droll, and Bergman uses such a light touch that one sometimes has to stop and wonder where all this fancifulness came from.

Fredrik Egerman (Gunnar Björnstrand) is a successful, respected, middle-aged lawyer. He’s married to the much younger Anne (Ulla Jacobsson). It is his second marriage, his first wife died some years ago. Before he met Anne he was involved in a torrid romance with Desiree (Eva Dahlbeck), a famous actress.

When he learns that Desiree is in town starring in a show, he gets two tickets and decides to take his wife. But before they go they take a nap together (as one does). While sleeping he reaches over and caresses Anne. She’s pretty excited by this because even though they’ve been married for a couple of years they’ve never had sex. He doesn’t want to spoil her or some such nonsense. So he’s caressing her and getting all sexy and stuff and then he says her name, and how much he loves her. Except the name he says isn’t Anne, it’s Desiree.

Oops.

They go to the theater, but Anne is understandably upset. When she realizes that the star is named Desiree and that her husband keeps looking at her through the opera glasses, she feigns illness and goes home. Once he’s settled her into bed he slips back out and goes to the theater.

They go back to their place where they barb, jab, and argue over why they broke up in the first place. Frederik solicits help from Desiree for his marital strife, but it is clear they both still have some feelings for each other.

Then Count Carl-Magnus Malcolm (Jarl Kulle) shows up. He’s Desiree’s current lover and he’s insanely jealous. He’s also married. To a girl named Charlotte Malcolm (Margit Carlqvist). At one point without a bit of irony, he utters the line “I can tolerate my wife’s infidelity, but if anyone touches my mistress, I become a tiger.”

Naturally, the five of them wind up together at a dinner party before the film ends. Plenty of mix-ups, double entendres, and verbal jousts ensue. It really is astounding just how light and effervescent this film is. It is hard to believe that the same man who directed this film would go on to direct The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries just two years later.

That isn’t to say everything is carefree and happy in this film, it is still a Bergman after all. There is a duel in which two characters play Russian Roulette. And one of the film’s best gags comes at the end of a suicide attempt.

One can’t help but wonder what cinema would be like had Bergman gone on to make delightful romantic comedies. Who knows what else we might have gotten. Instead, we got a plethora of serious dramatic masterpieces. I’ll certainly take that any day of the week.

Foreign Film February: Encounter of the Spooky Kind (1980)

encounter of the spooky kind

I recently resubscribed to The Criterion Channel. It is without a doubt my favorite streaming service, but I have a tendency to put it on hold for a month or two. There are just so many other services and various other ways in which to watch shows and movies that I just can’t afford to subscribe to everything all the time.

One of the many things I love about The Criterion Channel is that it not only has some of the world’s greatest cinema on there – from Kurosawa to Bergman, Fellini to Welles, but it also has tons of oddball, weirdo films as well. The people behind it are just as comfortable with the arthouse as with the grindhouse.

Case in point I watched this film this weekend on the channel. Encounter of the Spooky Kind is a silly martial arts movie that blends low-brow comedy with horror with lots of crazy kung fu thrown in for good measure.

It was co-written, directed by and stars Sammo Hung as Bold Cheung a rikshaw driver. One day while working he discovers two men looking through the peephole of his house, excited that a couple is making love inside. Bold Cheung barges in, narrowly missing the man with whom his wife is having an affair.

That man is actually Master Tam (Huang Ha) Bold Cheung’s boss. Afraid that he will be found out and that Bold Cheung will have his revenge on him, Master Tam vows to murder Bold Cheung. But he cannot do it outright as he might get caught and be put in prison.

Luckily Master Tam knows a sorcerer. He tricks Bold Cheung into spending two nights inside a haunted house. There the sorcerer has control over a hopping vampire (seriously, apparently Chinese folklore involves living corpses that move around by hopping and sucking out your life force).

Luckily for Bold Cheung the sorcerer’s apprentice doesn’t think they should use their powers for evil purposes and he sets out to help Bold Cheung to survive.

There’s a bit of voodoo, some more vampires, and even a magic undergarment thrown into the mix. It is all very silly (a little too silly for my tastes) and it runs a bit too long, but mostly it’s a lot of fun. The kung fu is excellent which more than makes it worthwhile to watch.

Foreign Film February: Re/Member (2022)

rememberposter

By now we all know the Groundhog Day Drill. Someone for some reason gets stuck in a time loop. The same day is played out for them over and over again. To stop it they must do something – make a life change, find a killer, stop a war, etc. whatever. There were time loop films before Groundhog Day, but that film perfected the concept and countless films have tried to repeat its success in various ways.

Re/Memory takes the basic concept and mixes it with a slasher horror film (something that has become something of a sub-sub-genre in itself) and a Japanese high school melodrama. Results are very mixed.

One of the many strange things the film does is that it kind of pushes many of the time loop elements to the side in order to focus on the relationship of its characters.

Set in a typical Japanese high school six students find themselves reliving the same day over and over. Eventually, they realize their task is to find the mutilated body parts of a young girl who was murdered many years ago. The ghost of the girl haunts them every day at midnight, stalking them until they are all dead, and the day resets.

But it only happens after midnight. The day begins in the morning and they each go about their regular day – attending school, having lunch, playing sports, etc. Then at midnight, they are transported to the chapel inside the school where they must find those body parts before getting killed. Apparently, the various arms and legs aren’t available during the day.

It is so strange to see them acting like normal high school kids with all of their romances and social clicks only to find them at night running for their lives. The film never deals with the fact that being murdered every night and watching your friends get killed would be incredibly traumatic for these kids.

These six kids are all lonely in one way or another. Our main protagonist, Asuka (Kanna Hashimoto) is considered a loner. No one at school talks to her and they act like she’s some sort of freak. Some of the others are outcasts as well, but some seem to be popular kids. They have friends, but deep down they are just as lonely.

Through battling a vengeful ghost every night they become a tight group of friends. It is like The Breakfast Club, but with a vengeful, murderous ghost. This is handled fairly poorly. For the first two days, all the other kids still shun Asuka, but suddenly on the third morning, they treat her like a bestie. And she’s suddenly no longer this super shy kid, but outgoing and friendly.

The horror aspects aren’t handled any better. The film tends to skip over the hunting for the body parts scenes. The kids do eventually learn to handle the hunt systematically, but there is very little actual searching for anything. In the same way, it skips over most of the real terror of the situation. There are maybe one or two moments where the kids are hiding from the monster, hoping to escape its clutches, but mostly the film focuses on the capture. There is plenty of violence and (poorly rendered) CGI gore.

I was more interested in the daytime scenes, but I’ve always been a sucker for high school movies. If you are looking for a horror take on the classic Ground Hog Day scenario there are many other better choices. I recommend Happy Death Day.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Noroi: The Curse (2005)

noroi the curse

For a very brief period in the early 2000s, Americans became obsessed with a certain type of Japanese horror (or J-Horror as it was known). We’d spent the 1980s watching slasher films, but by the 1990s those had grown stale. We didn’t seem to know what should take its place. So much so that in 1996 Wes Craven directed Scream which was essentially a self-aware slasher with hot TV stars.

Whereas American horror tended to be filled with horrendous violence and jump scares, Japanese horror at the time was more foreboding. The violence was toned down and in its place was psychological horror and a brooding atmosphere.

The Blair Witch Project introduced Americans to the found-footage genre in 1999. That movie, which is about some independent filmmakers making a documentary about a mythological witch that is supposed to haunt rural Maryland. They go missing and the film is supposedly made up of their leftover footage. It is a mix of their professionally made documentary footage and a lot of handheld camera work created by the actual actors living for a few weeks in the woods. It created a craze of found-footage horror.

Noroi: The Curse is a mixture of J-Horror and found footage films. It begins with a voiceover telling us about the life of Masafumi Kobayashi (Jin Muraki) who was a journalist investigating paranormal activity across Japan. Recently his house burned to the ground, killing his wife, but his body was not recovered and he is presumed missing.

He left behind a series of videotapes full of his research. The film presents those tapes along with a series of newsreels and television footage of various occult specials and the like. It all creates a sort of documentary approach to this fictional story.

At first, his investigative reports seem unrelated. There is a young girl with psychic abilities. An actress (Marika Matsumoto) sees something spooky in a graveyard and collapses. Another woman hears a baby crying next door, but the family’s children are all much older.

Slowly all of these various stories connect and point to a demon that was released from a village that is now buried under water after a dam was built. It seems to have possessed someone and is causing nearly everyone connected to the story to die under mysterious circumstances.

The violence is mostly off-screen and there is essentially zero gore. Tonally it is filled with an eeriness and the creepy soaks right through. I’m not a big fan of hand-held camerawork in movies as it tends to make me dizzy. There is some of that here, but mostly it’s used quite effectively. The camera is framed so that there are often strange little things in the background or on the edges of the screen. It makes you pay attention.

Like a lot of found footage films in which the characters seem to always be carrying a camera, there are times when I wanted to scream at them to put the camera down and run, or fight, or at least help that person getting pummelled by a demon. At least here our hero isn’t the one carrying the camera, he’s actually got a cameraman (working for his documentary) to do that for him.

The film uses the various footage in interesting ways. The way in which it moves between stuff shot by Kobayashi, and various television crews keeps the movie moving in a manner that other found footage films cannot keep up with.

I was a huge fan of J-horror during its initial craze, but I somehow missed this one. I’m glad I found it tonight as it is a good one.

Foreign Film February: Welcome to the Sticks (2008)

welcome to the sticks

I’ve been a bit slack in my foreign language movie-watching over the last week, but I wanted to end the month with something fun. Welcome to the Sticks was written, directed and stars Danny Boon, but he’s not the lead.

That role goes to Kad Merad who plays a postal worker who is desperate to get transferred somewhere on the southern coast of France. Instead, he is transferred to a small town in the far north of the country.

The north of France is to the French like the deep south is to many Americans. He fears that it will be incredibly cold, that the people will speak with terrible accents and everyone will be rude and backward and rather stupid.

It turns out that the climate is pleasant and the people are quite nice. The trouble is he left his wife and young son back in the south. When he visits them on the weekend she is so ready for him to be miserable up there he doesn’t know how to tell her he likes it. This causes a lot of sitcom or romantic comedy-style shenanigans.

There is also some business over Danny Boon’s characters’ love life and a lot of other very silly stuff. It is very breezy and very goofy and it makes me laugh. A lot. I’ve seen it before, we own it on DVD actually. I’ll no doubt see it again.

It probably won’t work for everyone and there is a lot that gets lost in translation. A lot of the gags have to do with the difference in language. In the north, they speak a dialect of French and there are a lot of jokes about the Southerner not understanding anyone or misunderstanding certain words.

I speak a little French but not enough to watch a French film without subtitles. Jokes about how two completely different words sound a lot alike are difficult to translate so I expect a lot of the humor here doesn’t work that well for non-French speakers. I was helped out by the fact that my wife is a French speaker and she helped get the jokes across. Also, her laugh is infectious.

But there are also loads of other jokes that don’t need translating. I’m surprised an American studio hasn’t adapted it for the USA. It would work well with someone from the coast of some New England state moving to Alabama.