Trouble Every Day (2001, Claire Denis) is a film about the desire to transgress. The vampire's desire to penetrate the skin is a grisly but fitting metaphor for Denis' camera, marked by its sensuality, its tactile desire to break through the image and actually touch its contents. There's an overwhelming primal urgency, a visceral carnality, trembling underneath the surface for most of the film, but twice unleashed in all its terrifying glory. Beatrice Dalle, wide-eyed, mouth contorted, speaking in grunts and moans, oozing this savage animal magnetism that she cannot contain, gives an incredible physical performance, among the most erotic and grotesque creations ever to appear on screen. Biting and clawing her way through the skin, she is like an expression of pure, no holds barred jouissance, contrasting with Vincent Gallo's relatively tame vampire, able to compartmentalize his own irrationality. This film is deeply disturbing, not only for what it shows, but because its tender, violent close-ups arouse our own desire for transgression and repel us at the same time.
How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (1967, David Swift) is an amusing musical-comedy with a deliciously 1960s look and feel and an exaggerated "critique" of the corporate environment. It's also spectacularly, gleefully sexist, so much so that it's hard not to ogle at its sheer audacity in portraying women in the office as ripe for the picking. It's a satire, sure, but it's a very light satire that really celebrates its subject, marvels at it more than criticizes it. Officially, as the cringe-inducing song goes, a secretary is not a toy, but the show's lack of bitterness, the softness of its critique, and its blindness to the systematic plights of women suggests otherwise and that makes it difficult to appreciate this as the entertainment it wants to be without suffering a guilty conscience.
The Gold Rush (1925, Charles Chaplin) finds that perfect balance of humor and pathos, that is to say of humor in pathos, for much of the comedy here comes at the expense of Chaplin's meek, impoverished, hungry and even lovelorn tramp. Not all of it -- in fact, one of the funniest moments is found right at the beginning, where documentary footage of dangerous looking expeditions through snowy wilderness sets up the Tramp's introduction, walking obliviously with his club-footed gait across a very phony-looking mountain pass, where the sheer artifice of the set becomes an almost postmodern self-parody -- but most of the humor derives from humiliating himself, in other words playing the clown, like the celebrated Chaplin-eats-his-shoe scene or the painfully funny sequence in which he joyously rips apart all the pillows and does somersaults in the fluff without realizing the girl he thinks he has a date with is still watching. Beyond the gags, the narrative never overstays its welcome, knowing just how long to hold a sequence before switching gears and introducing a new character, and Chaplin's mimetic performance is utterly perfect. This may not have the emotional swell that carries us away at the finale of City Lights, but this reconstructed version, which restores the spirit of the original 1925 cut, feels flawless and endearing.
Topic: What was the last movie you watched? (Read 1634418 times)
