Three Spectacular Films Make a Post: Dive Beneath The Surface

The Lure aka Córki dangingu (2015): Apart from the bare facts, Agnieszka Smoczynska’s film is one of those films which should be watched rather than written up. Fortunately, the basic facts should make this one enticing to exactly the sort of people who will enjoy it. So let’s just say this is a modern Polish retelling of the tale of the little mermaid as a musical taking place in a sleazy nightclub, with some fantastic musical numbers, eye-popping and often deep production design, some gore, nudity both sexy and grotesque, incredible acting particularly by mermaids Marta Mazurek and Michalina Olsuanska, one eye for the tragic and the other eye for the comical, feminist undertones carried by a director who somehow makes this stuff look like an aesthetic whole. If that sounds like the sort of thing you like, this is going to be a thing you adore. I, at least, found myself like that living cliché – the viewer glued to the screen.

The Love Witch (2016): Anna Biller’s rather more obviously feminist film using the perfectly emulated and enhanced ideal of late 60s/early 70s exploitation movies to explore concepts of love, desire, the male and female gaze in practice, and the pressures of societal expectations on women via the murderous adventures of one Elaine (Samantha Robinson) and her habit to first magically seduce and then murder men when they can’t live up to her (or really, her society’s) ideals of love or manliness would probably make a fantastic double feature, seeing as it shares The Lure’s deep aesthetic unity, though its aesthetics are very different ones. Both films also share the fact that they’re pretty incredible in a every respect.

I say the film emulates and enhances the ideal of the exploitation movies whose model it uses, but really, no actual exploitation movie ever looked this consciously constructed, seldom this intense in their use of colours, this intoxicatingly beautiful. Nor did these films usually use their slightly off acting styles as intelligent as lead Samantha Robinson and the rest of the cast do here. If that (and some of the reception) make the film sound insufferably camp – it isn’t insufferable all. There’s irony, there’s distance, but this is a film that is serious about its aesthetics and its message even though it also can see the joke in the former; it’s just not actually joking about it.

All the President’s Men (1976): Saying that the most famous film of Alan J. Pakula’s paranoia trilogy is a timely film to watch is so obvious I’m a bit embarrassed to even have mentioned it. However, it stands to mention how downright optimistic the film looks from today, seeing as it does suggest people in power will actually eventually be held accountable one way or the other, and features at least parts of the free press actually interested in truth more than access to the political feedings trough.


On the filmmaking side, it’s a brilliant film, calmly told, with an undertone of dread under the surface of an investigative tale that meets its audience at eye level and clearly has no doubt viewers will be able to follow it, without feeling the need to exposit or over-explain, or to add much overt drama to the proceedings, because all that’s in the story if you care to look closely. Add performances of Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman (who wins at reaction shots) in their prime and a delightful turn by Jason Robards and you have a pretty damn perfect film.