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.

In short: Caboblanco (1980)

1948. A bunch of characters of dubious morals and shifting allegiances – as played by Charles Bronson, Jason Robards and his ever disappearing and reappearing bad German accent, Dominique Sanda, Fernando Ray and Simon MacCorkindale – are after a ship full of Nazi gold that was sunk somewhere close to the deeply corrupt Peruvian town of Cabo Blanco. Shenanigans, melodramatic outbreaks, and random stuff happens.

This is one of the many Charles Bronson films directed by J. Lee Thompson, but it certainly isn’t one of their best team-ups. The film’s main problem is the screenplay. The script doesn’t really seem to know what it wants, and throws in all kinds of adventure and spy movie tropes without ever bothering to do much with them for longer than one scene or so. Which is too bad, for some of these scenes taken for themselves are rather effective or entertaining; they just don’t add up to a whole.

Parts of the film play as an attempt at an homage to classic Hollywood adventure and romance movies, but Bronson, as much as I love him, sure ain’t no Bogart (or Cary Grant, for that matter), and worse, the script never quite grasps what actually makes something like Casablanca work, so it includes a lot of cargo cult style writing that copies the surface but clearly doesn’t get what the surface elements are actually good for. The actors all seem to be in different films, stylistically: Robards – as is his wont – wildly swings between scenery chewing and moments where he is chilling and pathetic, Bronson is Bronson and therefore completely fails to convince as a romantic lead, something that certainly isn’t helped by the obvious trouble Sanda has acting in English which leaves her in turns wooden and overly melodramatic. MacCorkindale’s just plain bad and looks like he’s not even trying, while Fernando Rey obviously knows he’s Claude Rains’s character from Casablanca and acts appropriately.


On the positive side for the lover of strange films like me, this lends the whole affair a disjointed non-sequitur quality that threatens to reach a dream-like quality more often than not, and sometimes actually does. The best bit of the film when it comes to this sort of thing is certainly the climactic confrontation between the four main characters (fortunately without MacCorkindale) in the bar of Bronson’s hotel that involves full-on Italian-style lighting, a potentially explosive jukebox and a parrot, among rather more normal accoutrements like guns. It’s the sort of scene that would have made wading through a much more boring film worthwhile; in the context of Caboblanco’s general strangeness, it’s the cherry on the cake.

In short: Black Rainbow (1989)

Is there an official explanation for what happened with Mike Hodges at the beginning of the 80s? Sure, we can explain Flash Gordon with the kicking powers of the Horrible Boot of Camp (a creature I can only imagine being drawn by Jack Kirby), but why is the rest of Hodges (small) output of that decade equally messy and confused, and - alas - not equally entertaining? I don't dare to take a guess.

Anyhow, Black Rainbow is pretty much what you can expect from the director in that decade; in the spirit of the film's non-structure, let me describe it in a single, ridiculously long sentence with lots of parentheses, for that's exactly how it plays out. Black Rainbow is written with a lack of coherence that makes most giallos look logical (let me get that straight, a medium nobody in a position of authority believes foretells the identity of a murderer, so the bad guys send a professional killer after her, whose success will be the best way to ensure people will believe what she said?), sees Hodges frequently preach at the film's audience through the mouths of his characters (and hey, Mr Hodges, sir, you can't let your medium criticize her public's willingness to believe in a better afterlife and give her actually working prophetic powers and still make a sensible argument), contains the sort of scenery-chewing performance you get when you tell Jason Robards to put out all the stops (if that's a plus or a minus depends on your love for Robards; mine was tested), has an ending that is probably supposed to be ambiguous but just looks as if the writer didn't have a clue about how to actually end the convoluted mess, is overloaded with narrative elements that just don't fit together and sure as hell don't have a function (it's a Southern Gothic, so there must be a mad dead mother and implications of incest in Rosanna Arquette's background, plus what's up with Tom Hulce's marriage? Now that I think about it, why is his character even in here, seeing as he doesn't do anything a newspaper headline couldn't), and annoys me personally with a handful of scenes that suggest that Hodges might have made a fantastic piece of (tourist-y) Southern Gothic here, if he'd just had used the precision and ability to be clear even when backstories and characters are complicated his 70s films demonstrated again and again.

As it stands, Black Rainbow is a highly interesting mess.

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