Saturday Matinee: Delicatessen

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Les temps difficiles

By Tim Brayton

Source: Alternate Ending

There is a minor contradiction secreted away in the production history of Delicatessen. The 1991 film exists mostly so that Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro could prove they had what it took to write and direct a feature, and thereby secure financing for the screenplay they really wanted to make, The City of Lost Children. And that’s exactly what they did, using Delicatessen‘s impressive critical, commercial, and awards success to leap into making the far more ambitious, higher-budget movie, with Jeunet continuing on as a solo director to keep it up, sometimes having more resources and sometimes fewer, but never having to return to such a low-scale production as his feature debut. And yet for all this, I’m not sure that any of the films that Delicatessen‘s success enabled are actually as wholly satisfying on their own terms. It really is the perfect version of itself, barring a few errant shots or cuts here and there. Nor I do not think that the lack of resources is entirely coincidental. There are the films like Amélie that get made when a filmmaker has the ability to run wild and indulge himself, and while that can be exhilarating, just as easily it can be exhausting and annoyingly solipsistic. Delicatessen is a perfect demonstration of the idea that great art needs some constraints: everything Jeunet and Caro did in the film, they did deliberately and with focused intent, and the resultant film is just way the hell tighter than anything else the filmmaking team, or Jeunet solus, have ever put their names to.

Generally speaking, Delicatessen is described as “post-apocalyptic”, which I think is a little too cut-and-dry. From a production design standpoint – and everything in the film, up to and especially including the acting, needs to be understood from a production design standpoint (which was, for the record, provided by Caro himself) – the world presented in the film is a polyglot of elements from mid-20th Century France and America, with most of the props having the vague sense of ’60s home goods invested with untold years of decay and corruption (this is a perfect example of the “restraints create art” ethos: many of the objects seen in the film were scavenged on account of the small art direction budget). The sense that results isn’t that we’re watching some hideous future, but rather a nightmarish alternate version of the recent past, where everything went terribly wrong. More than anything, Delicatessen feels like it takes place just across the Channel from the bureaucratic hellhole England of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil a 1985 release set pointedly “somewhere in the 20th Century”.

Which makes sense, given that Gilliam’s work was a state influence on Jeunet and Caro, and Brazil looms particularly large over their body of work: beyond Delicatessen, both The City of Lost Children and Alien Resurrection (Jeunet’s third feature, and first without Caro co-directing) are fairly obvious in their borrowings from Brazil, though neither goes so far with it. Delicatessen doesn’t just share aspects of its design mentality with Gilliam’s film, it shares a very distinctive strategy for cinematography, with wide-angle lenses creating a sense of bug-eyed closeness that manages to avoid the edge distortion typical of wide angles, while exploiting their tendency to make objects in the center of the frame uncannily, uncomfortably present. It’s one of the two most obvious ways that the film visually puts across a feeling of thoroughly unnerving otherness, the other being its tightly constrained color palette – this is an outstandingly yellow movie, introducing its central location emerging from a thick yellow fog like the ruins of a medieval abbey, and never letting us forget about it through all of the shots of locations that appear to be permanently stained in ochre soot. It’s overwhelming and also subtle, but also cunning in its way: the payoff to all that yellow is the film’s solitary use of blue (yellow’s opposite in the RGB color system) is all the way in its final scene, when it is specifically used to counterbalance the diseased feeling of the whole movie up to that point. Among the film’s other points of interest, Delicatessen was the first film of major lasting significance shot by Darius Khondji, and it’s very much in line with his later triumphs: tightly constrained in color, marked with a certain filthy texture to the stock, and instantly effective at creating a very specific atmosphere.

So anyway, all of that visual presence is in service to something, after all, and here’s what that is: wherever and whenever we are, there is a solitary building on the outskirts of what used to be civilsation. On the bottom floor of this building is a delicatessen, run by by a rubbery, fat butcher named Clapet (Jean-Claude Dreyfus); he’s also the landlord for the apartments which occupy all of the upper levels, all of them populated by a visually grotesque menagerie of idiosyncratic characters: such as Marcel Tapioca (Ticky Holgado) and his wife (Anne-Marie Pisani), grubby impoverish sorts; the Interligators, Aurore (Silvie Laguna) and Georges (Jean-François Perrier), she dressed like a ’50s schoolchild’s idea of a society lady and plagued by a voice that only she hears, urging her to commit suicide; the nameless man (Howard Vernon) who lives in a watery dungeon full of snails and frogs, looking a bit slimy and frog-eyed himself; and Clapet’s own estranged daughter Julie (Marie-Laure Dougnac), a birdlike young woman with a thin face and sharp eyes. We learn pretty damn quickly that this building houses some kind of horrible secret, given that the opening scene features Clapet laughing broadly as he plunges a cleaver into the skull of a terrified man (Pascal Benezech) hiding in a garbage can; it’s no real surprise that the denizens of the building are all in on a conspiracy to entice drifters with the promise of a job, and then murder them for their meat, distributed evenly among all residents. It’s all part of the world of absolute social collapse and near-total privation that the film sketches out; cannibalism, it’s implied, is the only way to get any meat in this place.

The plot, such as it is, begins when ex-clown Louison (Dominique Pinon) takes up Clapet’s job posting, and turns out to be a skilled enough hand that the butcher is reluctant to kill him right away. Worse still, Julie takes pity on Louison, and starts feeding him a powerful soporific tea to keep him asleep and safely in bed at the times that Clapet waits in the stairwell to kill whoever ends up crossing his path. Naturally enough, Julie and Louison fall in love, because as you can no doubt tell from everything I’ve written so far, Delicatessen is first and foremost a romantic comedy. That’s not me being even a tiny bit sarcastic: after the florid design of the thing, which I broadly use to include the peculiar timbre of the cinematography and the physical distortions of the actors, the most notable thing about Delicatessen is its indefinite use of genre. I could not, if you forced me to, state with absolute confidence if this is mostly a horror film that happens to be so quirky and funny that it’s not even a tiny bit scary, or if it’s mostly a comedy that invests so much in violent death and a despairing culture in the midst of collapse that it becomes horrifying. What I can do is to approvingly note of the fact that as it moves towards the end, it abandons either to become a live-action Tex Avery cartoon: the nerve-wracking physical anarchy and use of slapstick as a murder weapon is entirely in the spirit of a Screwy Squirrel short, and the film even gets away with the old “bathroom fills up with water until somebody opens the door” bit at the end, having spent most of its 99 minutes building exactly the kind of demented anything-goes universe where that feels like a perfectly reasonable thing to occur, in between the attack by separatist vegetarians who live in the sewers and the Rube Goldberg suicide machines.

Whatever mode it’s occupying, what dominates Delicatessen is shocking: this is as dewy-eyed and sweet in its outlook as anything in Amélie. Even while indicting them all as willing cannibals, Jeunet and Caro and co-writer Gilles Adrien portray the residents of the apartment with an essential affection and whimsy, using a playful sequence early on (the residents all creating musical interludes to the accompaniment of Clapet having sex with a certain Mademoiselle Plusse (Karin Viard) on squeaky bedsprings) to set up the idea that the apartment is a living organism, an ecosystem in which every emotionally aberrant figure within has their key and necessary role in the proper functioning of the whole. Given how frankly evil they are, and how joyfully the starts knocking them off, it’s a bit surprising and pleasant how much Delicatessen openly loves its cast.

Most of all it loves Louison and Julie, who are the aspect of this film that looks forward the most clearly to Jeunet’s solo projects: childlike innocents playing at a beatified, sexless version of romance, set against things like the circus and tea sets to accentuate just how much they’re too lighthearted for this corrosive place and this corrosive world. It is a bent, weird, ugly, and menacing film in so many ways, but it is entirely driven by the sweet charms of its central pair; in turn, the saccharine sentimentality of that plot (that thing which ruined Amélie for those – I am not one, by any stretch – who consider it to be ruined) is counterbalanced by the savage nastiness of the setting and plot. It’s a perfect balance, and while there’s the odd moment here or there where the directors fluff the timing of scenes or repeat concepts once too often, Delicatessen is something close to a miracle of style and tone and narrative all slashing at each other from odd angles to produce a flawlessly unified whole. Lord knows that this isn’t for everybody, but if we take the idea of a romantic comedy set in the ruins of a dead society and dressed up with cannibal horror seriously at all, it’s hard to see how it could turn out better than this.

Watch Delicatessen on tubi here: https://tubitv.com/movies/308310/delicatessen

Saturday Matinee: Beside Bowie The Mick Ronson Story

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“Beside Bowie-The Mick Ronson Story” Is a Flawed But Essential Documentary For Every Bowie and Mick Ronson Fan

By Michael Fremer

Source: Analog Planet

Filmmaker Jon Brewer’s Mick Ronson documentary tells the truly sad story of the wholly under-apprecriated guitarist/arranger Mick Ronson, who is of course best known (if he’s known at all) for his work with David Bowie. That being the case, Brewer spends a great deal of time (too much time) at the beginning of the 101 minute film on the rise of David Bowie before getting to the fall of Mick Ronson, better known to his friends as “Ronno”.

Brewer seems afraid that his film would not find an audience if he didn’t push the Bowie connection, including the cover credit “Voice over by DAVID BOWIE”, which grossly overstates Bowie’s narrative contribution.

Nonetheless, the film does a good job covering Bowie’s early years, his casting about to find his musical identity, his dress-wearing sexual identity swapping, which, according to first wife, American-born Angie, featured onscreen then and now, was more exploitative play-acting than genuine and his connecting up with Tony Visconti who was instrumental (literally) in helping Bowie to fashion his sound.

Visconti, on camera, in an interview that appears to have been filmed some time ago, bemoans noisy recording tape, which you’ll no doubt find amusing, while discussing early recording efforts. The movie moves on to Ronson’s early musical years (he was born in Hull, England, 1946). Ronson was classically trained and played piano, violin and other instruments. Like Visconti, he also could read music. He got the “rock bug” in the early ’60s and began playing local clubs as a member of various groups before setting off for London in 1965.

After kicking around London for a few years and making little headway and less money, he returned to Hull and became a municipal groundskeeper. One of his band mates in a group called The Rats returned to Hull to try to convince the contented gardener to travel back to London to become a member of David Bowie’s backup band. Though hesitant after his previous experiences, Ronson made the trip and the rest, as they say, is a history in desperate need of telling, which this film manages pretty well so I’m not going to further synopsize it.

It’s clear that Ronson was a masterful guitarist with a unique sound that’s in part created by a partly open “Wah Wah” pedal that he matter of factly demonstrates on camera and that by the time Bowie’s semi-breakthrough album Hunky Dory was recorded, he’d learned from Visconti the art of arranging and had become a brilliant one.

Rick Wakeman, who plays piano on that Ken Scott-David Bowie produced classic, says in his on-screen interview that Ronson, not Bowie, was the real co-producer and that his string arrangements on tracks like “Life on Mars” were, as all listeners know, nothing short of brilliant. While “Michael Ronson” receives arranging credit, it’s kind of buried. Unfortunately, Brewer did not get the usually accessible Ken Scott’s input on all of this.

Ronson contributes mightily to the breakthrough album Ziggy Stardust… and again, though he gets arranging credits, he apparently doesn’t get paid for that work. Angie narrates much of what went on during this period when the group first toured America by bus building an audience and spending more money than it took in. Despite his critical contributions to the record and the live performances, Ronson was basically paid a stipend by MainMain Management run by Tony DeFries, who comes across in this film as one of the villains both because he reputedly made more money from Bowie than Bowie himself earned, and because once Bowie moved on from Ronson, DeFries pushed Ronson, almost against his will, to become a “front man”. Ronson could easily have built a successful arranger/producer career. The under-appreciated album Slaughter on 10th Avenue (RCA APL 1-0353) featured a cover shot of Ronson playing a part, but it could very well also sum up his true feelings being pushed to the front when he was really a great side man.

Meanwhile Ronson’s contributions to Lou Reed’s breakthrough album Transformer were also undervalued. There are crucial interviews with Mott the Hoople’s Ian Hunter. Ronson joined his group for a while, later playing with Bob Dylan’s band.

The movie skips over the second Ziggy tour, which was not by bus but rather by airplane. That’s the segment on which I was on the plane, covering the legendary Carnegie Hall concert, Detroit (where I sat next to Iggy Pop) and Chicago. It’s also where I got to meet Mick Ronson, easily the most friendly, approachable, unassuming and charming rock star you could ever hope to meet.

So yes, DeFries comes across as a villain in this story and as is often the case with super-talents, Bowie comes across looking like a user, sad to say.

Speaking of airplanes, I watched this on the flight back from Amsterdam so I can’t get into the technical aspects of the film or the sound, though I did listen on my Jerry Harvey Layla in-ear phones, which are amazing. My conclusion is that while this is a somewhat flawed presentation, it’s one every Mick Ronson fan should see as should every Bowie fan. In fact, It’s indispensable. When it was over, having “met” onscreen, Ronson’s wife and family I was left beyond sad by how this super-talented man, who was never a money-grubber, left this planet too young, under-appeciated and with little money to leave his family.

Watch Beside Bowie: The Mick Ronson Story on hoopla here: https://www.hoopladigital.com/movie/beside-bowie-the-mick-ronson-story-david-bowie/17400506

Saturday Matinee: Dark Waters

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Film Review: “Dark Waters” — Poison and Passion

By Peg Aloi

Source: Arts Fuse

Todd Haynes proffers a richly diverse palette as a filmmaker. Yet he revisits certain themes reliably, whether it’s via an experimental narrative that combines lyrical visuals and magic realism (Poison), or an exploration of the dark underside of fame (Superstar, Velvet Goldmine, I’m Not There), or the struggle to accept one’s homosexuality (Poison, Velvet Goldmine, Far From Heaven, Carol). With a background in semiotics, Haynes deploys an intricate but classic visual style (especially in grandiose period pieces Far From Heaven and Carol), often expressed through complex color designs, exploring truths both psychological and metaphorical. Working closely with his cinematographer Ed Lachman, Haynes crafts films that are unspeakably beautiful stories about pockets of American life.

Generally, Haynes is interested in the toxicity that lies beneath a pleasing surface. His 1995 film Safe is the story of a woman (Julianne Moore) who becomes ill when exposed to chemicals and discovers that she has a condition only beginning to be understood. In addition to portraying the very real impact of various substances (fabric, carpeting, cosmetics, food), the film looks at the more subtle poisoning that comes when emotions are repressed in an unsatisfying marriage, when someone is unable to ask for what they want. With Dark Waters, based on a story written by reporter Nathaniel Rich for the New York Times (and adapted for the screen by Mathew Michael Carnahan and Mario Correa), Haynes trains his sensitive eye on how chemical contamination impacts a small West Virginia town, delving into the layers of corruption that shroud corporate crimes. Like Safe, Dark Waters occasionally has the feel of a subtle, but unintentional, horror story.

Mark Ruffalo plays Robert Bilott, a Cincinnati lawyer who, as the film opens in 1998, has just been made partner in a law firm that specializes in defending corporate clients. Prior to this scene, we see a brief prologue, set in Parkersburg, West Virginia: a group of teenagers is having a beer-fueled frolic at a local swimming hole on a balmy summer night. They enjoy the water’s weird foamy texture. A boat comes near them, holding two men who are spraying a dispersant on the water’s surface. They yell at the trespassing teenagers to get out. A yellowish-green light shines on the surface of the dark blue water. Thus Haynes establishes a color schematic that pits the evil greed propelling the contamination against the hard working residents whose lives are destroyed.

Bilott is visited at his office by two men who bring videotapes that prove that their farm is being poisoned by DuPont, which owns a chemical plant in Parkersburg, Bilott’s hometown. These men have traveled over a hundred miles to see the lawyer because they live next door to his grandmother. Bilott tries to get them to contact a different lawyer because his professional role, defending large chemical companies, is at odds with their needs. But he is moved by the story of Wilbur Tennant (Bill Camp), a cattle farmer who has lost nearly 200 cows to strange illnesses. Bilott confers with his boss (Tim Robbins) and grudgingly gets the go-ahead to pursue action against DuPont.

In a saga that lasts a decade and a half, Bilott works tirelessly, and at the expense of his own health and domestic stability, to find justice for the residents of Parkersburg. His wife, played by Anne Hathaway, keeps the home fires burning, but becomes frustrated with her husband’s singular focus on his work. That work is solitary and grueling, as shown in scenes where we watch him digging through papers in hundreds of cartons, or trying in vain to find research on the dangerous PFOAs that are among the most deadly contaminants in question. Not widely known in the 1990s, PFOA contamination of municipal drinking water is now a familiar phenomenon (including here in upstate New York where I live). As a result of DuPont’s illegal dumping and poorly managed waste disposal, as well as exposure to chemicals at the plant itself, town residents and employees of the plant have experienced a range of serious problems, from birth defects to cancer, caused, apparently, by the city’s biggest, and thus well-loved, employer.

And therein lies one of Bilott’s biggest challenges: fighting to expose the wrongdoing of a corporation that, as far as many residents are concerned, is the only reason they have jobs. But the difficulty goes beyond Bilott being glared at in the local diner, or sneered at by DuPont’s in-house corporate counsel Phil Donnelly (Victor Garber). Tennant is diagnosed with cancer, as is his wife, and they are still shunned by some of their neighbors. Other residents who have brought lawsuits become the targets of arson. Paranoia begins to hound Bilott as he realizes the object of his lawsuit is a deeply dishonest and sociopathic entity (shades of Silkwood here). Unlike the passionate journalist Ruffalo plays in Spotlight, Michael Rezendes, his Bilott is a quiet and calm workaholic, not given to emotional outbursts. But his dogged devotion to the cause is apparent in his exhausted face, his trembling hands, his wordless sobbing. It’s a mature performance from Ruffalo, who is also a co-producer. His steady presence anchors the large cast, largely composed of lawyers in suits and working people in flannel and wool.

The visual opulence one expects from Haynes is subtly rendered here: the interiors appear somewhat drab, the exteriors rather ordinary. But a definite style comes through, once a viewer notices the way yellow and blue tie the film’s visuals together. Along with the color scheme, exquisite lighting and letter-perfect design elements are hiding in the plain sight of this real-life narrative. The music by Marcelo Zarvos is moody, spare, and evocative, an effective counterpoint to the secrets and fears lurking just beneath this story’s surface. Dark Waters may not be Haynes’s most beautiful film, but it may yet prove to be among his most important.

Saturday Matinee: Robocop 

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By Seth Harris

Source: Pop Cult

Robocop (1987)
Written by Edward Neumeier & Michael Miner
Directed by Paul Verhoeven

As an adult, I have developed an entirely new appreciation for the work of Paul Verhoeven. He was born in The Netherlands but managed to create a framework for American action movies in the 1980s while simultaneously delivering brutal satire about the United States. Robocop was his second English language film and his first pass at skewering the direction of Reagan’s America. The result is a science fiction classic, a combination of themes from Frankenstein mixed with commentary on the rise in corporatization of the public sphere. It’s not as biting as Starship Troopers, but it is full of brilliant takes on the United States’ ease & comfort with war and violence.

In the future, Detroit is on the verge of collapse. Money is dwindling, and society is overrun with crime. Omni Consumer Products (OCP) now have control of the Detroit PD and have plans to roll out innovations in crime-fighting. They just need a fresh corpse to make that happen. Meanwhile, Alex Murphy (Peter Weller) is transferred from the suburbs to a dangerous new precinct in the city’s heart. Murphy and his partner Lewis (Nancy Allen) begin the bonding process. They respond to a call over a bank robbery and pursue the suspect to an abandoned refinery. The officers get separated, and Murphy ends up riddled with bullets when the criminals ambush him. OCP recovers Murphy’s body and rebuilds him into Robocop. Of course, they don’t tell his fellow officers or his family that he’s partially alive. Even Murphy doesn’t remember his past except for a few flashes here and there.

The origins of Robocop lie in a surprising mishmash of influences. Screenwriter Edward Neumeier snuck his way onto the set of Blade Runner and was inspired by the production design of this future world. He imagined a story set in this place about a human turned into a cyborg police officer. He teamed up with aspiring director Michael Miner to collaborate on the script. They drew on their mutual love of comic books and experiences in 1980s corporate culture. They both found it bizarrely fascinating that the Japanese book The Way of the Five Rings was so popular on Wall Street at the time as it was focused around methods of samurai in the 17th century killing more effectively. Corporate types seemed to imagine themselves as these types of brazen warriors while working in finance and marketing. They envisioned a world influenced by this type of violent thinking leading to societal collapse, as we see in the film.

Paul Verhoeven was not the first choice, but he was suggested by a producer when other directors fell out. Verhoeven reportedly read the first page of Robocop, tossed it aside, and proclaimed it “a piece of shit.” It took his wife reading the script and encouraging him to look at the subtext of what was happening to convince the director to accept the project. Because he wasn’t fluent in English at the time, Verhoeven says a lot of the satire went over his head. When Murphy returns to his home, abandoned by his wife and son, the director clicked with the script. 

For someone who didn’t understand the satire fully at the time, you can see the throughline in Verhoeven’s films coming out of Robocop to Total Recall and Starship Troopers. They are hyper-violent films where the villains are fascists. One of the best parts of Robocop are the snippets of news and commercials. They strongly emphasize the twisted psychology of this future world. News anchors smile through reports about apartheid South Africa arming themselves with nuclear weapons and U.S. forces crushing rebellions in Acapulco. Families play board games based around Mutual Assured Destruction. Everyone mindlessly gobbles up inane sitcoms that simply repeat catchphrases. The world feels rotten and hollow. Even as a kid seeing Robocop for the first time, it never felt like a movie where things would get better in the world when the credits rolled.

There’s a constant tension between the “civilized” world and devolution into wanton violence. A boardroom meeting dissolves into a bloodbath when an invention goes awry and kills an executive. Corporate heads employ some of the worst criminals to act as their muscle on the streets. 

Robocop is another subversive action movie that seemed to satiate an American bloodlust while openly mocking the culture. It’s so surprising that so many appear to have been oblivious to what is very obvious satire. Robocop isn’t a traditional hero, and the film certainly doesn’t think the police are some flawless institution. Nothing is happening to remedy the circumstances that have led to the collapse of society; instead, corporate powers seek to create more brutal unfeeling enforcers. It’s sad how close to reality Robocop has become.

Watch Robocop on tubi here: https://tubitv.com/movies/389503/robocop-1987