Concussion (2013): Lesbian De Jour

Concussion (2013)
dir: Stacie Passon

One of the new movements in modern gay cinema is the re-appropriation of straight cinema, especially films that are not French New Wave or Italian, which had been re-appropriated during the height of the New Queer Cinema movement in the 1980s into the 1990s. Instead, as we saw with Weekend, gay filmmakers are re-appropriating movies that are strictly heterosexual and using their devices to create a queer-centric story. While Weekend appropriated Linklater's Before Sunrise for a gay male tale of love, Concussion appropriates the Luis Bunuel classic Belle De Jour for a lesbian tale of marriage.

Bunuel was creating a sleek stylish fuck you to the bourgeois ideals of fidelity and monogamous marital bliss, not to mention a fuck you to male machismo and to the demonization of female sexuality. Passon, on the other hand, is creating a fuck you to the lesbian ideals that the LGBTQ community is espousing of monogamous marriage and idealizing the hetero lifestyle.

Abby is a bored lesbian housewife with kids, who is also rich enough to start up projects like flipping apartments just because she is bored as hell. When she is hit with a baseball by her son, and gets a concussion, she starts to realize how bored she is, and rebels against the system of heteronormative ideals that she has become oppressed by. She hires a prostitute, and then, becomes a lesbian prostitute herself.

Through her life as a prostitute, she comes to grips with what is the equivalent to a lesbian midlife crisis. Abby comes to grips with her own boredom, she is exposed by her wife, and, in the end, she decides that perhaps she should have just taken a Hot Yoga class in order to deal with her impending boredom, at once being a sly wink to the double entendre that Hot Yoga can possess but also condemning her midlife crisis actions.

Stacie Passon, who wrote and directed Concussion also has the power of Rose Troche, from Go Fish as her producer. She has crafted a colder, distancing film that gradually warms up as Abby herself comes closer to herself, but still remains as a slightly laboriously paced meditation on the implications of growing up, and realizing you're not where you want to be.

However, Passon isn't as brave a soul as Troche was when she made Go Fish, nor Bunuel when he made Belle De Jour. Her whole statement may be that people sometimes have to take assessment of their life after being triggered by a certain event, but it is also that lesbians are just as boring as straight people. There are chances that Passon has to sear through some of society's hangups, but she largely ignores these with a pointed indifference.

One serious example is that one of Abby's first clients is a young, large, woman who says that she hasn't been kissed. Abby takes a maternal style attitude toward this client, who becomes a repeat client, trying to inform her that her brain is more beautiful than her body, and handing her books like The Second Sex, and about Gandhi, while also telling her to burn the diet books her mother has purchased her. However, Passon doesn't include any hot and heavy sex scenes with this large woman, and all of the other clients with hotter scenes are skinny women, setting the fat girl up as a character of empathy but not eroticism.

The whole accept-fat-people-as-long-as-they're-not-eroticized wishy-washiness is representative of Passon's overall wishy-washiness through the film. Is the heteronormative style of lesbian marriage to be damned, or praised, or neither? Is prostitution good, bad, or just a thing? Is a woman seeking her own life and able to have her own crisis something positive or destructive? What about society's pressures?  What about relationship pressures? Passon goes out of her way to create a film that very carefully doesn't push any buttons, while also playing with dual heady topics of gay marriage and prostitution.

It could also be argued that by all but ignoring the headier, more political topics, Passon is instead making a movie that is more about Abby as a human being and as a woman instead of as a politicized pawn. By playing with the spaces of life, Passon is trying to make a portrait of a woman, instead of a time. Abby, indeed, is drawn very well as a character, while most of the people surrounding her are barely there sketches. As a character study of a panicking lesbian, Concussion actually finds its strengths, but it's basically to give the LGBTQ community a gay version of hetero crisis tales.

Concussion is a successful character study of a bored lesbian housewife. It's gorgeously cold, it's steamy in the right places, its strongly visual, but it's also languid and fairly self-centered compared to the world around it. Passon suffers from mumblecore-itis, in that she doesn't seem to give two flying fucks about the larger political statements, but at least she doesn't give us insufferable characters who only seem to be able to see their lives through themselves. Abby is sympathetic, even as she's making controversial choices. Passon reinforces the heteronormative relationship by the end. And, it's well crafted. Taking Concussion for what it wants to be about, it's a well-done movie. But, if you're looking for Passon, under the training of Troche, to make more trenchant observations or statements about the world at large, you're going to be sorely disappointed.

1313: Night of the Widow (2012): Shirts and a script!

See?  They have a wardrobe!!

1313: Night of the Widow (2012)
dir: David DeCoteau

Previously, I've assumed that 1313 was a weird experiment in homoerotic minimalism on the cheap. Like an Andy Warhol for the genre picture. But, then David DeCoteau has to throw a curveball like Night of the Widow into the mix.

DeCoteau starts out Night of the Widow with a shock. There isn't 10 minutes of establishing shots. Instead, we get right to the meat of the 1313 series: a hot guy wandering around the DeCoteau mansion in his underwear. Within a minute, we're already watching a hot guy sleeping in his white briefs, and then he wakes up and wanders around in his tighty whities. OK, this is the 1313 we're used to!  Eventually he finds his wife, dressed like a black widow already, who raises a butcher's knife and squeaks "I want a divorce" then TITLE!

Humor, and fast pacing? DeCoteau, who are you and what have you done with David?

In all reality, Night of the Widow feels like one of DeCoteau's pre-1313 movies, in which characters talk a lot, there's a script, confusion, fun, and blatant and hilarious homoeroticism.

In the next scene, we get the set up of Michael (the dead guy)'s friends showing up for his funeral. They used to be in a band or something, and abandoned him 5 years ago. No explanations are offered for their absence from his life, which we learn later is because they really haven't abandoned him. everybody plays a part.

The set up is that Michael is some sort of rich orphan (huh?!) who has hidden a key to his fortune somewhere in the house. And, whoever finds it gets the fortune and can split it however they want. Which, normally, would be a set up for everybody, one by one, to strip down to their underwear wander around half-assedly looking for a key, probably while calling out "KEY! Where are you, Key?!" and then getting murdered by the black widow.

But, DeCoteau is always a violator of our expectations. We get a talky history of Michael as seen by his friends as they look for the key. These history scenes give some semblance of motives for possibly murdering Michael. Or, not as his ashes actually go missing midway through the movie. One of the scenes is Michael playing football with a male friend, who is telling him to dump his wife, leave his fortune and run away with him to a foreign country...no homo. Or another is a guy having a lengthy shower scene in Michael's house, and then Michael coming home to find his wife in the bathroom as well (but not in the shower).

In the end, there are the usual twists that we can kind of see coming a mile away. Which is also unusual for a 1313 series film, which usually don't have enough plot to actually have twists!

1313: Night of the Widow is the most entertaining of the DeCoteau series, namely because it doesn't obey the endless repetition of a random guy wandering around, ends up in his underwear then dead. This is more of an Agatha Christie movie that has lots of homoerotic subtext thrown in, and a bunch of shirtless flashback shots. If you have been wanting DeCoteau to make an actual movie in the 1313 series, Night of the Widow is your best bet.

That being said, it isn't a GOOD movie. It's low-budget entertainment, and something that doesn't actually bore you. But, if you want homoerotic, cheesy-as-hell, sub-par Agatha Christie, then you'll want to watch Night of the Widow.

Poison (1991): Rage Against the Closet

Poison (1991)
dir: Todd Haynes

It's been 23 years since Poison was made. 22 years before that was Stonewall. 20-26 years before that, Jean Genet wrote three French novels dealing with homosexuality (which wouldn't get English translations until the 60s and into the 70s).

Looking back on Poison from the same distance that Poison relates to Stonewall, which is the same distance from Genet's original sources seems to be important, not only to look at what has changed since the creation of Poison but, also what has stayed the same.

Poison was the first feature length film from Todd Haynes, and also an early entry in the New Queer Cinema movement that happened from the 80s into the 90s. Unlike most of the NQC films, Poison doesn't take its notes from the French New Wave. Haynes was never really interested in that movement. Poison, instead, takes its stylistic notes from pulpier sources: television tabloid, 50s monster movies, and claustrophobic grindhouse films.

Poison is constructed from three disparate stories. Hero, a tabloid expose about a severely antagonistic and abused 7-year-old boy who shoots his father then "flies away." Horror, a 1950s monster movie about a doctor who manages to distill the human sex drive into a liquid form, then drinks it and turns into a leperous killer. Homo, an arthouse grindhouse film about a gay prisoner who falls in love with a new young inmate.

Separately, they tell stories of homosexual life. But, together, these three stories are not just exposing what it is like to be gay in a heterodominant culture, but raging against the closet that these atmospheres create. In Hero, the kid is constantly abused by schoolmates, by teachers, by his parents, and won't or can't stand up for himself. Horror exposes the feeling of being gay in a culture that condemns homosexuality, and the feeling that everybody can see you for what you are even as you try to hide it. Homo exposes the dangers of falling in love while surrounded by a community that will slaughter you if they find out.

While Poison is a work of 1991, it is also a work informed by the original source materials written by Jean Genet in the 1940s. Jean Genet was an interesting early gay icon. A vagabond, a thief, a prostitute, a liar, and a homosexual, his works were the first sources of homosexual identity, and also came with heavy senses of irony, elevating evil to levels of respect, and also having a perverse sense of sadism and power struggles. Genet was one of the first playwrights that Andy Milligan would produce when he was a director in the early 1960s.

Given that Genet was writing in the 1940s, the closet and a condemning culture also figure heavily into his works. Genet himself was arrested and jailed for prostitution and lewd acts, as well as thievery, vagabondage, and fraudulent papers. In his works, people always existed in the face of an oppressive class, whether it is due to homosexuality or just general class struggles.

Sadism/masochism, power struggles, irony, the closet, and an oppressive culture are themes that Haynes would come back to time and again throughout his works, many of which explore through various aspects of the past. Haynes would constantly explore these themes through the pulp medium of American culture as well. Exploring homosexuality through the 1950s lens of a monster movie informs of the hysteria that would frequently accompany the fear of the homosexual. At that time, homosexual bars were being raided (though they were out of the public eye), and homosexuals were also being counted as communists in the great Lavender Scare that accompanied the Red Scare in the 1950s. The communists of the red scare were frequently the metaphor of the monster in the 1950s b-movies, so it makes sense that Haynes is setting up the metaphor of gay sexuality and monster movies, especially given that Haynes was making a movie during the height of the HIV/AIDS scare, which is informing the leprosy of the monster.

In the 1970s, homosexuals were starting to come out of the closet, but were still acting in secrets. Which is informing the story of Homo, where the prisoner is starting to come out in public, but the public is trying to come to grips with it. The warden of Homo writes down homosexual, but asks if it is one word or two. But, then the homoerotic tortures of the prison gangs are intertwined with the homosexual advances between the actual gays in search of love. There is also the abuse of school children for homosexual behaviors, accounting for a bullying trend which would later get mirrored in adulthood.

In the 1980s, homosexuals were starting to die and disappear, just as they were starting to get accepted. The homosexual abuse victim son would save the day, then disappear from life. The TV tabloid format wasn't really perfected until the 1980s, in which it would become a dominant form of expression. Homosexual youth suicide is one of those statistics that was strong in the 1980s, and suicide in general was one of those 1980s themes of high school. But, not only that, the 80s were the start of the HIV/AIDS crisis, where the gays started disappearing from life due to death of a mysterious disease. They didn't jump out of a window, and fly away to a mysterious nowhere. They fucking died.  And those that didn't die, ran away to the big cities, instead of living in the suburban nightmare they grew up in.

The worldly themes of these three films - bullying, HIV/AIDS scare, the closet, mass condemnation, systematic abuse - were all massive issues in the homosexual community in 1991. Still fighting for rights, due to the hiccup that the HIV/AIDS epidemic created from the late 70s into the 90s, the gay community was just now coming back to the activist behaviors that defined its moves into the public in the early 70s. Poison is one of the products of this return to activism. It points to a rage against the homophobia of the world. And, it isn't pretty about it. Poison actually is a toxic movie raging against the life.

23 years later, these issues are still being fought, but there has been significant advances from 1991. Bullying has become one of the nation's hot button topics, time and again, especially with homosexual teen suicide. HIV/AIDS has been reduced to being akin to "gay diabetes" and HIV rates are skyrocketing, especially among the young homosexuals, and moreso in the urban communities that are still resisting homosexual acceptance. Mass acceptance has started, but there is still a huge backlash against the homosexual "agenda." And, celebrities still have to come out of the closet because they're default thought to be heterosexual, and feel the need to hide their homosexuality in order to gain more financial security. But, things are getting better. The poison is starting to get sucked out of the system, but it's still pooled in our culture.

Poison is still a toxic movie, though it doesn't deserve it's NC-17 rating. The movie is a perpetually negative toxin about the ills of American society through the kaleidoscopic viewpoint of American pulp culture. It's ADD in its intercutting, which slows the movie down a bit, and Haynes is still mastering the camera. It's still a cultural milestone of independent cinema, and in the New Queer Cinema, as a form of raging against the machine that is both a product of its time, and an examination of the time past.

LA Zombie (2010): Fucking the Status Quo

LA Zombie (2010)
dir: Bruce LaBruce

Bruce LaBruce is a provocateur, first and foremost. His films have, traditionally, ridden a punk line between political statement and pornography, with both vying for screen time. Most of the political statements are of the anarcho-punk nature, but they always seemed to be more pointed to a solution than to the ills of society, and the sex was there to make you take note.

With L.A. Zombie, Bruce LaBruce isn't providing any answers. But, he's seeing a hell of a lot of problems.

First off, any reader should know there are two versions of L.A. Zombie in existence. A 67-minute cinema and film festival edition, and a 103 Hardcore edition. You'll know which one you're watching because, LaBruce retitled the full movie to LA Zombie Hardcore in the credits. And, there is a lot of gay hardcore sex (a lot).

The movie centers around a being who emerges from the Pacific Ocean as a zombie with vampiric fangs and a gaping red mouth. Throughout the movie this being changes into a regular homeless man, and also a beast with huge teeth or horns, and an modified fantasy cock. The essence of this character, played by Francois Sagat, could be that he's a schizophrenic homeless man. And, he could also be a zombie and a monster, which is how society regularly sees our mentally ill homeless population.

Homeless Zombie Monster, once out of the ocean, hitches a ride with a guy, who promptly crashes his truck and dies with gigantic gaping holes and a heart on the outside of his body. HZM then proceeds to fuck the gigantic gaping holes with his deformed fantasy cock, and ejaculates black semen in order to bring the driver back to life and in order to have a full-on hardcore sex scene with the living, but still completely injured, driver.

Much like David DeCoteau with his 1313 series, this pattern repeats itself rather ad nauseum. Guy dies. HZM sees the dead guy. HZM fucks dead guy back to life. And, then they have hardcore sex. Repeat.

With almost no dialogue whatsoever, Bruce LaBruce is forcing us to watch the images and see if we actually care about this. The sex, for the most part, isn't shown as erotic, being largely overlaid with somber boner-killing music that makes the sex almost dirge-like. The one exception to that is a 4-person leather orgy which is punctuated by men making manly gay sounds of passionate orgiastic gay sex.

The characters that HZM runs into, though, are actually symbols of the ills of society that we're constantly ignoring, or not caring about. The truck driver represents the ills of driving. There is a business deal that goes bad, with the business man surrounded by his white collar crime money. A black gang member who is dumped, dead, in an alley. A homeless guy who died alone in his refrigerator box home. And, four leather guys who are killed in a drug deal.

The film ends with HZM crying tears of blood as he looks over societies ills, before he digs the soft dirt over a grave marked "Law" as a storm brews overhead. Whether LaBruce is saying that the law of the land has created these horrible conditions, or whether he's saying that HZM wants to fuck Law back to life to fix these things is unclear. HZM never finds the body of Law to fuck it back to life. And, law never returns to the land.

Bruce LaBruce is creating a weird pornographic blend of political commentary that is pointed straight at the materialistic heart of society, namely American society. He isn't fetishizing these ills. He shows that he has the ability to create hardcore porno that's kind of hot when he actually shows us the pre-death 4-man leather orgy, which is the only scene I found stimulating. LaBruce is exposing these ills in society to the gay art house audience.

But, his main problem is that he puts in a lot of hardcore sex into this film. I mean, A LOT. We're talking about 10+ minute scenes of semi-unerotic blowjobs and fucking. Given that LaBruce cut out these scenes for the festival circuit, it leads to the question of why film them like this at all?  What's the statement he's trying to make, if any? Is he trying to say, "if you're bored of this, imagine if you were living like this?" Or, is he just trying to provoke some sort of shock value out of gay sex, but ending up with boredom?

LaBruce isn't a master filmmaker. Never was. Never will be. He's a punk filmmaker. He knows how to shock, or get a reaction. When you watch Sagat's unadorned cock starting to probe the shotgun wound in a guy's head, you're still a bit shocked, even if he's penetrated many other wounds before that. LA Zombie is almost Cronenbergian in its obsession with blood, wounds, and sex and the intersection thereof. Blood and open holes exist so that HZM can fuck people in their wounds back to life. But, LaBruce is no Cronenberg. His set ups and shots are like mid-level porn quality in the mid-90s. And, his editing is mildly atrocious.

But, does it provoke? Does it communicate his intention? Not as well as he hoped. And, it is in this that LA Zombie is ultimately a failure. Sure, I just spent an inordinate number of words talking about LA Zombie's cataloging of society's ills, but a lot of movies do that. LaBruce brings nothing much to the table, except, possibly, that we're killing ourselves. It's a sour note, in part because its a sour message that you have to give some credit for trying.

But, I do miss overly punk LaBruce.

Hotel (2001): Losing Your Mind On Screen

Hotel (2001)
dir: Mike Figgis

Hotel, upon its release, baffled everybody. Critics wondered what it was, and tried to pigeonhole the movie into one genre. Audiences avoided because it looked, sounded like, and was a more complicated extension of Figgis' easier movie Time Code.

From the standpoint of 2001, it was hard to figure out what was going on. Figgis didn't offer any clues either, probably because he didn't quite know. He declared it a work of art. Some said it was pretentious crap. Others saw it as a movie trying to be every movie. They're all right. They're all wrong.

On the surface, Hotel is like five separate movies all competing with each other. It starts out with a cannibal horror movie (movie 1), when John Malkovich checks in to the hotel, is treated to a final dinner, and then is presumably killed to become food. But, this plot is mainly dropped for the majority of the next two hours.

The main thrust of the movie is watching a cast and crew attempt to create a Dogme version of The Duchess of Malfi (movie 2). There are also scenes from the movie they're making of The Duchess of Malfi (movie 3). At one point, there is also a documentary filmmaker intending to do a feature on the Dogme movement, who is making the documentary of this movie (movie 4). The executive producers also seem to be involved in an erotic thriller of some sort with hookers and assassinations (movie 5).

A horror film, a behind-the-scenes, a Dogme movie, a pop documentary, and an erotic thriller. None of these genres blend together. Indeed, they almost seem to fight each other, as if there is some death struggle for control of the audience's attention.

So, what is this movie, really?  It's actually a document of watching somebody lose his mind behind the screen.

In 2001, Mike Figgis was still in his art house darling mode. He had a lot of good will attributed to him through his success with the traditional Leaving Las Vegas, and had followed that up with a good/bad run including the critically liked The Loss of Sexual Innocence. In 2000, he came up with the experimental four-camera single story Hollywood film Time Code. While the four camera split-screen technique was applauded, the story was seen as basic and undeserving of the experiment.

With the general dismissal of Time Code's story (which wasn't the point of the movie), Figgis seemed to finally say, "fuck it" and lost his damned mind. Then, we get this movie, Hotel.

After Hotel, Figgis did a few episodes of Television, with one last attempt at traditional filmmaking with Cold Creek Manor, a terrible revamping of Straw Dogs. Otherwise, his disenchantment was obviated, and in Hotel, it was actually on screen. But, nobody knew that it was the end of Figgis' line at the time.

Everything about Hotel is a specific aspect of Hollywood, and probably one that Figgis himself hated. The people who run the hotel are shown as cannibals who will dine with you and indulge your feckless stories, even as they're getting ready to dine on your corpse. The director (Rhys Ifans) of The Duchess of Malfi is an egotistical backstabbing asshole who yells at everybody because he can, and makes mincemeat out of his producer (David Schwimmer) in front of the cast. The executive producer will make business calls while paying for women to do weird sexual tricks for him (like dunking her breasts in champagne glasses of milk), while also trying to patch things up with his wife. There is also an assassination attempt on the director, who spends 15 minutes bleeding out on the floor in a coma as the producer and actors come over to try to talk to him without realizing he's been shot.

The documentary filmmaker is the worst of pop-internet culture, and is being hosted by a perky bubble-gum snapping Hispanic hotty who seems to trade on her breasts as much as her intelligence. Dogme is what was becoming a huge phony filmmaking trend (championed by Lars Von Fucking Trier) and something people went gaga over even though it was a waste of attempting to get something real and sincere on screen. Which is why the use of a period piece in Dogme is hilarious. In the end, the producer finishes directing the movie himself, when suddenly the director wakes out of his coma to (probably) take the full credit.

Watching Hotel as a single contiguous story is an attempt in futility. Watching Hotel as a satire on Hollywood and the chaos that it perpetrates is the only way to make any sort of sense of Hotel. It's like a metaphorical tin hat tract of paranoia. Figgis pulls no punches, either. He's scathing in this, leaving no body untainted. Once you settle in to imagining yourself at the center of this film, and that all these things are forces acting on you, you'll find it a hilarious, angry, bitter, raging asshole, primal scream of a film. Trying to make something coherent out of it will leave you crying in a corner.

The Tulse Luper Suitcases Part 1: The Moab Story (2003): Americans are corrupt

The Tulse Luper Suitcases Part 1: The Moab Story (2003)
dir: Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway has been at the forefront of pseudo-interactive cinema. Starting with The Pillow Book, Greenaway was beginning to experiment with cinema that broke every rule of conventional and arthouse cinema by using onscreen text, screens within screens, scenes within scenes, juxtapositions, voice-overs, repetition, overlaid imagery, intentionally fake sets, image projection, and a whole variety of other methods that smashed through the fourth wall with the force of a wrecking ball. In no other place has this more heavy-handed than here in The Tulse Luper Suitcases.

The Tulse Luper Suitcases is a huge scope of a project. It has its roots as a web project which was a sort of contest examining the life of Tulse Luper through 92 characters in his life, 92 suitcases he left behind, 1001 stories he had to write, and 92 random objects of life. 92 is the Atomic number of Uranium, which is a major theme in The Tulse Luper Suitcases, which is subtitled The Personal History of Uranium.

The website for The Tulse Luper Suitcases, however, appears still somewhat unfinished, as it is supposed to be a whole network of suitcases, events, characters, and real life history. But, as you'll see over the next three days, The Tulse Luper Suitcases isn't simple or easy.

Following The Tulse Luper Suitcases website were three 2-hour movies. Six hours to explore the life of Tulse Luper. Following that, there was a television show of 16 episodes, which seems to use a lot of the footage of the initial 2 hour movies (and has close to the same running length), as well as A Life in Suitcases which is a condensation of the 6 hour edition into 2 hours.

And, following the website, the 3 movies, the re-edited movie, and the television show, Greenaway also had installations which explored the life of Tulse Luper through the use of short repeated videos projected on multiple screens throughout a warehouse. In essence, the Tulse Luper Suitcases are the basis of what is now termed a Vine, in that most of these videos are very very short loops of 10 seconds or less. But, Greenaway used these to form a singular pastiche as an installation.

One of the debates that should be surrounding The Tulse Luper Suitcases is whether any of the above information is actually necessary to the project. Should the movies be stand alone films completely separate from the website? Or, should everything be taken as one big whole with the installations, that very few people had a chance to see, and the website and the show and the films all recalling and informing each other, making this a project for one person to get lost in for months as they create the lists upon lists and networks that the website was attempting to make.

The review that follows, as well as the next 2 reviews, will ignore all of the other media and focus solely on the 3 2-hour movies. While, I am not of the mind that no project can have appendices outside the main body of work, if a project is of a large enough scale, then each piece should be able to stand on its own.

The Moab Story

Peter Greenaway has stated that Tulse Luper is his alter ego. Indeed, Tulse Luper has had periodic references made to him throughout Greenaway's oeuvre. But, Tulse Luper is also a physical parallel to the development of Uranium in the modern world. And, to top it off, he's also a figure to explore the various aspects that eventually went into the development of the bomb.

The film version of The Tulse Luper Suitcases is subtitled "a life in 16 episodes," with the first movie containing the first three episodes of Tulse Luper's life, moving Luper from London to Utah to Belgium in episodic formats during the run up to World War II.

The first episode is Tulse Luper as a child in London, playing World War I games with his friends. They had a game crossing yards which were in reference to the historic areas or battles of World War 1. At the end, they break the final wall and Luper is punished by his father with imprisonment in a shed. Though, his friend Martino Knockavelli visits him and tries to define him according to a book with facial elements segmented out.

The second episode is Tulse Luper exploring Moab, Utah around the time of discovery of Uranium in Utah. While he is looking around at old abandoned towns, and discovering the importance of Utah, he also spies on a hot Mormon wife, and is punished through honey and bees to the genitalia...and then through imprisonment again.

The third episode is Tulse Luper writing in Belgium during the rise of the Nazi party, with his friend Martino while also looking after friends of the Mormons. Until he is imprisoned again, and the Mormon family comes looking for him and for everybody else.

These three episodes just form the bare bones plot on which Greenaway does whatever the fuck he wants to the structure, themes, and style. Some of the post-modern structural elements will stretch through the three movies, some only through two, and others only through this one movie. But, they're all telling.

The three episodes in Part 1 are separated by auditions for the various characters in the movie. The characters will repeat lines that haven't happened, yet, change actors or actresses, and faux-explore the various elements that go into movie making. In a way, Greenaway is having a conversation with the audience, and also with other movies that have preceded him.

It's rather obvious that Tulse Luper's three main conversationalists are History Channel documentaries, Zelig, and Forrest Gump. But, Luper borrows deconstructive elements of the hyperlink culture we started living in, some of which was seen in early adopter movies like Run Lola Run, sketch comedy shows, and sitcom cartoons like The Critic. Of course, Greenaway had already been exploring the limits of the frame and the constant delivery of condensed information since The Pillow Book and Drowning By Numbers.

With The Tulse Luper Suitcases, Greenaway begins deconstructing the constructions of the historical documentaries and biographic shows, and also pointing fingers at the fictionalization of historic events through popular culture. The set he constructed for London was an open stage set with cardboard blocks to represent the various yards or sections that the children crossed. A deconstructionist trait that Greenaway shared with Lars Von Trier's 2003 released Dogville, which even removed those walls for a completely open set.

By exposing the filmic trappings of set design as pure constructionist fiction, Greenaway already opens his firing shots at discussing the corruption of the world. Corruption, of course, being one of the most major themes in every single episode of The Tulse Luper Suitcases. In the first episode, the father is corrupt, the game children play is corrupt, the fictionalization is corrupt, the rehearsals we're shown are probably corrupt, the suitcases are corrupt. Everything is a corrupt commentary on everything else.

As I mentioned, Greenaway isn't just content to tell the story in a linear format. The traditional narrative film is frequently interrupted by talking head historians who are putting false context to the events happening, explaining or over explaining the story, and also introducing us to the various suitcases, most of which are filled with elements taken directly from the story, or with symbolic gestures that comment on the story.

In additional to that, Greenaway uses a style of placing frames over frames, sometimes of the same event, and using the same dialogue, starting to expose the repetition in modern culture for the confused corruption that it is.  We see commercials on repeat, we hear songs played over and over again on the radio, and this was just before America would be plagued by that terrible commercial for HeadOn. By constantly interrupting his own various styles, Greenaway participates in a cinema of frustration. All of our traditional narrative expectations are destroyed, and we try to build our own network of events and suitcases and history, all of which has been corrupted and fictionalized by Greenaway.

Greenaway uses the techniques the heaviest in the first 40 minutes, as he's acclimating us to the techniques he'll be using, as well as to the world he is creating. He will frequently return to his techniques throughout the films, but as he moves into the world of Moab, Utah and Belgium, Greenaway more and more frequently allows the story to play through for longer periods of time.

The main story-based element that Greenaway is criticizing in this first part are the Americans. He seems to be criticizing their handling of the first World War in the London segment. In the Moab, Utah section, he is openly critiquing the weird hyper religions, capitalism, the obsession for torture, and the self-serving nature of Americans. By the time we get to Beligum, and the Mormons enter sided with the Nazis, Greenaway is being completely critical of the Americans, even going so far to hint that they are more corrupt than the Nazis themselves. The Americans in Belgium act more like jackbooted thugs who rape, abuse and imprison people at their will, moreso than the Nazis do on screen.

Contrastingly, Tulse Luper is the constant victim in the first three episodes. He's imprisoned by his father for playing a game. Luper is tortured for spying on the Mormon wife. He is again imprisoned for succumbing to her charms after he was tortured. And, in Belgium, he's imprisoned by the Nazis and then by the Americans as Nazis. By making Luper be an ineffectual victim, Greenaway is starting to expose the corruption of our victim culture, where people who sacrifice are considered to be better people than the ones who do the punishing.

What Greenaway does in Part 1 is lay the corrupt groundwork for Tulse Luper's corrupt journey through the world of World War II, and the history of the 20th century. He introduces his dense post-modern techniques, and basically informs the viewers that, if they can't keep up with his attitude, they're going to suffer. The Tulse Luper Suitcases is a game within a conversation within a corruption within a movie, and it forces you to keep up or die. Some will say that it is cinema of the unpleasant, but I find this overindulgence entertaining, even if it is kind of exhausting.

Swoon (1992): Avant-garding the past

Swoon (1992)
dir: Tom Kalin

In the late '80s and early 1990s, there was a cinematic movement of sorts that came to be dubbed New Queer Cinema.  This was marked by an outburst of films that were made by queers for queers, whether they were gays, lesbians, trans, bi, fluid, or any of the other letters in the LGBTQ alphabet soup of inclusion (though mostly gay men).  Two directors came from the scene and into the mainstream:  Todd Haynes, who started with Poison and would go on to make Far From Heaven and I'm Not Here (and was also an uncredited script polisher on Office Killer), and Gus Van Sant, who made Mala Noche, but would go on to make Good Will Hunting and Milk. Other films included Gregg Araki's The Living End, Rose Troche's Go Fish, and Jennie Livingston's Paris is Burning.

New Queer Cinema was simultaneously rebellious and demanding of acceptance.  It was about the explicit rejection of cultural norms, while wanting to be embraced by the mainstream as normal.  The Living End, for instance, concerned a pair of HIV+ gay men who decide to go on a murderous criminal rampage in a fit of rage against their position in the system.  Poison was inspired by the works of Jean Genet who expressed gay themes through lurid subjects like horror and the murder of parents. Paris is Burning documents the drag and transgendered balls in Harlem and the illicit behavior that is required to sustain such a lifestyle in New York at that time.

Swoon retells the true story of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, two gay socialites in the 1920s who would become lovers and commit a series of escalating crimes, culminating in the murder of an 11-year-old boy.  The Leopold and Loeb murder was most famously the inspiration for Hitchcock's Rope, about two implicitly gay men who murder a friend of theirs and throw a party while the friend rotted in the trunk in the living room.  The Leopold and Loeb murder was sensationalist because it was committed by homosexuals, it had significant power dynamics, it was particularly gruesome (they used hydrochloric acid to try to dissolve identifying parts of the body), and it was essentially a thrill kill.

With Swoon, Tom Kalin takes a second look at the murder and subsequent trial with a modern set of eyes.  Throughout the first half of the movie, Kalin deconstructs the relationship between Leopold and Loeb and reconstructs it with modern sensibilities.  In the second half, he does the same with the ensuing trial.  Kalin reconstructs the whole story in a way that is reminiscent of the foreign art house directors of the late 60s and 70s.  French New Wave like Godard and Truffaut, and Fellini can be seen in the stylistic edges and artier-than-thou acting and direction.

Kalin is removing the artifice of reality in an attempt to force people to realize that what they know about the crime is false, and what they are watching about the case is also an artificial re-enactment that is not getting at the heart of the crime, but at the themes of the crime.  Those themes being homosexuality in society, rebellion, and bored socialites.

Throughout the first half of Swoon, we watch Nathan and Richard manipulate each other into doing as the other wants.  Sometimes it's for money.  Sometimes, it's for sex.  Sometimes for love, and sometimes for the thrill.  At one point, Nathan tells his psychologist that he fantasizes himself a king, and Richard as his slave.  At another point, Richard offers himself as payment for Nathan's participation in a crime.  They write kidnapping letters on a typewriter at a party.  They exchange rings. They're intrinsically tied to each other, and they are both as responsible for the crime as each other is.

The trial of Swoon gets even more stylized as the court recounts the immorality of the homosexual relationship.  At one point, in the middle of the trial, Nathan and Richard are making out on a bed put in the middle of the courtroom as the lawyers talk about their devious sexual acts.  Even though they both turn on each other blaming each other for the crime (so romantic), they're both still tied to each other.

Swoon is challenging what we know about the trial because everything we do know was colored through the biases and judgments of the era.  They were biased against homosexuals, so the homosexuality was really up for trial.  The murder is never shown as being false, however.  Kalin never suggests that it never happened.  Kalin never suggests that they were railroaded for that crime.  He mainly is making the challenge that everything we know is colored by the biases that the era held.

By association, Kalin is also suggesting that the biases that we have now also color how we view the events of the modern era.  As such, morality is relative.  Sure the murder is brutal and despicable, but what we think about it is colored by who we are and who we were.  Any crimes that we hold judgement on are inherently colored by the way we judge the people involved in the crime.  If we inherently don't like somebody, we will rule against them, and if we do like somebody we rule in favor of them.  This type of emotional response is manipulated by the lawyers all the time.

Swoon, while full of fascinating morality and an interesting take on a lurid and compelling crime, is not a great movie.  It is too artsy by a factor of at least 10.  The acting and direction is reminiscent of what Dr. Caligari was mocking in 1989.  While it sees everybody else with a distinct view of irony and derision, it has no such views of itself.  It's technique is super serious and Kalin almost thinks what he is doing is as serious as it is humorous.  There is no winking.  There is no easy way out.

If you can take the technique, then I can recommend the movie.  If you can't, than I can't...even if I do find the movie completely compelling in its ideas.

Schizopolis (1996): Going Backwards to Re-educate

Schizopolis (1996)
dir: Steven Soderbergh

I introduced myself to Schizopolis in quite possibly the best way possible.  I was doing a sleep study drug test for research, and had to stay in a psych ward for 72 hours.  I didn't socialize much at the psych ward, and was the only person there for "research."  So, I watched movies and tv on DVD all day.  Schizopolis was one of those movies.  And, in my mind, there is no other way to experience this movie, which is quite possibly the closest experience anybody could ever have of a nervous breakdown without actually having one themselves.  And, yet, this is only the surface of the movie.

I'm sure you all know Steven Soderbergh.  This was a man who came on strong with his first movie, Sex, Lies and Videotape, but got sucked into indie Hollywood hell of a string of rather uninspired crappy non-movies for 7 years.  Then, after he divorced his wife, he came out with Schizopolis, which is simultaneously a student film by a then-not-so-major director, a clarion call for help, and a learning process.  After this movie, his career rejuvenated and he started making popular and/or award-winning movies, and has continued to do so to this day.

Schizopolis is the story of three nights and days in the life of three characters told from different points of view.  The first two characters are Fletcher Munson (Steven Soderbergh) and his wife, Mrs Munson (real-life ex-wife Betsy Brantley).  After the death of Munson's co-worker, Fletcher is assigned to write a speech for his boss, a pseudo-L. Ron Hubbard type for the book Eventualism, but struggles with it.  His wife, however, has been having an affair with our third character Dr Jeffrey Korchek (Steven Soderbergh, again)...who is also trying to seduce Attractive Woman #2 (Betsy Brantley, again).  As the days go by, and the speech gets finished, and the affair is totaled, Schizopolis finally gives us a fake fantasy ending of happiness that it doesn't share with the real life couple.

Intertwined in this are two separate tales, whose tales move linearly out of sync with the Soderbergh stories.  The first is that of Elmo Oxygen, a pest control agent who goes door to door to seduce women, and is hired by a reality TV show team to assault people.  The second is that of Nameless Numberhead Man who is unhappily married to Attractive Woman #1, because she used to be fat but has lost all of her weight. So, while she's having affairs with the likes of Elmo and possibly Dr. Korchek, he's seducing an insurance agent who is much larger in size.

Soderbergh structures Schizopolis in 3 acts, each act telling the same set of days from a different perspective.  It's very Go before Go.  But, it is post Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction.  The first act is told strictly from Munson's point of view, in which he is so bored with his usual marriage that he doesn't even hear their conversations in real sentences.  All he hears is "Generic Greeting" and "Generic Greeting returned".  Basically, the framework of all our routine conversation to maintain our lives, even though it seems inconsequential.  Meanwhile, he has to suffer through work by masturbating in the bathroom, while writing shitty speeches and getting phone calls offering him money to be a mole.  He doesn't even notice that his wife is obviously cheating on him.  And, he barely notices that she left him on the second evening.  Also, in this first section, we first see Elmo seducing women using a Burroughs-esque cut-up nonsensical language.  And, we learn that Nameless Numberhead Man is depressed by his wife.

The second act is told from Dr. Korchek's point of view, which is fairly mundane and straightforward but observatory in ways that Munson's story isn't.  He also acknowledges that this may be the same character but a completely different personality.  At one point, he remarks "I'm having an affair with my wife."  In this section, we learn that Korchek is in love with Mrs. Munson and asks her to move in with him.  But, when she does move in with him, he rejects her out of the possibility that he has fallen in love with Attractive Woman #2.  The second act also has Elmo, now hired by a different reality tv crew, assaulting random people for his show.  And, we watch NNM seduce the rather large secretary as he mildly belittles Attractive Woman #1 for losing weight, telling her to eat something.

The third act is told from Mrs. Munson's point of view, who only hears herself in English.  She hears all the men in different, unsubtitled, foreign languages.  She hears Fletcher in Japanese, Korchek in Italian, and when she reconciles with Fletcher post-Korchek rejection, he is now in French.  The new information presented is that she actually leaves Fletcher.  And, after she is rejected by Korchek, Fletcher comes and rescues her from a coffee shop and they go home together.  They have sex, the speech is finished, and everybody is talking in normal English once again.   The third act is missing Elmo until he shows up in the epilogue.  And, Mrs Munson finds a video tape meant for NNM which is really large women who are having sex with small men.

So, in reality, this is a screaming reality check by Soderbergh for himself.  He started shooting with no script, and this is the movie that came straight out of his head.  It may seem like it is a psychotic movie about personalities and points of views that is further confused and obfuscated by Soderbergh playing two parts and Brantley playing two parts.  It may seem like the whole point of the film is story as therapy.  Especially when you add in that the speech sections came straight out of notes from executives on Soderbergh's scripts.  But, really, I don't think that was the purpose of this movie at all.

Schizopolis reminds me of Man Bites Dog, in that this was a movie that really wasn't about its subject.  Man Bites Dog was a movie about the making of movies.  Sure, it happened to be a movie about the making of a movie about a serial killer.  But, it was intended to be a movie about making movies.  It just had a sick sense of humor. Likewise, Schizopolis is mainly a training ground for Soderbergh to experiment on the effect of cinematic points of view, and in turn, to teach the audience on how to watch movies.  That it is also a bit of masturbation on affairs and marriage, just after he divorced his ex-wife, is incidental mind-fuckery.

Soderbergh was teaching himself what a point of view was in a film, and how the different ways you tell a story can have different effects on the story itself.  Since we don't follow Mrs. Munson at all in the first act, we don't really know that she's having an affair, even though the audience suspects it.  We see how following this character affects what the audience knows about the story, and then when we follow Dr Korchek, we learn more about the affair.  And, when we follow Mrs. Munson, we get the final pieces.

In the process, the audience learns that the language to the scene is incidental, even though the language used is far from incidental.  While one character is hearing things as a generic script filled with replacement place holders, the other is hearing the same conversation in two completely different languages.  Teaching us that we may not actually be hearing each other even if we think we're listening.  Also, teaching the audience that the words in plays and movies barely even need to exist as long as we learn the various attitudes of the characters through their dialogue.

Where the A-story is mainly an experiment in structure and form, the B-stories (that of Elmo Oxygen and NNM) are an experiment in style.  Elmo jumps from genre to genre.  From weird detective movie to sexpot movie to 60s drug out movie to reality tv show to, eventually, assassination thriller.  NNM is a straight up generic romance. Each different style is showcasing how every movie structures their camera shots, lighting, and editing to achieve a different feel for every scene.

Schizopolis played at Cannes to a legendarily bad reception.  Nobody knew what to make of it.  It played as a "surprise" film, and had no credits. The title is presented as a word on the shirt of a bottomless man, and ends with a single frame blip of a copyright. The movie, moving extremely fast with its overly complicated plot, operates at a pace where it is years ahead of its first-time audience at every scene.  Just as an audience thinks it may have caught up, wham its a different movie.  People were still catching up on the timeline experimentation that was Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction.  Variety had a particularly scathing and clueless review, saying "No narrative is developed on a comprehensible level, nor is any single idea fleshed out to meaningful dimensions."

As I said, though, Schizopolis is a training ground for both Soderbergh and for audiences alike (even though nobody saw Schizopolis).  In 1997, Tarantino would reuse this type of multiple viewpoint narration for his movie Jackie Brown, and Soderbergh would totally fuck timelines up with Out of Sight in 1998.  In fact, five of his next six movies would deal with points of view or timeline fuckery that Soderbergh developed here in Schizopolis.  Those movies: Out of Sight, The Limey, Traffic, Ocean's Eleven, and Full Frontal.  They also dealt with genre styling in a way that Soderbergh developed in Schizopolis.

There are a lot (a lot) of valid criticisms of Schizopolis. It's intentionally confusing. It's too fast to keep up with. It's too compressed with too many ideas. It's pretentious and self-indulgent as all get out. It's amateurish. It feels like a student film thesis project. It's disconnected. It's obvious. It's obtuse. In a sense, this movie doesn't work for a lot of people not willing to put time or energy into a film.  On the other hand, it is a blisteringly funny take on relationships, communication, and how to watch movies in general without feeling lecture-y about any of it.  This is one of The Other Films' Required Viewings.