Kaurismäki’s “Hamlet Goes Business” Takes the Bard Into Bizarro Territory

Aki Kaurismäki’s films were bizarro before bizarro became a thing. I can think of no other auteur who has done for the motion picture what authors like Kevin L. Donihe have done for alternative fiction—consummately married the mundane to the peculiar.

If there’s one thing that our readers will find appealing about Hamlet Goes Business, a film that could otherwise be summarized as a black-and-white arthouse melodrama, it’s the depths to which it goes to highlight the absurdity of ole Anonymous‘s play.

The high contrast black-and-white photography feels less like an homage to Shakespearean theater and more like a tip of the hat to Kafka fans who have relished cinema’s adaptations of the same (think Orson Welles’ production of The Trial). Indeed, the entire film feels less like a Shakespeare tragedy and more like an exercise in lampooning industrialism and Capitalism, and the people responsible for both.

Where the play starts out with two watchmen convincing Hamlet’s friend, Horatio, to stand watch with them so as to catch sight of the King’s ghost, Hamlet Goes Business opens on a tight shot of a puppy yapping, his cries falling on deaf ears.

Instead of the Prince’s friend becoming convinced that a specter spells bad things for the future of Denmark, Kaurismäki’s story finds Klaus (the Claudius character of the Shakespeare text) poisoning the King before sucking face with the widow Gertrude in a shot yanked straight out of Gone with the Wind.

In a first act reveal that would have likely drawn belly laughs from John Kennedy Toole, Prince Hamlet himself (played sublimely by Pirkka-Pekka Petelius) is shown to be a paunchy, greasy-haired brat.

The other men populating this adaptation are profoundly dense, their actions motivated by the basest of fears and desires. An early scene involving ham is laugh-out-loud funny but, also, symbolic of the flick’s central theme—man’s voracious appetite for amassing things. Wealth describes not only money but anything that can be horded and/or devoured.

As Polonius (Esko Nikkari) explains early on, the porky prince has the controlling shares of the family company with the rest belonging to the banks. Polonius takes for granted that Prince Hamlet will be too stupid to object to a modest allowance in lieu of a promotion. It’s his firm belief that the little bastard is so dumb that he won’t realize that the role of company president is his birthright.

At the King’s funeral, Klaus tells Hamlet that he has something he wants to show him. The next very abridged sequence is introduced by an intertitle reading, “Satan and Jesus on the Mountain.” It consists solely of Klaus showing the prince around the company’s factory as if introducing him to the nuts and bolts of Capitalism.

The intertitle seems to suggest that Klaus is the Devil, tempting the son with the fruits of other people’s labor. It’s a captivating metaphor, particularly in what is an otherwise pretty silly film. That Hamlet is then quite literally thrust upon Ofelia (Kaurismäki perennial Kati Outinen), the daughter of a “good family,” furthers this rather blunt metaphor.

The Finnish director behind this short and defiantly sloppy re-imagining is fond of calling his films dog shit, pointing out that they are failures when held up against the works which inspired them. In Kaurismäki’s eyes, even his masterworks—the Oscar-nominated ‘Man Without a Past‘ and his faithfully rendered film of La Vie de Boheme—are garbage compared to the Art of Bresson’s Mouchette or Ozu’s Tokyo Story.

Many would read the director’s comments as self-deprecation, but that’s only if you aren’t hip to the artist’s rather wicked sense of humor. This is the same guy who jarred David Lynch at Cannes by allegedly whispering, “Who are you?”

Silly and haphazard as much of Hamlet Goes Business is, it’s still a cinematic marvel and a well-crafted one at that. As a filmmaker notorious for his economy with dialogue, Kaurismäki never fails to deliver sparse lines that fester in one’s brain. Example:

[After rebutting Hamlet’s advances, Ofelia sits, slouched, on the bed, staring up at him timidly.]

Ofelia: You know I can’t. Not before marriage.

Hamlet: That’s blackmail, darling.

[Moments later, Hamlet advances towards her again, this time to the sort of melodramatic strings of a Douglas Sirk film.]

Ofelia: No, don’t. We’d both regret it afterwards.

Hamlet: That’s what you think.

Ofelia: What did you say?

Hamlet: Leave me now. I promised to dine with my mother.

[Ofelia gets up to leave as Hamlet exhales cigarette smoke and broods. As she leaves, Hamlet turns off the source of the melodramatic music—a reel-to-reel recorder—and turns to a vintage jukebox sitting against the wall of his bedroom.]

The mise-en-scène here is a key component of Kaurismäki’s signature brand of bizarro. On one level, it can be read as a meta-fictional detail bordering on parody, but on another it’s representative of the anachronisms that make his films so unique. I dare any viewer to name another artist working in motion pictures who better juxtaposes such incongruous elements.

After Ofelia leaves, Hamlet kicks the jukebox in anger, compelling it to skip to a 45” whose chorus commands, “Hush! Hush! You’re talkin’ too much.”

Unlike much of the 69-year old’s ouevre, Hamlet Goes Business was not well-received here in America. Of the few reviews that one can dig up on the Internet, nearly all of them agree that the flick is short, stilted and anything but representative of Kaurismäki at the height of his powers.

This strikes me as hilarious since the picture shares so much in common with an American film that suffered the same critical fate upon its release. There are aspects here that will call to mind The Hudsucker Proxy, a screwball comedy directed by the Coen Brothers and co-written by Sam Raimi (Evil Dead, A Simple Plan).

The most obvious similarities are the the ridiculously long dinner table and Polonius’s central hypothesis that Hamlet will be too stupid to succeed. It’s worth noting, however, that The Hudsucker Proxy didn’t come out until 1994, a full five years after ‘Hamlet‘ was released on our Shores.

Like the Coen Brothers, Kaurismäki has an affinity for the village idiot, a character that often propels his narratives forward (see: Leningrad Cowboys Go America). In ‘Hamlet,’ it is Rosencrantz and Guildenstern who are the big, dumb goons while Kaurismäki’s favorite male lead, the late-Matti Pellonpää (Ariel, Night on Earth), fills the ancillary role of The Guard (a conglomeration of the three guardsmen from the Shakespeare text).

The Guard and his young ward are obviously simpletons of the sort that are often found in the periphery of a Coen Brothers flick. Think Steve Buscemi’s Donnie in The Big Lebowski or Ryan Hurst’s Lump Hudson from their 2004 remake of The Ladykillers.

This correlation drew itself in my mind when I was less than a quarter of the way into Hamlet Goes Business. And the more I dwelt upon it, the more it made sense. For all of the credit that we give the Coen Brothers for their signature style, it’s impossible not to see Kaurismäki’s work in almost everything of theirs.

The way that Hamlet gobbles a thick slice of ham over his father’s dead body reminds one of nothing so much as George Clooney’s Harry Pfarrer messily gobbling hors d’oeuvres in Burn After Reading. Just when this theory begins to feel far-fetched, ask yourself what made Fargo, the Coens’ 1996 original film, so “original.”

At the time, cosmopolitan American audiences were widely unfamiliar with that distinctly Scandinavian Midwest populated by pregnant police officer Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) and loser car salesman Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy). What’s more, the laconic deadpan humor typical of Scandinavian countries was foreign to their ears.

It was this deadpan comedy and the way that the Coens portrayed Minnesota as a bleak winter tundra that got American viewers’ attention. Here was something that was rather eccentric and undoubtedly one-of-a-kind…except it wasn’t.

One could easily picture the Coens’ silent, stone-faced killer, Gaear Grimsrud (Peter Storemare), meeting one of Pellonpää’s sad sack working class characters at a pub in Kaurismäki’s Loser Trilogy (Shadows in Paradise, Ariel, The Match Factory Girl). And that bleak winter tundra has been well-represented in the auteur’s canon, from Ariel all the way up to Leningrad Cowboys Meet Moses.

This is not to slight the exceptionally talented Coens in any way, simply to state for posterity that the Finns did it first, Kaurismäki in particular. Here we are given one of the most indescribably odd adaptations of any classic volume. It’s equal parts Orson Welles drama and Three Stooges-style slapstick.

The incongruity I mentioned earlier pops up again when we arrive at one of the director’s perpetual live music sequences. Here it’s a raw punk rock performance of “Rich Little Bitch” by Melrose, one of Lapland’s greatest bands, whose rhythm section consists of a spiky-haired kid with a giant stand-up bass.

While most reviewers are probably right when they say that Hamlet Goes Business is an imperfect film, they neglect the fact that it is still head and shoulders above the hackneyed productions of Hamlet that are rolled out on the stages of International theaters on a near-constant basis. If there’s one thing going for it it’s the director’s obvious restlessness with the source material.

The resulting picture succeeds by virtue of its almost perverse refusal to acknowledge the play’s underlying concerns. The preternatural relationship between Prince Hamlet and his mother is reduced here to a throwaway line of dialogue that reduces the heir’s Oedipal complex to nothing more than the co-dependence of any sexless geek.

If it’s not a masterwork on the order of the director’s later port city stories (La Havre and The Other Side of Hope) then it’s definitely a worthy sizzle reel, demonstrating Kaurismaki’s knack for rendering the boring wildly compelling. If nothing else, it’s surely a worthy stocking stuffer for someone who loathes the Bard.

If you’re familiar with the Shakespeare play then you already know this one doesn’t end well, at least not historically. But in Hamlet Goes Business nothing goes according to plan. Don’t be surprised if the film’s ending finds you smiling. This is just part of what makes it so bizarre.

February 1, 2020 by Silent Motorist Media

Films That Fell Through the Cracks: “Aaltra” (2004)

“Aaltra”

(Film Movement Series; Delépine et K/Vern)

Some films have the ability to leave you in awe while others are in possession of something capable of driving you mad. Delépine and Kervern’s directorial debut, the nebulously titled Aaltra, is in full possession of both.

Described as a darkly comic road movie, this French-Belgium co-production came and went from European arthouses, collecting warm if largely pedestrian praise from native critics, ultimately landing on our shores only after New York City’s Film Movement launched their e-commerce distribution model in 2003.

The relative obscurity that it has existed in is unfortunate, first and foremost because discerning audiences deserve to see it but, furthermore, because American independent filmmakers could learn a lot from its style and structure.

Aaltra‘s plot seems tailor-made for the sort of broad bromantic comedies that Tinseltown loves to turn out like a cheap escort…at least on paper. To wit: After finding out that his neighbor’s lazy farmhand Gus (the hulking, disheveled de Kervern, credited here as K/Vern) has been screwing his wife, a nerdy motorbike enthusiast and failing company man (French funnyman Benoît Delépine) speeds out into the fields and instigates a haphazard fistfight.

As the two men wrestle, their bodies land in the gaping maw of Gus’s combine harvester. The machine swallows them up, leaving each of them paralyzed below the waist. After realizing that they are both F.U.B.A.R., they begrudgingly decide to team up to take on the corporate bigwigs at Aaltra, the manufacturer of the offending combine.

Naturally, a sort of stand-offish camaraderie develops between the two, one that would be easy to picture drowning in saccharine if placed within the wrong hands. Fortunately for us, Delépine and Kervern are not the wrong hands and Aaltra is not that sort of movie.

Eschewing the buddy comedy formula in favor of something at once more realistic and more surreal than anything most of us are used to, pic presents us with the kind of story that often plays out among modern men in the real world; emotions are stifled, feelings left unexpressed and base urges rule supreme.

Instead of the faux-meditative scene that would find Delépine’s Ben confiding in Gus about the disintegration of his marriage and the laughably awkward details of his sex life, Delépine and Kervern never speak of Gus’s covetous tryst or Ben’s wife at all.

This left quite the impression on me when first I saw it since it flies in the face of our collective understanding of narrative composition. And it’s this kind of ultra-realistic detail (or lack thereof) that gives Aaltra its charm. Of course Ben and Gus never engage in some contrived heart-to-heart about marriage, infidelity or divorce.

Why bother? No use squabbling about yesterday when tomorrow is gonna be lousy enough. After all, each is now half a man in their own eyes, but together they form one mean son of a bitch.

Those seeking an escape from the hypostatized universe of Hollywood cinema would do well to seek this one out. It provides viewers with a slightly askew realism that hasn’t been seen since Jeunet and Caro’s Delicatessan or, at least, Kaurismäki’s Leningrad Cowboys Go America (fitting that Kaurismäki should cameo in Aaltra‘s denouement).

There is much of the Theater of Cruelty on display, almost all of it more comical than anything Alejandro Jodorowsky ever committed to celluloid (save, perhaps, for select bits of Fando y Lis). From the way the male nurse fucks with them once he’s confirmed that they cannot feel their legs to Ben’s surreptitious theft of a barfly’s drink when he’s not looking.

There is also something of American vintage here in the particular physical comedy that both men employ. Gus’s slow ascension while lying in an automatic hospital bed feels like it was engineered to be an homage to the age of Keaton and Chaplin. And that’s to say nothing of Ben’s Harold Lloyd-worthy pratfalls.

We know from early on that Aaltra‘s journey will have its end in Finland, so it is appropriate that our dyspeptic duo manage to illustrate that country’s aversion to arbitrary loquaciousness. When an old sod at a pub talks relentlessly at a laconic patron, going on and on about something as seemingly mundane as air conditioning in a tractor, we can feel the collective pain of the Finns.

Subtle touches of physical and visual humor soon give way to an extremity that’s every bit as amusing and confounding. The flick is especially effective at juxtaposing the average person’s veneer of samaritanism with the patina of short-tempered prejudice simmering under the surface.

This paradox is first displayed in a worker’s removal of Ben and Gus from a motocross track. “You guys can’t stay here,” he exclaims. “It kills the dream.”

Just when you might begin to feel pity for them, pic reminds us how wrong that sentiment would be. As it turns out, these two scabrous individuals work well together, effortlessly pulling grift after grift on the proud fools in their path. These are guys who think nothing of stealing popcorn from a little boy and threatening to slit his throat if he snitches.

Their primary victims: Every bourgeois idiot who dares to count themselves as well-meaning do-gooders when, in reality, they treat the handicapped as anything but equal. Their encounter with a British motocross star and grade A wank (Jason Flemyng) is almost as riotous as the psychological havoc they wreak on an uptight German couple (Brrring! Brrring!).

It’s the wealthy and entitled Brit who gets one of the flick’s most quotable lines: “It’s people like you that give fucking people in wheelchairs a bad fucking name!” This emerges as one of the only lines worth mentioning in a film whose economy with the verbal gives every line weight.

Like all of the best comedies, Aaltra is also a tragedy, one that opts to impress its poignancy through stark and random images and penetrating silences instead of overwrought pathos.

The beach sequence, featured prominently in the DVD release’s artwork, leaves an indelible impression not only for its blackly comic tableau but, also, the austere beauty of the same. No other director has ever made such effective use of the Lord’s prayer, certainly not in such a perfectly literate fashion.

One of the funniest scenes in the entire picture is also one of its most tense. A stocky Finn with a greasy pompadour sings a flamboyant rendition of Bobby Hebb’s R & B classic “Sunny” while our cripples sit back eating sausage and a room full of mean-looking skinheads seethe.

It’s in moments like this that Delépine and Kervern’s message comes through loud and clear: You need not fear for the well-being of these antagonistic protagonists, but you should worry about everyone else around them.

According to IMDB, Aaltra’s worldwide box office amounted to little more than $6,000 in sales. This may be discouraging if film fans equate financial success with artistic success. Personally, I choose not to.

Part of me believes that true art has no monetary value, only a kind of spiritual one. But as a gambling man, my money’s on this one finding the audience it deserves on streaming platforms.

As for its directors, they have gone on to make a number of unique projects including their Aaltra follow-up Avida. It’s my intention to check that one out sooner than later. I have it on good authority that it made at least seven gs.—Bob Freville

January 29, 2020 by Silent Motorist Media

What a Bunch of Assholes: The Scatalogical Satire of Peter Vack

(Breaking Glass Pictures)

dir. Peter Vack

“I’m not fucking a fucking sober bitch pussy, and I’m not having sex like a..no…nobody else would have sex with me because how are they gonna do it? This day and age, all y—, the only way you fuck is if you go for a drink with someone.”

This is how Peter Vack’s 2017 indie addiction comedy Assholes opens, and it’s exactly the kind of irresponsible but fundamentally true diatribe that has become a red diamond in American cinema of late. The films of the 2000s are increasingly homogenized with even the so-called independent films bearing little resemblance to those made in the Seventies, Eighties or even Nineties.

With the exception of Harmony Korine’s tonal prose-poem The Beach Bum, I can think of few, if any, examples of recent movies that allowed their characters to be human, warts and all. Even long-form narratives aren’t permitted to be this honest or ugly. My mind immediately goes to the Hulu series Difficult People which focused on a duo of hopelessly despicable protagonists.

It’s worth mentioning that said show was canceled after its second season. So much for the artistic freedom of streaming services. I’ve gotta wonder if the Billy Eichner series was given the ax, at least in part, because of its equal opportunity insults. Indeed, nothing seemed to be off-limits in Difficult People, whether it was jokes about 9/11 being an inside job, the proliferation of pop-up restaurants or the obnoxious and out-of-control hipsterdom of 21^st Century Manhattan (see: John Mulaney as Old Timey Cecil whose breakout line is, “My family invented the jelly bean. Fuck you!”).

Difficult People would have been a fitting and admittedly more mature title for Peter Vack’s directorial debut. In another universe I could even see the two being paired up for a retrospective. But not in 2020, not even if you’re Todd Solondz or John Waters. The former is relegated to the back pages of Amazon while the latter has to write books in lieu of directing motion pictures.

All “get off my lawn” nostalgic yearning aside, I’ve gotta commend Vack for the bold choices that he makes from frame one. A lot of ink has been spilled about Assholes being a “gross-out” movie, but it’s not the crassness of the dialogue or the hideous sight gags that are really so jarring. Instead it’s Vack’s keen attention to detail that other millennial filmmakers would be unlikely to think of.

In the very first sequence of the flick, as Adah Shapiro, pic’s girl in begrudging recovery, complains about how much she hates sober people we are treated to subtitles that cannot be removed by remote. These subtitles aren’t in another language other than our own. In fact, they are all too familiar to some of us.

“When I was not a sober person and I looked at ber people, I wod be like, whoa, like, you are li, lame. Like, I never gonna be like you. And now that I have crossed over to the sober fe, I stil feel that way, I do! I just still feel that way, and I, I jt, you know, nothing’s changed, and just, and it makes me feel incredibly lonely. Like, incredibly alone in this world because now I forced to hang out with people who I relateero…”

This is just a taste of Adah’s lament and the accompanying subtitles read like nothing so much as a regrettable text message that you send to a former lover at four in the morning before crashing on a park bench and waking up in your own urine.

It is this sense of authenticity that gives Assholes its real power. And it is this power that makes this more than what can fairly be referred to as a “gross-out comedy.” For every feculent fluid that’s highlighted on-screen there are a handful of exchanges that underscore the seriousness of the subject matter.

This acute authenticity extends far beyond the frankness of Adah’s sexual frustration to the way in which she projects her sickness onto her brother, something that virtually every addict has been guilty of at some point in their downward spiral.

I feel like I need to point out that Adah is played by Vack’s real life sister and that Adam Shapiro, her on-screen brother, is played by Vack himself. The actor-director’s birth name was Peter S. Brown. He and his sister’s parents are Ron and Jane Brown, a screenwriter and producer, respectively.

If one were to venture a guess as to the origins of Assholes‘ plot they would probably assume that it’s a work of autobiography. Fortunately for Vack and his sibling, this was never the case. The pair were raised on the Upper West Side by an entrepreneurial father and a mother who earned a living as a psychoanalyst.

While Vack has copped to the fact that they drew upon “past animosities” toward each other, this was not the crux of his idea for the story. In fact, the characters were originally written as ex-lovers and Vack only decided to alter the script after his sister performed the part of the ex-gf during a table read.

People can talk all they want about how “disgusting” this film is, but I dare anyone to name another recent American film that has so lovingly paid homage to the composition of International arthouse pictures. From the off-kilter framing and overbearing lighting to the stilted dialogue and random outbursts, there is little here that could be compared to the likes of the Farrelly Brothers or a Judd Apatow flick.

Maybe Peter Vack isn’t the real asshole, maybe it’s people like me who get off on seeing something that so brazenly thumbs its nose at narrative convention and domestic cinematic structure. I suspect this was at least a consideration of Vack’s if not his full intent.

While I was watching Assholes I was reminded of a quote by Finnish auteur Aki Kaurismäki in which he complained about the state of modern cinema, saying, “In the old days you had one murder and that was enough for a story. Now you have to kill 300,000 people just to get the audience’s attention.”

If any quote explains the necessity of Assholes‘ verbal and visual excesses it’s this jeremiad. In a world that’s become increasingly desensitized to sex and violence on camera, the only logical next step is for a male and female protagonist to suck each others’ assholes and cold sores. Not because it’s particularly beautiful or artistic, simply because there’s nowhere left to go. How else will you get anyone’s attention?

While it can easily be argued that subtlety would be a better and craftier weapon against mainstream cinema’s excesses, it’s impossible not to acknowledge a certain brilliance in Vack’s politically incorrect presentation of drug-induced insanity.

One extended sequence in the first half hour feels so painfully real that it’s difficult to imagine it being filmed without the cast and crew landing in NYC’s infamous Tombs. And that’s before the birth of the shit-smeared demon woman from the mortal asshole.

It’s fitting that Vack and his sister grew up with a mother who specialized in psychoanalysis because the entire film could be read as one protracted 74-minute therapy session. This is not lost on Assholes‘ creator who makes it a point to include an analyst as a central character, one that seems perpetually put upon by his neurotic patients.

That the analyst is himself so desperate for a connection that he considers himself friends with these assholes reinforces the notion that Assholes isn’t merely about assholes and their obsession with assholes but, more importantly, about how we all have our heads wedged firmly up our assholes.

In short, Assholes is a family film that everyone should be able to connect with. One character sums the madness up quite succinctly: “It’s gender blind, it seems to be directed at all of us.” At the end of the day, these assholes are us.—Bob Freville

January 28, 2020 by Silent Motorist Media

Feedback – Movie Review

(Breaking Glass Pictures)

Dir. Pedro C. Alonso

Review by Zakary McGaha

Feedback is a thriller that was quite fun, but providing feedback on it is…difficult. It’s not that I didn’t understand its more political aspirations; they’re pretty simple. However, the messages seemed mixed. Discerning exactly what the filmmakers were aiming for is difficult. The themes can be taken many different ways.

First off, it was cool seeing Richard Brake in a ghoulish role reminiscent of his “Foxy” character from Rob Zombie’s 3 From Hell, but his character in Feedback was a bit conflicted. On one hand, he wants to find his missing daughter, but on the other hand he’s just as confused as the viewer and is thus unable to stick to his guns (literally, he gets his gun taken away from him frequently).

The setting of this invasion movie is what drags it down a bit: it concerns a talk-radio host whose lavish studio is broken into while he’s on air. The fact that he is on air means we have to listen to his generic political ramblings which are disgustingly typical despite being presented as rebellious. They also wind up paralleling the mayhem that unfolds.

This wouldn’t be a problem if the story was given enough meat so as to overshadow the politics, but it wasn’t. Oddly, the political verbiage presented at the beginning, as well as throughout, seems to sneakily propel the film forward. Envision the story as a raft with the politics being the river.

Basically, the people who infiltrate the studio represent the “bad” political party full of conspiracy-minded skeptics (who happen to hold a secret grudge against our main protagonist) while the radio peeps are clean-cut, intelligent and oh-so-dangerous in their thought despite being given an uber-fancy, moneyed platform.

The odd thing is that the “bad guys” actually end up being right in many ways, yet they’re still strangely demonized. I’m debating the artistic intentions here. Is there supposed to be an “ah-ha” moment where we start rooting for the villains when we realize they were right? That would make sense, but this is never clearly translated visually.

Said villains are never shown in a positive light while our main character, who is revealed to have some real skeletons in his closet, is consistently eloquent, well-mannered, well-dressed, and in possession of the “correct” political opinions. All of this is quite definitely presented in such a way as to make us root for him, despite it becoming obvious throughout the film that he’s a less-than-noble fella. Is that the point? Are we supposed to see that political opinions, no matter how nice and/or sincere, often mask evil souls?

The very last scene of Feedback makes me think I’m correct in my last theory, but it’s hard to rest on that given the stark, over-simplified “good-guy/bad-guy, black-and-white” presentation that never lets up even when the tables are turned and the plot twists are taken.

The more I mull over this, the more confused I get because no character is likable and no emotion is genuine; it’s hard to get any feeling at all from most of the film.

Perhaps that’s the point? Perhaps we’re supposed to be confused, because every character seems to have good sides and bad sides. But if that were the case, one would assume genuine emotion could show through the murkiness in one direction or the other, but it never happens. The characters simply go through the “home invasion” motions, there’s a bloody fight scene mixed with an explosion, and then an ambivalent epilogue.

With all that gabbing aside, let’s focus on the main reason people will watch this movie. How thrilling is it?

I would say it’s pretty good in that regard. There were some tense, painful moments as well as some cool visuals that seem to permeate Breaking Glass Pictures’ catalog. There are a couple cranium cracks, some finger torture and a lot of chasing. Plus, the masks the “antagonists” wear are genuinely creepy. If I saw tall, lanky weirdos walking toward me wearing such masks, I’d hightail it to the nearest crowd of well-to-do bystanders.

Finally, can I recommend Feedback as an entertaining thriller? Depends on if you mind the semi one-sided political banter that never goes anywhere tangible. I feel there’s more of this story left to be told. Why the ambivalence? Why the continual black-and-white portrayal of good guys and bad guys if the tables are supposed to be turned? Are we not supposed to have sympathy for the baddies given that they’re technically right? Perhaps those are questions a sequel can answer.

January 22, 2020 by Silent Motorist Media

In A Dark Place – Film Review

by Bob Freville

The following review originally appeared on the now-defunct horror website KillingBoxx in the Fall of 2011. It is shared here in the hopes that a new generation of readers will discover this woefully forgotten DtoDVD gem.

“How dare you…You made me feel like I was mad!”

The color yellow is symbolic of many things. To the eternal optimist it signifies bright rays of sunshine and exists as a “warm” color, one that represents the hope of a loved one’s return or the promise of a cheerful occasion. For the Egyptians it is a tone emblematic of mourning. For us horror fans it is, and will always be, related to the gialli (the Horror films of Argento, Bava and Fulci, and, quite literally, the Italian word whose translation means “Yellow”). Yellow is also, most significantly, the color which actors of the Middle Ages wore to connote the Dead.

Yellow is the color of Horror and of the Dead, a color of hazard and Danger. So it is no mere fashion statement for Anna Veigh (Leelee Sobieski) to wear yellow clothes in virtually every scene of Donato Rotunno’s In A Dark Place. Anna’s life is consumed by the dead and, more appropriately, Death.

In A Dark Place is a widely overlooked and sorely underrated 2006 adaptation of Henry James’ classic Turn of the Screw. And aside from earning four cleavers for so exquisitely displaying Ms. Sobieski’s ample bosom (without so much as one arbitrary topless scene), it scores plentiful points for purveying all the goods of a grand Gothic slash bash (a gorgeous alien-like female lead with no small semblance of complexity, a steamy but classy lesbian tryst worthy of a Tinto Brass-David Lynch foursome, two marvelous mammaries that act as scene stealers and hand in some understated acting of their own, a sprawling Victorian manse that straddles Art Nouveau and Contempo Creepy, enough vibrant colors to make Dario A. shoot his W., and so many twists and surprises it should be called a lemon meringue layer cake).

When first we meet Ms. Veigh, whose last name hints of the V-eight, a car known for its internal combustion, she is bent over on a cafeteria floor, picking up broken glass and licking blood from her fingers. The location is the lunch room of what looks to be an elementary school and Ms. Veigh’s curious action, not to mention her Grade A gams, are quickly noticed by a lecherous Principal. The Principal calls her away to his office where he ogles her further and informs of her dismissal.

In this instant, and her subsequent landing back on her feet at a job interview, Anna is wearing pink and she seems to embody the color with her wide smile and beaming eyes, as if she was sugar and spice incarnate. But in no time at all the earth tones are introduced after Anna is hired to be the new nanny for a pair of rich and weird little brats who live in the wealthy Countryside.

The rugrats are boarding school types whose Father is an absentee parent and a very powerful man. The only other adult guardian on the premises is Ms. Grose (Tara Fitzgerald), a British ice queen with an unreadable face and an unpredictable temperament. Ms. Grose doesn’t seem to like Ms. Veigh much, yet she, and the children’s father, are adamant about her staying on to supervise the kids.

This being a suspense-chiller, Ms. Veigh soon encounters bizarre behavior from the little tykes, is harassed by fleeting appearances from a threatening phantom and begins to suspect that the previous Nanny’s death was no mere accident. And it doesn’t seem to help matters that Anna brings a shadowy past of her own to the table.

Henry James’ book, on which Rotunno’s film is based, is one of the stalest, blandest and most bombastic ghost yarns ever written. As a student of the Arts I can, of course, see its value as part of History, but that doesn’t negate its chief allure—to provide a read that will put you to sleep or drive you crazy with pretentiously-penned run-on sentences.

This particular film adaptation, on the other hand, is anything but. A stylized, but never showy, shrewdly-paced and dexterously-photographed Expressionist noir-horror, In A Dark Place does what Hitchcock profferred as the chief purpose of a good film–It plays the audience like a piano. Or, rather, a violin, the instrument that figures into the action without much explanation.

In many ways it is a film as much about art as it is an invention of it. Anna implements Art Therapy as a means of feeling out her two young wards while providing them an optional catharsis. The results yield as many questions as they do answers and the once-molested Anna commences suspecting the children of either being sinister themselves or suffering abuse from a sinister figure similar to her own.

Like this year’s above-average human trafficking thriller and fellow adaptation And Soon The Darkness, In A Dark Place makes optimum use of its locations, using a soft lens on snow and quilted beanie to off-set the atmospheric iniquity of a frozen lake and cantankerous dead brush. It is a lens (thanks to D.P. Jean-Francois Hensgens) with a warmth for human texture and a detached fearfulness of interior and exterior space worthy of John Alcott and Roy Walker (The Shining).

And speaking of piano, Adam Pendse (scoring for the first time) gives us such incessant and eclectic sounds that we can’t help but feel like a jittery fly on the wall of this vast home of seclusion.

The snow falls as if in a holding pattern, in shock, as gelid as the lake beyond the woods. And it is as sad and beautiful as Rotunno’s film is as a whole. As alluded to before, ‘Dark Place’ is a picture with all the giallo juice, minus the unnecessary gore, a pic where nudity and sex, although sizzling hot, are handled with class and care, with the sensual being cut short to match the disquiet and fragmentation of the root of Anna Veigh’s experience.

Leelee Sobieski’s performance should go down in the annals of Horror History alongside Joan Crawford in Straight-Jacket, Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, Ellen Burstyn in The Exorcist, Barbara Steele in Castle of Blood and Brigitte Lahaie in La Nuit Des Traquees (or Night of the Hunted). Sadly, I doubt, given pic’s under-the-radar DVD release, that it will qualify to be celebrated alongside even something as modern and memorable as Lauren German’s turn in Hostel: Part II.

Nevertheless Sobieski and Fitzgerald own this ghastly gospel. It is seldom enough for two strong women to share the majority of a film’s running time (without the movie being a rom-com), but it is rarer still for those women to exude multidimensional personas, sentience, strength and resolve, even in scenes of vulnerability.

In A Dark Place is the first directorial endeavor of Mr. Rotunno, whose reputation is as the producer of at least 17 films (including Vinyan director Fabrice Du Welz’s awesome Calvaire: The Ordeal, starring previously-mentioned Brigitte Lahaie). After seeing this flick I will follow this man’s camera into the depths of any sort of cinematic Hell. Alas it is unlikely he will direct again, given that In A Dark Place was helmed in 2005 and distributed in 2006. Here’s hoping that I’m wrong.

Finally it is important to acknowledge the infrequent anomaly that In A Dark Place is—a picture which never falls prey to the trappings of the hackneyed ghost theme, instead opting to unsettle and excite by way of rationing out elaborate exposition, extolling intricate performances and deftly manufacturing uncanny atmosphere by virtue of gorgeous art direction and ace cinematography. As Ms. Grose says to Ms. Veigh midway through, “Don’t go yet.”

Four cleavers for Leelee’s tee-tees, four cleavers for hellish housing, three cleavers for genuine mystery and one cleaver for inspired ambiguity.

In A Dark Place can be streamed on Amazon Prime or stream it for free with ads on Popcornflix or VUDU Free.

November 4, 2019 by Silent Motorist Media