Category: Filmography

Dir: Jacques Deray
Star: Nastassja Kinski, Jean-Hugues Anglade, Michel Piccoli, Jean-Claude Brialy

In which we learn, that everyone in France is a slut.

Okay, maybe that’s an exaggeration. But it sure seems like it here: in the love triangle between hairdresser Juliet (Kinski), and doctors Clément (Anglade) and Raoul (Bergeron), fidelity is low on the list of priorities for everyone. Clément has an “almost fiancée,” and Raoul is flat-out married: these existing relationships hardly appear to present the slightest impediment to either man getting involved with Juliet. Meanwhile, she bounces between the two of them like a elaborately coiffed shuttlecock (if, like me, you’d forgotten this was an eighties film, some of her hairstyles will quickly remind you; an example can be seen below), as her whims appear to dictate. It’s like she’s forever requiring a second opinion.

You can argue who has the prior claim. Clément is the first to see her, sharing a carriage and a “strangers on a train” moment on their way in to Bordeaux. But it’s Raoul who is the first to engage with her, being a customer at the salon where Juliet works. However, it isn’t long before the smarts gulf between a highly-respected oncologist and a hairdresser starts to prove problematic. When the pet dog he gives her dies (it belonged to a late patient of his), Raoul isn’t around to comfort her. Clément is, leading to a passionate session, word of which unfortunately, gets back to Raoul. He calls the subordinate doctor into his office and berates him about the deceased canine. “He had a first-class funeral. Two beautiful young undertakers. They fucked on his grave, then went to a hotel.”

Seeing his career evaporating in front of his eyes, Clément backpedals desperately, saying “That didn’t count. It was just playing around… It was nothing,” which counts as a bit of a dick move, I’d say. It is, however, orders of magnitude better than Raoul’s behavior: for he has been tape-recording the conversation, and rushes home to play it to Juliet. She’s not happy with his dismissal, needless to say, and breaks off their affair. However, a little further down the road, she makes up with Clément; he abandons his specialist’s position to avoid reprisals from Raoul, in favor of general practice in a small French town. For a brief while, they appear to be happy. But wouldn’t you know it? She gets bored of life as a provincial housewife, after he wants to have a child, and heads back to Bordeaux, to be with Raoul once again.

Really? I know it’s eighties Kinski and all, but c’mon. There’s a certain point at which any sensible person would have to say: “If you don’t want to be with me, then I don’t want to be with you.” The film’s biggest weakness is its failure to get over to the viewer why both these men – successful professionals, presumably wealthy and not exactly ugly – are so completely obsessed with Juliet. Physical attraction goes only so far, especially in the apparent absence of other qualities. She is clearly not an intellectual foil for them (she names her dog Levi Strauss – not after the philosopher, but for some unexplained reason, the jeans), and displays little or no personality to speak of. If there had been some kind of adversarial relationship established between Raoul and Clément, with Juliet as a trophy, even that would have been an improvement on what the film offers.

Then, just as I’m growing increasingly annoyed by this, the film goes for the nuclear option of cinematic clichés. What else could it be, when a woman is being fought over by a pair of cancer doctors? If you guessed “Juliet gets cancer,” give yourself two points, whenever you’ve finished rolling your eyes. It was cynical emotional manipulation in 1970, when Ali McGraw went down with leukemia, and has become increasingly trite and ineffective since. Here, there’s almost no emotional impact, since the movie has given you little or no reason to care about Juliet, up to that point. The rest of the movie plays out like a Lifetime ‘Disease of the Week’ TVM, except that Raoul is rewarded for his ceaseless efforts to help Juliet find a cure, by her bailing on him, and running back to the provincial doctor’s house.

I started this project back in the summer of 2013, and from the start it was clear Maladie d’Amour was going to be one of those “lost” Kinski films, apparently unavailable with English subtitles. After more than five years, I had given up hope when, just a couple of weeks for before the site officially launched, I discovered someone on one of those grey-market film sites had created a set of fan subs for it. My delight knew no bounds… until I watched what has to be considered one of her weakest efforts of the decade. I’m not sure who deserves blame. The three actors who form the triangle all have solid track records, and Deray has as well. However, the latter is far better known for crime movies and thrillers, with the likes of Alain Delon and Jean-Paul Belmondo. The results here are evidence that crafting a tragic love story requires a different set of cinematic skills altogether.

Equal criticism should probably be directed at the screenwriters, Danièle Thompson and well-known Polish film-maker, Andrzej Żuławski, most famous for directing Possession, starring Isabelle Adjani and Sam Neill. Their script knows where it wants to go, aiming for a poignant ending – it reminded me a little of Tess, in its doomed heroine, taking up residence in an empty house. It just has no clue how to get there, pushing the characters around in the apparent hope of generating a spark to set things ablaze. This film apparently relies on the charisma of its actors to make up the deficit: for whatever reason, that doesn’t happen, with Nastassja delivering one of her most uninterested performances. This one definitely was not worth waiting five years to see.

Dir: Rotimi Rainwater
Star: Shenae Grimes, Marshall Allman, Austin Williams, Nastassja Kinski

It’s odd that, at the time of writing, this is now Nastassja’s sole feature appearance in over a decade, since Inland Empire in 2006. Two things are particularly strange: it’s little more than a meaningless cameo, and comes in Rainwater’s first feature – I can’t even see anything on which he worked in another capacity, where he might have met her. Still, good on him, especially since this is clearly a work from the heart, and indeed, personal experience. For, in his late teens, Rainwater spent nine months living rough, on the streets of Orlando. He was lucky enough to escape, but never forgot the experience: it informed not only this feature, but his subsequent documentary, Lost in America.

However, passion and writing what you know isn’t enough, in itself, for a feature film to succeed. I’m almost entirely in agreement with the Variety review, which described it as, “A well-intentioned attempt to illuminate the plight of homeless youth,” then said it “falls flat in [a] dramatically inert narrative debut… Its compassion and careful sidestepping of exploitation tropes can’t make up for a fundamental lack of depth and urgency in the storytelling.” As a slice-of-life depicting life on the street, it has an air of authenticity. The problem is its efforts to impose dramatic structure feel so half-hearted, I suspect Rainwater would likely have been better off not bothering at all., as with the documentary.

The movie focuses on Sugar (Grimes), part of a loose-knit group of homeless kids and young adults, whose base is in Venice Beach, California. She has been on the streets for a while, after a car accident which killed both her parents left her suffering from PTSD. Her closest friends are Marshall (Allman), a former Mormon who is her boyfriend, yet has an escalating issue of substance abuse; and Ronnie (Williams), a younger kid who bailed out on the foster system after one too many bad homes. They survive on a mix of pan-handling from strangers, charity from local stores, and the occasional hand out from Bishop (Wes Studi), a charity outreach worker who is trying to build trust with the deeply-suspicious Sugar.

The tepid drama ensues when Sugar’s uncle Gene (the always reliable Angus Macfadyen) shows up in Bishop’s office, offering to take her home. Time to find out whether Sugar meant it, when she said, “Everyone says they wanna help, but nobody really does anything. I wish someone really was there to help.” For one of the themes here is perhaps a strange double-standard of the homeless. They need assistance. They want assistance. But when it’s offered, as often as not, it’s thrown back in the helper’s face. We see that particularly with Kinski’s character, Sister Nadia. She first appears (top) interacting with Ronnie, giving him five bucks to help her hand out fliers for her homeless mission. When Sugar sees that, she heads right over and marches Ronnie away from what she perceives as Nadia’s threat.

This is part of the dilemma we faced when dealing with homelessness: what may be best for them is not necessarily what the homeless think is best for them. It has to be frustrating, and as an outside observer, it felt kinda off-putting, like the casual lies Sugar and her gang told to “normals” to get money out of us. If anything, it feels like Rainwater soft-pedals the harsher elements of homelessness a good deal, perhaps for fear of coming over as exploitative. Sugar’s back story seemed implausible, and certain elements depicted here, came across to me almost like they were promoting urban camping as a lifestyle. You too can spend your days hanging out at the beach and skateboarding! Who needs to work, when you can live off the efforts of others! I get the feeling this is not quite the impact the maker intended…

Sometimes, though, you can see the homeless have a point. Ronnie, for example, steadfastly refuses even Bishop’s help, fearing it’s a trap to get him back into a system, of whose abuse he has first-hand experience. But there’s nothing to suggest Sister Nadia’s motives are anything except pure, or that her charity has a hidden agenda. Not that we get to see much of them, or indeed, her. Kinski’s only other scene of note is near the end, when she sits alongside Sugar on a bench (below). It’s almost like she had a day off, was visiting Venice Beach where she saw the production, and offered to help out. Cue Rainwater frantically scribbling a part for her on the back of a napkin.

Grimes and the rest of the mostly young cast do what they can with the material, and are generally solid enough, and are reasonably convincing, if perhaps a little too polished and articulate. It’s easy to forget their background is more in things like 90210 and High School Musical. The drama, such as it is, comes towards the end of the film. Part of Sugar (or Shelley, as Gene knows her) does want to go with her uncle; however, she is reluctant to leave Ronnie and, to a certain extent, Marshall to their fates. She presents the latter with an ultimatum after she discovers his promise to kick the habit is an empty one, and it’s that which propels things to their final denouement. Not that there’s much tension here either, beyond will she or won’t she go off with Uncle Gene?

While I didn’t hate this, to be clear, it’s striving too earnestly to be worthy, coming over rather too much as the cinematic equivalent of The Road to Wigan Pier. If it turns out to be the end of Kinski’s feature career, there will be a certain irony present. For her filmography will (as far as English-language films go, at least) have ended as it began: with her playing a nun, as in To The Devil a Daughter, 37 years previously. Yet should this be a parting shot, it will be one which does her little, if any, justice.

Dir: David Lynch
Star: Laura Dern, Karolina Gruszka, Krzysztof Majchrzak, Nastassja Kinski

It says a great deal about Inland Empire, that this 75-minute selection of deleted scenes is no less coherent, and perhaps also works better than the feature from which they were removed. It probably helps that I went in with absolutely no expectation of these “making sense”. But, while there is no real narrative, they certainly share a common look and feel, Lynch having edited them together into a single item that manages to generate a significant amount of unsettling atmosphere. This is mainly due to a disturbing feeling of misogynistic violence bubbling just beneath the surface, close to breaking through at any point.

This is particularly apparent in the first two scenes. The opening one sees the pregnant Sue (Dern) at home. Her husband arrives home, and berates her for the untidy state of the house, as well as for her claim that she’s getting “more pregnant.” The second opens with some seriously intense staring, before settling down into a dialogue between the characters known as the “Lost Girl” (Gruszka) and the “Phantom” (Majchrzak). The latter offers to sell the former a timepiece which will bring good luck, and also to look over her. The price will be $25, and holding his hand for a moment. The way in which this is filmed is particularly unsettling, almost entirely in close-up, which leaves the viewer with no way to escape its intensity.

At least there is actually Kinski to be found here – unlike the main feature, where her presence is at the “Processed in a facility that also handles” volume i.e. negligible. She is sitting with Nikki – the film actress played by Dern – and relates the story of an incident which happened to her in a bar. She meets a married man, and goes back to his hotel room. She calls the man Billy: this is likely a reference to the character by the same name, whose character in the film on which Nikki is working, has an affair with Nikki’s character. Yeah, if this seems excessively complicated… that’s because it is, an almost inevitable result of the multiple levels of reality with which the film plays. Like the rest of these deleted scenes, it doesn’t so much clarify anything, as obscure it further.

I read a theory that it’s actually her character recounting, from a different  the opening scene of the film, in which a Polish prostitute goes into a hotel room with her client, which may explains the growing expression of terror on Nikki’s face. Though without any idea of where this deleted scene was intended to go in Inland Empire, it is particularly hard to be sure of its significance. Here’s a transcription of her soliloquy:

I had the most incredible experience. It all started at Al’s. I was sitting at the bar; you know at the back, where the bathrooms are? And there was this guy. He turned around and looked at me and I just lit up inside, you know? He asked me if I wanted a beer and I said, I said, “Yeah, okay, thank you.” And, um, I noticed he was… he had a ring. He was married, but I didn’t care. And then he said he was just passing through and, um, he asked me my name and I told him. And he said his name was Billy. And he said, “Nice to meet you,”and I said, “Nice to meet you, Billy.”And Pete was in the back serving a beer to Sandra and uh, I don’t know, it was like he suddenly, like, he said, um, “I think I’ve met you before.”And I’m like, not falling for that line, you know? But now I said, “I think I’ve met you before.”
 
And I don’t… I thought I met him before but I don’t even remember where. And then he suddenly he said, like, I wanted him so bad, I don’t know, I was just and I felt he felt the same thing, you know? And then he said, “I want you.”And I said, “Where do you want to go?”And he said he was staying at the hotel. And I said, “At the Harriston?”and he said yeah. And so we were… we just left. And Pete was looking at me like [sighs]and Sandra was eyeballing this man I was leaving with. And then we got to the hotel and I was kind of hanging back in the dark while he was getting his key. Everything wasit was different; we went through the hallway and I didn’t know where I was. Think they must have changed the decor or something. Everything was different, I didn’t recognize any of it. I didn’t know where I was. It was like I was dreaming.

It’s a relatively short scene: Nastassja is present for not much more than four minutes, before the film drifts away into another of its multiverses. Yet it’s still fun to watch; she does a lot of that “peering sideways from under her fringe” thing, which I’ve always found one of her more adorable looks. It’s certainly preferable to the ten minutes of Los Angeles street hookers’ bickering, with which More Things ends. Like most of the feature from which it was excised, it’s very much a case of more being less. Overall, I can’t argue with Lynch, who explained this film thus: “There are things in More Things That Happened that give a feeling that could be like a brother or sister to the film. It’s like if you know a family but you haven’t met the sister yet, you go over to Ohio and meet the sister and it adds more to the feeling of the whole family.”

However, it’s still not a family with whom I want to spent any time.

Dir: Aruna Villiers
Star: Christopher Lambert, Nastassja Kinski, Audrey DeWilder, Andrzej Seweryn

Gynecologist Thomas (Lambert) rescues Mathilde (Kinski) from the side of the road, after her car breaks down, and so begins their relationship. She is more than a bit unstable, having been on anti-depressants, and already lost a son in a previous incident, whose details remain obscure for most of the movie. Mathilde is now apparently unable to have any further kids, but Thomas knows someone – Professeur Cardoze (Seweryn), who is doing some research on the cutting edge of human cloning. Without telling Mathilde, Thomas enrolls her in the program, and the couple are delighted when she becomes pregnant, and has a bouncing baby girl, Manon. The proud parents live happily ever after with their daughter, able to enjoy family life through the grace of modern technology. The End. Sorry? That isn’t what happens? I am shocked – shocked – by this development.

Remember when cloning was the Next Big Thing? Or course, there have been clone movies around for a long time; 1978’s The Boys From Brazil was probably the first to take the idea mainstream. However, there was a five-year period, roughly covering 2000-04, when they seemed particularly fashionable, including things like The 6th Day. What almost every clone film, regardless of era, seems to have in common is their cautionary nature. Whether it’s Multiplicity or Godsend, cloning is rarely if ever depicted as a boon to humanity. Stuff goes wrong, because this is, it appears, firmly filed in the box marked “things with which mankind is not supposed to meddle.” And so it proves here, inevitably.

There are two particular problems, though I’m not sure either have even the slightest credible basis in scientific logic. Firstly, and most obviously, is what appears to be the accelerated rate at which Manon grows up. This is likely necessary for cinematic purposes, and I did enjoy some of the tricks which Villiers found to show the passage of time, such as having toddler Manon crawl round the back of the well in their garden, only for little girl Manon to run out on the other side. It’s hard to be quite sure about the time-frame in question, not least because Lambert and Kinski don’t appear to age a single day, but also because of Manon (DeWilder) playing ahead of her chronological age: by the end, she’s supposedly twelve, but seems to be acting more like someone in their late teens.

The other issue is that Manon appears have all her mother’s memories as well. At first, this cloneiness manifests itself relatively innocently, in nightmares during which Manon appears to relive the circumstances surrounding the death of her sibling, and a fondness for dressing in the same clothes as her mother – as well as performing (what can only be described as “moderately creepy”) dress-up musical numbers for Thomas, shown below. However, as she matures into adolescence, the same unstable streak which her mother had, begins to develop in Manon, and it becomes increasingly clear the daughter is intent on using this knowledge of Mathilda against her, to replace her in Thomas’s affections.

It’s perhaps this aspect which is one of the reasons why the film has received only limited distribution, not apparently receiving an official DVD release in the US or UK. [I ended up having to subtitle the film myself, based off a combination of Google Translate, and my schoolboy French!] While hardly explicit, and being produced by Luc Besson’s Europacorp studio, having a 12-year-old character attempting to seduce her father is still the kind of thing guaranteed to provoke tabloid “BAN THIS EVIL FILTH!” headlines, and the fact the DeWilder was 15 at the time of shooting isn’t likely to help matters much. This is very much the kind of approach to the topic of clones and their consequences, which would only come out of French cinema, and likely helped restrict its appeal in other territories.

Though overall, it’s not too bad, I’d say – save for a climax which topples over from the implausible into the entirely absurd, set around the back-garden well mentioned earlier. There’s a struggle between Manon and Mathilda, while Thomas lies unconscious nearby, having been whacked with a shovel earlier in proceedings. But the way the script finds to end things is so abrupt, it smells of desperation on the part of the film-makers. I’d be curious to know if the novel by Louise Lambrichs, on which the film was based, does better in this department. However, it doesn’t seem to have received an English translation either, and neither my French nor my patience are up to the task of investigating further.

Kinski is good in her role as the damaged Mathilda, drifting slowly from delight at being able to have another child into horror, into the realization there is something terribly wrong, and that Thomas has been far from honest with her. She projects the necessary air of fragility, and I could see the story going doing an alternate route, where her suspicions are rejected by her husband as paranoid delusions, stemming from her mental state. I’m not as convinced by Lambert. His iconic role as the immortal Connor MacLeod in Highlander makes it a little bit difficult to accept him as any kind of scientist. and the performance isn’t good enough to make the viewer take him seriously.

The film occupies a bit of an awkward middle-ground: the topic is pure sensationalism, but Villiers, who also worked on the script, apparently wants us to take the subject matter seriously. She never quite manages to get the audience – or, at least, me – to go along with her on that. I sense I might have enjoyed it more, if there had been a more lurid and exploitational approach, because that’s likely what the concepts here deserve.