Scenes from a Marriage (1973)
I’d been wandering the house crying about my mom’s peritoneal metastasis when I remembered on Christmas day that I’d stupidly pitched writer-watches-Scenes-From-A-Marriage-with-three-partners (the 281-minute TV version, not the meagre 167-minute theatrical one) as a dark joke because no one ever wants to watch Bergman with me, especially not in the winter, and I’ve never seen it. So later, after Christmas but before New Years, I find myself beside the one partner I’ve successfully bullied into enduring art. Elsewhere, I’m pretty sure two fun blonds are watching Supercross or something.
At the end of Innocence & Panic, my partner calls me a sociopath for still wanting post-Bergman sex. He looks deeply concerned the next day when I point out, at the beginning of The Art of Sweeping Things Under the Rug, just how relatable Bergman is. “Look!” I say, “a woman sobbing under a duvet just like how I was recently sobbing under a duvet.” Sure, it’s not in the thrall of just any TV that I feel physically nauseous, but I’m pretty sure it’s because of new empathy with these startlingly believable fictional characters and not just the gut rot of my own real-world depression. I am distracted as hell, and it feels great.
We binge on to Paula, where the big infidelity is revealed over the course of a late-night snack. We pause so that we may snack also, decimating a themed plate of fragrant cheese and pickles with dark beer.
–
I’m now watching Vale of Tears, muted with the subtitles on. It’s less upsetting without the pained voices of Marianne and Johan, and this way I can hang out with all my partners without subjecting them to the show. I move on, watching only half of The Illiterates, because 1.5 episodes is the maximum number of episodes of Scenes From a Marriage you can reasonably expect to watch without being existentially débandé.e.s.
Wait… what’s the final episode called? In the Middle of the Night in a Dark House Somewhere in the World. Fuck that. I’m going to pour myself an orgasm and have a drink and forget for a moment the vortex of Swedish sadness gracing my screen.
—Nora Rosenthal is a writer, filmmaker, and the editor-in-chief of Rat Chat magazine.
Armageddon (1998)
Forget Jack sketching a nude Rose by candlelight in Titanic. Miss me with that famous line in Casablanca. And don’t even think of mentioning The Notebook. I learned everything I need to know about romance from the animal cracker scene in Armageddon.
Apologies to everyone in my life, and also everything I stand for. But I won’t try to deny it—I love this movie. And that sexy, orange-hued scene with Ben Affleck and Liv Tyler holds a very special place in my heart.
I dare you not to shed a tear when Bruce Willis and his ragtag group of tax-evading assholes spend one last night with their loved ones before heading up to space. With no experience. To drill a hole in an asteroid. Before it crashes into Earth.
Because before you know it, the intro chords to “I Don’t Wanna Miss A Thing” by Aerosmith are playing softly. The sun is setting. A convertible is parked under an oak tree. And Ben Affleck is talking in a fake Australian accent, inching an animal cracker down Liv Tyler’s navel. Soon, he will tuck it into her underwear line, and she will bite her lip and giggle.
I swear to god, this scene was my introduction to eroticism. My childhood understanding of “sexy” founded upon that giggle. The chemistry between Ben and Liv signalled something to me about desire and connection. That romance wasn’t all serious—there was pleasure baked in. I figured that in relationships, you’re either the holder of the animal cracker, or the haver of the navel. Either way, you’re chasing that glint of pleasure in your lover’s eyes. A bit lip, a stomach flushed with butterflies when you realize, they like it. And you know what? That still kind of works for me.
—Katy D’Avella is a writer based in London, UK.
Irma Vep (1996)
“I am just making images about images!” René Vidal says about his adaptation of Louis Feuillade’s Vampires. The fictional filmmaker in Olivier Assayas’ movie Irma Vep is frustrated with his lack of originality, and not even Maggie Cheung herself can console him. He ends up quitting the project after his obsession with creating something fresh drives him off the precipice. I empathize with Vidal’s spiritual ailment. Having survived decades of reboot fixation, franchise rotation, and endless citation in film, I am familiar with the nausea that overly-familiar images can cause. I left Cinéma Moderne that cold, late 2021 evening and immediately fell into an endless scroll of recycled tweets and TikTok videos.
There is nothing intrinsically wrong with quotation. I’m old enough to remember postmodernism; I recognize that most things worth saying have already been said. But just because we’ve run out of nouns, doesn’t mean we cannot experiment with framing and syntax to create unusual expressions. Something as simple as an anagram can make us chuckle and admire the unexpected.
In Irma Vep the adaptation of Vampires is ultimately given to another director, but we are treated to a screening of Vidal’s director’s cut before the credits roll. In it, we see Maggie Cheung as we have never seen her before. She’s wearing black latex in the style of the original Irma, but the film itself has been scratched to create pictographic lines that come out of her eyes, shapes that cover her face and flicker around her aura; a parade of figures floats around the frame like specks of dust in sunlight. Irma Vep uses Feuillade’s story, Stan Brakhage’s techniques and Maggie Cheung’s star persona, but the film still manages to create images that vibrate with unique splendour. Whether it is skill, alchemy, or an obsession for beautiful images, Assayas reminded me why I love cinema in the first place. Great movies don’t just recreate images; they rearrange the letters in familiar words to create a new language.
—Juan Velásquez is a Colombian/kinda Canadian writer based in Montréal.
Duet for Cannibals (1969)
Coming back from a tiring work day recently, I pulled out my laptop and cued up a recent Metrograph restoration of Duet for Cannibals, Susan Sontag’s film debut, a film that I wrote off as too static when I first became obsessed with her. I had previously watched the movie on a large television screen, assuming that this was the right way to go about it. Of course, the print was far from pristine since I had found it on Ubuweb. I gave up on the film rather quickly then and just convinced myself that Sontag’s brilliance lay in the written word. It turns out that the only issue was the medium and the location. The ideal place to appreciate Duet for Cannibals is on a bus, at around 7 PM, wintertime, premature darkness surrounding you as you leave a class of uncooperative students behind.
While the film is yet another story of the rich using their money to take power over the poor, it is so much weirder than any European man could ever hope to create. A rich couple offers a man a job. The actual job’s purpose is not quite made clear, but that is because the job is just puppetry. The hired couple are forced to undergo bouts of gaslighting and infantilization as the rich couple attempt to distort their very sense of reality, exposing the husband to a tape recorder with contradictory information, turning the wife into their child, and often retconning their reality. What Sontag does differently than any other is make her own people, young, idealist leftists, the target of this pseudo-fascist chicanery. The rich couple lay in bed reading their newspapers while the employee’s wife lays motionless between them in the centre of the bed; he reads a book, she reads a fashion magazine, their new daughter, bordering on incestuous partner, looks upwards, aimlessly, simultaneously lit up and darkened by two reading lamps and the concurrent shadows of her superiors. At another point, the employee and the rich woman are naked in bed when the rich man, dressed to impress, shows up. Instead of showing any sign of jealousy, he simply says that he is heading out and shakes the employee’s hand as he stands nude and semi-erect in front of him. Never before has a film shown such a complex and contradictory sort of power imbalance. Owing to the general prudishness of Canadian society, I check to make sure no one is taking offense at the nudity, only to realize that I have been sitting alone on the bus for quite some time.
This immersion, one that I even occasionally find difficult to reach in a cinema, seems proof positive that the big screen is not the only way to appreciate a film. Sometimes the only way to appreciate an unusual, Swedish arthouse film from the sixties is a laptop, a pair of headphones and a dark bus with snow falling outside of the window.
—Shahbaz Khayambashi is an academic, curator and failed artist suffering toward a PhD at York University.
Sibyl (2019)
In the opening scene of Justine Triet’s Sibyl, the heroine—a psychotherapist attempting to sunset her practice in order to write a novel—processes a barrage of advice from a literary insider, who muses frenetically on the preoccupations of the public and the difficulty of generating a bestseller in a culturally oversaturated climate. The industry aficionado comes off as a goof—talking nonstop and flinging his hands about as plates of sushi fly past the characters—but his portrait of an inundated, burned-out population receives a suitable avatar in Sibyl, a recovering alcoholic and distracted mother still grappling with a long-ago breakup. In one piercing transition, Sibyl reminisces mid-bath on a New Year’s Eve kiss with old flame Gabriel before being transported to the present by now-husband Etienne, who sidles up to the tub with a cocktail and a smile.
Sibyl’s fantasies and memories, which editor Laurent Sénéchal elegantly folds into the action, position her as a figure compellingly torn between realms. Alongside her internal debate of past and present, Sibyl juggles fiction and reality, taking on a new patient—a pregnant actress named Margot embroiled in an on-set love triangle with a star actor and a director—and drawing on the woman’s circumstances for her book. Later, Margot implores Sibyl to visit her movie’s Stromboli shoot to provide in-person counsel, and the resulting clash of egos unleashes another extreme dichotomy, between Sibyl’s cluttered Parisian life and this comically troubled artistic endeavour’s remotest island paradise.
Like the defence attorney protagonist of Triet’s In Bed With Victoria (2016)—also starring the great Virginie Efira—Sibyl glides over ethical boundaries in her pursuit of contentment. But she doesn’t do so cavalierly: many scenes find her somberly pulling on a vape pen; staring at her in-airplane-mode phone and dreading the pileup of Margot’s messages; or sobbing in an unfamiliar room. Sibyl constantly negotiates conflicting desires and disturbances—professional overkill, helter-skelter relationships—and watching Triet and Efira try to make sense of this madness is a thrill even as the pair indicate the staying power of Sibyl’s disquietude.
—Danny King is a writer and editor based in New York.
Doriana Gray (1976)
One of my pandemic copes has been poring over menswear blogs (and trying to talk myself out of unwise purchases while they’re sitting in my cart). What this has meant for my viewing habits is that I’ve been paying closer attention to the relationship between clothing and storytelling. Consider two films by Jess Franco, and particularly the characters played by Monica Swinn. In Barbed Wire Dolls, with her slicked back hair, monocle, and western shirt (and no pants), she embodies the militaristic cruelty of her evil prison warden. In Doriana Gray, filmed at the same time, she wears the same western shirt, but with her curls (and actual pants), her look is softer, chic. She could be a hipper version of ourselves.
Much of Doriana Gray’s power comes from playing like a B-side to the other movie. In Barbed Wire Dolls, the castle setting is decrepit, harsh; in Doriana Gray, exotic, almost sensuous. Barbed Wire Dolls’ scale highlights its cheapness; Doriana Gray’s smallness feels intimate and emotionally isolating. The plot of Doriana Gray concerns a pair of twins played by Lina Romay, one pursuing sexual pleasure that she cannot feel with murderous results, another locked in an asylum in the thrall of that pleasure. Romay does a lot with her eyes, at times showing great vulnerability and at others giving us nothing, while Franco’s roving zooms slide into her gaze with hypnotic effect.
This story of sex-crazed Lina Romay ends perhaps as it must, but the final image, of her writhing around nude in a pool in the loneliness of her castle, is both unsettling and strangely inviting. Wouldn’t you want to spend a little more time with her and in this movie? And if there’s a chance of death by coitus? There are worse ways to go.
—Tarek M. is a perfectly ordinary member of society by day, stark raving cinephile by night.
Lisztomania (1975)
There are few better ways to watch the 1960s turn into the 1970s than watching 1963 Best Picture winner Tom Jones, followed by Ken Russell’s unorthodox 1975 Franz Liszt biopic Lisztomania. Tom Jones is a mad delight, shuffling through styles and genres with abandon: it’s a silent movie, it’s a sex comedy, it’s Benny Hill, it’s Oscar Wilde, it’s a harrowing documentary about fox hunting. Ken Russell said he wanted Lisztomania to be “like Tom Jones riding in Blazing Saddles.” It takes the giddy, kinetic joy of Tom Jones and takes it so much further: Tom Jones is a mad, but ultimately cheeky, 1960s sex comedy. Lisztomania can’t be boiled down like that.
Lisztomania is a biopic of nineteenth-century composer Franz Liszt, played by Roger Daltrey of The Who, but it’s also a political story, a supernatural horror movie, a musical, a trashy sex comedy, and a religious drama. Richard Wagner is a vampire who gets reanimated like Frankenstein and turns into Hitler. Ringo Starr plays the Pope. It features the biggest penis I’ve seen in a movie (ten feet!), and Liszt dies when his daughter stabs a voodoo doll in his likeness.
The 1960s was a decade of transition in cinema: old masters juxtaposed with new waves, you’ve got sex comedies and spaghetti westerns, the last gasps of Old Hollywood alongside the birth of the movie brats, Swedish art films shown in American porn theatres. Tom Jones snuck through in the chaos, and became a big hit and a Best Picture winner purely on the force of its own likeability. By the 1970s, a new if short-lived equilibrium had emerged as a generation of young male filmmakers were given creative freedom. That unchaos meant Lisztomania didn’t have that space to burst through. In many ways, it prefigures the lesson New York, New York, One From the Heart or Heaven’s Gate would teach by decade’s end: that this newfound freedom came with limits.
It’s, ultimately, a poignant meditation on how art can be used for both good and evil – what responsibility artists have, morally and politically. It ends with Liszt defeating Frankenstein-Wagner-Hitler and bringing about peace on earth through the power of music, and in a film that’s so irreverent, it’s not played for laughs: it’s sincerely moving. It’s beautiful.
—Ciara Moloney is a film critic based in Dublin. She likes splatter movies, sitcoms and compilation videos of Bob Mortimer on Would I Lie To You.
Slow Machine (2020)
I watched Slow Machine in bed at around midnight on a Wednesday. There’s a TV in my room but I thought it would be better to watch on my laptop with headphones on in case my roommates were trying to sleep. Despite Slow Machine’s oppressive themes (paranoia, alienation, trauma), I found the experience of watching it to be strangely comforting.
Stephanie, the protagonist of Slow Machine, befriends an NYC counterterrorism agent, Gerard, and their relationship ends with a scene of violence in an abandoned apartment. Fearing what may happen next, she decides to hide out at a secluded house in upstate New York where musician Eleanor Friedberger and her band are recording an album (presumably the excellent New View).
While trying to process what happened between her and Gerard, Stephanie bounces between interactions with Eleanor and members of her band, who either come off as creepy, standoffish, or both. Stephanie isn’t the easiest person to be around, either — she tries on several different accents and personas throughout the course of the film and often acts cagey when asked personal questions.
Being uncomfortably hit on by one musician, or alienated by another, is at least a solid distraction from painful recent memories. The use of 16mm film adds to the dreamlike feel of these moments. As long as Stephanie is lost in the discomfort of hanging out with a band, she doesn’t have to reckon with what happened to Gerard.
I’m writing this in early December. The days are getting shorter, colder, and generally more unpleasant. It’s harder to pretend to be happy. Watching Slow Machine was reassuring. Life might be hard, but at least I haven’t had a friendship end with as much blood and panic as Stephanie and Gerard’s. If I’m hanging out with socially awkward musicians, I can leave. Unlike Stephanie, I’m not stuck, and I don’t have to be afraid of retribution, conspiracy, or obnoxious indie rockers.
—Sacha Kingston-Wayne has written for several publications, most of which don’t exist anymore.
An Ode to Bright-Darkness: on Alabama Shakes' "Sound & Colour"
There’s an immortal rhapsody to Alabama’s Shakes’ “Sound & Colour” video. It is tangible, aching, gut-wrenching. A lone negro cosmonaut wakes in a vessel floating amidst the cosmos. But there’s a problem… he finds himself on a winding voyage of memories lost. He questions! He questions! He questions! Who am I? A lone space-traverser sailing the stars, or a married man with a lost love, as indicated by the wedding band on his arm. The black void grows larger… as he traipses amidst this lonesome galaxy, this desolate space, this forlorn universe; the expanding blackness of a lost Earth reveals the shrinking brightness of a found world. Its beauty breaks him, as he sheds immortal tears for fallen dreams future and raised daydreams past. A moment of confused solace with his lover. A day spent with a child that races slowly. A blissful life that sends off a sad death. Those moments together-alone are precious…
The video is a symphony about the need for human connection. For what is life without compassion for the soul? For what is existence without truth for feeling? For what is “being” without a relationship for “the self.” Nothing. Just an empty void tumbling, being out of touch with space and time. As the band croons on, they assure us of the need to connect. Lead songstress Brittany Howard put it best: “I wanna touch a human being.” And at the end of the day, isn’t that what we all want?! Fuck respect. Fuck regard. Fuck repute. It’s love we crave.
—Marvin Darkwa
Scenes from a Marriage (1973)
I’d been wandering the house crying about my mom’s peritoneal metastasis when I remembered on Christmas day that I’d stupidly pitched writer-watches-Scenes-From-A-Marriage-with-three-partners (the 281-minute TV version, not the meagre 167-minute theatrical one) as a dark joke because no one ever wants to watch Bergman with me, especially not in the winter, and I’ve never seen it. So later, after Christmas but before New Years, I find myself beside the one partner I’ve successfully bullied into enduring art. Elsewhere, I’m pretty sure two fun blonds are watching Supercross or something.
At the end of Innocence & Panic, my partner calls me a sociopath for still wanting post-Bergman sex. He looks deeply concerned the next day when I point out, at the beginning of The Art of Sweeping Things Under the Rug, just how relatable Bergman is. “Look!” I say, “a woman sobbing under a duvet just like how I was recently sobbing under a duvet.” Sure, it’s not in the thrall of just any TV that I feel physically nauseous, but I’m pretty sure it’s because of new empathy with these startlingly believable fictional characters and not just the gut rot of my own real-world depression. I am distracted as hell, and it feels great.
We binge on to Paula, where the big infidelity is revealed over the course of a late-night snack. We pause so that we may snack also, decimating a themed plate of fragrant cheese and pickles with dark beer.
–
I’m now watching Vale of Tears, muted with the subtitles on. It’s less upsetting without the pained voices of Marianne and Johan, and this way I can hang out with all my partners without subjecting them to the show. I move on, watching only half of The Illiterates, because 1.5 episodes is the maximum number of episodes of Scenes From a Marriage you can reasonably expect to watch without being existentially débandé.e.s.
Wait… what’s the final episode called? In the Middle of the Night in a Dark House Somewhere in the World. Fuck that. I’m going to pour myself an orgasm and have a drink and forget for a moment the vortex of Swedish sadness gracing my screen.
—Nora Rosenthal is a writer, filmmaker, and the editor-in-chief of Rat Chat magazine.
Armageddon (1998)
Forget Jack sketching a nude Rose by candlelight in Titanic. Miss me with that famous line in Casablanca. And don’t even think of mentioning The Notebook. I learned everything I need to know about romance from the animal cracker scene in Armageddon.
Apologies to everyone in my life, and also everything I stand for. But I won’t try to deny it—I love this movie. And that sexy, orange-hued scene with Ben Affleck and Liv Tyler holds a very special place in my heart.
I dare you not to shed a tear when Bruce Willis and his ragtag group of tax-evading assholes spend one last night with their loved ones before heading up to space. With no experience. To drill a hole in an asteroid. Before it crashes into Earth.
Because before you know it, the intro chords to “I Don’t Wanna Miss A Thing” by Aerosmith are playing softly. The sun is setting. A convertible is parked under an oak tree. And Ben Affleck is talking in a fake Australian accent, inching an animal cracker down Liv Tyler’s navel. Soon, he will tuck it into her underwear line, and she will bite her lip and giggle.
I swear to god, this scene was my introduction to eroticism. My childhood understanding of “sexy” founded upon that giggle. The chemistry between Ben and Liv signalled something to me about desire and connection. That romance wasn’t all serious—there was pleasure baked in. I figured that in relationships, you’re either the holder of the animal cracker, or the haver of the navel. Either way, you’re chasing that glint of pleasure in your lover’s eyes. A bit lip, a stomach flushed with butterflies when you realize, they like it. And you know what? That still kind of works for me.
—Katy D’Avella is a writer based in London, UK.
Irma Vep (1996)
“I am just making images about images!” René Vidal says about his adaptation of Louis Feuillade’s Vampires. The fictional filmmaker in Olivier Assayas’ movie Irma Vep is frustrated with his lack of originality, and not even Maggie Cheung herself can console him. He ends up quitting the project after his obsession with creating something fresh drives him off the precipice. I empathize with Vidal’s spiritual ailment. Having survived decades of reboot fixation, franchise rotation, and endless citation in film, I am familiar with the nausea that overly-familiar images can cause. I left Cinéma Moderne that cold, late 2021 evening and immediately fell into an endless scroll of recycled tweets and TikTok videos.
There is nothing intrinsically wrong with quotation. I’m old enough to remember postmodernism; I recognize that most things worth saying have already been said. But just because we’ve run out of nouns, doesn’t mean we cannot experiment with framing and syntax to create unusual expressions. Something as simple as an anagram can make us chuckle and admire the unexpected.
In Irma Vep the adaptation of Vampires is ultimately given to another director, but we are treated to a screening of Vidal’s director’s cut before the credits roll. In it, we see Maggie Cheung as we have never seen her before. She’s wearing black latex in the style of the original Irma, but the film itself has been scratched to create pictographic lines that come out of her eyes, shapes that cover her face and flicker around her aura; a parade of figures floats around the frame like specks of dust in sunlight. Irma Vep uses Feuillade’s story, Stan Brakhage’s techniques and Maggie Cheung’s star persona, but the film still manages to create images that vibrate with unique splendour. Whether it is skill, alchemy, or an obsession for beautiful images, Assayas reminded me why I love cinema in the first place. Great movies don’t just recreate images; they rearrange the letters in familiar words to create a new language.
—Juan Velásquez is a Colombian/kinda Canadian writer based in Montréal.
Duet for Cannibals (1969)
Coming back from a tiring work day recently, I pulled out my laptop and cued up a recent Metrograph restoration of Duet for Cannibals, Susan Sontag’s film debut, a film that I wrote off as too static when I first became obsessed with her. I had previously watched the movie on a large television screen, assuming that this was the right way to go about it. Of course, the print was far from pristine since I had found it on Ubuweb. I gave up on the film rather quickly then and just convinced myself that Sontag’s brilliance lay in the written word. It turns out that the only issue was the medium and the location. The ideal place to appreciate Duet for Cannibals is on a bus, at around 7 PM, wintertime, premature darkness surrounding you as you leave a class of uncooperative students behind.
While the film is yet another story of the rich using their money to take power over the poor, it is so much weirder than any European man could ever hope to create. A rich couple offers a man a job. The actual job’s purpose is not quite made clear, but that is because the job is just puppetry. The hired couple are forced to undergo bouts of gaslighting and infantilization as the rich couple attempt to distort their very sense of reality, exposing the husband to a tape recorder with contradictory information, turning the wife into their child, and often retconning their reality. What Sontag does differently than any other is make her own people, young, idealist leftists, the target of this pseudo-fascist chicanery. The rich couple lay in bed reading their newspapers while the employee’s wife lays motionless between them in the centre of the bed; he reads a book, she reads a fashion magazine, their new daughter, bordering on incestuous partner, looks upwards, aimlessly, simultaneously lit up and darkened by two reading lamps and the concurrent shadows of her superiors. At another point, the employee and the rich woman are naked in bed when the rich man, dressed to impress, shows up. Instead of showing any sign of jealousy, he simply says that he is heading out and shakes the employee’s hand as he stands nude and semi-erect in front of him. Never before has a film shown such a complex and contradictory sort of power imbalance. Owing to the general prudishness of Canadian society, I check to make sure no one is taking offense at the nudity, only to realize that I have been sitting alone on the bus for quite some time.
This immersion, one that I even occasionally find difficult to reach in a cinema, seems proof positive that the big screen is not the only way to appreciate a film. Sometimes the only way to appreciate an unusual, Swedish arthouse film from the sixties is a laptop, a pair of headphones and a dark bus with snow falling outside of the window.
—Shahbaz Khayambashi is an academic, curator and failed artist suffering toward a PhD at York University.
Sibyl (2019)
In the opening scene of Justine Triet’s Sibyl, the heroine—a psychotherapist attempting to sunset her practice in order to write a novel—processes a barrage of advice from a literary insider, who muses frenetically on the preoccupations of the public and the difficulty of generating a bestseller in a culturally oversaturated climate. The industry aficionado comes off as a goof—talking nonstop and flinging his hands about as plates of sushi fly past the characters—but his portrait of an inundated, burned-out population receives a suitable avatar in Sibyl, a recovering alcoholic and distracted mother still grappling with a long-ago breakup. In one piercing transition, Sibyl reminisces mid-bath on a New Year’s Eve kiss with old flame Gabriel before being transported to the present by now-husband Etienne, who sidles up to the tub with a cocktail and a smile.
Sibyl’s fantasies and memories, which editor Laurent Sénéchal elegantly folds into the action, position her as a figure compellingly torn between realms. Alongside her internal debate of past and present, Sibyl juggles fiction and reality, taking on a new patient—a pregnant actress named Margot embroiled in an on-set love triangle with a star actor and a director—and drawing on the woman’s circumstances for her book. Later, Margot implores Sibyl to visit her movie’s Stromboli shoot to provide in-person counsel, and the resulting clash of egos unleashes another extreme dichotomy, between Sibyl’s cluttered Parisian life and this comically troubled artistic endeavour’s remotest island paradise.
Like the defence attorney protagonist of Triet’s In Bed With Victoria (2016)—also starring the great Virginie Efira—Sibyl glides over ethical boundaries in her pursuit of contentment. But she doesn’t do so cavalierly: many scenes find her somberly pulling on a vape pen; staring at her in-airplane-mode phone and dreading the pileup of Margot’s messages; or sobbing in an unfamiliar room. Sibyl constantly negotiates conflicting desires and disturbances—professional overkill, helter-skelter relationships—and watching Triet and Efira try to make sense of this madness is a thrill even as the pair indicate the staying power of Sibyl’s disquietude.
—Danny King is a writer and editor based in New York.
Doriana Gray (1976)
One of my pandemic copes has been poring over menswear blogs (and trying to talk myself out of unwise purchases while they’re sitting in my cart). What this has meant for my viewing habits is that I’ve been paying closer attention to the relationship between clothing and storytelling. Consider two films by Jess Franco, and particularly the characters played by Monica Swinn. In Barbed Wire Dolls, with her slicked back hair, monocle, and western shirt (and no pants), she embodies the militaristic cruelty of her evil prison warden. In Doriana Gray, filmed at the same time, she wears the same western shirt, but with her curls (and actual pants), her look is softer, chic. She could be a hipper version of ourselves.
Much of Doriana Gray’s power comes from playing like a B-side to the other movie. In Barbed Wire Dolls, the castle setting is decrepit, harsh; in Doriana Gray, exotic, almost sensuous. Barbed Wire Dolls’ scale highlights its cheapness; Doriana Gray’s smallness feels intimate and emotionally isolating. The plot of Doriana Gray concerns a pair of twins played by Lina Romay, one pursuing sexual pleasure that she cannot feel with murderous results, another locked in an asylum in the thrall of that pleasure. Romay does a lot with her eyes, at times showing great vulnerability and at others giving us nothing, while Franco’s roving zooms slide into her gaze with hypnotic effect.
This story of sex-crazed Lina Romay ends perhaps as it must, but the final image, of her writhing around nude in a pool in the loneliness of her castle, is both unsettling and strangely inviting. Wouldn’t you want to spend a little more time with her and in this movie? And if there’s a chance of death by coitus? There are worse ways to go.
—Tarek M. is a perfectly ordinary member of society by day, stark raving cinephile by night.
Lisztomania (1975)
There are few better ways to watch the 1960s turn into the 1970s than watching 1963 Best Picture winner Tom Jones, followed by Ken Russell’s unorthodox 1975 Franz Liszt biopic Lisztomania. Tom Jones is a mad delight, shuffling through styles and genres with abandon: it’s a silent movie, it’s a sex comedy, it’s Benny Hill, it’s Oscar Wilde, it’s a harrowing documentary about fox hunting. Ken Russell said he wanted Lisztomania to be “like Tom Jones riding in Blazing Saddles.” It takes the giddy, kinetic joy of Tom Jones and takes it so much further: Tom Jones is a mad, but ultimately cheeky, 1960s sex comedy. Lisztomania can’t be boiled down like that.
Lisztomania is a biopic of nineteenth-century composer Franz Liszt, played by Roger Daltrey of The Who, but it’s also a political story, a supernatural horror movie, a musical, a trashy sex comedy, and a religious drama. Richard Wagner is a vampire who gets reanimated like Frankenstein and turns into Hitler. Ringo Starr plays the Pope. It features the biggest penis I’ve seen in a movie (ten feet!), and Liszt dies when his daughter stabs a voodoo doll in his likeness.
The 1960s was a decade of transition in cinema: old masters juxtaposed with new waves, you’ve got sex comedies and spaghetti westerns, the last gasps of Old Hollywood alongside the birth of the movie brats, Swedish art films shown in American porn theatres. Tom Jones snuck through in the chaos, and became a big hit and a Best Picture winner purely on the force of its own likeability. By the 1970s, a new if short-lived equilibrium had emerged as a generation of young male filmmakers were given creative freedom. That unchaos meant Lisztomania didn’t have that space to burst through. In many ways, it prefigures the lesson New York, New York, One From the Heart or Heaven’s Gate would teach by decade’s end: that this newfound freedom came with limits.
It’s, ultimately, a poignant meditation on how art can be used for both good and evil – what responsibility artists have, morally and politically. It ends with Liszt defeating Frankenstein-Wagner-Hitler and bringing about peace on earth through the power of music, and in a film that’s so irreverent, it’s not played for laughs: it’s sincerely moving. It’s beautiful.
—Ciara Moloney is a film critic based in Dublin. She likes splatter movies, sitcoms and compilation videos of Bob Mortimer on Would I Lie To You.
Slow Machine (2020)
I watched Slow Machine in bed at around midnight on a Wednesday. There’s a TV in my room but I thought it would be better to watch on my laptop with headphones on in case my roommates were trying to sleep. Despite Slow Machine’s oppressive themes (paranoia, alienation, trauma), I found the experience of watching it to be strangely comforting.
Stephanie, the protagonist of Slow Machine, befriends an NYC counterterrorism agent, Gerard, and their relationship ends with a scene of violence in an abandoned apartment. Fearing what may happen next, she decides to hide out at a secluded house in upstate New York where musician Eleanor Friedberger and her band are recording an album (presumably the excellent New View).
While trying to process what happened between her and Gerard, Stephanie bounces between interactions with Eleanor and members of her band, who either come off as creepy, standoffish, or both. Stephanie isn’t the easiest person to be around, either — she tries on several different accents and personas throughout the course of the film and often acts cagey when asked personal questions.
Being uncomfortably hit on by one musician, or alienated by another, is at least a solid distraction from painful recent memories. The use of 16mm film adds to the dreamlike feel of these moments. As long as Stephanie is lost in the discomfort of hanging out with a band, she doesn’t have to reckon with what happened to Gerard.
I’m writing this in early December. The days are getting shorter, colder, and generally more unpleasant. It’s harder to pretend to be happy. Watching Slow Machine was reassuring. Life might be hard, but at least I haven’t had a friendship end with as much blood and panic as Stephanie and Gerard’s. If I’m hanging out with socially awkward musicians, I can leave. Unlike Stephanie, I’m not stuck, and I don’t have to be afraid of retribution, conspiracy, or obnoxious indie rockers.
—Sacha Kingston-Wayne has written for several publications, most of which don’t exist anymore.
An Ode to Bright-Darkness: on Alabama Shakes' "Sound & Colour"
There’s an immortal rhapsody to Alabama’s Shakes’ “Sound & Colour” video. It is tangible, aching, gut-wrenching. A lone negro cosmonaut wakes in a vessel floating amidst the cosmos. But there’s a problem… he finds himself on a winding voyage of memories lost. He questions! He questions! He questions! Who am I? A lone space-traverser sailing the stars, or a married man with a lost love, as indicated by the wedding band on his arm. The black void grows larger… as he traipses amidst this lonesome galaxy, this desolate space, this forlorn universe; the expanding blackness of a lost Earth reveals the shrinking brightness of a found world. Its beauty breaks him, as he sheds immortal tears for fallen dreams future and raised daydreams past. A moment of confused solace with his lover. A day spent with a child that races slowly. A blissful life that sends off a sad death. Those moments together-alone are precious…
The video is a symphony about the need for human connection. For what is life without compassion for the soul? For what is existence without truth for feeling? For what is “being” without a relationship for “the self.” Nothing. Just an empty void tumbling, being out of touch with space and time. As the band croons on, they assure us of the need to connect. Lead songstress Brittany Howard put it best: “I wanna touch a human being.” And at the end of the day, isn’t that what we all want?! Fuck respect. Fuck regard. Fuck repute. It’s love we crave.