Keren Cytter | Terrorist of Love / 2016

diversionary tactics

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tal Hefter, Yammi Wisler, and Naama Yuria (music and lyrics), Keren Cytter (director) Terrorist of Love / 2016 [3 minutes]

 

Video artist, filmmaker, dramatist, choreographer, and novelist Keren Cytter has long expressed interest in her work about issues of gender and sexual difference, although, as critics have made clear, her interests are so vast, it is difficult to pigeon-hole her art.

      But in several films, particularly in 2016, she seems to explore these concerns without fully making clear what her attitude is toward them, an aspect of the disorientation of the viewer she insists upon in all of her films.

    Strangely, however, Terrorist of Love is presented in the form of a genre that is most comprehensible, a music video which relies of the music and lyrics instead of the usual complex narrative, formal structures, and dialogical absurdity of Cytter’s works such as Object of the same year.

      Here, we’re talking about love and desire almost as straightforwardly as we can, a young singer, standing on a New York rooftop begins, with a stationery camera facing him, to sing about love. Even the director suggests that film appears as if “It’s going to be cute. It’s like, all Disney.”

      But the barking klezmer-like music, performer Peter Gramlich singing out, “Come, come, come, come go ahead, why, why, why, why, why, why can’t you catch me in?”

      Suddenly, we see him in his Justin Bieber T-shirt, the video having surrounded both sides of the frame with the waving colors of the LGBTQ community. His song, we suddenly realize, is a gay song about unrequited love, a desire for sexual copulation.

      Singing, “Search me, search me, search me,” he pulls off his T-shirt, pours out a coke, singing “glub, glub, glub, glub, glub, won’t you drink me?” The lyrics have suddenly fallen into another mad dimension, and he now pounds his belly, singing “do, do, do, do, come again.”

      Suddenly into the scene cartwheels a young woman in a short red dress, surely a temptress (Laura Hajek is the performer) performing in something closer to a rap style who argues that he is “like a bomb to a camel is a tourist of love.”

      The young man seems to call out in a sort of Tarzan call, suddenly moving in a choreographic manner of a sort of automaton, dancing in sync with the female interloper, just as a series of flowers

replaces the side banners that previously represented the LGTBQ flag. Cute cats and an image of crossed trumpets complete the complete banner of now heterosexual love, a kind a greeting card that truly repeats some of the Hallmark card representations of love, although we wonder whether or not the seeming Asian characters on his chest suggest something other.

       Little hearts appearing above their highly choregraphed hand movements, almost as if they were puppets, suggests our young gay man has suddenly found love that removes him from the terrorist list—in short into heteronormative behavior. The red-dressed temptress seems to have been successful in her quick conversion of the terrorist’s desires.

       It’s a rather terrifying possibility. But as the song ends, the young man again puts on his Justin Bieber shirt, as the temptress moves off in one direction and the boy in another. Their momentary bonding was apparently only as long as the song, hinting at perhaps the reality of many such a commercial musical video that represents worlds that never could or should have existed.

 

Los Angeles, January 10, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2024).  

Pierre Étaix | Le Soupirant (The Suitor) / 1962

balancing himself in a world that has tilted in a wrong direction

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jean-Claude Carrière (screenplay), Pierre Étaix (director) Le Soupirant (The Suitor) / 1962

 

Pierre Étaix may be one of the most almost-forgotten geniuses of cinema history. For years, because of contested film rights and much-needed restoration of his cinematic history, Étaix was basically ignored, despite his continuation of the tradition of great filmmakers such as Buster Keaton and, more particularly, Jacques Tati, the latter of whom for which he worked as a sketch artist and assistant director before moving onto his own cinematic career.

    A bit like both Keaton and Tati, Étaix, whom critic Dave Kehr describes as “a small man, with a spherical head and large, liquid eyes,” and like his predecessors is a kind of acrobatic being, balancing himself constantly against a world that has tilted in a wrong direction.

     Yet not one of this trio of comic greats is a true clown in the sense of Fellini’s notions or even that of the frantic American Jerry Lewis, who Étaix attempted to make a movie with, Day the Clown Died (apparently now lost). Rather, Keaton, Tati, and Étaix always maintain a certain dignity despite indignity of the situations in which they become involved.

     As Kehr points out, Keaton, Tati, and Étaix, unlike Lewis or even the Marx brothers before him, were never non-conformists nor were they innocents. Indeed, they desperately attempted to maintain a conservative equilibrium in a society which simply did not know how to incorporate their personal eccentricities. Or, perhaps even that is a wrong word. They were not intentionally eccentric, but simply incapable of behaving as the conservative, often wealthy society in which they lived, demanded.

     The young man of Étaix’s suitor is simply tuned out as we might say today, with earplugs in his ears—not in this case so that he might tune in to the newest YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, or other computer devices—simply so that he might be able to study his intellectual interests of astronomy.

      His imperious mother (Denise Perrone), however, determines that it is now the time that he should be married, as if he were some overaged maiden, and prods the father (Claude Massot) to lecture him on the subject.

      Fortunately, the tuned-out son hears little of his father’s discussion of the subject except for the last few words that he must now marry, and obediently attempts to follow up. He asks the families’ Swedish au pair, Ilka (Karin Vesely), in his first actual line of dialogue in what basically, for Étaix’s character, a silent movie, if she will marry him. Ilka, as lovely as she is and as longingly she might look in his direction, does not yet have the skill to completely comprehend French, and answers in her native language, representing yet another kind of “tuning out” —and another kind of “difference” that cannot quite be bridged.

 

       To find a proper mate, our hero goes to all the wrong places. Seeing an attractive woman on the street, carrying groceries, he mistakenly offers help, grabbing up the packages, which actually belong to an elderly woman with whom he is left. 

     His attempts to imitate the suave men who seduce women in restaurants and bars is an utter disaster. He can never, fortunately, be the cads he might wish to imitate, who these women seem to prefer to the natural innocent (and yes, I use that word advisedly, since this figure would desire to be nothing like a foolish innocent) that he actually is. He attempts to light cigarettes for women with the art of Humphrey Bogart to no avail; he slips into banquettes where women have been temporarily abandoned by their would-be lovers, only to have the males return to their conquests. He is trying to learn all the tricks of male dominance far too late in his life.

      When he finally meets a woman, abandoned by her male companion, who seems receptive to his gaze, she turns out to me a drunken lout, joyful for his financial appreciation, but unable even to return to her own house.

       She chases him into the would-be arms of performer Stella, with whom, after a backstage encounter, he imagines a relationship, posting dozens of pictures of her on his walls, even bringing a larger-than-life cut-out of her into his bedroom. He has become the teenage boy with a crush that he before never had the opportunity of being.

       His parents are righteously aghast. And we realize that this suitor is no longer up to the task. Meanwhile, the beautiful Swedish Ilka has been working hard to learn her French, finally is able to respond positively to his request. She is the perfect match.

       The great screenwriter, who worked with Buñuel and so many others, Jean-Claude Carrière, wrote this comedic romp, the premier of Étaix’s brilliant, if somehow forgotten, career. Fortunately, Criterion films again came to the rescue, and we now can see the works of a master comedian we otherwise might almost have lost.

 

Los Angeles, November 2, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2019).

Georges Franju | Judex / 1963

characters of many faces

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jacques Champreux and Francis Lacassin (screenplay), Georges Franju (director) Judex / 1963

 

Georges Franju’s 1963 film, Judex, is one of those films that critics might be immediately puzzled about how to describe to viewers who have never seen it. Despite Franju’s often very original filmmaking, this work is based on a 1916 French film by the great serial cinema-creator, Louis Feuillade (several of whose shorter films I have previously reviewed), in which the same character and some of the same events enchanted the early 20th-century film-goers.

 

     Yet, Franju makes this film—suggested to him by Feuillade’s grandson, Jacques Champreux, who also as a collaborator on the script—with many completely contrary movies from the original. Franju has long wanted to remake Feuillade’s Fantômas, for which he could not get permission. No matter, Franju took matters into his own hands, focusing on his own beautiful black-and-white images, which he’d already established in his 1960 classic Eyes Without a Face, while, as he had also done in that film, basically ignoring the acting talents of his characters.

     Franju loved the inter-connectedness of all his films, while embracing film history in general. In this case, he hired Édith Scob, who played the terribly scarred and frightened daughter in that earlier film to play the villain’s daughter Jacqueline; as the hero he chose the handsome American actor, Channing Pollack to be Judex, but dressed him up throughout much of the film as an elderly bearded man, Vallieres, serving as secretary to the film’s villain, banker, Favraux; the building-climbing cat-like woman, also nanny to Jacqueline’s child (Francine Bergé), is eerily similar to another Feuillade villain, Irma Vep in his Les Vampires; and Franju even manages to bring in Fantômas as reading matter for the bumbling but gentle detective Cocantin (Jacques Jouanneau).

      Indeed, it appears that the director spent more time on his cinematography and numerous film associations than on finding actors who could fully express his characters’ psychology and motivations. Entire portions of the original were jettisoned, making, at times, for inexplicable behavior and acts. Why, for instance is Vallieres so determined to out the evil-doings of his employer, and why has he waited so long to accomplish what we gradually perceive is revenge? Why does the same rather staid and boring Vallieres suddenly become a kind of bird-loving magician, returning to life a seemingly dead dove before conjuring up an entire flock of the same birds, and how does he poison Favraux without the man drinking a sip of the poisoned wine he has offered? These and dozens of other questions throw the viewer into a sense of utter confusion, which, evidently, is what Franju sought.              Any excitement in this film lies within its sudden and utter transformations: Vallieres becoming the matinée idol-like figure (the producers noted his facial resemblance to Rudolph Valentino), Favraux, a dead corpse, suddenly returning to life, and the formerly demur nanny becoming a knife-packing cat before transforming herself again into a nun right out of Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes. The previously passive Jacqueline, after her father’s apparent death, even becomes noble, denying her inheritance to help pay back those whom her father has defrauded. In his story-telling capacities (he begins the tale of Alice in Wonderland) to Jacqueline’s daughter, Cocantin becomes a better teacher than her nanny, Diana, might ever have been.

 

   With each of these shifts, moreover, Franju’s film also sheds its genre, taking on various movie types: a revenge drama, a spooky murder mystery, a devious film about kidnapping, with its almost comic intertitles, a silent movie with spoken dialogue, and, finally, in its absolute devotion to birds, a kind of tribute to Hitchcock’s movie of the same year, The Birds. As The New York Times justifiably commented at the time of Judex’s US release: “It is hard to tell whether Georges Franju, who made it, wants us to laugh at it or take it seriously."

     Given my basically contrarian nature, I’d argue that the film is both a loving and almost comical tribute to the absurd Feuillade original while also being a kind of serious exploration of the very tropes of filmmaking that for so long dominated French cinema. One must remember that Franju, as co-founder of the Cinémathèque Française film archive, knew film history intimately, and in this film was not only exploring some of its various manifestations but putting himself and his films into that context. If to many viewers of Judex the work might seem more like pastiche than a coherent movie, I agree with them, but simply ask them to enjoy the circus of nods to popular film history. This may be a kind of silly movie at times, but it is also an extremely intelligent one which ought to be taken utterly seriously. The film is clearly not one of his greatest, but if seen from the right perspective is so fascinating that it cannot be forgotten.

 

Los Angeles, July 10, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2018).