Isles of Löwensohn: THE WILD BOYS, LET THE CORPSES TAN

Funny that after decades of seeing her only hither or yon, I find Elina Löwensohn (NADJA herself!) in two new auteur-driven super weird movies (both en français), which I happened to watch, back-to-back, on two consecutive nights. In each film she plays a semi-insane ruler of a gorgeous but remote location wherein she presides like some kind of perverted Ms. Roarke over a Fantasy Island gone horribly wrong, and R-rated. Owning her masculine side with a cigar chomping swagger. In THE WILD BOYS and LET THEIR CORPSES TAN alike, this Romanian-American actress (just one year older than me and she's handling it way better) sure can swing a wild dick, if you'll pardon my French. N'cest pas? Both films just arrived in the US via streaming; both are shot in blazing Super-16mm celluloid. Both are so surreal they make Buñuel seem like di Sica. Coïncidence? Non, mon ami, Absolument oui

Wait, has she ever been in a movie that's not surrealist? The last time I saw her was The Forbidden Room (and before that, Nadja), and she looked, frankly, like a different person in each those. She was gamin-esque. Gone is that gamin! La gamin est parti... She has surrendered even late-inning Delpy/Huppert-style mature Parisian hotness in favor of a stogie and a laugh throaty enough to choke the communism out of Lionel Stander. Wagging her sun-browned body around like a Bowery-born scrapper, bounding over piles of enemy corpses with Patton-esque gusto, breasts bared with the 'who cares?' haughtiness that marks European women as the superior to all other genders and continents. Rocking punk rock bangs and a stare that could freeze the blood of a drowsy, sun-basking tiger, Löwensohn poses and shifts around on the rocks and beaches with the short guy beatnik cool of Dick Miller and the existential ambivalence of Warner Herzog. 

Yet those breasts are young and full-still, as if eternal. Shall you not try to swing the same?

8 THE WILD BOYS

(Les garçons sauvages)

Dir Bertrand Mandico

***1/2

Gender-bending a Clockwork Orange / Captains Courageous bad boy rehab adventure into erotic surrealist shapes not unlike like Batailles' Story of the Eye and Angela Carter's Passion of a New Eve,  comes Mandico's Les garçons sauvages. Five over-privileged boys are pressed aboard a rough trade reform school rehab fishing boat after Trevor (a malicious spiritual force envisioned by the boys as dog with a jeweled mask) incites them to violence against their indulgent lit teacher during a masked drunken Macbeth performance. A kind of 'scared straight at sea' adventure, the ship is helmed by a very salty sadistic captain with a map tattooed on his penis--one of many we'll see, though they all seem rough, uncircumcised and woven from burlap--results. Collared and tied to the ship and regularly choked to within an inch of their lives at the salty captain's whim, (most of) the boys gradually become submissive, the rough living snapping them out of their entitled sadistic prep school funk...

But that's just the beginning of this bizarro odyssey! The destination of the ship is a mysterious island with sexually active vegetation (which the boys are encouraged to take relentless advantage of). Oysters, oozing tree sap, pollen, the salty sea, and other island fragrances infise a strange hormonal magic in the air, enough to slowly turn these rough trade specimens into girls (their penises drop off and are swept away in the uncaring surf, suddenly no more relevant than land crabs). Meanwhile trees and rocks become giant asses and mocking breasts. "Luckily," a mysterious lady (formerly male) doctor (Löwensohn) arrives to take them under her wing; together they will eventually start sexually devouring and killing randy sailors, committing high seas mutiny, and surrendering to the intoxicating touch and taste of the local plant life. For the in-cahoots captain and the doctor, it's a living. 

Announcing Mandico as a vital new presence in the international film scene (there should be dozens more like him), Les garçons sauvages is really off in a field by itself, chasing horny phallic dragonflies, drinking manna-jaculate from phallic tubers, screwing between leafy legs, sleeping deep in the shrubbery, Uranus' severed testicles foaming into Venus, then back to foam again. There are signs of other unclassifiable movies, everything from Naked Lunch to Matango to Valhalla Rising in its hallucinatory amok Robinson Crusoe wanderings... but there's only Batailles and Carter's fiction and maybe moments in the films fellow French provocatuers Claire Denis, Catherine Breillat, and Gaspar Noe, but they never quite go this far into the Cocteau mirror. 

 The great twist though is that these boys are all played by girls, to start with, and the freedom accorded these already free French actresses allows them to swagger and strut in ways that do a heart good to see. Female sexual aggression isn't, apparently, the same existential threat in France as it is here in the US. It's merely recognized as performance, one the girls-as-boys are all keen to embody, strutting and making lewd gestures and wave their cocks around like they just strapped them on, their fair feminine features actually make them perfect as teenage boys. While their burlap members fall off, they behold their new breasts like they just earned their team colors. It's quite revealing when deconstructing the postures and posing of performative manly mannishness ala Beau Travail  (with which it would make a wild double feature), all swivel-hipped sailors and grabby crotch-forward surrender --the way letting your unconscious anima/animus stretch out in drag brings all sorts of in-the-moment awareness and mojo. It's twice as sexy as it should be, really, no  matter what your persuasion.

What does it all mean? Why don't you read some Batailles, Huysmanns and Angela Carter and learn something about just how precarious your own sexuality is. Words on a page can reorganize the molecular structure of your private parts! Read the wrong book and get aroused in places you didn't even know were there, and maybe weren't before you read it. Suddenly buried infant memories sweep up onto the rocks as gender's social constructs are surrendered to the lapping oyster-rich waves.

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LET THE CORPSES TAN

(Laissez bronzer les cadavres)

Dirs. Helene Cattet's and Bruno Forzani

**1/2

My expectations ran mighty high for this. Too high, perhaps. being such a gigantic fan of Belgian writer/director/producer team Helene Cattet's and Bruno Forzani's 2009 debut, Amer, and their sophomore effort, The Strange Color of Her Body's Tears. It's been a case of too much early promise to keep up with. This, their third feature is still suffused with their signature style (gorgeous 35mm photography, tastefully-recycled Ennio Morricone music, lots of feverish close-ups of eyes, hands, knives, guns, mouths, wild clothing, dissociative nonlinear editing, stylized violence) but there's no room in a traditional crime thriller (adopted from a potboiler French novel) for the kind of psychosexual or post-structuralist departures that made their earlier more giallo/Argento-inspired work so delectably artsy. They make some feints towards that level of giddy experimentation, like early Dario Argento and Maya Deren fighting with Stan Brakhage and Luis Bunuel in a phone both kind of style, but the result is that neither element quite gels. Maybe the bottom line is, there are just too many sunbeated old French male actor faces that look too much alike; with all the Leone eye close-ups and mouths and arms and all that they seem quite interchangeable.

The terrain though is lovely. Blazingly shot almost all outdoors--church ruins, filled with winding passages and cold rock interiors, an artist enclave high on a hill overlooking the crashing Mediterranean surf: clear deep blue sky, blazing sun --you can feel how hot the stones are where the sun hits them; you can feel how cold it is in the shade. It's run by a crazy middle-aged artist (Elina Löwensohn, still smoking those stogies) and her has-been writer lover played by the indefatigable Marc Barbé (they were last paired together as killer and final girl/lady in Sombre) and at the moment mostly inhabited by shady character. Stephane Ferrara is a guy named Rhino, but he's not the big bald bruiser you'd think was named Rhino --that guy's in the cold storage cave, humping the roast lamb hanging there (that lamb gets pretty gross and shot up by the end of the film--in slo motion). At least I think that's true. Who can keep all these craggy old man faces straight?

Anyway, it's a perfect location. Who wouldn't want to shoot a movie there, or hide out after a crime, even without air conditioning, phone or electricity? Even the the has-been writer's young black wife comes there, uninvited, with her kid (stolen from her ex-husband who has sole custody), a cute young maid. Complications! The father might get the law on the place now, so the crooks will have to kill everyone. And then two motorcycle cops show up. Oy, it's going to be a long afternoon. 

The cast dwindles out like ticker tape as visions of everything from Point Blank to Django Kill... If you Live, Shoot cohere amidst the coronas, vaginal solar flares, Brocken spectres, fata Morgana, and sun dogs cohere amidst the lacatatin tied-up breasts and flying bullets. A cliche'd close-ups of ants crawling on an arial photo of the ruins may pass with only mild groans. Ask not when deconstructed homage becomes cliche! We just know.

Alas, sometimes Forzani and Cattet have such devotion to their startling compositions and deep colors that the big picture falls away. They cram in surreal details like afterthoughts that take away rather than add: when one man is shot the gold he's carrying is hit and explodes as if liquid, splashing all over him (art... from Django Kill!) but aside from a very cool skull-headed hobby horse, and a painting Elina makes in the beginning by shooting paint pellets at a canvas and burning holes in it with her cigar, there's not much art on the scene to make the splashing gold have relevant context. It all has to be made up on the spot by the filmmakers who showed keen awareness of Jungian archetypes and surrealism in Amer, but here when they resort weirdly sexual or death driven tableaux (below) it doesn't signify much beyond its own ephemerality.  Should have been watching Bernardo Bertolucci and Ingmar Bergman the same time you be watching them giallos and westerns but maybe school is out, so they watch what they want rather than what the teacher assigns... and as Merlin says in Excalibur, it is mens' nature to forget.

I think.

But hey -shock value abounds and there's nothing wrong with that (aside from its desensitizing long-term effects). In what are either fantasies or flashbacks, a young silhouetted anima figure (presumably Löwensohn's character in her younger artist muse days), stands over a group of men and pees on them as the Morricone guitar stings bray. In another she's tied to a cross; cruel tight ropes over her breasts cause them to lactate in great rivers down her body (evoking similar imagery with the lit teacher in the early portion of The Wild Boys! What's up with Lowenson and rope-forced lactatio?). Later still she jams her heel into the mouth of one of the men  intercut with the use of a gun in a similar orifice, ala the 'dying primal scene reverie' images in Argento's Tenebrae. 

And yet, the synergy that made Amer so magnificently Antonioni-meets-Argento-esque (dialoguing with Lucretia Martel's paranoia and Claire Denis' butch sexuality as well as Argento's psychosexual post-modernism) is missing. Aside from the snarky obviousness of "gold"-en showering, or the commerce/art compromise when gold coins become liquid gold paint, the twin voices--the feminine avant garde experimental non-narrative lovingly ying/yanged with the masculine/Apollonian linea narrative--so indicative of the Cattet/Forzani union in the past--don't connect like one would hope. We end up admiring the lovely location, the photography, the range of styles, the great use of classic Italian film music, but eventually we lose any idea of which craggy middle-aged heavy is shooting which, or if we're supposed to care who gets the gold or not.

The reason those new wave crime movies (which Corpses clearly pay homage to) worked back in the day was their pro-crime attack on cultural norms of the time. Censorship and big budgets made mainstream fare so tedious and conventional that unusual angles, splurges of sex and giddy violence, the bad getting off free from their crimes, was fresh and new. The usual plots were subverted, even rendered meaningless; the crime was the style. Outlaw culture was born, leading directly from Breathless to Bonnie to Badlands. I'll definitely see Corpses again and hope my feelings change but as of now, I'm just left confused by the plot and disappointed by the mismatched Franco-esque asides.

Another weird connection: seeing this film the same year as the release of Other Side of the Wind, for Welles' artsy film-within-the-film is the Cattet-Forzani film I was hoping for. Welles keeps all the surrealism connecting properly, the colors and imagery are trippy relevant because they connect. You know what it all means even if what it means isn't clear. The part of you that 'gets' weird art knows what it means and if that part doesn't tell you, it's because it's saving it for your dreams. He keeps it simple, allowing the style and symbolism to directly link. He taps into the myth. He was doing psychedelic modernism back in the goddamned 40s so he doesn't need to underline Big Messages (his message is always the same anyway: having a massive ego and the confidence to flim-flam people eventually backfires. It's that message every time with Welles. But hey, along the way he points to the eternal truths as they pass by in parade, like an excited kid at the reptile house who knows all their Latin names.

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In the same way Amer worked. It had form and unity of modern and post-modern in a tale of one girl's evolving relationship to her parents and animus. Three-vignettes of sexual awakening in a girl's life are told in three distinct retro styles, allowing for true new wave energy, giving us the modernist frisson of slip-sliding signifiers we find in the best of Antonioni. We didn't need a narrative in Amer because we saw the common thread through it all, as if all the movies made in Europe about woman's sexuality suddenly rearranged themselves into a completed puzzle. Amer didn't have to make sense, it was sense. Forzani and Cattet's sophomore effort, Strange Color of Her Body's Tear, on the other hand, was more like an exercise in bravura style, but with enough enticingly lovely actors and such a gorgeous art nouveau hotel setting it didn't matter if the story got monotonous and incoherent. With Corpses though, what do we have? Bronzed Mediterranean fifty-somethings lounging amidst the cloudless blazing blue sky and groovy ruins? Up close shots of eyes, guns and gross mouths stuffed with food and bad teeth? One is tempted to recall Hitchcock's line about how some directors make slices of life, while he mades slices of cake. Alas, Cattet and Forlani have tried to make a slice of a slice of a slice of a slice and we're left with nothing but an empty fork.

Anyway, it's worth the trip, just for the view.

And the balls.

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