Andrzej Zulawski's Dead: An Acidemic Tribute Round-up

 I just fond out the great Polish Insanity Clause himself, Andrzej Zulawski, died last Wednesday, forcing we fans in the States to cry and then rear up and make sure all our precious Mondo Vision collector item DVDs are still there.... waiting for the time to be 'right' again - their dust jackets keeping the art pristine, not that we'd ever sell them. Nay, instead let us take his passing as a cue that the time is nigh upon us. Drugs in the system or no, these films have been growing in us like a seed mutating and pulsating since we last saw unsheathed them - and thus Zulawski--in some hideous protean form conjured in the unfettered madness of his art--still lives. Though unscreened in theaters or given US releases, his films are done justice on these fine DVDs, testament to his cinematic bravery and ability to so vividly entwine genuine druggy hallucinatory madness, classic Russian literature (and Shakespeare), Godardesque meta-deconstruction, depravity, and covert anti-Stalinism.

In America, especially, outside of POSSESSION, which was able to be billed as an arty horror movie, his films are appreciated only by a few marginalized madmen. Situated within a specific category in our weird film libraries, POSSESSION fits the 1970s-80s 'Euro-Horror' category so we know what to do with it which is why for a long time it was our only taste of Zulawski. Until the recent Mondo Vision restoration, it was only avail. only as the flipside of a double feature disc with the terrible Lamberto Bava's terrible BEYOND THE DOOR II. But it belongs where it is now, on a beautifully restored disc, ready to be filed on the same shelf as Kubrick and Godard and Bergman.

Just look at him, at left, with long-time girlfriend Sophie Marceau, with whom he made four films, two of which are seeable in the US, (one on a Mondo disc and one on Amazon Prime). Maybe it's that Cyrano de Bergerac is one of France's key mythic heroes, leading the greatest beauties in this or any generation to find great writers as sexy as rock stars and actors. Either way, I trust her judgment, and wish I was in Paris. So RIP to a great visionary mad man who made far too few films, and whose possibly greatest work, the science fiction film ON THE SILVER GLOBE, was never finished thanks to Polish government intervention. What were they afraid of?

Whatever it was, maybe they were right. Decades on and his best work is still dangerous. I'm not sure it could topple a regime, but even the more sex-drenched of the lot could topple your sanity right quick. I think you can handle it, though. And prayers and thoughts to his family and friends, and all those still sick and suffering in and out of Warsaw.

Here's a round-up of some of the Acidemic features on Zulawski's shimmering ouevre:

Surf the Maelstrom: POSSESSION

... the landscape of POSSESSION could be summed up in terms of SUNSHINE's mind washing machine, with Sam Neill trapped in inescapable loops with the same woman in different forms, with Winslet's hair changes and bi-polar mood swings reflected in Adjani's careening back and forth between the sterile apartment she shares with Neill and their son, Bob, and this decayed East Berlin apartment building, with its goop-covered floor and writhing tentacled lover like a decayed animal carcass swathed in glistening rainbow brown blood / oil paint palette runoff and being devoured by long large white worms. "He's very tired, he's been making love to me all night," Adjani says of the beast to a horrified gay detective before bashing his brains in with a jar of paint. She's so crazy by then she makes Klaus Kinski seem like Water Pidgeon.

By this time Neill has more or less detoxed and is playing the clean-cut parent, subject to fits only when Adjani comes careening back to put laundry away (in the fridge) and throw some cold cuts from the pantry into her suitcase and carve herself up with an electric knife while shouting and convulsing like she's receiving electro-shock therapy in the midst of a Macbeth monologue. Her character splits between two poles: one Adjani as nurturing elementary school teacher potential love interest (Sam's idealized femme) vs. the homicidal birther/fucker/painter of her own monster (ala Susan Hogan and Samantha Eggers and in The Brood) a blazing insane nightmare woman, shrieking and miscarrying an array of colors as if dissolving a painting in her womb to start again. (there's a kind of mention that she brought the ejected fetus whatever-thing over to that apartment and its been her sick lover ever since). Is it a metaphor for art, a masterpiece or an example of the way a true artist is in a state of exalted frenzied madness when working on their project, giving themselves over completely, maybe never to return, except in the form of that immortal art? It's ambiguous of course, cuz it's artsy first, horror second, but both far more than others. Zulawksi is exorcising emotions brought up by his own crumbling marriage at the time, the frustrations of jealousy and confusion when your lover is drifting over to the arms of another and reluctant to fill in the blanks your mind paints with lurid insane speculation, but--since he pursues the emotions to their extreme end-- the cumulative effect becomes far more cosmic.

Neil's characters have always made me dislike him and need to be cock-blocked by some younger, looser man, i.e. Harvey Keitel, Billy Zane, even Jeff Goldblum, so his innate sexually frustrated petulance has an intertextual context. But when delivered from being just a weird side platter of Pierce Brosnan /Anthony Perkins, and when given a part that calls for truly insane and giddy grace, he's suddenly big as all the ocean and the land. He makes you want to keep an eye on him so he doesn't suddenly appear behind you, smiling and showing you his new razor from your insides out. What makes him such a good secret agent (his last mission was something across the Wall where he'd been sizing up some scientist defector in pink socks on other side of the wall or something) lies in his ability to ride this tide of lunacy with confidence, able to match crazy for crazy, and then some. Wherever Adjani's crazy boat's going, he's going to match her, bob for bob. Sometimes going under, sometimes rising above, absorbing everything and everyone he sees, from his son's crashing toy airplanes to his rival's 'love of everything,' he's always more or less on the crest of that Poesy maelstrom. (cont.)

The Sorrows of Softcore are the Joys of Art: L'IMPORTANT C'EST D'AMIER

In Zulawski-ville you can have you cake, eat it too, store it in the fridge, throw it away in a fit of pride and self-will, fish it out later and freeze it, all at once, but it's still not going to satisfy your cake craving. And that is why his image is always stronger than the reality it services, like neo-realism reversed, and reversed back and forth atop, until it becomes raw blood, guts and modernism. As consumers of the image we're forced to reckon with the inescapable idea that baser arts such as smut make the higher arts possible and even 'high' by definition. Was not even Shakespeare once considered a 'low' art? It's only the dumbing down of already dumbed-down dumbness and the changes in linguistic structure that has made Shakespeare a "higher" art, just as flowers can't blossom without the girtty, ugly, muddy soil and the leering gaffers who tape it down. It is what it is because of what it isn't (the basic tenet of structuralism!) Thus artists are always courting the bourgeoisie for grants in order to make art that criticizes artists for taking grants from the bourgeoisie. No wonder Kinski has to kick so much ass just to get an orgy on for the night!

The importance of Kinski has still yet to be fully gauged, there is yet no meter with which to measure it. So when he hears that the RICHARD III will get the last part of the funding if they cast Nadine as Lady Anne, he suddenly remembers her from her last film, Nymphocula! (a Jess Franco film title if ever there was one!) which he remembers as "the one with two dykes in a castle with a dwarf. "She was fantastic," he cries, "amazing!" Kinski's own appearances in Eurosleaze titles are not only numerous to measure (he was in Nymphocula too, whether it exists or not) but intrinsic to the genre. He's the crucified, screaming (but angrily not in pain) scarecrow at the crossroads between genius, insanity, art, exploitation, raving anger, and complete detachment. Both creepy and sexy, he's never a full hero or villain: half debonair intellectual aesthete, half wild orangutan, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde swirled together like soft serve. Somehow when he does these low-rent high art man on a wire flicks his insanity keeps him grounded and he emerges unscathed from the carnage.

The sane, however, to judge by Zulawski's moping protagonists at any rate, remain permanently traumatized. They wanted to do Shakespeare and wound up in Eurosleaze; they're despondent about their failure but Kinski knows better: he brings the Shakespeare to the porn and the porn to the Shakespeare. (cont)

The Ancient She-Shaman and her Shrooming Exhumer: SZAMANKA

In that sense, no one does it quite as shamanistically correct as old Andrzej Zulawski --Jodorowsky is too vulgar, Emir Kusturica too whimsical, Lynch too straight, and Gilliam too bent. None are the types to take "fucking flybanes" at their science lab and pitch a doctoral thesis to their advisor and future father-in law while rolling around on the floor in the hospital chapel. In other words, to offer fusion of the dramatic, forward-thinking, mystical, druggy, and socio-political all without whimsy, vulgarity, raunchy, weird-for-weird's sake-ism, or any semblance of humor... or drama... Because Poles, like their Russian neighbors, just don't give a fuck. They sidestep altogether the things that trip up America--for all its talk of freedom--in unhackable tendrils of churchy censorship and narrative, in morasses of need to explain things to the rubes in the cheap seats. These students don't need to worry about narcs or rubes, due to the joys of the socialist education system. If they find some shrooms in the ancient pocket of the exhumed shaman, they're going to eat them. And wait for the shaman floating in the tub to make the first move. And they're going to hide that they did them from even us, so you have to know what the signs are, cuz they don't want to share. And the signs are indistinguishable from 'everyday' Warsaw life in the 1990s. (more)

The Luxury of Desperate Gamblers: L'AMOUR BRAQUE

Like Godard whom he clearly (and rightly) emulates, Zulawski throws you a new film language and expects you to hang on while he pulls you around by motorboat, and like Godard your enjoyment must depend on your ability to associate certain quotes, movements, and gestures with other films. When you see the bank robbers in their Disney masks knocking off a bank in the opening sequence you might think of Kathryn Bigelow's Point Break (1991); when they're horsing through an impromptu number on their getaway route, you might think of the Marxes on a cocaine bender or Emir Kusturica's frothy gypsies; the way the bourgeoisie endure endless abuse without ever losing their nonchalance evokes Bunuel -- but these names just locate the onscreen insanity in some kind of loose contextual framework. It doesn't help. This stuff is so fucked-up in its mad play on words-on-action genre and bourgeoisie art film expectation subversions that it can be hard to know where to set your bearings, but isn't that just Kubrick? It's a madness that can be hard to 'sink into' unless you are first "experienced" or have spent time in a lunatic theater company, or seen a lot of Bergman movies about lunatic theater companies, or are on meds, a lot of meds.

One of my biggest regrets as an actor/filmmaker was-- in Queen of Disks (2007)--when a Viking woman stuck a knife to my throat as I was drinking coffee and I missed a chance to do a spit-take; my innate decency and worry about spilling coffee on my ratty jeans stopped me from doing one and/or dropping the coffee cup, just letting go. You know how impossible those things can be to do intentionally? Like when someone pays you to pee in your pants, and you just can't do it, no matter how hard you try, even though the money is good? The actors in this film don't have that problem --they crowd surf into total candy-coated confusion, they roll around on tables laden with food and the waiters don't bat an eyelash. They spazz out and sing at the top of their lungs while being chased by cops in riot gear, and then the riot cops forget where they parked. And it would all just be posturing if Zulawski didn't capture a realistic sense of Parisian hustle and bustle like he's a freakin' Oscar-hungry auteur riche. (cont)

See also the excellent entry on Andrzej on Breakfast in the Ruins: 
And here to MONDO VISION

The Ancient She-Shaman and her Shrooming Exhumer: SZAMANKA

The American holiday trifecta has already passed its first hurtle, Thanksgiving. Now the sluggish traffic and unruly Wal-Mart tazing begins in earnest and a skittish mummified shamanic Pisces like me turns naturally inward, for movies are the best way to avoid holiday shopping lines. All those commercials that try so hard to become a patronizing life coach for Americans, using the "we" not to mean their company but you the viewer + them, united: "we don't settle for anything less," and "we're always pushing just a little further" like they already know you, like David Manners telling Mina "we're going to forget all about these dreams, and think of something cheerful, aren't we?" in DRACULA (1931), or a narc would if he suddenly appeared at the edge of your druggy circle trying to imply he's always been part of your inside clique. But "we're" going stay inside, like an urban hermit, and savor the poison path, the peaceful darkness of the amniotic sac couch bog. One century soon, some decadent Warsaw university students will dig us up and put us in a nice preservative solution isolation tank. Rummaging through our fanny pack he'll find our secret stash of mushrooms both psilocybe and 'flybane' (i.e. fly agaric or Amanita Muscaria) and then eat them, so he can bond with us, and we'll warn him about the crazy woman fixing to devour his soul, SZAMANKA (or She-Shaman) is her name... and like so many hot girls in cold climates, she's fucking crazy. She's the one who killed us!

 (PS - All the collages in this post are made by me - so don't expect to see them in the actual film, I was just trying to help clarify the madness a little bit, on Zulawski's behalf, by throwing in some druggy Polish film stills with Bosch 'n shrooms hallucinations)

Speaking of shrooms: amanita muscaria are currently legal, and it's easy to see why if you ever tried them --they're gross. Too many can make you feel poisoned, not enough can make you feel like you're not getting off - and just the right amount gets the colors enhanced and the sweaty glow feeling of being connected to the world, but they also make that world smell like urine. You're supposed to drink your urine once they 'pass' through you, and then you get really high - but no thanks, bro. I have yet to do that, so can't comment. Maybe they were better in Poland or Siberia, 2,500 years ago, when the locals noticed the reindeer rummaging through the snow for them, wolfing them down and getting drunken crazy on them (apparently they used to drink the reindeer urine, which---I guess makes it all right? (Who was the first laplander who figured that out? "Dude, I was drinking reindeer urine, you know, like always, and I suddenly noticed...").

Either way, age has not diminished their power: a few thousand years in the bog and the anthropologist, played by Boguslaw Linda in SZAMANKA still gets off on them (literally and figuratively). But he learns the hard way: once you've submitted to the full stripping away of persona layers, divested yourself of all attachment, unmade the trappings of self, remembered your own birth, bathed in the white light of pure love, and forgiven everyone everywhere, then what? Life goes on without you. No one gets where you're coming from, or quite buys your mystic conversion. Your fiancee thinks you're nuts, and the people who do get your message, who feel the same cosmic light, are gross. They wear sandals and patchouli and eat too much garlic and look anemic from not eating meat. "We" sure don't want to hang out with them, too often.

So we turn to the nest of sweet isolation, a few cool cats to cuddle with, and an endless supply of DVDs. There's so much great trippy shit out there. No matter how 'gone' we get, Chile's Alejandro Jodorowsky, America's David Lynch, and Poland's Andrzej Zulawski can always guide us in a holding pattern 'til the rest of the world slowly catches up and we sink down into the post-Thanksgiving depths of Mordor Xmas. To that end, we save SZAMANKA for when we're delirious or have been in the cave so long we've forgotten there's even an outdoors. Zulawski doesn't even need to show us anyone actually taking the drugs. The shit's in the celluloid.

I first discussed Zulawski's SZAMANKA in conjunction with Carrie Matheson and Claire Forlan's awesome Dewar's ad while back in November of 2012, during that previously discussed enlightenment breakthrough awareness state I wrote "from boxes heart-shaped shapelessness, bags tossed as rubbish into the Warsaw mud, flown, Angus, darlin' - rather, a punk-en down Dalle Betty Blue-blackened bird spazzing through anthropology classes as her lover pilfers thousand year-old psilocybe and Amanita Muscaria mushrooms from a mummified shaman's pockets. Each wodka shot or peanut butter-covered stem tracking each punch and drunken stumble dream pie like meth and coveralls to grinding mechanical factory sex atop crumbling swamp corpse; grinding academics in their dancing and beer spillage and moving far away from the needle tip distance twixt the ancient fungal shaman's last expression train down through more more the turn style jumps, coiffed, jumps back through and gay references hurtled like Jack Benny's Polish theater troupe, bombed and built anew under which in the shelter Zulawski slept as a child. (more)

I don't remember writing that and I'm miles away from that galactic alignment euphoria, but I dig my crazy jive poetry as if it's from a long lost twin. I'm finding references to everything from T.S. Eliot to SULLIVAN'S TRAVELS to the obscure Lou Reed song, "Billy." But I wouldn't write like that again if I could. I'm too jaded. I was on a holy fool pre-apocalyptic role back this time in 2012, as seen in The Scrooge Satori, all without a single mushroom, And I would never have made the TO BE OR NOT TO BE connection in my current cave-bound form. Yet when else is a Polish theater troupe the main character of a comedy film set and shot in 1942 Hollywood?

Before you answer, quick imagine Roman Polanski urchins skittering through the Warsaw sewers while Germans shell the city above and Russians wait on the outskirts, until the Resistance is wiped out, so they can step in an Iron Curtain the place. What a bum deal. Poland gets screwed double, so who can blame them for being depressed? A little urine.... clears them of this deed.

Am I going somewhere with this, as some ancient astronaut theorists believe? Shamans are waiting for you to exhume their ancient stashes! Did you hear in the news that a 747 recently crashed in a cemetery in Poland? The Polish officials have so far retrieved 2,000 bodies! (1)

SZAMANKA (1994), aka SHE-SHAMAN, is one of them. Great judicious synthesizers underwrite Andrzej Zulawski's uber-bizarre panic movement-ish meditation on the nature of primitivism, Neanderthal train sex momentum, insanity, eating brains to gain that person's knowledge, and the lack of mores or coherence in 90s Warsaw. And the script was written by a woman! Manuela Gretowska co-founded the Polish Women's Party and ran for office... So best believe it's way darker sexually than even Zulawski would normally go. But thanks to his own 'maturer' madness, he makes a pretty good movie around it, way better than that punk Jean-Pierre Leaud was making in LAST TANGO IN PARIS (below, overlaid by me with a Bosch detail for easy decoding).

I mention this because Zulawski and Gretowska clearly know SZAMANKA is a lot like LAST TANGO IN PARIS, and that star Iwona Petry looks and foams at the mouth like Beatrice Dalle in BETTY BLUE which lest we forget ends with Dalle going totally crazy, getting electroshock, and winding up smothered with a pillow by the man who loves her ala saucy Jack in CUCKOO'S NEST. As with Bertolucci's film, Zulawski's crazy roving camera chases sexy nutcase Petry, running everywhere--onto trains, off of trains--upstairs and down--and at times there's obscene perverse men leering from every corner and it begins to almost seem like some perverse sexual nightmare. Fat bugs, these men are ready for the maw of a Kali mantis like Beatrice Dalle's in her holy trifecta - BETTY BLUE, TROUBLE EVERY DAY, and INSIDE.   One of her anthropologist lover's pals notes of her weird behavior that some people are "God's fools, with souls so big there's no room for brains," Iwona Petry's character is known as "the Italian" but is at least smart enough to realize they're talking about her, and to knock over their table accordingly. So while Boguslaw Linda goes on his lecture, she's illustrating his tales of Neanderthal shamanism by mouthing a display case and "careening through the streets of Warszawa like a culturally inept marathon runner who's afraid of clowns" (2). While he pursues a doctorate in medicine, she's studying engineering at the same school, so it's a metaphor to the division of labor and culture in Poland, and of woman's sexuality as something so archaically Precambrian as to devour the entirety of Apollonian civilization in a single sparagmosticated brain bite.

Her hotness making her a one-woman cliff for Warszawa's lemming males, it's as if she's constantly trying to keep them at bay by behaving in a way that turns even the staunchest stomach: she foams at the mouth, eats cat food out of her landlady's cat dish, and in short behaves like a proper panic movement-era primal screen actress, which means undergoing convulsions like one does on, say, too way way way WAY WAYyyy way too much acid. Four times what you usually take, I guess, is enough to get you to that level of walking down the middle of the street with no pants on, screaming at the top of your lungs, each root of hair in your scalp tingling like fiberoptic tendrils pummeling signals from every web string of time and space, sensory impression magnified to the point of distortion, contradicting the other impressions, coming into your brain past your normal blinders and defenses, so that you literally hear your own thoughts talk to you in the roar of a passing truck or the bark of a dog. In case you can't tell, I've been there: everyone you see looks like melting Cubist seventh dimensional sculptures, all laden with pulsing blood just millimeters from the surface. And it goes on like that for upwards of six hours (or if on DOM or STP, up to 36 hours). The only salvation is benzos, or whiskey... lots and lots, like a bull rhinoceros popping Ketamine in a vain attempt to put yourself under while being slowly fed through a paper shredder. Sometimes open mouth kissing display cases, salting your clothes, peppering your hair and spraying perfume on your lettuce, will at least help you break free from the normal behaviors of your social and cultural position, behaviors now revealed to be little more than straitjackets pulled past suffocation tightness.

this is your brain on drugs

Zulawski's been there, too. Petry and Linda know all the tricks, and maybe so has Gretowska, I'd imagine, because in SZAMANKA even engineering lectures weld sexual-reproductive organs on to the curriculum in ways that would probably blow Cronenberg's mind.

"Zulawski said the animus inspired by his film was mainly directed at his uninhibited actress. The press “hated her and destroyed her, and she disappeared.” He has not made another movie in Poland since: “This country is still in the Middle Ages.” - J. Hoberman NY Times March 2nd, 2012 (my birthday!)

Still in the Middle Ages. I agree, half of America is right there with them, and as Petry's performance is clearly meant to have a certain 'the whole Cro-Magnon Thing passed my evolution by" -style idiot savant savage ambivalence, she's a living contradiction to everything the Texas Board of Education--and by weird extension the International Film Critics Circle-- holds dear, he said, reading aloud from his notebook while running it under water in the sink, then dripping the blue inky runoff all over her naked body. Clearly, he (Boguslaw Linda) is tripping balls. But it's for science! And he doesn't need a frickin' medical research hothead like Charles Haid (in ALTERED STATES) or a creep like Bruce Dern (in THE TRIP) as a 'guide,' in fact Zulawski doesn't even feel the movie needs a shot of him actually taking the mushrooms. He's just suddenly on them, and we're left to guess how many he took or how long ago or which kind. He doesn't even need to mention reasons at first that his doctoral thesis is going to be an attempt to locate the ancient shamanic spirit within modern paranoid schizophrenics, realizing that "drugs, hunger, danger, darkness" -the constants of life in the dark ages--kept these primitive humans in a paranoid schizophrenic state 24/7. In other words, they were all the time, like most of us only are when tripping. To prove this point, Boguslaw starts slowly devolving along the same lines, craving that mystical union via any ceremonial sex magic or 2,500 year old mushrooms he can find. 

In that sense, no one does it quite as shamanistically correct as old Andrzej Zulawski. Jodorowsky is , by contrast, too bawdy-vulgar, Emir Kusturica too eccentric-whimsical, Lynch too straight, and Gilliam too bent. None are the types to take "fucking flybanes" at their science lab and pitch a doctoral thesis to their advisor and future father-in law while rolling around on the floor in the hospital chapel, to offer a unique fusion of the dramatic, forward-thinking, mystical, druggy, and socio-political all without whimsy, vulgarity, weird-for-weird's sake-ism, or any semblance of humor... or drama...

Maybe Poles, stuck in those Middle Ages, just don't give a fuck. They sidestep altogether the things that trip up America--for all its talk of freedom--in unhackable tendrils of churchy censorship and the compulsive need to to exposit onto the rubes. These students don't need to worry about narcs or rubes -- due to the joys of free socialist education, all are educated, and all hate the government. If they find some shrooms in the ancient pocket of the exhumed shaman, they're going to do them. And wait for the shaman in the dish to make the first move. And they're going to hide that they did them from even us, so you have to know what the signs are. And the signs are, apparently, indistinguishable from 'everyday' Warsaw life in the 1990s.

Dude, I've been on all sides of that equation, everyone except the mummified shaman. And that, according to my spirit guide, is what's waiting in fall 2015. Because let me tell you, without our space mushroom brothers as co-workers, we'll never get off this rock in any conveyance other than space ships. What's it gonna be, Hollywood? More big dollar-intensive conveyances just to wind up back with Jessica Chastain in the Pre-Raphaelite TREE OF LIFE shirt reflection, where we could have been all this time through some simple deep breathing meditation and/or a handful of nonlocal mushrooms?

these are Amanitas not psilocybe cubenses, but they're prettier

By the power of Terence McKenna, I hereby confirm that psychedelic mushrooms are standing by, ready to work hand-in-stamen with the next generation of psychonauts. The future's alien skies are limitless. Let the shrooms be your NASA and orbit is instantly transcended. Just first make it past the screaming terror breakwaters of your Scrooge tomb slab; breathe and pray your way past the hottie primitive from the Middle Ages eating your brain on drugs as it sizzles apart in the heated pan of pure consciousness; and the cancerous cops inside the marrow of your bones will melt away like dew in the desert.

On the other hand, maybe the dollar-intensive conveyances would be better, frozen forever 'til some far gone destination is arrived at, comfy in the couch-like peat bog of the 'old freezarino' in deep empty space, til the Boguslaw archeologist computer rifles our pockets and bids our mummy husks defrost. Alas, not even INTERSTELLAR sleep lasts forever. No matter how long they drag it out, the exhuming from the bog of cine-dream will inevitably occur, and one will wake up to house lights and the terror of an empty screen, once more reflecting like a DOS prompt on your empty helmet. Fucking flyboys...

NOTES.
1. Old Polish JokeS
2. The great Yum-Yum, House of Self Indulgence (5/30/13)
3. i.e. the Warsaw-set WW2 comedy thriller To Be or Not to Be

Claire Forlani drinks Dewars, Carrie Matheson, Andrzej Zulawski's SZAMANKA (1996) and Angela Chase

From left: Claire Forlani, Claire Danes, Tiff

I wanted to talk about so many things, Angus darlin': Seed of Chucky, angels, dolls in blood splattered that watched yesterday in MTV sanitized plasticine, shellacking my brew capped madness, Angus, darlin, and Jennifer Tilly's shrieking and and Redman's guts disinterred from his horny bucket and everything edited for MTV-ready close-ups of Glen or Glenda-gendered dolls and flashes of Nirvana's leader's shotgun smiles and long long screams that turn from crying into laughter and back again, then watching right after it Andrzej Zulawski's Szamanka (1996) which is not an easy thing to say with false teeth.

At least the words are not false, that from said teeth flow, from boxes heart-shaped in their shapelessness, bags tossed as rubbish into the Warsaw mud. Flown, Angus, darlin' -blown rather, a punk-en down Dalle Betty Blue-blackend bird spazzing through anthropology classes as her lover pilfers thousand year-old psilocybe and amanita muscaria mushrooms from a mummified shaman's pockets. Each wodka shot or peanut butter-covered stem tracking each punch and drunken stumble dream pie like meth and coveralls to grinding mechanical factory sex atop crumbling swamp corpse; grinding academics in their dancing and beer spill sip-n-slide; moving far away from the phony graphic-tinged needle tip distance twixt the ancient fungal shaman's last expression train down through more more the turn style jumped, coiffed, jumped back through and gay references hurtled like Jack Benny's Polish theater troupe bombed and built anew under which in the shelter Zulawski slept as a child.

With a little sex in it -- in this case too much 
gown
own, eru aasway to wit, ergo, in lieu
you outta brush up on your Greek, Janderson.

So get a Greek and brush up on him.

gloob gloob cheek cheek cheek remember that girl round the bend, up the creek to the unreal city, Warsaw, the sign, smashed by vandals who can't remember if they're pro-or-now-anti, what? War, of course, vulgar, the Molloch shell vents in its sewer steam a gentle cloud over the sleepy pylon circle round the sad scene of concrete-and-carcass carnage; gritty cop gloves waving laborers in tiny roadsters; a continuous surly blur; the sad clown whistle of electro-shock, aging right there in the chair with frozen lips like embryos in the freezers of rich Parisian ladies with no time for the future, just Emmys, three year sobriety chips, and of course, love.

 Go... now....
Homeland, Carrie, the river Catalano... and Tino, now visible, barely, up in the monitors. Frozen Embryos all thawed and playing for all ages so long as they're grown up past beanstalk heights. Carrie Matheson's madness retro-fitted to the micro movements of Saudi journalists, the seething hormonal guilt of traitors over tailors and Gettysburg's ghosts sluiced through the filters of  swimming pools heated from nearby crematoriums.



Claire Forlani may not be really Scottish but it's about time we had more 'Red Flag' style nutcase women ruling in booze-shill hell rather than these khaki-wearing 'regular guys' who will never leave the safety of their heaven-lite Budweiser perches or hit their kids or blow up their garages but instead watch Up all Night but never stay it, instead get lassoed into family dynamics and beige color schemes and dear I think you've had enough but they'll never actually have it.

I vote for the natural hell habitat of stumbler psycho hotties storming through 4:20 AM clubs, ranting about some guy you've never met (I'm not going to admit I don't know who Angus is, not if it keeps her pouring) but clearly she fucked the guy who owns the place at one point and now owns it or thinks she does and anyway she's pouring you enough post-last call slugs of near-top-shelf from behind the bar that her anger and narcissistic indignation is seductive like a slightly less cold freight train down an ice cold mountain you've been climbing 'til yr fingers frozen bloody be and then down down down deep deep down
down rather than listen one more minute to the still preachy echo of last call wives and
moms and bosses and sanity hand
rails and Up All Night marathon in progress still, attended now by mothers in laws, and the law itself, folded in the couch cracks like mold in their menopausal minds.

Instead, all of that is shuckered loose from and you grab the last falling skittering perfume and real fur coat (faint scent of kitty litter and bile amidst the Chanel) and marble ice covered in melanin-melting thinner in older age hand of Forlani's Lady Macbeth-ish mad Scot,
slipping from yours soon enough, aye Angus,
if skin were mottled fur,
out along the slimy ocean cobblestone streets,
into more and more warming drinks,
floating you home on blackened bruise cushions (for the nonce mere tingles),
a vague memory of a cab driver shouting but no sound in the oceanic roar of your ears,
handing a crumpled twenty (cuz she liked round figures), a flag of surrender from weak wavy fingers, no receipt, and no bags except the Dewars promo swag,
soft applause dampening yr fall
into the comfortable curbside trash pile pillows.
The gentle muddy on-all-fours crumble,
the keyhole of yr deadbolt, bruised by step stumbles but not bloody
thence to in the warming carpet
die and dive and wake, reborn, ashen of complexion,
and the sun's already set on the.... day? night? Or is it dusk? That's the devil of it, Nat.
I mean not the devil, but Claire... my madwoman of the tarot. 

She's gone and left only bruises and a hangover fit to darken half of Glasgow..

Claire Forlani, Mallrats (1996)

and Glasgow's already pretty dark, mate.
It's Sunday...already. Pink Edges along the skyline,
pink edges along the rooftops,
twice as sad either way, like eyeliner stains the streaky
soot of fingerprinted window glass,

adieu, she left her cell # on your dresser, your messages all texted threats and oaths,
each one expanding on the last since gone
unanswered.

Angela Chase

 But o she was a dark sexy hurricane of black velvety mink and broken necklace clasps. Death takes a holiday (excuse me, Joe Black), Mallrats...


and worse, Mystery Men, Magicians, and The Medallion
waking Tiffany (Jennifer Tilly) from her plastic frozen sleep.

a family dressed for church steps gingerly over you, and saving your last act of valor just for them, ye vomit near, but not right on, the dad's black polished shoes with a whale-like roar "All Hail to the Drinkin' Man! All Hail Macbeth! Thane of Cawdor! 

The Sorrows of Softcore are the Joys of Art: L'IMPORTANT C'EST D'AMIER (1975, Andrzej ZulawskI)

The French love their neuromantic triangles. What's up with that? Well, I dated a Swiss-French lady and I can tell you; they love what they call a cinq à sept (like Cleo, it means from 5-7): a pre-set tryst with one's lover on the way between work and home for dinner. Participating in this convenient and marvelous alternative to a conventional relationship can ruin you for all other kinds, specifically the "I can't understand why you don't like my friends" American variety. The 5-7 is very, very French and variations can be seen in everything from Jean Renoir's La regle du jeu (1939) to Le Mepris (1968) up through to Last Tango in Paris (1970). Andrzej Zulawksi's third feature, the 1975 romantic tragedy, L'important c'est d'aimer ("The Important thing is to Love")  carries this torch of Gallic perversity with knowing references to all three of those aforementioned films, right up to having Georges Delerue do a kind of sequel to his unforgettable orchestral Le Mepris score. That's to say nothing of the film's intertextually ill-fated production of Richard III that centers the action, and off-the-cuff references to Miriam Hopkins (see: 'la reine de Menage a Trois').

In a career-capping self-reflexive performance along the lines of Norma Desmond's in Sunset Boulevard (1950), or Sylvia Miles in Heat (1972), French actress Romy Schneider plays Nadine, a B-list French actress, hanging on by her nails in softcore (?) sex films. She can still look stunning in the right make-up and lighting, but Zulawski keeps her aging face ravaged by strange, pale, orange glows; we can see the lines of anguish in the corners of her eyes; gravity and the ravages of unfeeling exploitation film crews drag on her cheeks. Further, she's burdened by the knowledge that she'd still be neck-deep in a world of prostitution and smack addiction if not for the "Zorro-like" rescue of her otherwise ineffectual husband, Jacques, an autograph collecting cinephile played with intentionally irritating impishness-cum-starry-eyed self-loathing by sometimes-chanson singer Jacques Dutronc.

Joe Gillis en verso: Jacques rescued Nadine from the garage sale of aging female fallen idols, cleaned her up, and now stores her in amidst all his stacks of LPS, stills, and film books. The walls around his bright studio apartment are garish with Hollywood movie posters. It's the kind of pad that DVD collectors may recognize as approximate to their own, but in Zulawski's vision it carries a stale, empty, even claustrophobic ennui. It's the den of a consumer, not a creator. Reflected within the sad disconnect on Schneider's face and her husband's oblivious oppression, the posters become like prison walls; the gaze expanded into some approximate escapist aesthetic arrest is still male.

We see all this through the depth-focused eyes of handsome, ever-so-tortured photographer Servais (Fabio Testi), who falls for Nadine after he sneaks into her Eurosleaze film shoot on his way to shoot gay porn for his deceptively dapper smutmeister uncle, Mazelli (Claude Dauphin).

But Mazelli is the corrupt one, the purveyor, not the noble Servais, who's just paying off dad's gambling debts. Each a slave to desire on one side of the camera or the other, Servais and Nadine fall in love through the pain and emptiness they find in each others' eyes; they're bonded by their moral disgust and sense of self-degradation. They are two prudes inextricably immersed in the sleaze business, so they spend most of the film circling each other, bound by fidelity to their spouses -- a fidelity that is so un-French it needs special reasons to exist (Servias stole his current wife from another man who's since been drinking himself to death, etc.). Meanwhile Delerue throbs on the soundtrack like Contempt's kinkier younger brother, egging them on to the inevitable hook up.

Let us take a moment to remember that Paris (and Rome, as per The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone) has always been more cultured in the ways of non-marital, financially-rewarding love than America, and the figure of a houseboy/stud who depends on his looks and weak scruples for drug money needn't carry the same repellent currency it has in the States, where pretty rent boys are expected to suffer more operatically even than Liz Taylor in Butterfield 8. William Holden in Sunset Boulevard, Gene Kelly in An American in Paris, and George Peppard in Breakfast at Tiffany's, to name but three examples, all feel the need to censor their enjoyment of their special situation. They take the cash of their rich sponsors and no doubt provide certain services but the censors don't let us know what those services specifically are, and either way they aren't allowed to enjoy their positions and keep our sympathy. They have to squirm like every dollar hurts their pocket. Mon dieu! Les hypocrites!

Zulawski seems to be sending up this kind of self-loathing and torment with d'amier, albeit in a post-Sirkian way ala Almodovar or Fassbinder. There are also echoes of Midnight Cowboy's Joe Buck in Servais in that both are pretty, relatively unspoiled punks clinging to the delusion that they can call the shots without any cash to back said shots up. Adrift in a midnight world of sordid desire, in love with the sadness he catches in the newer porn performer's faces, Servais would like to forget that he borrowed big bucks from Mazelli to co-finance a a performance of Richard III just so that Nadine can play Lady Anne. Ever the noble, he insists the producers not let her know he put up the money. Yawn-ement! But luckily for us, that's where Klaus Kinski enters, and cuts through la merde del martyr like a knife through water.

As with the other Zulawski films that have recently appeared in beautiful editions from Mondo Vision, L'important c'est d'aimer's style is form-fitted to the subtexts: voyeurism, cinema, the insanity that true art both requires and instills, and the spiritual purity of over-acting to the point of surrealism. The camera moves in an around actors, leering over their shoulders like a pesky reporter. Often, the actors seem to be trying to get away from Zulawski's camera, just to breathe. They don't really acknowledge the camera directly, but they feel it watching, like a starlet on set might ignore a leering gaffer. Who knows if this is what's happening? Is Zulawski deliberately annoying his actors to the point they're always about to storm out of the room? He'd still chase them.

Escape is futile.

In Zulawski-ville you can have you cake, eat it too, store it in the fridge, throw it away in a fit of pride and self-will, fish it out later and freeze it for future generations, all at once, but it's still not going to satisfy your cake craving. Rabid foaming mouth hungry ghost insanity is yours no matter how much you eat. And that is why, for Zulawski, the image is always stronger than the reality it services, like neo-realism reversed, and reversed back and forth atop, until it becomes raw blood, guts and modernism. As consumers of these images, we're forced to reckon with the inescapable idea that baser arts such as smut make the higher arts possible and even 'high' by definition. Was not even Shakespeare once considered a 'low' art? It's only the dumbing down of already dumbed-down dumbness and the changes in linguistic structure that has made Shakespeare a "higher" art, just as flowers can't blossom without the gritty, ugly, muddy soil and the leering gaffers who pat it down. It is what it is because of what it isn't (on this rocklessness, structuralism doth build its church). Thus artists are always courting the bourgeoisie for grants in order to make art that criticizes artists for taking grants from the bourgeoisie. No wonder Kinski has to kick so much ass just to get an orgy going!

The importance of Kinski has still yet to be fully gauged, there is yet no meter with which to measure it. So when he hears that the RICHARD III will get the last part of the funding if they cast Nadine as Lady Anne, he suddenly remembers her from her last film, Nymphocula! (a Jess Franco film title if ever there was one!) which he remembers as "the one with two dykes in a castle with a dwarf. "She was fantastic," he cries, "amazing!" That sounds like Franco, all right. Kinski's own appearances in Eurosleaze titles are not only too numerous to measure (he was in Nymphocula too, whether it exists or not) but intrinsic to the genre. He's the crucified, screaming scarecrow at the crossroads between genius and insanity, art and exploitation, raving anger, and complete detachment. Both creepy and sexy, he's never a full hero or villain: half debonair intellectual aesthete, half wild orangutan, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde swirled together like soft serve. Somehow, when he does these low-rent high art 'man on a wire' flicks, his insanity keeps him grounded and he emerges unscathed from the carnage.

The sane, however, to judge by Zulawski's moping protagonists at any rate, remain permanently traumatized. They wanted to do Shakespeare and wound up in Eurosleaze; they're despondent about their failure but Kinski knows better: he brings the Shakespeare to the porn and the porn to the Shakespeare.

The key Richard III meta-scene is in act 1, scene 2, wherein Richard woos Lady Anne as she mourns by Edward's coffin. Romy's not putting it over too well, so the director asks her husband (Dutronc) to lie in the coffin, hoping Nadine will perhaps get some extra emotional punch from seeing him in there. Tellingly, Jacques comments during the five-minute break: "I thought I did pretty well, no?" And of course, he will do even better--and help Nadine even more--very soon, for real this time, as his cheerful disregard for the druggy emotional nakedness of real theater heralds his own 'real' death. His flippancy here is a punch-in-the-gut reminder to us viewers that we are standing on the sideline, watching other people act or sing and quietly judging them. We like to think we're secret kings who could do this all super well if we bothered to try. We hate to be reminded that we're just watchers in this world, already dead, looking up from our coffins at the faces weeping down on us. Cue Delerue!

It's that sense of sacrifice and death that makes up a woman's picture in the classic pre-code Hollywood version of the term: fantasias of women running up and down the pole of financial success via a series of men they've manipulated and ruined. Or they slavishly throw it all away on some handsome bounder with no bread. Or they fall from grace and sleep with everyone in sight, except the man they truly love -- he, this one man, alone, must stay a perfect memory, untouched by her corrosive caresses. On his side, however, that's crap. Why should he stay a virgin because she hates herself?

Thus, the ideal lover for such a weepy self-righteous martyr is dead and so can't cheat or steal or grow tired of said martyr's incessant sobbing. The dead lover is a lover whom no amount of licentious rubbing can denature. You can pine for him and think he was "the one" and hopefully, for your sake, he's not going to come groveling back from Hollywood in two years with gray hairs and gambling debts, wanting a "mommy" to make it right. And you, dolefully glancing at your one true love in the shadows, would probably take him back, because of your wedding vow.

Any less than three people in a marriage is a mockery of the Trinity.

Where Zulawski takes a self-reflexive step back from all this is with Jacques' possessive insecurity taking on a horrifically babyish form: he's being forced to admit he never learned to fight back or to "care" enough about the living, the people he knows (photos and film memorabilia are a different story). Take it from me, it's very difficult to know what to do, how to be graceful, when one is being cuckolded, or cuckolding, or breaking up a home. I've played all the parts once or twice over my romantic lifetime, and that's what Jacques doesn't quite realize --it's an act. I played the parts - the jealous old lover, the tactful new one, and the two-timer trying to oil the hinge between them - but they are interchangeable in the end. Nothing is real. Resorting to violence is pointless for any sensible or educated man, no matter how badly cuckolded, so all he can do is make snarky comments, bitter veiled threats, and--as I used to do -- spill wine on the other guy's stupid hippie sandals "accidentally."

Another thing you can do is just dig that it's about post-modern Baudrillard simulacrum deconstruction -- i.e. romance inside a mirror --but that doesn't make it any less painful.

In the end, Jacques offers a quietly unflattering portrait of a fan who hides behind images and record albums as if a mother's skirt, afraid to look life in the eye. Servais, on the other hand, is a photographer and Nadine a model; they actually create the images that Jacques worships. They feel validated by the act of leaving their mark for better or worse on eternity, superior to the consumers of the images they make, even if their destiny hangs by such abstract threads as an early morning edition theater review in the local paper. The critics! baisez tous les critiques stupides!

Meta-riches are to be found in this film's DVD packaging, which invites you to luxuriate in fine design and cultivate your inner collecteur as you watch a film that savages the collecteur instinct. Consider the image above, wherein Jacques waxes ecstatic over an old glossy of Miriam Hopkins while his ex-movie star wife languishes stoically next to him, leaving her left flank exposed to the sympathetic gaze of Servais on the right. Her hair pulled back to resemble Hopkins' in the photo, Nadine is radiating a docile calm which Jacques entirely misses, instead talking aloud as if to a rapt audience, announcing of the photo: "This one is going in the safe," indicating his preferred treatment (isolation) for all his pretty prizes. Poor Jacques!

But not poor Erich! I still have my memories and now, thanks to Mondo, a very cool DVD for the top row of my bookshelf--right next to Godard, Antonioni, Bertolucci, Romero, Argento y Fulci? N'cest pas? Do you feel my self-loathing? Ach, wohin ist Klaus Kinski!!! Klaus, kommen Sie hier, bitte! Wir verrotten in der Hölle ohne Ihre Verrücktheit!  

PS. 3/13/16-- Romy's name just turned up in a WWII documentary I was watching. As a kid she played with the high ranking Nazi's children as her mother was a big German star under the Goebbels-managed German cinema! I went back over this to figure out how to slide that bit in like I knew it all the time, but non. It's too perfect as is... though knowing this makes her defeated calm extra resonant 

The Luxury of Desperate Gamblers: Andrzej Zulawski's "L'Amour Braque" (1985)

Niche film fans of all nations and genres can rejoice with the release of three borderline hysterical (in all senses of the word) Andrzej Zulawksi films onto DVD, via the amazing Mondo Vision. The first of them I've seen is 1985's L'AMOUR BRAQUE, an insane, coked-up little miracle which prefigures the anarchic Joker scenes in LE CHEVALIER NOIR (below), including the maniacal burning of mass amounts of money and gleefully lysergic/anarchic assaults on the conventions of the bourgeoisie and capitalism! Did Chris Nolan and Heath Ledger see this movie? Or are they and Braque's director Andrzej Zulawski birds of a feather? Or is Zulawski way beyond even BATMAN? I'd normally never mention Batman and Zulawski in the same sentence, but times have changes. Post-modernism has erase the borders of high and low, regardless of what the petit-bourgeois may think. Also, the Ledger Joker is, like Hannibal Lecter before him, something new -- almost legitimately dangerous, threatening to grab us and pull us into the screen at any moment. Being European, an ex-pat Parisian out of Poland (?), Zulawski seems a slavering psychedelic/crystal meth poet, known for either hypnotizing (or maybe drugging?) his actors and driving them to and beyond the brink of madness for their performances. L'AMOR BRAQUE is kind of an 'if an ensemble of meth-addled actors from Antonin Artaud's Theater of Cruelty crashed into a Luc Besson French crime film, thinking they were still doing Artaud's adaptation of Dostoevsky's THE IDIOT and that the crime film mise-en-scene around them must be 'the drugs talking'. 

Or  to put it another way, is Zulawski's yen for heedless kineticism, surfeit de style and spastic physicality rooted in something, or did someone just dump LSD into the Parisian water supply?

Any way you slice him, what a real treat to find such a worthy yet under-explored canon, all presented so lushly we can go excavating in air conditioned style. A whole catalog of Zulawski's awesome films-- few of which (other than POSSESSION) have been seen at all here in the US-- are coming our way on beautiful DVDs. MondoVision plans on releasing nine in all! Jokers, start your burning!

Though L'AMOUR BRAQUE carries a 1985 French action movie glossy punk style (ala the violent late-80s/early-90s nocturnal neon decor of films you might know like SUBWAY or LA FEMME NIKITA) it's actually an art film, or a drug film, Brechtian... of course, with great gobs of classical Russian literature references that, I don't mind saying, were partially over my head. Tcheky Karyo stars, or co-stars! SUBWAY! It may look on the surface enough like a normal 80s French action movie movie, but it would probably weird out a whole room of relatively un-intoxicated bros if they were expecting Luc Besson-ish linearity in addition to the Luc Besson-ish glamor, especially with the subtitles off. And action fans who wondered--as I did--if Karyo was just a dud actor with his stone-faced performance in NIKITA can now know for sure, as his character in BRAQUE is wayyy out there. Not even the same guy, if I can paraphrase William Demarest in THE LADY EVE. 

I glean what I can get, and figure I'll finish the Karamazovs when I can. Until then, those cheesy 80s synth stabs and and Mondo Vision's lovely transfer and well-written subtitles all fuel the rush of Zulawski's poetic post-structuralist approach in a way that echoes the accidental poetry of old HK movies, the old kind of fractured English subtitles and plots so rapid and crazy that to even think about what's going on for a half a second means to be lost for the next two minutes, but if trust your instincts, stop reading the subtitles and 'hear' the dialogue (using the subtitles in tandem with the language) and let go of the rails, you just may experience a giddy and unique cine-high. See, Zulawski has a weird way of feeding you his movie plots subliminally. Somehow or other, you're pulled along by the scruff of your neck. With no time to get your bearings, you realize that, if you don't think about it too much (as with the aforementioned HK films), you know what's happening on an unconscious level if not a conscious one. This is especially true if you had to read Dostoevsky's The Idiot once. Or even did intentionally. 

Francis Huster is the hero, a down-for-whatever Czech refugee named Leon, who finds himself spontaneously adopted by the drunken (coked up?) Mickey (Karyo) and his gang of laughing, joking, Nietzsche-quoting Arab terrorists on the run after robbing a bank dressed in Disney masks. Huster and Karyo bond on the train, but then beautiful Sophie Marceau shows up as Mickey's--and soon Leon's--obsession, ensuring neither man can ever leave the other alone for a minute for the rest of the film, lest he gain ground in the race to her bed. 

A perennial 'lost soul" rich girl using Micky and his terrorist friends as dupes; acting coy and lost and doomed so they practically kill each other jostling to be the one to wipe out her enemies; cockblocking and seducing right and left; the two men chase, and are chased by, and adore each other as Marceau proves more and more sociopathic and manipulative. 

And then there's Leon's only slightly-less-hot-than-Marceau (who isn't) cousin Aglae (Christiane Jean, below) who competes for Leon's attention while performing in a version of Chekhov's "The Seagull".

Zulawski loves the Russians, even if they indirectly ruined two years of work on his would-a-been masterpiece On the Silver Globe. 

Meanwhile, a strange cop follows the gang around, and in one sun-dappled grilling scene, notes that Mickey and company carry on with the "luxury of desperate gamblers", a telling phrase I bothered to write down and thought a most clever title, because it describes most of the film--indeed most of Zulawski's blade-running / hot tin roof-dancing output. There's very little stopping to regroup or fortify positions here. If you've ever been on a manic high for any length of time--basking in a spiritual awakening, blessed with an almost supernatural level of good fortune--you know implicitly that if you to go to sleep or nurture negative thinking, your luck will change; your whole holy mindset will crash into nothingness and despair (and hangover). So you drinking, gambling and laughing like a maniac, desperate to keep the the wave alive enough to surf upon, even after it breaks and recedes along the shore. Until there you are, standing on your surfboard on the beach while kids make sandcastles around you and the tide goes out. Finally you've no choice but to pay the kids to dig you a hole, then crawl inside and sleep the rest of the day, until the evening tide comes in and mercifully drowns you.

If things get rough with this film, may I suggest good way to get through the weirdness of the onscreen action (if you're not going to 'roll' along on the last of your Pervatin stash) is to ground it in other movies you may be more familiar with, like bizarro world remakes in a vein of post-modern ultra-violent satire we Americans have hardly seen except for Kathryn Bigelow.  When you see the robbers in their Disney masks knocking off a bank in the opening sequence you might think of POINT BREAK, but when you see them horsing through an impromptu number on their getaway route, they're like a dozen Harpo Marxes on a blood bender or the Groucho-guerrillas in the films of Emir Kusturica. But these names just locate the onscreen insanity in some kind of loose contextual framework, because otherwise, goddamn it, this stuff is so fucked-up in its deconstructed avant garde madness, so far ahead of the Luc Besson curve, even your bourgeois art film expectation of a night of modernist subversion may be frustrated. Just where do you situate Zulawski and his panic-attack-meets-ecstasy-overdose clenched jaw freak-out in the canon of 80s filmmaking?

Also, it's very long: two hours of nearly nonstop shouting, kicking over vases, affronting the mores of capitalism and frothing at the succulently lipsticked mouth. You'd think it would grate on one's nerves, but Zulawski is such a master of pace and rhythm that he never gets you too worn out or cranky. And what works too is that, though these guys are all insane--and maybe this is just the French way--all the passers-by and authority figures go along with their gags, like it would be rude not to, the way the bourgeoisie in Bunuel movies look upon their children's destructive savagery with bemused tolerance. Etiquette dictates that when a crazy Marxist sticks a gun to your temple after crashing your dinner party, it's considered declasse' to panic or plead. One must do the right thing and smile and pat the man's hand in encouragement and calmly ask if he would like some wine. When sudden gunfights erupt, cars get smashed and people run around throwing smoke bombs and breaking windows, all it gets from the gendarmes is that famous Parisian shrug. They crowd surf into total candy-coated confusion; they roll around on tables laden with food and the waiters don't bat an eyelash; they spazz out and sing at the top of their lungs while being chased by cops in riot gear; and it would all just be posturing if Zulawski didn't capture a realistic sense of Parisian hustle and bustle like he's a freakin' Oscar-hungry auteur riche. When you're wading deep into a well-crafted, lit, Parisian street corner, man, you're into some fucked up architecture. If you're seeing it on a good HD screen, you can see right up into the cobwebbed corners between the gargoyles. 

One of my biggest regrets as an actor/filmmaker was in QUEEN OF DISKS (2007), when a Clare Horgan as the Queen of Disks stuck a knife to my throat as I was drinking coffee I missed a chance to do a spit take! My innate decency and worry about spilling coffee on my ratty jeans stopped me from doing one and/or dropping the coffee cup, just letting it spill all over me and crash to the floor and break. You know how impossible those things can be to do intentionally? Like when someone pays you to pee in your pants, and you just can't do it, no matter how hard you try?

These guys in this film? They don't have that problem.

It all makes you realize that while someone like Godard's a great one for deconstructing genre, he's a bad one at capturing the momentum of genre itself-- poor Jean Pierre Leaud or Belmondo, for example, always seemed to carry an inherent decency that stops them from peeing on people's trousers or throwing grenades into dining rooms or dropping coffee cups full of coffee on themselves and letting the cup shatter on the linoleum floor. If they did, it was often just to a picture of a comic book "Bang!" or riot footage that exploded. Not in this film, baby. That's action like Van Damme! Zoot alors!  A+

Surf the Maelstrom: POSSESSION

One of the cool things about Europe (and Buenos Aires) as opposed to the US is that trends seem to come and go more slowly, with an innate, even mature, ability to stay cool that shows up the reactionary youth market-kowtowing of America for the panicky insecurity it is. After the US had foregone 70s mature horror ala Let's Scare Jessica to Death, The Exorcist and Alien in favor of teen-sucking 80s slashers, there were still sexy, druggy, fucked-up adult horror movies coming out of France, Poland, and Germany. If they came to our shores, such as happened with the truly disturbing genuinely adult Andrzej Zulawski film, POSSESSION (1981), it was only released here, apparently, in a severely truncated, nearly incomprehensible edit aimed at VHS shelves and back ends of drive-in double bills. While America was cowering at home in their stone-washed denims, Europeans--who had way had more legit reasons to hide at home and be freaked out than we ever did--were still dropping acid and going to the art house cinema..

Europe had been through the war right in their own backyard; the dividing between sunny tranquil capitalist west and dour, psychotic grey unrestored east ran right across their Berlin lawns.. Aside from Pearl Harbor and 9/11, Americans still haven't had a lot of shit get blown up in their faces while they tried to read the paper. Considering the trauma endured just from those two single day events, can you imagine watching your whole country more or less go through a giant Nazi thresher machine, for the first five years of your life?

It might make you a little twisted.

Polish director Andrzej Zulawski was born during just such a time and place: nightly bombing raids became like a lullaby for him (he says); part of the comforts of childhood, like a night-light or teddy bear. This weird amniotic death hybrid explains much of POSSESSION's full-spectrum insanity. If you've wondered what it's like to be high on acid while having a miscarriage alone in a Paris Metro station after having to leave a European history lecture because you started frothing at the mouth, this is your movie.

Zulawski get it: when you're gone on strong drugs, baby, none of the old signifier chains apply -that's also art, the Antonioni signifier melt-down. With a head full of mescaline you are just like a child, new to the world, free from labeling and judging your sensory impressions, things are neither this or that, good or bad, they are all just new and 'weird.' Without judgment, it's all good, until you gradually realize it's all bad, because it's gnawing on your leg... and working its way up to your crotch. Whatever it is, better kill it quick, and eat it for its placenta nutrients. Second chakra sacral wheels alight in twisted backfiring surges of desire and loathing, rust and dried blood flaking off the re-ground gears. Eat or be eaten, and don't hesitate. If the cops come in and see you've been eating a helpless old neighbor who came to the door to borrow some flour, well, eat them too. You're on a roll - and you taste great. Or at least it tastes intense.

If you never experienced all that, man, you might not dig all of POSSESSION. But for some of us, those who can still hear colors and see sounds, the ancient, semi-ancient, and recent history of the human race is always clattering on the kitchen floor of our collective mind like a dropped casserole dish that grows Rob Bottin spider legs on contact with linoleum. European border tensions live in our sacral chakras, interlocking serpentine tentacles connect every groin, mouth, and fingertip in the whole of existence, to the tip of our extremities, which is not more infinite than a tomb, and our breathing. The flushing of the toilet sounds like the diving of Stuka followed by VE day revels as the tank refills. But is that American jubilation in the west VE or the screams of East Berlin women being mauled by drunken Russian soldiers? Don't judge, man - you were doing so well. Here, do this shot.

Even if your knowledge of post-war European social psychology and bad trip acid horror iconography is incomplete well, there's bound to be something in POSSESSION still able to suck you down with the cigarette butts into the tangy blood-flavored mud of 70s Euro-horror, which is the same really as just shrugging your shoulders and sashaying toward the exit while the huns are distracted.

POSSESION is set in West Berlin, in an apartment with windows that look out over towards the Wall (so you can see East German guards smoking and looking at you in the distance, feigning neighborly disinterest) But meanwhile everyone speaks English all the time, except when Adjani speaks French while torturing a girl in her ballet class in a super 8mm movie that Neill's fellow cuckold, a sexually fluid and tantric fellow named Heinrich (from the East side), sends over. My point? Less.

And when Adjani moans up at the cross in a church, unleashing a prolonged, piteous whine, one senses Harvey Keitel stirring from his noon feeding, and making a mental note that would lay buried for 10 years until BAD LIEUTENANT.

Still, even if you're type of crazy psychedelic surfer who used to watch the R. Bud Dwyer suicide tape over and over on acid, fascinated by the suddenness of it (one split second Dwyer's in the room, and then BAM - he is completely gone - where'd he go?) even then, that hardcore as you are, Adjani's prolonged miscarriage in the tunnel scene might be too much.  Her convulsive jerkiness might be read as an interpretive dance, encompassing the history of mental illness--from electroshock to the miracle of Clozapine--it's mind-bogglingly fearless and fully committed in ways I just don't think it's possible for American actresses to ever be, nor would they want to, for certainly it won't win them an Oscar. Adjani could give a shit about your Oscars; she just goes for it with more gusto than most American actresses ever dare muster without an A for 'Art' burnished on their chest, not this isn't artsy. Has America ever had any women either this beautiful or this crazy? Nein. The English have maniacs like Kate Winslet, Australia has Judy Davis, who was originally attached to POSSESSION since Zulawski and his casting director loved MY BRILLIANT CAREER (which was why they cast Sam Neill) and maybe her wanting to do it is why she gamely wound up in a similar legless monster sex scene in NAKED LUNCH ten years later.  (it all fits, doctor, since the whole creature / pregnancy angle--a kind of symbol-made-flesh ala 'psychoplasmics' in THE BROOD--was done by Cronenberg two years earlier, with super crazy (Brit) Samantha Eggers). But whom do we have? No one --our actresses can afford good SSRI meds and the best clinical care Beverly Hills ha$ to offer. Their health is Hollywood's loss.

Perhaps it's because the terrifying freedom of flying fast and loose atop the ever-inward spiral of the maelstrom is just not an American thing anymore. It used to be. We had Poe and we had Melville. In the former's "A Descent into the Maelstrom," for example, a sailor finds himself on a damned ghostly boat hovering ever on the edge of a vast never-ending whirlpool wave, trapped in a time loop. Our hero eventually escapes and is rescued only to find his ship mates no longer recognize him: "My hair, which had been raven-black the day before, was as white as you see it now."

Sometimes that change of countenance has to happen: you've seen too much; you've peered beyond the veil and the veil has left its gnarly mark. Or you've aged 100 years in a goddamn 13-day bender. Or just got old, suddenly, as it always is when you dare to take the voyage into the maelstrom or walk that yellow "brick" road. Some of us are called to the curtain and bid look beyond, and some do, and they get white hair, if not a diploma. I've never seen a film before or since that made the color white such a violently post-modern wrenching force (not even in Kieślowski's WHITE or Argento's TENEBRE) except maybe--in a humorous and romantic way--ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND, wherein white swallows up whole bookstores and kitchens of Jim Carey's memory of Kate Winslet.



In fact, the hair and split subject aspects of POSSESSION are there in SUNSHINE's mind washing machine, with Sam Neill trapped in inescapable loops with the same woman in different forms, with Winslet's hair changes and bi-polar mood swings reflected in Adjani's careening back and forth between the sterile apartment she shares with Neill and their son, Bob, and this decayed East Berlin apartment building with its goop-covered floor and writhing tentacled lover, looking like a decayed animal carcass swathed in glistening rainbow brown blood / oil paint palette runoff and being devoured by long large white worms. "He's very tired, he's been making love to me all night," Adjani says before bashing a cop's brains in with a paint can.

At such times as these, Adjani makes Klaus Kinski seem dull as Walter Pidgeon.

By this point in the film, Neill has more or less detoxed and is playing the clean-cut parent, subject to fits only when Adjani comes careening back to put laundry away (in the fridge) and throw some cold cuts from the pantry into her suitcase and carve herself up with an electric knife while shouting and convulsing like she's not in their kitchen at all but receiving electro-shock therapy in a mental hospital while performing a MACBETH monologue. Now split between two opposite roles (either two characters or a fragmented persona), one is a nurturing elementary school teacher / potential love interest  (ala Susan Hogan and Egger and in THE BROOD) the other is the homicidal birther/fucker/self-mutilating/cop-killing painter of her own monster, a blazing insane nightmare woman, shrieking and miscarrying an array of colors all over the Metro, as if dissolving a painting in her womb and reproducing it as performance art. (there's a kind of mention that she brought the ejected fetus whatever-thing over to that apartment and its been her sickly lover ever since).

Is this monster a metaphor for her art, the way a true artist is in a state of exalted frenzied madness when working on their project, giving themselves over completely, maybe never to return, except in the form of that immortal art? A squid. Three Olives. A feather. A dead bike messenger. bombs.

Oh yeah, SAM... whom I never liked much in films like DEAD CALM or THE PIANO (or worst of all, IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS). He's just somehow dislikable, though that's inevitably why he's often cast, there's just something about him that if you're a dog you'd want to bark at him. Often his characters need to be cock-blocked by some younger, looser man, i.e. Harvey Keitel, Billy Zane, even Jeff Goldblum, in order for his wormy smug petulance to have context. But when delivered from being just a weird side platter of Pierce Brosnan /Anthony Perkins surf-and-turf, when given a part that calls for truly insane and giddy grace, and looking young and actually handsome, he's suddenly big as all the ocean. He makes you want to keep an eye on him so he doesn't suddenly appear behind you, or show you his new razor from your insides out. What makes him such a good secret agent (his last mission was something across the Wall where he'd been sizing up some scientist defector in pink socks) lies in his ability to ride this tide of lunacy with confidence and eye-for-eye madness glint. Wherever Adjani's crazy boat's going, he's going to be on it, bob for bob. Sometimes going under, sometimes rising above, absorbing everything and everyone he sees. From his son's crashing toy airplanes to his rival's 'love of everything,' he's always reacting and seeing deep, surfing the crest of that Poesy maelstrom.

Whoa, bro, now that I do the math I realize Neill hadn't even yet tried to compete with Zane or Keitel when this film was made. 1981: the same year he rocketed to the bottom as the adult Damien in OMEN III: THE FINAL CONFLICT -- in which he was cast at the request of co-star James Mason who loved him in MY BRILLIANT CAREER! Now we realize the inevitable truth, it's all James Mason's fault and it makes sense, since-- in acting style--Neill could be like Mason's psychotic younger brother. His accent here and the way he can start refined, and wind his way down slow spiral staircase into jealous madness by the end of the scene, is reminiscent in many ways of Mason--especially in LOLITA, such as in the scene where he must be restrained by hospital orderlies after Lo flees, for example, which finds a methamphetamine mirror in Neill's being piled on by the entire staff of 'Cafe Einstein' after chasing Isabelle Adjani out the door in a whirl of empty wooden chairs. His nose and face strangely cleft, teeth crooked, Neill's still got a bit of Timothy Spall floating around his features, as if the mirror halves of his face didn't quite line up, like it's ready to split down the center, to open like an egg hatching some newfound man. But he knows how to fucking act. During his big initial meltdown, for example, he seems to be suffering from serious withdrawal of either heroin or alcohol --the latter I've experienced, and I handled it very similar to how he does, shaking and twitching, barely able to talk, trapped in isolation. Good times.

And like Neill, Mason is a guy who you can never quite trust no matter how refined and loquacious his character is onscreen. Well, maybe you do trust him for a few reels, but then he takes that cortisone again and he's at you with a knife.

So there's your moral: sometimes you can't get at the audience with a razor, so you have to use the only thing you can find that's even sharper, and sometimes that thing is named Sam Neill. POSSESSION stabs us with him until even the screaming sound of Stukas dive bombing his neighborhood to hell is like a soothing nursery school lullaby and the scorching beauty of Adjani is like a freezing of the blood in the veins and on the floor. Lick it up, like a good dog.. (tape cuts off)