You Can't be Coughing on a Moving Train: CONTAGION and the Soderbergh/Assayas Post-Post Post

If you can't wait and must see Steven Soderbergh's disaster movie CONTAGION (2011) in a theater, be sure to sit next to a guy who won't stop coughing  --it's what this movie needs to really 'hit you' with that William Castle 'Percepto' aural 3-D meta feeling, and Steven Soderbergh must have known a coughing person in every showing was all but assured based on its early autumn release --in 2011 of all years, right before the 'man comes around'  in 2012.

As a product of one of indie-dom's few prolific auteurs, CONTAGION makes me worry Soderbergh's bottomed out in the post-affect school of eternal jet lag, i.e. he's become a permanent tourist, enamored to the point of idiocy by the brooding post-modern thrill of hustling from airport to airport, convinced setting humans in rapid motion through public places-- timed to a cool ambient techno track; editing taking advantage of every corner; every reflective surface singing with Antonioni alienation--will bring meaning to the vaguest and most anemic of shaggy plague dog tales.

But Soderbergh forgot that some of us don't just automatically root for the cardboard humanity on display, especially if we're population control advocates. In the end, the only characters we end up feeling bad for are the animals --frightened pigs and traumatized monkeys are tortured and slaughtered in the name of science, all so a few million more people don't die, like we really need them not to; it's like jettisoning all the oxygen tanks in an airless spaceship to make room for a dozen more shallow breathers. Not that I'd prefer to get to know each and everyone of them - their families, hopes and --oh brother---dreams for the 'cough' future. OK OK Sorry I said anything!

And as far as that prized post-affect 'moving sidewalk to the next gate' jet lag genre goes, Soderbergh's just tagging along in the brisk footsteps of French filmmaker Olivier Assayas, the genius behind the influential post-affect films BOARDING GATE (2007, above) and DEMONLOVER (2002). As long as Soderbergh is focusing on the progression of the disease--making the virus itself the star--a hand smear on a door, or the fingerprint smudge on a subway pole, bus strap, door to a store, hand-rail down the subway stairs, apron to shaking hands to panhandles--it's fine: the virus is like Jason Bourne or Will Smith in ENEMY OF THE STATE (1998), tracked by satellites and security cams patched into the nexuszzz. But there's always dumb human--dare I say Spielbergian?--moments that seem far more contemptible than the riots and looting, like the Matt Damon righteous father making a big beeyootiful prom space for his isolated daughter and then crying in the closet looking at his wife's pictures from Hong Kong, which he should have turned in to the feds for ID-ing and sterilizing and so forth, but then we wouldn't have all this 'perfect' meta Baudrillardian closure. 

Soderbergh himself has become so post-post that these scenes scan trite as one of those irritatingly homespun Peter Coyote ipad2 commercial voiceovers. Forget it Peter! No folksy drawl is going to bring back the open plains and prairie flowers. Over in France, Olivier Assayas is too smart for such sentimental rot: he finds humanity in the running from it. The secret to the post-post cinematic time-image affect lies in its total transparency. Soderbergh can't show the virus coming home from work after a hard day of dodging the men in the white hazmat suits, so he does the next worse thing. Won't somebody please think of the janitor!? Look at this picture of his small boy! Tell him about the violin lessons for a-his dead-a mama to be a-so proud of a-him.

Moving out to a metatextual wide shot: CONTAGION will not promote international tourism (you will not want to visit Hong Kong after this film); it also doesn't encourage cinema-going in a city like New York, especially if you took the subway to the theater and forgot your hand sanitizer. One moron in our row at the BAM coughed more or less nonstop until his date made him go outside and get a drink of water. At first he just joked and pretended to be super sick like he thought she was kidding. Three minutes after his brief sojurn he was back again, coughing away, oblivious.

I'm sure I wasn't alone in wanting to kill him, with plastic gloves on.

He confirmed my worst suspicions about humanity's decline into the abyss, and Soderbergh's suspicions seem confirmed as well, for what we see in CONTAGION is not the truth, not even a fantasy, but a problem that is the result of our overpopulated, horrifically over-linked social order --the end game 'nonfiction/fiction' collapse of interpersonal borders. With Soderbergh's smug liberalism in play, even our fictional minor characters are too important to let die, so everyone lives to endanger humanity as a whole, swamping the lifeboat. The meltdown 'melting pot' of genres and styles as well as communities ensures that no one can escape the thresher with a golden ticket--no women and children first, boys, with sailors brave enough to threaten to shoot Molly Brown if she tries to row into  the drowning panicked Titanic melee. The sorrows of the individual are the ambivalent solution of the many and so seldom vice versa, thanks to Spielberg and Ford, rather than Hawks and Assayas. Mere life takes effect and no one is allowed a vegan or special dietary restriction option on their in-flight meal.There are lives at stake and you blather about leg room?  Not a chance.

But I betcha Soderbergh never flies coach --otherwise he might feel different.

Not to be a devil's advocate, BUT... If contagious diseases can spread this fast because we're so super-connected, wouldn't it help to be less connected? To lose sixty percent off our world population total and revert to an agrarian hunter-gatherer post-apocalyptic paradise? A couple billion people could die on this planet and--if you didn't know them--would you miss them? Would you weep with frustration at the big statistics in the paper or would you breathe a sigh of relief that real estate prices are finally going down? We could lose half the current population and still only be back to where we were in the 1970s --when we were allowed to worry about these things without being branded as anti-human. And what about the pigs, chickens, goats, cows, and fish who die by the billions daily to feed our combined appetite? Won't someone think of the innocent turkeys and pigs that might have more on the ball than the slack-jawed cradle-to-graver who assumes his red meat just comes magically from the back of the supermarket and gets indignant when an activist shows him photos of an abattoir? If any and all humans weren't 'entitled' by the meat welfare system to a lifetime of free meals they are way too stupid to ever catch for themselves, natural selection might have a fighting chance. To use the TEXAS CHAINSAW analogy, we're a nation of comatose grandpas, too weak to even lift the hammer but still guaranteed a piece of Marilyn Burns, and thus the Burns's are chopped up by the thousands at the Leatherface brand Marilyn packing center. But if a single grandpa dies, oh the humanity!

CONTAGION brings these feeling up by ignoring them, never realizing the animals seen in the film are the only humans worth rooting for, and their welfare is in the hands of sadistic liberals who would kill an entire population of chimps if it might save temporarily extend the life of a single elderly pedophile.

12 Monkeys

If I was king I would free these monkeys, move them to an animal sanctuary and use convicted felons and pedophiles and stoner volunteers for lab rats instead: one monkey freed for every criminal convicted --making a reverse monkey jail!  Reverse Monkey Jail monkeys: you shall be free...

In a way I'm secretly proud of my fellow humans that so many of them seem genuinely concerned for the welfare of those people in places like Indonesia or Rwanda, places they only read about on the news but still feel, by 'virtue' of having read the stories--connected, outraged, and personally responsible. They don't need even to see the faces of the suffering; the statistics alone awaken compassion. Maybe, though, it's all  just a pose they've been taught at their bourgeois private schools and somehow Soderbergh's seems enamored of the pose rather than the solution that would make compassion unneccesary.

I personally think that genuine compassion must engage the issues of overpopulation, cruelty to animals and depletion of resources. If you only have food to feed three people, why struggle to keep 30,000 more mouths alive, knowing that in a few years that number will swell to 60,000 because America's fundamentalist Christian bloc won't let you give them condoms? And they'll still be right where we left them, yelling "pan pan pan!" and mimicking eating motions like the beach kids in SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER.

And it's that stony, long range humanism that marks a great genius like Assayas, the abandoning of the publicity-garnering, short-sighted moral high ground in favor of a prismatic retreat that the not-one-domino liberal quagmirism of CONTAGION fails to encompass, and thus the whole film falls flat unless you, here and now, turn vegan!

Compare for example Assayas' CARLOS (2010) with Soderbergh's CHE (2008): they're both multi-part biopics about globe-traveling revolutionary terrorists, both are set in the 1960s-70s, both have one word name titles that start with 'C', but the lines dividing them are so basic, so elementary, they go back to the basic dividing line of all pop culture - the Stones/Beatles dichotomy: Assayas and Carlos the Jackal are the Stones to Soderbergh's Che Beatles. Like the Beatles, Soderbergh seems to believe in humanity as it currently defines itself, never losing faith in 'Us' - believing that love is all there is and the love you take is equal to the love you make and still confident in the possibility of utopia, an inclusive exclusivity underneath the waves.  Like the Stones, by contrast, Assayas knows you can't always get what you want, but if you keep moving forward, keep lunging through the crack in every closing door, keep rocking and balling, never saying no to a drink or drug, always showing sympathy to the devil and jiving sister morphine, then maybe you might at least get laid or super high in the process of fighting for truth, as you define it. There's no belief the possibility of a fair system for Assayas because he knows any system in itself doesn't exist... and never has. Men live and die by ficciones.

Che, top / Carlos, bottom

Even when doing non-fiction like CARLOS, Assayas isn't too concerned with 'real' people and integral consistency: his Carlos changes as a character from moment to moment as calmly as Travis Bickle or Lawrence of Arabia, fluctuating along lines that erase all distinctions between social and personal action, and maybe the only difference between terrorism and heroism lies along these same lines. Soderbergh's Che must always struggle for the people, for the cause... and that means tending to the wounded even if it means staying behind and risking capture, and of course never smiling because even one person is starving somehwere for freedom from capitalist oppression. Both characters delude themselves in their quest for a 'better world' and how to get it. But at least Carlos knows--deep down--there wouldn't be a movie about him if he wasn't dangerous. Che can't allow such honesty to corrupt his self-righteous Marxist buzz. While Che would be making bandages, showing you photos of the poor people of his village and reading aloud from Das Kapital, Carlos would be hiding his bazooka under your bed, drinking all your whiskey, and stealing your girlfriend.

demonlover

This is why Assayas' heroines--like Asia Argento's assassin in BOARDING GATE or Connie Nielsen's corporate spy (above) in DEMONLOVER--are so much more alive and sympathetic and even realistic than the 'good' girls in CONTAGION like Winslet's epidemi-vestigator or Marion Cotillard's Stockholm-syndrome hostage (her run back to her abductors in the airport comes off phony and bleeding heart self-righteous) or Jennifer Ehle's spunky little biologist (top) in her cute orange outfits and blue-green dishwashing gloves, cooking away in the sterilized lab kitchen-- the ultimate petrochemical-armed mom as envisioned in Laurie Anderson's "O Superman." In their noble missions to save as many space-wasting lives as possible Soderbergh's chicks are the bleeding hearts that stop human evolution in its tracks -- not that they shouldn't save the planet but they could at least acknowledge the paradox: If they could go back in time and prevent the bubonic plague, would they? or the Spanish influenza, or even small pox? I can see some idiot out there saying of course they should! Life would be so much better if our global pop. was 12 billion instead of only six! They're all for it until, of course, someone expects them to share their bedroom with a homeless family and their chicken.

That last image I cribbed from Dr. ZHIVAGO, and like that film, CONTAGION is the kind of moving train Howard Zinn decided awhile ago you can't be neutral on, though by now this train has become so crowded you can't even sit down, let alone remain neutral, or anything but suffocated. The only time a seat opens up is when someone dies but then Soderbergh's doctors run up and save them for a few more stops, until the only ones allowed to sit are the dying which never quite die thanks to those 'heroic' medicos... and soon there are many trains on the track they all have to crawl slower and slower until they're nearly as torturous as the 4 'express' at NYC rush hour, and people are hanging off the sides like the commuter to Kolkata.

And people wonder why we're broke, and why our democratic system is so crippled by fear of change. Being from France, Assayas moves much more freely through the post-affect landscape: his characters get off the train and sneak down alleyway shortcuts. Soderbergh might ape the New World Order / Assayas post-modern gridwork image-within-image paradigm, but he's still a tourist, and CONTAGION is just another stack of high-res postcards from the edgeless.

Sexy Terrorists are Go!!! - CARLOS (2010) and Post-Cinematic Airline After-Affect

If you were wondering about where the whole "we don't negotiate with terrorists" thing got started, meet the guy who ruined it for everyone: Carlos the Jackal, who grabs hostages and demands planes to safe havens the way the rest of us order tickets online, at least until policy changes. With his new zillion-hour epic CARLOS, Olivier Assayas continues his post-modern affect approach to film, proving he's the best on-airplane director in history, capturing the feeling of the aircraft roar and air circulation inside a sealed plane, the way pressurization pops the ears; he even captures the horror and drag of being stuck in your seat for what seems like days on end, when the government won't let you deplane because your hijacker's demands aren't being met. Assayas brings the 'you are there' distress where it belongs, back to the terrorists who started it all.

Divided into three two-hour slabs of cryptic meetings, hostage negotiations, and jarring moments of gratuitous sex, we don't learn much in CARLOS, but we 'feel' like we do. The middle slab is the best: Carlos and company take the 1975 OPEC meeting hostage and are supposed to fly to Iraq for sanctuary, but Saddam turns out to have been up to shady treacherous tricks even then. Back when 'we' did negotiate with terrorists, taking hostages was an easy way to fly to some safe haven country whereupon the terrorists would usually release the prisoners and plane -- why not? As long as they did, their demands were more likely to be met the next time. And anyway, so many of the terrorists were good looking and educated, you know, college kids. But that didn't last long, terrorists lost their sense of humor and sexiness, and Carlos got his comeuppance when his safety zone's regime changed hands while he was still on the tarmac, leaving him SOL. Such is life.

By the end it's a bit of a drag as Carlos (Edgar Ramirez) loses all his friends and allies and the new post-communist world takes effect and there's just no place for an airport-fightin' man now that the whole world has been divvied up--every country getting $$ from either side to keep the Jackal at bay. Even with the bummer slow descent (rather than a fiery SCARFACE finale), CARLOS is an invaluable peek at the other side of the curtain, which few of us in the States ever imagined or would film so objectively. It takes a Socialist country like France, who kept their 70s decor longer and never routed the commies out of their academic tenures, to make a grand film like CARLOS. And there are sexy girl terrorists whom Carlos sleeps with at the drop of a hat, the most noticeable of which is Nora von Waldstätten as Magdalene Kopp, Carlos' future wife. Their hook-up (top) is one of the first times I've been genuinely turned on by a seduction scene in years. Years! Maybe it's the red dark room lighting, or the amazing von Waldstätten's jet black hair and pale skin--a combo that sends me, Jackson. But again, not much reason for it in the long run, except to show Carlos is seductive. You can feel the drag of her attraction to him in her eyes and speech, like a gravitational drug.

What's bizarre is that Asia Argento is not involved. CARLOS is perfect Assayas material and Argento was the perfect Assayas heroine in BOARDING GATE, and like that film and DEMONLOVER, there's that impression in CARLOS of what Steven Shaviro called "Post-Cinematic Affect" (a highly recommended book) and I know there's some critics that seem to miss what 'post-cinematic affect' - is all about, the best I can sum it up is two things, 1) Asia Argento, and 2) international air travel:

Here's how you too can discern it if you haven't already: Next time you're flying out of the country take stock of all your surroundings, from the drive to the airport to the taxi to your final destination, see it all as a movie with you as the star engaging in the Deleuzian Time-Image. How are you 'manifesting' your character during this journey, via what you gaze at or listen to on your iPod? Do you ever feel like a rat in a TV camera-monitored trap? How many choices, actions, freedoms are available to you within the confines of the plane, the customs line, the monorail, etc.? Do you feel like you're just a pair of eyes and ears soaking up prerecorded pre-flight messages, gate departure lounge CNN screens, lines, obnoxious cab drivers, and baggage checks? Do you get a feeling of adrift ennui in a preconfigured landscape of retro futurist simulacra? Don't you wish you could escape it somehow? Go off the grid without the grid noticing? Carlos thinks he can, and that's the fantasy in his mind, which differs from ours because he still wants to hang out at airports, and make a big scene there, where most of us just want to zip through them like a ghost. We turn off our ego and just tune out and take it all in--from the science fiction weirdness of the traffic lights reflecting on the rain streaked windshields to the lines and customs and clouds and electric grids--we become it all, rather than ourselves --and in so doing avoid ruffling any feathers.

So next time you're going through the whole door-to-door experience of flying somewhere, ideally to a hotel, imagine you are high on glue fumes or a spiked whiskey, or better yet, be high, and then you might get a glimpse of the Assayas effect.

Asia Argento was a great match for Assayas in BOARDING GATE. She has what Shaviro calls 'direct carnality.' She is "immediately present in the flesh." She "collapses the seductive distance between star and audience, and instead offers us her own hyperbolic presence... Even her irony is immediate, and too close for comfort." (p. 55).  Dude! This is what I was circling around, slowly and tenderly and distractedly, in my 2003 praise for her directorial debut SCARLET DIVA (2000). As you experience that glue sniff lost in translation post-affect disconnect at that airport, let's say you're watching CNN in the waiting area by your gate. Suddenly Asia Argento is onscreen and she looks right at you. No one else notices, and before you know it, she's coming out of the women's room, walking towards you, smiling back. You scared? Damn right. But are you supposed to recognize her, ask for an autograph, smile, mouth the words "I loved you in XXX"? Or what if she's incognito, so if you say hello her crazy ex-husband hears her name and comes running out of nowhere with a knife and/or a court order. Or maybe she's in character, and you're so method you forgot you're not actually living this movie... remember your lines and let them sound like you just thought of them. That should be easy... you can't even remember who you really are. Now, now you got it.

Postmodern affect in the States--from what I discern via Shaviro's book-- is based around the complete saturation of the image, to the point reality --if it exists or ever did --is lost, or inseparable from said saturation. SOUTHLAND TALES and GAMER are examples of this in Shaviro's book - not dividing lines so much between nations and corporate economies as between screen and person; the image and the 'real' within the film's diegetic framework collapse into one another and the world grows cold and strange and much wider than the cinema has ever before been able to conjure. The post-cinematic affect breaks down difference just as when you're in an airport you're neither here nor there, in a post-cinematic affect you're neither safe nor in danger, neither an actor nor an extra, neither on TV or in front of it. Assayas landed on the map with this in his IRMA VEP which collapsed eight ways from Sunday a visit from Maggie Cheung to a French film studio, and the subsequent breakdown of authority and knowledge about a project.

One of the first sights of this post-cinematic might well be Fellini's 8 1/2 wherein the director onscreen creates the movie we watch as a defense mechanism against nosy producers. Godard makes films that operate on this post-cinematic level, flattening the dimensions of the mise-en-scene, and boiling whole narratives down to detourned Cocoa-Cola ads. And you know why there ain't more of it? Because the terrorists--the cool, sexy, crazy international Marxist-version, not the stubbly and sandy new a-Qaeda--- lost!! They blew it. The globalizing forces of evil capitalism won. What can a poor boy do? Except sing a karaoke "Streetfightin' Man"?  In this paralyzed post-cinematic town there's just no place for a Carlos... outside a first person shooter game on Playstation.

See also: Olivier Assayas, Super Genius! (BOARDING GATE)

Get in My Arachnid Black Belly!

There's something doped up and jet lagged in the giallo tropes of La Tarantola dal ventre nero (1971), one of the many "commercially minded" animal-titled films to come out in the wake of Argento's big hit, The Bird with Crystal Plumage (1970). Everything good La Tarantola has going for it seems borrowed from Plumage, including the use of a heavy breathing avant garde percussive Ennio Morricone score. Well, sometimes a heavy breathing avant garde percussive Ennio Morricone score is enough! Add some past and future Bond girls and... well, even if nobody goes home happy, nobody goes home more than mildly irritated.

Our cop lead (Giancarlo Giannini--"Inspector Mathis" in Casino Royale) gets the most screen time, with the hot starlets (Claudine Auger, Barbara Bouchet, Barbara Bach) barely registering as characters before they are set up and knocked down like puling bowling pins. Too bad, because while he's very expressive--with big doleful eyes--Giannini lacks his future self's gravitas. He's less a cop here and more a benzo junkie swimming through the tail end of an expired prescription. He lets prime suspects go if they sass or stall him; and, though he's clearly way out of his depth, never thinks to ask for a partner or back-up to helps solve this multiple homicide case. What kind of DA lets a case that gets new victims nightly get handled by a single doleful detective? Oh well, there must be a bottle of J&B somewhere around here amidst the Edgar Wallace gimmickry, the rote blackmailers, acupuncturist needles, drug smuggling herrings, red sports cars, musty offices,  plush love nests, stamps on envelopes in the jacket of the murder victims, nature films (the wasp paralyzes the tarantula then lays eggs in its big black belly! Yeesh!) and loads of tracking shots and pull foci through trees in the park and the hustle bustle of Rome's bustling, hustling streets. Yes, some J&B will help us turn a blind eye to the dated gay stereotypes, the suspiciously unsuspicious blind masseurs, the arty suspects running over sewer grates (shot from below) and up and down twisting outdoor staircases past little dingy gray polizia cars, well-performed but badly recorded English dubbing, and the... what was I ranting about, oh yeah, your drink is empty!

Anyway, the giallo goods are all there, but with neither a deranged genius like Argento behind or a riveting lead like Franco Nero in front, the camera can only point and shoot. The venom may paralyze us enough to not change the channel, but there's has no kicker to devour us from within.

Poor Giannini! He fits the bill in mustache but not in sexy glower. He needs have someone to play off of, a handsome bland photographer or obsessed musician--inexplicably linked to the killer as in the Argento blueprint--to play cat and mouse games with. But that kind of interplay is beyond the Belly's reach. Giannini can spar with naught but himself, which he does to a catatonic level of internal intensity that seems to gobble down miles of film, usually via his sitting in his car staring blankly out the side window, or buttoning his drab raincoat, or not responding to some prompt from his girlfriend. When he's not around, however, Tarantola is giallo right down to its kinky gold curtains, spiral staircases, and fetishistic toys and latex gloves... and mannequins, naturally. It's almost an Argento "animal" trilogy remix, only without any zip, energy or insight.

Thank god then, for the aforementioned Morricone score, which provides a cacophonic counterpoint whenever it can. You don't even need a story when Ennio is at the top of his game like he is here. All crumbling electric guitars, atonal mashes of the keyboard, deep breathing and wheezy organs, he catches and balances the woozy mise-en-scene the way a patient friend might help a stumbling drunk to his car.

Considering the by-the-numbers direction of journeyman-hack Paolo Cavara (Mondo Cane) and the fact that Tarantolo's screenplay was written by woman (Lucille Laks) it's perhaps no surprise that a) the film is lacking the obsessive aspects of Catholic male guilt and sexual longing (1), and b) its strengths lie in its 'weaknesses,' in its swooning, feminine sexuality,  which feminist horror studies fans will note is almost completely free of voyeuristic "eye"-conography. The stripping nude of the female victims and the paralysis method seem to set the stage for kinky sexual torture, rape, etc., but censors or soft stomachs mercilessly (or--if you prefer--mercifully) make these scenes short, as if the killer, after going through all the trouble of getting victim set up for torture just stabs and runs --a result perhaps of the director perhaps realizing that once they stop screaming and act dead, the tension goes out and it just becomes mannequin-jabbing necrophile boredom which is why I'm sure the Edgar Wallace novel the idea was cribbed from was never actually read by the cribbers.

Dull as the film can be in stretches, the great disc from Blue Underground is so crisp and uniformly strong in color--the music so boldly reproduced--that a discerning trash film fan has little choice but to embrace it. I can imagine really hating The Black Belly of the Tarantula on a faded badly cropped and edited VHS, but seeing it on a good widescreen TV or projector is like being part of a glorious archeological excavation, digging a window back to a long gone world of macho mustaches, shoulder-length hair, drab grey raincoats over shiny shoes, relentless drizzle, bohemians, cocaine smuggled in tarantula aquariums, and Barbara Bach sporting some of the longest, straightest, shiniest hair in all of giallo land.

The most off-putting aspect of this film, if we're being honest, which makes the murders more a relief than a source of tension, is the sleepwalker idiocy of all the characters (not just our Ritalin-deprived sheriff, all of them). Most notably dumb is a woman who, after running into her apartment building while being chased through the streets by the killer, rushes inside her door, and stands panting right by the door while refusing to even turn the lock, and leaving the big heavy chain just hanging down as she stands panting by the door, dazed, perhaps struggling to remember her lines or to hear our shouts at the screen from the presumed audience of the future: "Lock the damn door!" All the victims of our maniac rush to or from their deaths like lemmings (note to giallo characters: if you want to rat out your friends to the cops, don't boldly announce your intentions to them while standing unarmed and alone in a darkened, deserted, cavernous health spa). Even the forensic scientist who shows Giannini the nature footage misidentifies the spider being devoured by the paralyzing tarantula-laying wasp. Even Cavaro is an idiot with no idea of how to generate identification or sympathy for the cop after he makes the scientist kill all the tarantulas ("don't waste my time," he tells the scientist) and then is mean to his girlfriend's cat.

With so little suspense or empathy generated by the killings, the big mystery becomes how a cop as foggy and strung-out as Giannini's Inspector Tellini ever made it to homicide in the first place. He should be handing out parking tickets, at best. When you see him, for example , step into an abandoned house, where the killer might be hiding, you know you have time to go to the bathroom and mix a round of cocktails for your guests and he'll still only have made it a few feet farther inside when you get back. No wonder all these sex killers ran so rampant in 1970s Italian cinema! Drunk cops soaked in ennui are no defense. Thank God he's handing in his resignation at the end of the case, or at least considering it: "I was unable to save a woman last night," he groans to his wife/girlfriend, who is too busy dealing furniture to pay attention Meanwhile the heavy sighs on the soundtrack begin to resonate less with feminine lust and more with resigned exacerbation. He was unable to save a woman? No shit. Well at least he kind of halfway tried. He told a suspect, loudly, she was his only lead to a killer after her, but then just leaving her to die.


From a surrealist standpoint the detective's confusion puts him in the rarefied realm of somnambulist shamuses, inhabited by the likes of Mickey Rourke in Angel Heart; Bruce Willis in the Sixth Sense; Asia Argento in The Stendahl Syndrome; Ralph Meeker in Kiss Me Deadly--characters who may or may not be already dead, as if they awoke from a dream into the film and don't really remember a damn thing about investigative protocol. But at least in those films the target always turns out to be someone or something intrinsically tied up with the pursuer. In Belly, the final disconnect becomes more of a Dirty Harry sort of "this time it's personal!" punch out, which illuminates our hero's darkened path not a watt. Oh well, if you're so xanaxed out you don't even know where or who you are it helps to have some really weird Morricone to help you home. One psychedelically twisted note of discordant guitar and you know that you're safe in the beloved giallo genre, where druggy amnesia isn't only forgiven, it's practically essential.

NOTES
1. Please don't take that as a dis, Lucille, and women. Laks wrote lots of stuff that's too heavy with misogynistic violence for me to see, such as The Savage Three - it has nothing to do with that, but rather like saying some straight male writer may not capture that passion inherent in, say, what drives a woman to mad distraction, I shudder to think.

Olivier Assayas - Super Genius: BOARDING GATE, DEMONLOVER

Thank god that at least there are a few Frenchmen, like Olivier Assayas, who get that life is beautiful even when (or especially when) it's drenched in blood. Assayas makes movies that move and feel like ambient techno music: glacial emotions and settings, rapid tempo stream of conscious flow editing and magnificent paranoid foley work cohere and swirl. As characters walk around crowded hallways there's a constant flow of parties, cash registers, and other sounds from every hole in the wall they pass, the kind of thing Orson Welles fought to keep in TOUCH OF EVIL but lost, the real noises of this crazy world. In attempting a futurist neo-realism, he shows us just how bizarre our lives have become. He makes it seem ironic that science fiction movies are built on sets when the real world is right now far more complex and cyber-delic than anything one singular human mind could e'er imagine. Assayas provides a link wherein even corporate work and air travel becomes sexual and dangerous, futuristic. He knows where to point the camera to make the familiar resonate into the uncanny, the everyday into the post-modern and sinister.

His latest, BOARDING GATE (2007), returns to the world of corporate espionage in catsuits that won him mixed reviews with DEMONLOVER (2002). Superstar Asia Argento is great here playing a cross between her strung-out exhibitionist more-or-less self in SCARLET DIVA and the role which helped make her an international sex symbol, the influential-but-little-seen cult film NEW ROSE HOTEL (1998).

Based on a short story by William Gibson and directed by Abel Ferrara, HOTEL was set in a dystopian future where international corporations had replaced government and everything from banking to boarding room negotiations were done via camera phones. It starred Christopher Walken and Willem DaFoe as two corporate spies-for-hire who recruit Asia's duplicitous and irresistible prostitute to seduce and betray a married Japanese researcher. They find Argento at a hip bar where the DJ is playing Cat Power in all murky cool Bozan Bajeli reds. Assayas clearly loves NEW ROSE HOTEL or parts of it. The son of Jacques Remy, Assayas has captures the child's eye view of jet set privilege, being shuffled through futuristic airport terminals and off to weird meetings and culture shock shopping malls without hardly knowing why or how soon you will get to rest and have a coke. Parents, nannies, porters, and a hostile but fascinating swirl of international commerce going on all around his eggshell mind.

Critics say that for all his innovations, but that's hardly relevant; if he riffs on other's work, it's cool because he steals only from the very best. Using the template of Godard's ALPHAVILLE (modern business architecture and practices as science fiction) and the sexy late night with unlimited mini-bar expense account decadence of Ferrara's HOTEL, he joins them together at the USB port where Argento's own SCARLET DIVA wanders in exile.

One thing Assayas does better than all the rest, Godard included, is transmitting the sense of emotionless futurism that comes from being drugged out on international flights: following the protracted hook-up and assassination of Michael Madsen comes a bravura montage of Asia (Argento) on an overnight flight to Hong Kong (the city), the television on the back of the seat hawking the tourist spots seem strange and alien in ways only Assayas can deliver. He also sjhows the weird intimacy that develops between passengers sleeping next to each other in a darkened cabin for hours and hours; Asia climbing over sleeping Chinese people to get back to her seat; waking up cuddled against the old man next to her and not feeling good or bad about it, how in this one situation, there's still such a thing as a communal slumber party of all ages and nationalities, Grabbing a bottle of water off the stewardess's tray at what seems like the dead of night, but then opening the window shade and the harsh white rays of the rising sun blast in like a laser.

If you have seen DEMONLOVER you remember the opening with the water on the plane and this leads to a sense of overall paranoia which Assayas clearly loves playing with, exploiting for our mutual benefit. Most of all he has an eye for Asia Argento, perhaps the perfect queen of the Assayas universe (which she helped birth, after all, via HOTEL). Maggie Cheung and Connie Nielsen could only do so much with their catsuits and slinky stares; Asia is this sort of person, this cat woman espionage agent: like Assayas she has a famous filmmaker dad (Dario) and a penchant for "stealing" shots at airports for maximum free sci fi affect. And just like her character in GATE, Argento lives the life of a jet setting debauched intellectual artist forever maneuvering her way through the tangled web of vice and male desire for her own exhibitionist fun and profit! It's who she is... in real life...

If such a thing still existed.