Film 95 - The Unusual Suspects

by Gerald Houghton (December 1995)

1995 was not a good year for cinema.

Some years are classic, others merely good. 1995 was neither. Mind, what was good was exceptionally good, but what was bad - inevitably scrapping from the bottomless coffers of Hollywood - was dire. Working under the enduring fallacy that actions speak louder than words there were Waterworld, Batman Forever (more successful now they’ve jettisoned anything even remotely stimulating from the franchise), Jade, the manufactured plastic outrage of Natural Born Killers and Disclosure. And to think they even withheld Showgirls as a New Year treat.

It could just be explanation enough for why 1995 was a year heavy with marvellous revivals in shiny new prints: Franju’s Les Yeux Sans Visage; Clouzot’s Les Diaboliques; Schlondorff’s The Tin Drum; Bunuel’s Viridiana; Cocteau’s La Belle et La Bete; Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch; the enormously successful The Big Sleep; and the recently-late Louis Malle’s Lift To The Scaffold. Recommended all.

So what made it worth the trip to the multiplex? Here are an entirely subjective ten, remembering of course that the order is pretty much arbitrary. See one, see all.

The beginning of 1995 saw two highlights from the previous year’s Cannes from two other most exciting and idiosyncratic of North American film-makers - true auteurs - developing their oeuvre for the mainstream. Both Hal Hartley and the extraordinary Canadian Atom Egoyan sought to coerce their process into the framework of the (nominal) thriller, with predictably thrilling results.

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Egoyan is the more difficult of the two. EXOTICA (18, 104 mins, Artificial Eye) is a strip club for $5 table-dancers. It’s frequented by Francis (the dour Bruce Greenwood), a tax auditor fascinated by Christina (Mia Kirschner) whose school-girl act revolves provocatively around Leonard Cohen’s sour ‘Everybody Knows’. Thomas (Don McKellar) is the gay owner of an exotic but shabby pet store, smuggler of rare eggs, and under tax investigation. Flashbacks show Kirschner and Exotica’s MC/DJ Eric (Elias Koteas) helping search verdant countryside for a missing child.

Shorn of elliptical elegance and its ingenious juxtaposition of language and image, Exotica betrays none of its brilliance. Egoyan is fascinated by the nature of seeing, objectification, the transformation of self-image. Whereas before he used film and video, here his methods are more intricate, using professional uniforms and mirrors that double as windows.

Much of the superb cast’ll be familiar to Egoyan watchers, while Mychael Danna’s cross-cultural score and Paul Sarossy’s elegant camerawork offer an easy but troubling way into this puzzle about desire, eroticism and exploitation. Once inside, grief and emotion take over and Egoyan only resolves things in the closing seconds with a frankly astounding final shot. Whether it retains its layers on repeated viewing (like 1991’s remarkable The Adjuster) remains to be seen, but there wasn’t a better film seen all year.

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Hartley began January with his funniest, most approachable film to date in AMATEUR (15, 105 mins, Artificial Eye), a "thriller with a flat tyre" which opens when young amnesiac (Martin Donovan, seldom better) wakes up bleeding on a New York street. He stumbles into Isabelle (Isabelle Huppert, all understated eroticism and melancholy) a self-proclaimed nymphomaniac and virginal ex-nun who supports herself by writing pornography. Together they seek his identity through a web of international espionage and hard porn.

A thriller with no thrills, a plot that makes no sense, Amateur is a conceit. Hartley’s films are more about how than what they say. This script is typically non-naturalistic, dotted with non-sequiturs and straight-faced irony. And the score, by Jeff Taylor and Ned Rifle (Hartley’s alter-ego) is exceptional. It may be a little overlong, and last year’s short Surviving Desire still his masterpiece, but this is as good a jumping off point with this director as one could wish for.

Conventional thriller of the year, attesting to life post-Tarantino, was undoubtedly THE USUAL SUSPECTS (18, 106 mins, Polygram). Christopher McQuarrie’s brilliant shaggy dog script sustains a Chinese puzzle box of flashbacks demonstrating how four of New York’s finest criminal minds wound up dead in a San Pedro harbour when a multimillion dollar drug heist goes disastrously wrong. Why, and just what has the legendary Hungarian gangster Keyer Soze got to do with it? asks FBI agent Chazz Palmintieri.

There is something of the classic noir about Bryan Singer’s film, alluring shot, beguilingly scored, and with pithy ensemble playing from Gabriel Byrne, Kevin Spacey, Kevin Pollack, Stephen Baldwin, Benico Del Torro, Pete Postlethwaite and the ever watchable Palmintieri. Riveting, visceral cinema, this is the thinking man’s Pulp Fiction.

Biography had a good screen outing this past year, both fictionalised and genuine. Best of the latter was documentarist Terry Zwigoff’s bizarre CRUMB (18, 120 mins, Artificial Eye) on the life of celebrated cartoonist and unrepentant geek Robert Crumb. Intricate, obsessive, offensive, as soon as his Rotring hits paper Crumb provokes a response. Work, wives, masturbation, a childhood fixation on Bugs Bunny; it’s all here. But it’s brothers Charles and Maxon who steal the show, the former a charming, gifted but reclusive manic depressive, the latter a painter with a history of molestation. Around these people Robert seems positively normal.

Crumb is chock full of the kind of rich humour and impending doom fiction alone cannot easily provide; unfortunately, it also has a tragically cinematic climax. Documentary it may be, but this was the funniest, most honest and plain haunting film on offer all year, and the best big screen documentary since Michael Moore’s Roger & Me.

ED WOOD (15, 127 mins, Buena Vista) is Tim Burton’s gloriously monochrome take on the so-called worst director of all time, a man who couldn’t direct traffic let alone coherent narrative. (It’s debatable, of course: the spectacular awfulness of Plan 9 From Outer Space is more entertaining than most Spielberg pictures.) Scott Alexander and Karry Karaszwski’s screenplay turns what was probably a squalid existence into a paean to self-belief and dogged persistence. It renounces Wood’s end as a bloated, boozy pornographer for the glory years between 1951 and 1956, when he made his infamous triptych. It works because it’s never derisory, painting Wood (Johnny Depp, terrific), as an inoffensive amateur, and through his relationship with dying morphine addict Bela Lugosi (Oscar winner Martin Landau) the film is genuinely poignant. A box office catastrophe it may have been, but it’s Burton’s best film since the classic Edward Scissorhands.

Female performance of the year (mystifyingly overlooked at the Oscars) came from Jennifer Jason Leigh in Alan Rudolph’s eagerly anticipated follow-up to the essential Equinox. In MRS. PARKER & THE VICIOUS CIRCLE (15, 124 mins, Artificial Eye) Leigh is note perfect as writer, wit, would-be suicide and professional drunk Dorothy Parker, assiduously recreating that laggardly drawl as she holds court in Jazz Age New York at the celebrated Algonquin round table. It’s a talking piece, stuffed with terrific performances from the likes of Campbell Scott, Jennifer Beals, Martha Plimpton, Lili Taylor, Matthew Broderick and Andrew McCarthy.

A little overlong in its second half and neglectful of the real Parker’s proud left wing credentials, Rudolph’s picture is nonetheless beautifully and painfully realised.

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Given that New Zealand’s Peter Jackson made his name on three trashy and frankly appalling horror pictures, not much could have been expected of HEAVENLY CREATURES (18, 98 mins, Buena Vista). Shocking indeed then that it should be quite as good as it undoubtedly is.

Pauline and Juliet (Melanie Lanskey, Kate Winslet) were school friends in New Zealand in the 50s. In a mutual love of Mario Lanza, shared experiences of childhood illness, and the plasticine fantasy world of Borovnia were seen nascent lesbian undertones and moves made to separate the two forever. That was when an ill-conceived plan to murder Pauline’s mother began to hatch.

The script is largely taken from the real Pauline’s diaries, but also dangerously risks delivering Borovnia as menacingly real. The combination of effects with assured playing from the two young leads, and remarkably subtle direction from this most unlikely of sources, render a convincing, intelligent, touching portrait of innocent love and desperation. The final, explosive ten minutes leave you numb.

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QUIZ SHOW (15, 132 mins, Buena Vista) has real teeth. In 1958 a scandal erupted around top-rated US quiz show Twenty One when it emerged that clean-cut Ivy Leaguer Charles Van Doren (Ralph Fiennes) had become a national personality by being fed the right answers before a camera was ever switched on. The fallout destroyed lives and changed TV forever.

Robert Redford’s film balances on Paul Attanasio’s marvellously calculated, Oscar nominated script. Cleverly side-stepping Capra-ish cute, it never offers us a hero; this is a film about shades of grey, and its climax is brilliantly sour and humiliating. Fiennes is superb, ably supported by the never-less than magnetic John Tutturro as his Jewish opponent with a "face for radio", and TV’s Rob Morrow as the ambitious Congressional investigator who uncovered the whole sorry mess. Brimming with genuine insight and wit, Quiz Show is compulsive adult film-making of an degree rare from contemporary Hollywood.

Quiz Show could hardly be more different from Patrice Chereau’s hysterical historical romp LA REINE MARGOT (18, 162 mins, Guild), an epic recreation of the days surrounding the bloody St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572. Catholic Marguerite de Valois (the terrifyingly intense Isabelle Adjani) marries the Huguenot Henri de Navarre (French mega-star Daniel Auteuil), but fails to unite the country as her scheming mother Catherine intends. Before long, and despite Margot’s growing tolerance of her husband, the Catholics and Protestants are at one another’s throats and the screen is soon awash with gore.

Chereau’s picture is the kind of costume drama no other country seems ready to make. While the UK gets in a tizzy with Jane Austin, over the Channel our Gallic cousins are single-handedly birthing the New Brutalist costume-drama. It’s long but never dull, paced at breakneck speed, sumptuously shot but never chocolate-boxy, and packed with pitch-perfect playing. Jean-Hugues Anglade’s greasy, eccentric King Charles IX - who ends his days literally sweating blood - is a boundless joy. Our old favourites, sex and violence, never looked better in 1995.

Cannes 1995 representative (it brought Mathieu Kassovitz ‘Best Director’) LA HAINE (15, 97 mins, Tartan) is the firecracker picture that got the French Right in a right old lather. It follows three friends - Jewish, black, Arab - through the 24 hours following a riot on a Paris housing project. All ennui and tension, armed police and FN skinheads, the film is an enormous (black and white) spring being wound for the brief, blazing climax.

It’s Scorsese and Spike Lee (particularly Do The Right Thing) wrapped in one tight, expressive package. Close-ups, fluid camera moves, and a single, breathtaking helicopter track over the estate seek to break the documentary realism with a degree of unsettling urban surrealism. La Haine is moral but nihilistic, redeemed by common humanity, but also both ambiguous and fatalist. It says fuck the police and means it.

Those are the must-sees, but there are easily a fistful slightly less essential pictures that could also stand recommendation. To that end, time would be gainfully employed in the company of: Terence Davis’ slow, typically stylised American debut The Neon Bible; the very funny film-making comedy Living In Oblivion, Tom DiCillo’s follow-up to his charming Johnny Suede; British director Danny Boyle bucking the prevailing trend with the surprisingly sharp psychological-thriller Shallow Grave; Antonia Bird’s BBC-produced church/Queer morality play Priest; Woody Allen’s Oscar nomination-heavy Bullets Over Broadway; Michael Winterbottom’s bleak UK female serial killer flick Butterfly Kiss; Kevin Smith’s cheap, likeably foul-mouthed comedy Clerks; Steve James’s superb three-hour documentary Hoop Dreams; and from India, the defiantly un-Indian Bandit Queen, by Shekhar Kapur.

And for 1996?

Apart from the thrilling news that Poland’s Krzysztof Kieslowski has come out of premature retirement to direct a whole new trilogy, we’re promised a new blood-strewn Martin Scorsese gangster epic with Casino. It stars Robert De Niro, who also pops up opposite Al Pacino for the first time in the very highly regarded Heat, from Michael Mann. Veteran Italian Michelangelo Antonioni returns to the screen (in collaboration with Wim Wenders) with Beyond The Clouds, staring the remarkable, award-winning Swiss actress Irene Jacob. British artist/director/kiddie author Philip Ridley finally follows his The Reflecting Skin with The Passion of Darkly Noon. Danish maverick Lars Von Trier gives us his 5 hour surreal hospital soap The Kingdom. And there are two new vampire flicks from two of America’s most individualistic of film-makers: Abel Ferrara’s The Addiction and Michael Almereyda’s Nadja (with Martin Donovan, Peter Fonda and David Lynch). Add new films from Hartley, Steven Soderbergh, Mike Leigh, Todd Haynes, Gregg Araki and especially British iconoclast Peter Greenaway with his first film since the unjustly slammed Baby of Macon, and suddenly 1996 looks a far happier proposition than its ailing sibling.

Photos: Mrs Parker & the Vicious Circle, Exotica, Amateur, Crumb, Heavenly Creatures, Quiz Show, Living in Oblivion