Dogtooth (2009)
dir: Giorgos Lanthimos
I used to have a friend who claimed that when he eventually had children he was going to teach them to sleep standing up. His plan was to give his unfortunate offspring the impression that this was how everybody slept, their own parents included. The payoff for this bizarre idea would come when the gullible little saps went to their first-ever sleepover, only to be inevitably confused and most likely terrified when all of their friends started laying down to go to sleep. It was a stupid idea conjured by a future bad father, but it was also completely hilarious and, if you’re willing to believe in the realistic possibilities of a film like Dogtooth, one that could be entirely feasible to pull off. The basic outline here is that two otherwise seemingly reasonable adults with the same bizarre outlook on child-rearing as my friend somehow met one another, fell in love and proceeded to pop out a few descendent test subjects. Confined for the entirety of their lives to what my uncultured ass can only assume to be a somewhat common upper-middle class home somewhere in Greece, the siblings are subject to a myriad of strange and often ingenious deceptions at the hands of their patriarchs. It is honestly impossible to efficiently explain the lifestyle depicted without referring to, and thus SPOILING, many specific scenes, but rest assured that the ridiculous nature of such a lifestyle makes for some seriously dark but nevertheless hilarious situations. There is never anything along the lines of an “explanation” given for the parents’ motives in raising children this way, other than their obvious desire to protect their progeny from the outside world and some vague intimations at an underlying sense of indignation towards the mundane oppression that is common life. But this is no pretentiously dickish Michael Haneke finger-wag at the world. Instead, Lanthimos has crafted a beautiful-to-look-at fable that may or may not be an indictment of modern society. Alternatingly comic, touching and tragic and peppered with small doses of surprising (but never cruel-spirited) violence, the film successfully tells a story that is both difficult to relate to and impossible to write off as mere fantasy. Plus if you’re a philistine, there are some pretty stellar tits.
Enter the Void (2009)
dir: Gaspar Noe
Gaspar Noe is a great filmmaker, regardless of what actual film critics, aggressive yet morally wishy-washy feminists, and naysaying collegiate sticks in the mud probably want you to believe (just like them). Dude can make a movie. Dude can tell a story about an ostensibly horrible middle-aged drunk who punches his pregnant mistress in the stomach, vows to murder a small handful of people who basically just rubbed him the wrong way, and fantasizes about boning his own autistic daughter and then killing her. And somehow, by the time it’s all over, you will sympathize with this character, feel sorry for him and possibly even aspire to be as uncompromising and determined, however misguidedly, as he is (I Stand Alone). Dude can also weave a gut-churning yarn about revenge gone wrong, featuring an infamously drawn-out rape scene and sudden acts of such brutal violence that unaware extras on the film set were reported to have started vomiting and just generally wigging out. But by the end of it all, you will feel like your entire shitty soul has just been forcibly cleansed by a seriously gifted tough-love style motherfucker (Irreversible). Obviously I’m a bit of a fan. So it only stands to reason that Noe could pull off this latest audacious experiment in audio-visual mindfuckery without a hitch. And in some ways he has. Enter the Void looks and sounds fantastic; the visuals are seriously nothing if not astounding. I’ve never smoked DMT myself, but friends who have were impressed by the accuracy of the film’s representation of the experience. I’ve also never died, but I have enough faith in the man and his knowledge of the Tibetan Book of the Dead to believe that he got that shit pretty spot-on as well. Technical achievement aside, however, this thing is a bit of an overblown mess. For starters, it’s too long. The plot, as it tenuously exists, is beyond muddy. The atrocious acting by the two generic American Apparel leads doesn’t help much, either. Perhaps a bit more editing could have saved the film from its own weaknesses, but as it stands—and don’t for a second believe that it doesn’t pain me to admit this—it is pretty much an extremely ambitious and undeniably dazzling failure. Props to Noe, though, for creating this beast based on an idea he had after eating a bunch of mushrooms. The last time I ate a bunch of mushrooms the only idea I came up with, while pissing in the woods and staring at my dick, was to start a band called My Dick on Mushrooms. For the sake of all that doesn’t suck, thank god I lack Noe’s stubborn ambition.
Santa Sangre (1989)
dir: Alejandro Jodorowsky
Most film nerds with even a passing interest in the surreal are most likely familiar with the legal curse that was cast upon Jodorowsky’s more well-known films El Topo and The Holy Mountain, essentially making them unavailable to new audiences for over three decades. Criminal indeed, but the less-publicized and much more baffling tragedy has always seemed to me to be the lack of a solid release for this, Jodorowsky’s slightly more straight-forward personal masterpiece. No longer, as a new DVD with (gasp!) some legitimate and quality special features has finally been released. Jodorowsky can be a polarizing artist. His themes tend to be somehow both vague and overbearingly heavy-handed, often weaving together so many political, cultural and spiritual reference points that it can be hard to fully grasp what the hell is even going on. Santa Sangre itself is certainly not devoid of his usual underlying themes (sexuality, familial turmoil, religious and political dissidence, the curse/gift of memory) and features just as much religious iconography and phallic imagery as you’ve come to expect from this Chilean weirdo. But its delivery is much more coherent, and thus genuinely enjoyable as a narrative feature. It’s easy to pick up on the obvious inspirations, most notably Hitchcock’s Psycho, but such simple comparisons are honestly pretty lazy, and do a disservice to Jodorowsky’s fractured and visually lush sense of storytelling. I seriously doubt that any other director could have crafted such a romantic portrait of young love and unwavering dedication amidst the nightmarish insanity of mental illness, mutilated genitals, monstrous father figures and the worst aspects of shallow humanity that are displayed here. Bonus: a musical waltz through the seedy streets of Mexico, with a handful of mentally handicapped youths and one amazingly sleazy guy-with-mustache, that may somehow serve as the most convincing sensory argument for doing cocaine in cinematic history. Jodorowsky just makes everything look so great that you almost wish your life was as fucked up and crazy as those of his characters. That’s a pretty remarkable feat, and can probably only be accomplished with this much aplomb by a guy who once famously claimed to have three testicles.