setsuled | Entries tagged with mystery

A handsome, fashionable young man is suddenly arrested and it's only after being brought to the station and carrying on with several adversarial conversations is he told that his lover has been murdered. Of course, he's the primary suspect in 1961's L'assassino. Marcello Mastroianni stars as the young man and with plenty of location shots in Rome and most of the movie consisting of dialogue it's easy to be reminded of the famous Fellini films he starred in. It's not quite as good as those films but it's an interesting rumination on perception.

Despite the dialogue-heavy nature of the screenplay, which could almost be a stage play with one or two locations, the action continually shifts from one place to another as Alfredo (Mastroianni) is interrogated. Now in an office, now in a hotel room, now in a cell, everything changes but Alfredo expresses the same exasperation. And other people start winding up dead.

The film frequently shifts to flashback and we see Alfredo with his lover, the murdered woman, Adalgisa (Micheline Presle). A wealthy older woman, he nevertheless seems to have real affection for her but she generally regards him with an ironical, mildly impatient smile. We see other women in Alfredo's life, too, including his mother whom he seems oddly anxious to put on a train out of town.

I want that sport coat. The wardrobe in this movie is great, of course.

The ending of the film could possibly be a twist but it's given in such an offhand way it could merely be a joke. But it compels the viewer to think back over all that's happened, successfully forcing close attention to the endless, seemingly trivial and casual conversation.

L'assassino is available on Amazon Prime.

Twitter Sonnet #1326

A paper brick began a wooden house.
A field of logging traps've took the tree.
Entire thoughts were dreams inside the mouse.
Completed fountains drain the marble sea.
A candy climate gifts the sugar cloud.
Obliging coats adorn the frosty arms.
The humble plate reflects the pastry proud.
A second plane completes but never harms.
A golden chain was painted grey and brown.
A row of relished wine became the dog.
Returning agents wore a copied frown.
With quickened steps we trod the thickest fog.
A deck of fevered glimpses brought the meal.
Successive cuts destroyed the sense of real.

Current Mood: groggy
Current Location: Rome
Current Music: "Cradle and All" - Ani DiFranco

Why do works of fiction spend time on people with amnesia? One good reason can be seen in Hal Hartley's 1994 film Amateur--it's a convenient tool for discussing essential human nature. But it's just one of the ways the film talks about guilt and compassion, men and woman, and the significance of socially prescribed identity.

The protagonists all have extreme, larger than life identities--in addition to the amnesiac, who turns out to have been a high level gangster, there's a porn star, described as one of the biggest porn stars in the world, and a virgin former nun who describes herself as a nymphomaniac.

The amnesiac, Thomas (Michael Donovan), wanders into a cafe at the beginning of the film where he meets the former nun, Isabelle (Isabelle Huppert). Both characters are blank slates in different ways--Thomas, obviously because he doesn't even know his own name, and Isabelle because her peculiar history makes her free of prejudice. She now tries to earn a living writing smut for a porno magazine but the publisher is frustrated when she constantly brings him stories that end with depressing existential statements.

There's a cuteness in the size of things established in the film and the deadpan dialogue that has a fetishistic quality. The porn star, Sofia (Elina Lowensohn), is intensely beautiful and Hartley wastes no opportunity to remind us.

She blames Thomas, her husband, for leading her to a life of porn. She talks about the abuse she's suffered at his hands and she's clearly terrified of him yet at the same time she says she loves him. The film never actually shows us Thomas before he lost his memory so almost everything we know about him comes from Sophia with one significant exception.

Isabelle hears Thomas talking in his sleep to someone named Sophia, threatening to cut her face with a razor. So we can assume Thomas was capable of horrific behaviour but the fact that we never actually get to see him or his relationship with Sofia puts us in his perspective since we know about as much about him as he does. Sofia's terror of him is justified but his frustration at being constantly met with suspicion also seems justified.

Thomas says he doesn't think Isabelle is really a nymphomaniac and he might have a point. We see her go on a date to a movie with a guy she met through a phone sex line. When he starts groping her she seems mildly surprised, gets bored, and abruptly leaves. She says she wants to sleep with Thomas but keeps putting it off throughout the movie. She, too, starts to wonder if he's really the decent guy he seems to be, and if this is because he's not the man he used to be or if it's because that man was more complicated than the few horrible details we know about him. With her being a former nun--who is on this adventure because of a divine vision she claims to have had--it's hard not to think about original sin and her potentially infinite compassion being the grace of God, or her potential condemnation being God's wrath.

As a counterpoint, we meet another man in the film, Edward (Damian Young), a friend of Sofia's who's mixed up in the same Dutch criminal empire as her and Thomas, run by a sinister, unseen man named Jaque. Two of Jaque's goons wind up catching Edward and he's unwilling to give them the goods on Sofia despite the fact that they spend all night torturing him by electrocuting him. After this, though, it's hard to tell if he hasn't also lost his identity. When he winds up at a police station, a soft hearted police woman uncuffs him at which point he immediately takes a gun and murders another officer. So this is a world in which Isabelle would not be wise to blindly trust someone like Thomas.

Huppert gives a performance that is both deeply cool and weirdly innocent. Hartley's storytelling instincts are nicely low key and this is an enjoyable, thoughtful film.

Current Mood: groggy
Current Location: The waiting room
Current Music: "Adrift" - Cranes

A man returns to his hometown in Bavaria after years spent growing up in England, the years during and after World War II. He identifies as English now and doesn't think he cares that much about his German father until he finds a weirdly tangled mystery around him in 1963's The Man Who Finally Died. Based on a television serial I suspect made a lot more sense than the muddled plot of this film, it's still entertaining with some nice performances and cinematography.

Stanley Baker as the protagonist, Joe, bears a weirdly strong resemblance to Morrissey, a not unpleasant distraction (apparently I'm not the first person to notice this). And he does a decent job as the point of view character, undermined a bit by the soundtrack's tendency to give a big menacing sting for every revelation in this mystery.

Joe thought his father had died years earlier until he received a phone call in England from a man claiming to be his father and claiming to be in need of help. Arriving in the small Bavarian town, he discovers his father had apparently died weeks before the phone call was made and inhabiting the family manor now is a perfectly pleasant, slightly sinister, and quite delightful couple played by Peter Cushing and Mai Zetterling.

No, no, nothing suspicious here. I only wish these two were in the movie more.

Joe uncovers one odd detail after another--his Protestant father was apparently taken to a Catholic church, there's an insurance agent apparently stalking Joe, and there's a grave where the name seems to have been swapped with another. The movie throws out more weird clues, in fact, than are quite supported by the solution given in the climax but there is some fun getting there.

Also in the film are Eric Portman as an irritable police inspector and an adorable Georgina Ward whose dead father may or may not have been swapped with Joe's dead father. It's not really clear why she starts wanting to help Joe, who's a bit of a jerk to her. Maybe it was clearer in the serial.

Twitter Sonnet #1074

Distracting squares arrive to spin the board.
Arranged on kitchen shelves were tiny trees.
A sudden cable stopped the breaking cord.
A face emerged composed of cheddar cheese.
On legs as thin as bars the metal stood.
In webs of ceiling fans the Shadow knows.
In hearts of lacing root and branches wood
The source of cloud and lightning slowly grows.
The moon's mistaken on the line of thugs.
In twisting flame a cherry vine awaits.
The lesser candy's sold for gummy pugs.
The tide of sour hooves at dawn abates.
Forgotten cushions hold a mess of pins.
Confusion tables list bouquets of sins.

Current Mood: busy
Current Location: Bavaria
Current Music: "The Jean Genie" - David Bowie

Siamese twins, a woman who eats man eating crabs, an imposter for a dead men, circus abductions, poison administered via the ceiling--can you have all these things in one movie that still reasonably holds together? 1969's Horrors of Malformed Men (江戸川乱歩全集　恐怖奇形人間) has all these things and more. Produced just at the beginning of the proliferation of exploitation film in Japan, the film has some kink, too, though it often feels out of place. But mainly the film succeeds for how it introduces strangeness in a way that feels simultaneously reasonable and disorientating, very like a dream.

The film starts with a young man, Hirosuke (Teruo Yoshida), locked in a cell being menaced by mad topless women with a collapsible pocket knife. It turns out he's also an inmate here, a medical student who was committed for unknown reasons--he clearly doesn't feel like he belongs.

He's haunted by dreams of a rocky beach with a strangely gesticulating man with long hair. The man is played by Tatsumi Hijikata, the creator of a dance performance art called Butoh and the strange gestures seen in the film are presumably part of this art. There's something both animalistic and robotic about him--it's no wonder Hirosuke can't decide if the man is human.

Hirosuke eventually escapes after hearing a woman outside singing the song from his dream. One thing leads to another and Hirosuke's implicated in a circus murder, sees an obituary for someone who looks exactly like him in a paper on the train, and goes to a remote seaside town to assume the influential dead man's identity. The rapidity with which strange events occur in itself suggests something's not quite right and I found myself wondering if Hirosuke really deserved to be in the mad house.

This all takes a back seat, though, to tension surrounding Hirosuke's attempts to live as the dead man, fooling his wife, mistress, and household servants. And then a new mystery develops as the women are beset first by snakes and then by strange, deformed men in the bath.

I wonder if these scenes were originally set in the bath in the source novel. This is another film based on a book by Edogawa Rampo and his famous detective, Kogoro Akechi, eventually shows up played by Minoru Oki. But it feels almost like an afterthought.

There's some post modern humour here and there, like a scene where three people who discover a dead body deliberately sabotage their characters as if to show up the inevitably artificial quality of film. Despite this and some gratuitous nudity, the film has some really effective subtext about identity and guilt. And not all the kinky stuff is a detour--Hirosuke discovers the strange man is the leader of a secret society of deformed men and beautiful women who engage in weird body paint performance art.