Synonyms

Israel and Palestine / No True 

I started forgetting even in the course of watching — I remembered things related to the situation in Palestine. Forgetting or suppressing? One scene wipes out the territory of the previous scene. Whom do we have to thank?

The third Lapid film I've seen thus far returns to the themes of tutorial classrooms and late-teens/early-20s, IDF memories — that is, Synonyms [Synonymes, 2018] — come back to the scene of an aggressive homo-male sexuality of the IDF.

News from Gaza a little more than a week ago tells of a Palestinian man raped by a group of three female IDF soldiers; he was quoted as saying he wishes only that his daughter and wife are able to escape a similar undergoing. •

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Other writing at Cinemasparagus on the films of Nadav Lapid:

Lama? / Why? [2014]

Haganenet [2015]

Synonymes [Synonyms, 2018]

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Haganenet (aka "The Kindergarten Teacher")

IDF Animals (continued but not contained), and the Oracle Wunderkind

My favorite of the three Lapid films I've seen to date (Synonyms might be the best; Ahed's Knee will mark my fourth), 2015's Haganenet sets the mystical alongside the realist — I call this interlock 'realistic' — in its story of sensitive poetry reading and analysis, whereby a kindergartener named Yoav seems to be beamed extraordinary verse from some 'other place' outside known or at least acknowledged spectrums. His kindergarten teacher builds a rapport with Yoav on these lines, talented poet that she herself is; henceforth the film builds towards a dramatic conclusion and the most impressive final shot I've witnessed since my most recent viewing of Akerman's Jeanne Dielman. 

A note on the title: I have no idea what it means and am having a pretty tough time tracking down the Hebrew, let alone the translation and transliteration. I thought perhaps "The Hagan Family" but no longer recall why I think this should be so — if any reader can assist, I'll gladly update this text. Kino Lorber went with "The Kindergarten Teacher" — for me a turn-off, as it brings to mind perfumed festival-Euro-Trash which will later run for a few weeks at New York's Angelika. It turns out this couldn't be farther from the truth, though — Lapid's is a rigorous auteur cinema, not to be taken by its tight/loose compositions which Pedro Costa once described as "Cahiers du Cinéma shots."

Note too the heart-fluttering naptime sequences, evoking les fées fantastiques or the child's bubbling slumber in JLG's Film Socialisme. •

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Other writing at Cinemasparagus on the films of Nadav Lapid:

Lama? / Why? [2014]

Haganenet [2015]

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The Security Guard from Hell (aka "The Guard from Underground")

An Early Work by the "Other" Kurosawa

Nothing comes close to modern-day security! I had just awakened from a dream in which the drone's POV had taken over my own and within the cheap eye-display the horse could be spotted through the ground-level night-vision sludge bolting inexorably through freeway morass, a gunshot wound through its left front scapula doing nothing to hinder the wild forward thrash of either horse nor just-married patrolman, all the time unable, maybe unwilling, to resist being yanked in two by the attached medium-lay nylon just to make it stop and extinguish his qualms about this new gig! It was like the old gig, minus the hovering assistant (moi, begoggled) who would finally step in and deliver the shoulder-propelled rocket straight into the courser's fucking head. Lying beneath my sheets I took in the whistle of the birds and the yelp of a child, pulled hard from my phone, and was recast as night-shift down the Gormenghast reprintery. Tugged his fatigued balls rightward. Chomped on half a pumpkin muffin — once again it was Welcome to the Sec-Psi Trade.

The truth of the matter is that a few weeks back I'd wanted to watch once or twice more Kiyoshi Kurosawa's early straight-to-video feature (an easy if not usually initial in the first KK discoveries even twenty years ago) Jigoku no keibiin [The Security Guard from Hell, 1992 — aka "The Guard from Underground" in its western release]. It's out on a new Blu-ray from Third Window Films, who did a fine job in bringing this early example of J-horror back to life. Yet there were difficulties on my second attempt at watching involving some pan-regional map and unselectable colored territories. Trashy old DVD-R I used to have in the archives looked during playback like eel-skin. 

In any form The Security Guard from Hell tells the story from a skeptical female coworker's point-of-view of a malevolent demon-man, seven-three in uniform, hired to take on guard duty in the dim flickering basement corridors of an outstanding business concern.

"And it's a hard rain's a-gonna fall..." • 

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Other writing on Kiyoshi Kurosawa at Cinemasparagus:

Jigoku no keibiin [The Security Guard from Hell, 1992]

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Why?

Forsaken

At the start of his career, the French-Israeli filmmaker of the short Why? [Lama? in Hebrew, 2014], Nadav Lapid, provided us already the biggest question for his protagonist, his audience, the state — for Charles Tesson of the Cahiers du Cinéma. Lapid's mobile chirps with a commission from Tesson to explore the "potency of the image." Super-task to resolve such a question as "Why?" in the 'real world' of Lapid's film-alter-ego name, Yoav; perhaps even more difficult still as contemplated by Yoav, young member of the IDF, film protagonist/projection used both by Yoav and Nadav to bearing witness: (1) Before the classroom attendees of the IDF camp who jerk around with a boombox during a screening of Pasolini's Teorema; (2) Identifying with the grizzled figure in the final desolate moments of Pier Paolo's picture, and moved to touch the projected ephemeral image. (See also Godard's Scénario du film Passion.) Why can't he be he, I be I? 

In a New York Times op piece published earlier today, Jake Halpern recounts his pre-adolescent son recently inquiring, "Daddy, is the world falling apart?" It's no longer even a question of "why," but rather an implicit response somewhat along the lines of, "Sure the world is falling apart. Funny you should ask." "Funny?" "Yes; why ask?" •

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Writing at Cinemasparagus on Nadav Lapid:

Lama? / Why? [2014]

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L'amour braque

Libidniks

One of the most maudit of that shadowy classification films maudits, Żuławski's 1985 feature L'amour braque [Love's at the Steering Wheel, or Love's in Control, etc.] is something like four movies in one; it doesn't play the cross-cut narratives structure, — blends rather from one evolution of the cast to the next. A gang of hoodlums roll into town to undertake a bank robbery disguised as vintage Disney characters, and chaos ensues as the sexual feelings for Sophie Marceau (never more beautiful, except maybe in Maurice Pialat's supreme masterpiece Police of the same year) test the tensile libidics of her admirers. On to the next evolution of the plot, and so forth. (Is this not storytelling, a variation on which exists as we've known it traditionally?)

Back to the bank robbery — an evocation of Żuławski's hero Godard; as with the Delerue score from Contempt reused in L'important c'est d'aimer, here the Master's film First Name Carmen of two years prior lends itself to the scenario, the mise-en-scène, and a general examination of the crudeness of a capitalist society.

The physicality of the cast goes ‘over the top,’ to put it mildly, in a reconciliation (or split?) between French theatrical tradition of mugging / pulling faces, and the heavy influence in the years following of the mark left by the influence of NYC's Living Theater. One shot of note finds the Folies Bergère looming over the frame.

A film to be cherished or hated, — and hatred has no place in the fault-line societies of 1985 nor 2024. •

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Other writing at Cinemasparagus on the films of Andrzej Żuławski:

L'important c'est d'aimer [1975]

L'amour braque [1985]

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L'important c'est d'aimer (aka: "That Most Important Thing: Love")

A Defiant Reality

The earliest Andrzej Żuławski film I've seen to date, L'important c'est d'aimer [The Important Thing Is to Love, 1975] has made me a fan of the Polish/French director for certain; where I had anticipated jerky handheld-shot nihilistic images and wing-it scenarios, instead exists complex 'storytelling' and mise-en-scène. Two items of note before I get a little more into the movie proper:

(1) That term "mise-en-scène" seems within the last year or so to have pervaded the realms of even casual film-buffs. Its usage sometimes hits the spot; other times it's employed as a kind of synonym for 'cinematic style via camera motion, framing, and lighting; visuals.' Which isn't far off, but some day I'd like to write a piece that really gets at it. Real quickly: "Mais mise-en-scène, c'est la mise-en-scène et ça c'est l'importante."

(2) The pronunciation of the director's name. A problem for basically everyone who possesses even a scintilla of Polish language pronunciation and its panoply of diacritics that transform the assumed English pronunciation of the city of Lodz ("lodz") into Łódź ("woodj"). So let's take it in: the pronunciation of "Żuławski" in English-equivalent registers as: "Dzu-WAF-skee," and not "Zu-LAW-skee." Now back to our program.

This Romy Schneider-starring 'tale' of an acclaimed actress of stage and screen involves her being loved by two men: her live-in husband played by Jacques Dutronc, and a paparazzo lover portrayed by Fabio Testi. A warning for the misophonians among viewers (which includes myself to a minor extent) — the screaming German bitch director on the set of the film-shoot in progress that bookends L'important, and Dutronc's French theatrics in and out of kitchen and bedroom — constitute an onslaught of waveform peaks in-the-red neutralized perhaps only by the equivalent volume of Klaus Kinski's fascinating recitation of a monologue from Shakespeare's Richard III, during a rehearsal for the stage production in which Schneider also participates.

Georges Delerue granted in advance to Żuławski and the production his originally-used theme from Godard's 1963 Contempt with its interweave of melancholy, sexual compulsion, and underlying death-ward trajectory, thereby by both initiating and completing the film's cinephile program. •

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