Tag: Roman Polanski

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Horrotober: Rosemary’s Baby (1968)

FILM TITLE: Rosemary’s Baby (1968)

ELAPSED TIME: I watched it all.

WHY DID I STOP WATCHING? Rosemary cedes to Satan. Hail Satan!

Before we get started, I want to apologize. Apologize to myself because this isn’t a review of what I think may be my new favorite spooky movie, A Halloween Puppy, about a silly boy who accidentally magicks his mother’s boyfriend into an English Bulldog. D’oh! I’ve never actually seen A Halloween Puppy but if it is as good as A Talking Cat!?! — the other movie IMDB suggests for people who want to see A Halloween Puppy — it has to be great, right?

Or at least better, for my purposes, than The Exorcist, which I thought about watching last night but couldn’t because I think there’s someone living in my attic and/or my kitchen pantry. A bad, evil, possibly possessed person. I mean, I don’t know for sure, because if this person was living there, primed to kill me, they definitely wouldn’t reveal themselves until I decided to watch The Exorcist alone at midnight. It’s like a Schrodinger’s Cat thing. I’m sure you understand.

I don’t want to let you down (“I came here for CONTENT,” you are doubtless yelling now. “FILM WRITING CONTENT!”) so I watched Rosemary’s Baby. What a relief! Rosemary’s Baby isn’t scary, at least not like The Exorcist. There is a lot of portent, for sure. There is the telling murder of a young dope fiend who has been resuscitated and then possibly killed by a couple of weird old people, the Castevets, who live next door to Rosemary (Mia Farrow) and her husband, Guy Woodhouse (John Cassavetes.) And by the continued illusions to the death of children, all while the misty-eyed and dewy-skinned Rosemary avows her desire for a baby. There is that freaky half-lullaby theme that makes the first half of the movie (which, sans soundtrack, is exclusively about 1960s home design) into something foreboding.

But when the shit is actually going down, when Rosemary is raped by the Devil in a dream sequence (and to hide the truth her husband claims that he did it because he was “loaded” and “it was fun in a kind of necrophiliac way”?!?), the feeling isn’t so much fear is it is familiarity. The movie takes place on the very edge of the utterly normal, turning normal conversations about picture hangings into something slightly nefarious. Perhaps the scariest thing about Rosemary’s Baby is how, in the cumulative scene — when Rosemary discovers that everyone is, in fact, conspiring against her, and that she has, yes, birthed the son of the Satan — there is almost nothing, tonally, to differentiate it from a mundane cocktail party scene. Except that everyone is yelling “Hail Satan!” The movie ends with Rosemary learning she isn’t crazy, and then quietly realizing that she must accept her child and become crazy, because the world is crazy. Everyone she loves and knows is crazy.

It isn’t scary, but it is haunting. Especially considering Mia Farrow’s terrible real-life abusive marriage to Woody Allen, and the fact that director Roman Polanski eventually fled the country to avoid rape charges. And perhaps the most haunting thing about Rosemary’s Baby is not that it is about Satan, but that it is a hysterical rape myth (Satan, Polanski? Really?) constructed around a world that quietly condones the real deal.

On second thought, I’ll take The Exorcist. 

Horrotober: Rosemary’s Baby (1968)

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Addison’s November Film Journal

Tess (1979; dir. Roman Polanski)—Pretty soon, I’ll have to figure out—excuse me, “reveal”—my Top 10 movies of 2014. But this task always reminds me that, regardless of quality, there are just too many movies released in theaters every year for an amateur like me to see. (And let’s not talk about the Wild West of VOD, although its importance as both exhibition platform and moneymaker is growing.) Unless you’re really on top of your game, even the most promising movies can sneak out of town under your nose. This happened to me with Roman Polanski’s Venus In Fur a while back. Flyer Film/TV editor Chris McCoy reviewed it and really liked it. But when Venus In Fur showed up at my local theater I missed my chance to see it, so I got my Polanski fix by watching his gorgeous adaptation of Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy’s 1891 novel about ruined families, lost legacies, creeping industrialism and crushing female degradation. Polanski meets Hardy’s “oblivion almost inconceivable in its profundity” head-on, in part because his widescreen framing and production design are as well-designed as Hardy’s prose and in part because he gets a strange, unnerving performance from a lead actress (Natassia Kinski) for whom English is a second language. It’s almost as though Polanski took a line from the book and made it his credo: “And it was the touch of the imperfect upon the would-be perfect that gave the sweetness, because it was that which gave the humanity.” Grade: A+

Art and Craft (2014; dirs. Sam Cullman, Jennifer Grausman and Mark Becker)—According to Mark Landis, it’s easy to make new paintings look like old ones: just pour a little instant coffee on them. He should know: the soft-spoken, stoop-shouldered Landis spends his days copying paintings and sketches he loves. That’s just the beginning of his hobby, though. His affectionate forgeries lead to “philanthropic binges” which involve him dressing up like a grieving relative (or, in some cases, a priest) and donating his imitation artworks to local museums. Landis is an ingratiating and talented prankster with significant mental health issues but without a trace of malice; he could be one of Robert Crumb’s long-lost siblings. He means no apparent harm, but that isn’t to say the local art museums he fools are happy about what he does. Art and Craft is first and foremost a slow and steady portrait of Landis, but it is also a portrait of former museum employee Matt Leiniger, who has made it his life’s mission to track this bony old fraud down and bring him to justice. There’s a catch, though: there isn’t any justice to bring him to. Landis hasn’t committed a crime, and he doesn’t make any money for his efforts. As the film meanders towards Leiniger’s confrontation with Landis at an exhibit of Landis’ work, the looming sense of anticlimax is as satisfying as a more explosive and conventional confrontation. Grade: B+

Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970; dir. Jaromir Jiles)— Flyer commenter “Coffell Scruggs” (did we go to high school together, C.S.?) suggested this movie last month, and although I couldn’t stay up late enough to catch it when it originally aired on Turner Classic Movies in the wee wee hours, I took advantage of TCM.com’s Movies On Demand feature and saw it a couple days later. (N.B.: TCM.com is the one of the better free movie sites out there. Seriously, I wouldn’t be offended if you clicked over there right now and watched Buster Keaton’s The Navigator. In fact, I’d be flattered.) I’m not sure what Jiles’ film is about, exactly—it’s full of sexual awakenings, occult rituals and mystical showdowns captured from cameras that appear to be perched in treetops and church belfries—but it’s got the morbid kink of an Angela Carter fairy tale, and the deep, barrel-aged color effects please the eye and the soul. Grade: A-

Adieu Au Langage (Goodbye to Language) (2014; dir. Jean-Luc Godard)— I really hope you get a chance to see Godard’s new movie in 3D. No joke: it’s the best movie of the year, and it’s so refreshing that you should plan a vacation around seeing it wherever it plays next. Like Jacques Tati’s PlayTime, if you accept its challenges and embrace its difficulties, it will change the way you see the world. (And if you walk out scratching your head, don’t lose faith: there’s already a ton of great scholarship and analysis online. Start with David Bordwell’s lengthy appreciation and follow the links.) Like many later Godard films, Adieu Au Langage is both a fairly coherent statement and a protean sketchbook of short films and scenes covering a wide range of subjects: dogs, old VHS images, color, language, philosophy, nature, canted framing, optical illusions, books, female nudity, and, uh, poop jokes. (You heard me. Poop jokes.) I wanted to see this all three times it played at the Walker Art Center, but I only made it there once. Still, what I wouldn’t give to re-experience the remarkable shot involving two 3D cameras that split and merge so that you see superimposition, split-screen and 3D simultaneously. Apparently when people saw this shot at Cannes they lost their marbles. Distribution and difficulty be damned; why deprive others of such spontaneous joy and wonder? Grade: A+

Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown (2014; dir. Alex Gibney)—This HBO documentary, which covers Brown’s life and career from 1962-1974, is the perfect complement to Tate Taylor’s excellent biopic Get On Up. It contains more (and better) music than Taylor’s film, too. And it does much more than verify Get On Up’s surreal scenes at the famous Boston show Brown played the night after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. It partially explains why Brown gave a shout-out to Hubert Humphrey when I saw him perform in Duluth in 1996, and it also explains Brown’s affection for Richard Nixon. But mainly it gives the band a chance to talk back. Their affectionate reminiscences overshadow the film’s many knowledgeable commentators and musicians, and it turns Mr. Dynamite into a gossipy mosaic. I mean, wouldn’t you like to hear Bootsy Collins tell stories about James Brown’s tacky shoes and his inability to tell a joke? Wouldn’t you like to hear drummer Clyde Stubblefield explain why he hates “Funky Drummer”? Wouldn’t you like to know why Maceo Parker’s brother once put the barrel of a revolver up Brown’s nose? And wouldn’t you like to hear some more of that music again? Grade: A- 

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Film Features Film/TV

Venus in Fur

Making a film version of a play is always tricky business, as anyone who has ever tried to make a Shakespearean adaptation would probably tell you. My all time favorite Shakespeare adaptation is Laurence Olivier’s 1944 version of Henry V. Made in London in the midst of the Blitz, it is an ingenious Russian doll of a film that starts out as a movie about the actors and craftspeople putting on the original 1599 production at the Globe Theatre. Then, in one sweeping tracking shot, it moves from backstage to the front of the house, where we watch the play slowly transform so that, by the time the climactic Battle of Agincourt occurs, it has become a fully realized film shot on location in a muddy battlefield.

There is more than a little of Henry V’s DNA in Venus In Fur, director Roman Polanski’s French adaptation of a 2010 Off-Broadway play by David Ives (which is itself an adaptation of Venus In Furs, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s famous 1870 novella), which inspired a song by the Velvet Underground, which, as is explicitly stated by an actor playing a theater director who has an intense and presumably intentional resemblance to the actual director of the film, is not irrelevant. Also, the actress whom the actor playing the director playing the director says that line to is actually the wife of the actual director of the film.

Confused yet? Read on — the rabbit hole goes deeper.

Venus in Fur opens with a slow track through rainy Paris, entering the front door of a rundown theater where Thomas Novachek (Mathieu Amalric), a playwright making his directing debut, is finishing up a fruitless day of auditions for his theatrical adaptation of Venus in Furs. Just as he is lamenting the low quality of actresses these days, Vanda Jordan (Emmanuelle Seigner, Roman Polanski’s aforementioned wife) bursts through the door. Hours late for her scheduled audition and dressed in leather and a dog collar for what she believed was an S&M porn role, she seems to reinforce Thomas’ vapid actress stereotype. He turns her away, wanting to get home to have dinner with his fiancé, but Vanda’s insistence and energy convince Thomas to give her a shot, in part because she shares a name with the play’s female protagonist.

Once they begin reading the play, it becomes clear that she is much more intelligent and prepared than she at first seemed, and the director becomes smitten with her. The pair read through the play, and the line between make-believe and reality starts to break down.

When Vanda thought she was auditioning for S&M porn, she was not far from the truth. The 1870 Venus in Furs is an erotic novella responsible for immortalizing the author’s name in the term “masochism” — the derivation of sexual pleasure from physical pain. The original text is a classic exploration of the shifting power relationships between a couple in love (or at least lust), and the theatrical adaptation explores those themes by having the two characters comment on and rewrite the text while they trade places as actor and director, master and servant, and even male and female.

In the tradition of Spike Jones’ brilliant 2002 Adaptation, where writer Charlie Kaufman wrote himself into the film as the guy who was trying to write a film from a seemingly unadaptable nonfiction book, director Polanski not only casts his wife as the female lead in his film adaptation but also takes pains to make his lead actor, Amalric, look like himself. Casting Seigner, an accomplished actress who appeared with Amalric in 2007’s acclaimed The Diving Bell And the Butterfly, was not entirely a stunt. As is vital for a true two-hander like this, the actors have incredible chemistry together, even while volleying gender power roles back and forth like tennis players. Polanski does a great job teasing out the nuances of the script with a cinematic subtlety that would be beyond most directors, using camera angles, lighting, and some truly inspired sound design to keep interesting a film that takes place entirely in one room.

I am a big advocate of separating the art from the artist, but when an artist inserts himself and his wife so prominently in the artwork, it’s hard to ignore the resonances between the real world and fictional. Polanski’s personal history of accusations of sexual crimes will no doubt color the way many people receive this film. But Polanski is also the guy who did Chinatown, which puts him on the shortlist of the greatest directors ever, and he’s made a challenging, timely, and entertaining movie. You’ll have to figure out for yourself where to draw the line.

Venus in Fur

Opens Friday, July 18th

Ridgeway Cinema Grill