The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye

Since founding the COUM Transmissions collective in the late sixties, via Throbbing Gristle’s invention of industrial music, and numerous highly provocative music and art shows (sex, gender, physical alteration, domination and extremity being constant themes, with a smattering of black magick), Genesis Breyer P-Orridge has dedicated herself to exploring the (off-)limits and possibilities defined and denied by societal taboos.

As s/he bemoans at one point in this documentary, people have not been listening to her constant cry of “change” – who knows what beauty experimentation may reveal.
P-Orridge’s life project post-1995 has been about as extreme a demonstration of this principal as can be imagined yet, given how it chimes with other longheld P-Orridge preoccupations, somehow not surprising.

She fell in love at first sight with dominatrix Lady Jaye (cheerfully crashing on the floor of a friend’s dungeon, whilst still he). In typically straightforward terms she describes the universal need to join, to merge with one’s lover, and from that impulse was born the project that would occupy the couple for the next twelve years: a series of plastic surgeries and cosmetic efforts to look as much like one another as possible, to create a new person, a third entity, a perfect offspring in that it’s the literal combination of the two into one. So Jaye got a new nose, P-Orridge got beauty spot tattoos, and together they got boob jobs: the romance of their waking with new breasts, holding hands in neighboring beds, is sweetly irresistible.


Andrew Megson was the boy who once became Genesis but now, P-Orridge declares (with some pride), she doesn’t know what she is. She refers to herself as “we” as often to designate the traditional self as to refer to the entity comprised of the pair of them. Both had been investigating gender boundaries and the transgression thereof for years, and pandrogeny was the inevitable outcome. P-Orridge ventures onto shakey ground when he suggests pandrogeny as the future of the human race, but expounding it as a basic human right of free choice needs no hyperbole. Equally effective is some priceless footage shot by for Bruce La Bruce’s The Rasberry Reich (2004): standing on a trashcan in an alley, dressed in leather Nazi regalia, with pencil skirt, platinum layers, and a Hitler moustache over that infinitely sour mouth, P-Orridge rants guilelessly about the right of the individual to appear as they wish, and not to pander to expectation and convention, a mesmerizing cri de coeur.

Marie Losier’s documentary covers various activities with a fine lightness of touch, filmed mostly on a silent 16mm, capturing the treasure-trove apartment and the underground archive, P-Orridge larking about, Jaye dancing with herbs, Psychic TV (PTV3) Thee Majesty on and backstage, and fly-on-the-wall points in between. Talking heads are rigorously avoided and an almost completely consistent disjunction of sound and image is appropriately discomforting over the live footage, and attention-sharpening throughout.


Such an articulate and lucid narrator as P-Orridge would be to any film’s benefit. Throughout her career she has demanded to be taken seriously, but for all the frequent darkness and dourness in performance, she’s frequently given to bouts of silliness onscreen, and the voiceover is frequently that of the mumsy storyteller. Her account of the pair’s falling love and the excitement of what their mutual project represented, along with Jaye’s sudden and untimely death, are beautiful and affecting. As with the disjunction between image and personal manner, self-mytholigizing is necessarily at work, and always has been; but the myth, including the fundamental right to change, and the will to embrace the abnormal as normal, is well-formed, and P-Orridge has an endearing way of passing off the extraordinary as everyday.

Losier discretely places P-Orridge in a tradition of English eccentricity with the opening old-timey whistle act, and as she chuckles over the horrified reactions of the national press. The close mentorship of Brion Gysin and William Burroughs are recounted: the cut-up technique has remained at the center of P-Orridge’s work throughout her career and finds unlaboured echoes in the plastic surgery procedures. Recollections of childhood bullying give way to vintage TG footage (no mention of the stomach-churning ritual abuse films) and the pandrogeny project is deftly situated in the context of P-Orridge’s ongoing and glorious commitment to living her life as an art experiment.

Amply represented in the footage, Jaye’s absence on the soundtrack is felt, but perhaps rightly so: it is certainly felt in the most recent scenes of the somewhat bloated P-Orridge, an undeniably strange-looking individual, left alone with the almost tangible ghost of her second self. There’s no ostentatious self-pity but there is fond reminiscing, and a profound sadness in the bereavement. If the film elucidates too little of Jaye’s personality to function as a eulogy for her, it does at least eulogize the remarkable love and commitment the pair gave to one another – her wish to be remembered for one of the great love affairs of all time is dutifully honoured and elevated by the film; nor is it much more than a skim through the career of one of the most consistently exciting figures in modern music (a montage of record sleeves is mouth-watering). What it is, however, is an unapologetically romantic portrait of lives committed to beauty with no boundaries: it makes you want to fall this much in love (and go out a buy a whole bunch of records).

d/ph/ed Marie Losier p Steve Holmgren, Marie Losier m Bryin Dall feat Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge, Big Boy Breyer P-Orridge, Edley Odowd, David Max, Alice Genese, Markus Persson, Bryin Dall
(2012, US, 65m)

Sound of Noise

There's a potential hazard in making a film about the making some other art form, that it may be too much of one or not enough of the other, either the art-making or the movie a flimsy excuse for the other. Riding the wave of that special relationship between film and music, however, Sound of Noise records the extraordinary performances and sound-making of a group of six drummers, within enough fictional narrative and food for musical thought to lift their endeavour to inspired – and hugely entertaining – absurdity.

The whole film is shot through with a deadpan wit from the elegiac opening, a montage introduction to the eminent musical family of the narrator, a cop born tone-deaf and with a deep-seated dislike of music. Following such clues as the serial number of a totemic metronome, he pursues a group of “musical terrorists” as they stage a piece entitled “Music for One City and Six Drummers”.

In what cause they terrorize is not specified, although the core pair get a great introduction to their musical madness, before crashing a van into the gates of the German embassy. Four more drummers amusingly recruited and they begin. Their performances of the four movements of the piece – or Attacks – employ politically and socially charged elements, but they’re just as much in it for the joy of the music.

The attacks are amazing, employing nothing like a conventional musical or percussive instrument, from the beeps of a surgery theater monitoring machine, to the thudding and scraping of giant diggers, or the heavy clang of a beater on a pylon wire. The film-makers Ola Simonsson and Johannes Sjärne Nilsson have been working with the drummers for over ten years, since a remarkable 2001 short, Music for One Apartment and Six Drummers, and their ambitions have grown to glorious proportions. Sounds were meticulously sourced, and audio and video editing are exceptionally deft, in conjuring the sense of a perfect live performance. Part of the appeal – and impressive effect – are the tangled logistics of performing such pieces; that we see no rehearsals lends the musicians a semi-mystical aura.


The drummers are amusingly drawn into types, deftly defined, and Bengt Nilsson as cop Amadeus Warnebring, brings subtle emotion to his role, from the way he wraps his mouth around the pronunciation of his name, with the disdain of denied self-pity; to the film-makers’ gag about funk bass, which he transforms into a bubble of vulnerability. He manages too to pull off an odd element of magic realism, when it becomes clear he can no longer hear objects on which the group has played. This unexplained quirk is another pleasant mystery, however, to engineer a neat conclusion, and offset the easy way in which the film glides over the divisions between sound and music, sound and silence.

As much as it may sound off-puttingly avant-garde, the whole musical project is thrillingly easy on the ear, driven by fantastic rhythms, fantastic sounds, and the palpable dedication of the performers. Not only do Simonsson and Nilsson do the musicians proud, but neither do they put a foot wrong as film-makers either. They capture a remarkable sense of the daring, absurdity, and excitement of going for something crazy all out, because that’s just what they’ve done themselves, with tremendous results. It’s also very funny.

d/sc Ola Simonsson, Johannes Sjärne Nilsson p Christophe Audeguis, Jim Brimant, Olivier Guerpillon, Guy Péchard ph Charlotta Tengroth ed Stefan Sundlöf, Andreas Johnsson Hay pd Cecilia Sterna s Nicolas Becker, Lasse Liljeholm m Magnus Börjeson and Six Drummers, Fred Avril cast Bengt Nilsson, Sanna Persson Halapi, Magnus Börjeson, Johannes Björk, Frederik Myhr, Marcus Haraldson Boij, Anders Vestergård, Sven Ahlstrom
(2010, Swe, Fr, 102m)

Attenberg

Director/producer Athina Rachel Tsangari’s reluctance to be lumped in with some nebulous Greek New Wave is as understandable as the categorization is inevitable. She has been producing the work of Giorgos Lanthimos, and her second film as director shares with his Dogtooth (2009) and Alps (2011) not only strong tonal and thematic similarities, and an interest in linguistic distortion, but also the cool white light of Thimios Bakatakis’ camerawork (Dogtooth) and Lanthimos even takes the supporting role of in the quartet of Attenberg’s cast.

Like Dogtooth, this is something like a case study of a strange, sequestered group. The title is a mispronunciation of (Sir David ) Attenborough, the idol of a young woman, Marina (Ariane Labed, from Alps). She lives in a rather bleak industrial town on the coast, with a dying architect father, and a sexually forward best friend, Bella. The study concerns her discovery of sex, towards which she initially feels disgust: the film opens with a sloppy, forcibly awkward (no hands) kiss the between the best friends, with Bella instructing. Marina says Bella’s tongue in her mouth feels like a slug but later, after an awkward episode of nudity, she will be initiated into actual intercourse by a visiting engineer (Lanthimos). That their eventual coupling should evidently be real, filmed by a detached camera, is entirely appropriate to the film’s evocation of nature documentaries; it connects also (albeit in an apparently contradictory manner) with the father’s explanation that taboos are a tool of evolution in the human animal. The depiction of actual intercourse, the busting of a cinematic taboo, and the presentation of the characters as objects of study all aspire to devolve the participants (in general, however, Tsangari worries at the uncomfortably off-limits much less than the films she produces for Lanthimos).

It is that absence of unease that allows the film’s eccentricities to protrude. The recurring emphasis on physicality (present also in those previous films) stems from Tsangari’s extensive dance background: she has Labed move her uncanny, protruding shoulder blades in a beautifully lit abstract composition, for Bella’s entertainment; and time and again we cut to the girls in almost matching dresses, doing silly walks down a long courtyard pathway. Amusing as some of these walks are, they develop a rote tone, like actor’s exercises; the same is true of several scenes that devolve from rat-a-tat assonant wordplay into non verbal, animalistic play-acting.

The childish air of the opening scene (it develops into all-four primate play) and Marina’s semi-autistic approach to sex (she appears normally developed in all other ways) are elucidated by her father’s wish that she live with other people – she simply states that that is not how he brought her up, and we’re left to wonder at past details. The heady atmosphere of awakening is convincingly whipped up by Bella’s detached account of a dream, a tree dripping with penises; but one remains fatally curious as to what has retarded this young woman so.

The offhand elision of backstory is familiar from Dogtooth and Alps, as is the small group in self-imposed separation, of vague cause. There are others in this albeit sparsely populated town, however: the few patrons of the bar in which Bella works; in a slo-mo female changing room to the bird-like chirp of Daniel Johnston singing “I am a baby in the universe” (women are? Marina is? It seems calculated more for suggestion than meaning); and in a row of lamplit youths past whom the girls walk slowly, lip-synching to François Hardy’s cry of loneliness, “Tous les garcons et les filles”. The causes of Marina’s feelings of isolation are vague, and ultimately, in ways also skirted by Lanthimos films, the eccentricity feels a trifle put on.

Just as the film presents these people as mammals, its languid pace allows also for numerous static interstitials of their habitat, the wintery, industrial town. This landscape becomes resonant only for a moment however, when Marina’s father Spyros late on rues his part in its creation, the failure of his dream of innovation, and the banal, repetitive reality that resulted: all too inevitable, however, that the final shot should long hold on a dour mining yard, to no more than suggestive purpose.

Tsangari confessed last year to Jonathon Romney that she feared her film might really be a mess, and she’s close to being right; structurally haphazard, it is almost a collection of sketches. Some are intriguing nonetheless: there’s a lovely soft image shot through a rain-drenched window; and one episode in particular strikes a true emotional chord, a surprising and underplayed expression of grief, in an empty hospital corridor, as though the impending inevitable finally sinks in on Marina for the first time; but together these scenes add up to nothing very comprehensive or satisfying; and undermined by eccentricities, the casting of the naturalist’s eye on specimens of the human animal does not ring true, either in terms of sexual discovery or grief.

d/sc Athina Rachel Tsangari p Maria Hatzakou, Giorgos Lanthimos, Iraklis Mavroidis, Athina Rachel Tsangari, Angelos Venetis ph Thimios Bakatakis ed Sandrine Cheyrol, Matthew Johnson pd Dafni Kalogianni cast Ariane Labed, Vangelis Mourikis, Evangelia Randou, Giorgos Lanthimos
(201o, Gr, 97m)

Orly

A familiar sort of festival film, small of scale, with a potentially interesting conceptual slant, but unlikely to get any sort of wide release, Orly is the sort of film one is glad to have seen, but which one is unlikely to urge anyone else to seek out.

The interesting slant is that it takes place in the eponymous Paris airport, filmed in almost real time over the course of a morning with what must have been at least a semi-hidden camera since most of the crowd of travelers (and there’s a release headache-inducing number of them) take no notice of either the film-makers or the protagonists.

In fact, it is not quite entirely confined to the airport: the film opens in a living room with a middle-aged man, Théo, talking painfully and semi-idiotically on the telephone to his recent ex, Sabine. He’s only obliquely related to what follows, and we leave the airport only once again to follow a young woman in a cab, who it turns out is this same Sabine.

In the airport itself, the film focuses on three couples — the first is a man and a woman who meet in passing and fall gently into a life conversation, she apparently dissatisfied with her married existence in Montreal, he just decided to return to live in Paris from America, perhaps against his better judgment. An older woman and her consistently disrespectful teenage son pass the time in conversation that keeps returning to the sort of semi-deliberate misunderstandings that makes the relationship ring true. Later on, a young German couple, of whom the boy keeps wandering off to follow the woman who caught his eye in the airport store, the man leaving his (much prettier) girlfriend reading Ada and admiring a nearby baby.

We also return from time to time to a check-in girl who sits and stares, exchanges minimal small talk with her colleague, and eats a sandwich. Sabine sits and reads a letter from her lover Théo, who returns in voiceover, before the airport is evacuated for some unspecified alert and we return with her to another taxi; this time she is unexpectedly accompanied by a small child who pointedly ignores her question “where were you going?” before the film comes to a close.

This ending epitomizes the deliberate inconsequentially. Essentially, the film is a portrait of the airport waiting lounge and a tiny sampling of the sort of lives which pass through, although peppered with suggestive elements, such as when the first woman (Natacha Régnier) posits that “when you meet someone you meet yourself”, or when Théo’s voiceover describes looking around a cafe and seeing an old man whom he designates as God, among us, observing. Equally, however, the most oft-repeated lines are “I don’t know” or “I’ve no idea”; there’s no scheme here to create a web of meaning from quotidian and barely-related conversations.

It’s fortunate therefore that the patter of the script is neat and well-played, particularly by Régnier, quintessentially French both in her easy openness of conversation and body language, and in her amusing reaction to discovering she’s lost her coat; also by Mireille Perrier as the mother, whose facial expressions, especially at her son’s neatly set-up revelation, are priceless. Neither character, nor any of the others, is particularly solicitous of our interest, however, any more than in a randomly overheard conversation, which is undoubtedly part of the point. In the end, however, this inevitably makes the experience of watching the film little more interesting than spending an hour and a half in a departures lounge.

d/sc Angela Schanelec p Christophe Delsaux, Céline Maugis, Gian-Piero Ringel, Angela Shanelec ph Reinhold Vorschneider ed Mathiulde Bonnefoy cast Josse De Pauw, Maren Eggert, Natacha Régnier, Bruno Todeschini, Mireille Perrier, Emile Berling
(2010, Fr/Ger, 84m)

Art House

There are predictably interesting questions bubbling under here, concerning the nature of art, what makes an artist, and how one decides the aesthetic worth of their work. Perhaps with equal predictability, the film is content to coast through a stock story of slacker students struggling to prove their worth in the face of the comic-evil dean who’s trying to convert their bequeathed-to-art dorm house into a golf-team club house; they must knuckle down and actually make some art in order to save the decades-long tradition of a free space for art students to live and work. It’s a fine concept, such an art-haven, although it hardly looks as though many of the students actually deserve the cushy set-up.

Whilst trying to save their living space, terminally nice house leader Greta Gerwig must also contend with the emotional demands of a wimpy but hetero best friend, the amusing older (piss-)artist who hangs around, and the latter’s visiting bo-hunk photographer nephew. Gerwig’s surprisingly shaky early on, but resigns herself to the blandness of the role; indeed, no-one is required to exhibit more than two dimensions apart from Chris Beier as the morally ambiguous man-candy, but he is the least well-equipped of the cast to manage it, woefully inadequate in even the simplest dialogues.

Iggy Pop is on only fairly good form, but takes ages to turn up, despite being second-billed; what’s more, despite neatly setting up an amusing reappearance for the finale, the film (or perhaps his schedule) denies us the pleasure. We are also denied the pleasure of seeing much art – Gerwig’s portraits for the final show are almost intriguing, but we see them only obliquely, and most of the other pieces are strangely sidelined: an odd decision that functions deliberately or not as a satirical jab at effort and craft, since the piece that finally saves the house is created by accident, purely through drunken emotional outpouring, with none of skill, intention or concept.

It’s unlikely that this is the message, however: the film has no interest in the philosophy of aesthetics even on the most basic level, and the saving of the house is entirely in the tradition of giving the sensitive oddballs a safe place and a free ride, than it is about engaging with or encouraging art-making. Rather than probing or thought-provoking, it’s a film intended to be fun and warm-hearted, but it’s barely either of those things (compared to the wit of (untitled) or the evocatively-drawn milieu of Unmade Beds), and it’s at least twenty minutes too long.

d Victor Franchi p Debashis Mazumber, Eddie Rubin sc Kris Brown, Victor Franchi ph Shawn Grice ed Carmelle Flanagan pd Jennifer Durban cast Greta Gerwig, Chris Beier, Hayes Hargrove, Timothy Brennan, Danny Mooney, Iggy Pop
(2010, USA, 95m)

Night Tide

Curtis Harrington’s debut feature kicks off as a seaside noir, with sailor Dennis Hopper tooling around the night-time Venice promenade before wandering into the scene at a basement jazz club. Amidst the hipsters and hopheads he spies a mysterious and elegant young woman, who’s scared away by a scary old lady speaking a weird language.

It turns out the younger woman, Mora, is the amusement pier mermaid, but it might just be that she’s also a mermaid in real life, and that the Sea People are calling her back; her last two boyfriends have been found washed up on the beach and everyone warns the sailor he’s in grave danger. Hopper is awkward with the more prosaic lines, but displays flashes of method and his winning grin to good effect, and gets a great octopus dream. Totally independent and shooting on a tiny budget, Harrington makes use of good set-dressing, locations and effective atmospherics to conjure some of the dread mystery of his hero Poe; but sense starts to drift away towards the end and the parochiality of the police station in the final scene firmly dissipates the air of mythical mystery that otherwise makes the film such an appealing oddity.

d/sc Curtis Harrington p Aram Katarian ph Vilis Lapenieks, Floyd Crosby ed Jodie Copelan pd Paul Mathison m David Raksin cast Dennis Hopper, Linda Lawson, Gavin Muir, Luana Anders, Marjorie Eaton, Tom Dillon, H.E. West.
(1961, US, 84m, b/w)

Aguas verdes

For a decade or so the Argentine government has been increasingly subsidizing the local cinema industry, to produce well-made, classy films that can beat Hollywood at its own game. But in response to growing state control, a faction has formed loosely around filmmaker and teacher Mariano Llinás to produce projects of a more adventurous nature. Although not a glossy product by any means, it’s to the credit of Aguas verdes that it could be from either camp (indeed, funded in part by both the government and the national film school).

The title appears in a nicely ironic fashion over a sink of dirty dishes. Aguas Verdes is a beach resort to which bearded bourgeois social worker Juan is taking his wife and two children to vacation. He’s an intelligent and authoritative husband and father, but his family is on the brink of chaos. His children are always fighting (teenage Laura and pre-pubescent Aribal), his psychiatrist wife always forgets to lock the front door, and his car is a half-rusted rattletrap.

Once at the resort, it’s the film’s mission to worry and humiliate him as he completely fails to relax and enjoy his vacation. His wife makes friends with a pair of lesbian school teachers whom he brands ‘idiots’, Aribal is reportedly a sexual menace to the other kids, and he’s desperate to protect Laura from the handsome roguish-seeming but unfailingly polite Roberto (not that he seems concerned about her frankly inappropriate bikini bottoms).

The details of family interaction are observed with near-hilarious exactness. Rarely has a summer vacation full of potential sexual abandon been evoked so perfectly. It’s unfailingly funny – amusingly overwrought music is used to signify Juan’s panic as he feels himself being socially railroaded and imagines his family, authority and masculinity being threatened. But there are real hints of menace when he loses sight of Aribal over a dune and hears strange noises outside the bedroom at night. We have a feeling things will come to a head.

But the head is botched. It’s sudden but not unexpected, brief but not shocking, and the aftermath is immediately steered off into animal kingdom allegory, admittedly stylish, but an unsatisfying sidestep. It betrays the attention to character and detail thus far displayed, and possibly even the unrelieved tension of a lack of climax would have been preferable; it’s a great shame, since in one fell swoop the disturbing undercurrents are cheapened and an otherwise pitch-perfect hour and a half of excellent character study is spoiled.
d/p/sc/ed Mariano De Rosa ph Pablo Schverdfinger ad Oscar Lozano, Luis Sales m Hernán Cieza cast Alejandro Fiore, Milagros Gallo, Julieta Mora, Maxi Gigli, Diego Cremonesi, Jorgelina Amedolara, Efrat Wolns
(2009, Arg, 90m)

The Wild Hunt

Lauded as best debut at Toronto, and winner of the audience award at Slamdance, this is an English-language Quebecois production that does away with the frequently parochial quirkiness of the region’s cinema, for an idiosyncratic outsider theme familiar to oddballs everywhere, in an attempt to conjure the resonance of Norse myth through the weekend games of a large group of live medieval role-players.

Slobby Erik (Ricky Mabe) is pissed that his girlfriend Lynne (Kaniehtiio Horn) disappears to the woods on the weekends to cavort with berserkers, knights and elves, and heads off to bring her back. The problem is that, as the Viking princess, she’s rather important to their game and currently a prisoner of the sinister Shaman (Trevor Hayes) and his crew. Aided by his rather-too-into-it brother Bjorn (Mark Anthony Krupa), a busty pixie-haired referee (Claudia Jurt) and a gawky red-haired knight, appropriately blessed with the flat sloping face of a young Max von Sydow (Kyle Gatehouse), his interference, or love quest, as the players designate it, causes the fantasy of the Shaman’s Wild Hunt – a frenzied night-time rampage initiated by the blood-letting of a “virgin” – to tip over into frightening reality.

The film-makers are D&D veterans and this is no easy mockery of the fantasy games depicted, but humorous mileage is gotten out of the incongruities of Thor’s hammer being kept under a sink, slippages between the archaic language of the game and contemporary idiolect, and pythonesque touches such as the king’s charge “in the name of my name”. The sunshine, river and forest are photographed to maximum aesthetic effect (a shade overdone) and the varied costumes and the backwoods village compound, complete with Viking longship and stone amphitheatre, are all superb. The slide from fantasy to real-life violence, however, is undercut by some easy and obvious sound design and misses out on the sickening chill that should have made it truly disturbing: blood-lust, suicide and revenge may be fine and noble in myth but look supremely ugly in real life, even if it’s movie real life. With committed playing (though Horn struggles with a part woefully underwritten) the film manages its humour far better than its conflict, and in blurring the ancient stories’ lessons as to how to live an enriched and honourable life, it ends by leaving an unpleasantly sour taste in the mouth.

d Alexandre Franchi p Alexandre Franchi, Karen Murphy sc Alexandre Franchi, Mark Antony Krupa ph Claudine Sauvé ed Stephen Philipson, Arthur Tarnowski pd Katka Hubacek m Vincent Hänni, Gabriel Scotti cast Ricky Mabe, Mark Antony Krupa, Trevor Hayes, Kaniehtiio Horn, Claudia Jurt, Kent McQuaid
(2009, Can, 96m)

To Die Like A Man (Morrer como um homem)

From the war-paint-as-make-up opening, followed by a terrific sex-change origami demonstration, to the musical afterlife-view finale, Portugese director João Pedro Rodrigues’ third feature glides smoothly and unhurriedly through the story of aging transvestite Tonia (Fernando Santos), scared of the butchery implied in title’s final transformation, secure in her inner identity, but undeceived by the outer, and slowly dying from the very things that help make her physically what she is (leaking breast implants).

There are moments of stylistic exuberance but barely a hint of camp: Tonia sings quietly to herself on several occasions but we see not a jot of her high-drag cabaret act. Moments of good humour and catty club rivalry dot the melancholy, whilst Rodrigues’s serious approach ranges from distinctly Bressonian hand gestures and intonation, to the anti-spectacular Academy ratio. Tonia has two sons, one biological (Chandra Malatitch), estranged and wayward; the other her young, troubled boyfriend Rosário (Alexander David), to whom she’s devoted even while believing him to be stealing from her to feed his smack habit. He’s also a pretty spiffy dressmaker, and he’s introduced being rescued from an alley by Tonia in a particularly splendid sparkly red number, shimmering like ruby slippers in robe form. An unexpected interlude takes the pair to a quasi-magical forest where they encounter the marvelous Maria Bakker (playing herself), in retreat from the world, poised and elegant in silver-black sparkles and feathered cuffs (and tremendous hair!) In this enchanted place, Baby Dee’s beatific “Calvary” appears on the soundtrack from nowhere, and the film freezes unexpectedly into a red-filtered woodland tableau of inexplicable beauty.

No less beautiful is a late vindication of Rosário, via a back-garden treasure trove, that plays as a poignantly literal passing of Tonia’s life before her eyes. Its ending is inevitable, but the film succumbs to excesses of neither of nobility nor self-pity. As Tonia herself says, there are no secrets, only shame. Her dual nature is hidden from no-one, and her will to undergo the final sex-change speaks to the strength of how she feels herself to be on the inside; despite Rosário’s urgings, she has been reluctant to take the final step, having grown fully into this in-between identity. Now having the vestiges of her femininity stripped from her, however, it would be dishonest to die anything other than like a man. It seems like a very sad ending, in part because the film fails to show us any of the joy that must surely have filled at least part of Tonia’s life, but her final song is apposite, a wish to be plural, the impossible dream that underpins a serious-minded, tender and moving film.

d João Pedro Rodrigues p Maria João Sigalho sc João Pedro Rodrigues, Rui Catalão ph Rui Poças ed João Pedro Rodrigues, Rui Mourão ad João Rui Guerra da Mata cast Fernando Santos, Jenny Larue, Miguel Loureira, Fernando Gomes, Alexander David, Chandra Malatitch, Gonçalo Ferreira De Almeida
(2009, Por/Fr, 133m)

House on Haunted Hill

An archetypal funhouse of Castle hokum. Millionaire Price offers five strangers $10,000 to live through the night, locked in a haunted mansion (atmospherically played in exteriors by Wright’s Ennis Brown House). But does he have an ulterior motive concerning his young wife (his fifth!)? Or does she? It’s scarcely important, compared with giving the audience a good scare, via a vat of acid in the basement, severed heads, guns in coffins etc and, on the first run, “Emergo”, a glowing skeleton swooping through the theatres. The shocks are executed with a minimum of ingenuity in light, sound and editing, and the plot becomes an interference, but taken as a creaky ghost-train ride, 75 minutes’ entertaining nonsense is assured.

d/p William Castle sc Robb White p Carl E. Guthrie ed Roy Livingstone ad David Milton m Von Dexter cast Vincent Price, Carolyn Craig, Richard Long, Elisha Cook Jr, Carol Ohmart, Alan Marshall, Julie Mitchum
(1959, USA, 75min, b/w)

Dirigible

This was the movie that ushered Harry Cohn’s Columbia Pictures into the big time, with a spanking gala opening at Grauman’s Chinese, Hollywood’s premier premiere theater; it was the studio’s and Capra’s first million-dollar movie, and an unqualified success.

Yet like so many films from the early (and not so early) years of our still young film-art, it had sort of disappeared, as an adventure film obscure and anomalous amongst the pre-code sauciness and comedies of the common man in Capra’s oeuvre. Frank Capra III was on hand to present its re-emergence at the 2011 TCM Festival, and laud the virtues of his grandfather’s movie in a brand new restoration; his introduction was happily appropriate to the film, stilted yet endearing, broad-brush inaccurate but with good old-fashioned, optimistic enthusiasm trumping any more troubling issues.

The story centres on stolid dirigible captain Jack Braden (Jack Holt) and daredevil plane pilot ‘Frisky’ Pierce (Ralph Graves), both set on getting to the South Pole. Despite their being best pals, this goal turns into a rivalry contest, thoughtlessly initiated by Fay Wray, married to the latter but in love with them both. Capra hadn’t found his ear yet: the dialogue is remarkably uneven in its pacing, the human story is negligible (Holt is a stiff, Graves an arrested adolescent, Wray simpers throughout unable to decide what she wants) and the wonky tone is exemplified by a terrifically ironic reading of a love letter at the climax, immediately negated by a far-too-obvious accident and a weak “can you beat that?”

If that was all there was to the film it’d hardly be worth restoring, even with the Capra name on it. The real draw, however, is in the terrific aviation stuff and a splendid 3-acre Antarctic set built in the 90° heat of the San Gabriel Valley. There’s great footage of the USS Los Angeles taking off, landing, and sailing majestically through a skyful of balloons; Pierce’s aeroplane soaring and corkscrewing through the clouds; and a fantastic sequence of the latter docking beneath the former whilst in flight (also of interest is extensive footage of the Lakehurst naval base, where the Hindenburg burned up four years later).

The dirigible’s thunderstorm crack-up is rather underwhelming, but there’s excellent model-work and process shots elsewhere, alongside actual flying footage, and a strikingly effective polar crash-land. Capra III told a pretty grim story about using dry ice to simulate sub-zero breath (an actor losing several teeth and part of his jaw..) but the breath is all that’s missing from the Californian Antarctic; the bright cumulus skies photograph in black and white as crisp and frigid over an impressive vista of ice mountains and snow plains, and the grim hardships of a 900-mile trek over the ice are neither glossed nor gloated over. For all that it may lack in texture of character, Dirigible rattles along quite happily, eminently deserving of restoration not only as a significant picture in the history of Hollywood, but as a terrific document of a brief and exciting chapter in US aviation.

d Frank Capra p Frank Capra, Harry Cohn, Frank Fouce sc Jo Swerling ph Joseph Walker ed Maurice Wright, Harry L. Decker sd Edward C. Jewell, Edward Shulter m C. Bakaleinikoff cast Jack Holt, Ralph Graves, Fay Wray, Hobart Bosworth, Roscoe Karns, Harold Goodwin, Clarence Muse, Emmett Corrigan
(1931, US, 100, b/w)