Greta

Director Neil Jordan

Actress Chloë Grace Moretz at an event for Greta

Actress Isabelle Huppert doing her thing

GRETA                       D                    

Ireland  USA  (98 mi)  2019 ‘Scope  d:  Neil Jordan             Official Site

This is not Isabelle Huppert as the gregariously sunny and overly friendly tourist in Hang Sang-soo’s delightfully funny Claire's Camera (La caméra de Claire) (2017), but something more along the lines of Paul Verhoeven’s twistedly demented, over-the-top Elle (2016), where Huppert steals the show as a rape victim gone psycho in retaliation, a howling audience pleaser that likely sent Huppert more scripts along similar lines, with this film exploring similar territory.  Here, in an English-speaking role, she’s a wildly exaggerated, wacko stalker character, amusingly borrowing an Olivier Assayas technique utilized in Personal Shopper (2017), where a cellphone becomes an instrument of horror, sending shockwaves of anxiety through the audience in what seems an outrageous sequential sequence of editing, each emailed photo showing a glimpse of someone being followed, literally tracking her by the second, yet there is no one that can be seen, creating a creepy feeling of ghostly invisibility.  Huppert inhabits that unfilled space where you don’t want to go, feeling quite comfortable in the role, perhaps relishing the opportunity, as after each shot is finished shooting, the subsequent relief afterwards is probably a cascade of laughs, as this was probably much more fun to make than to sit in a theater to witness, where it’s all about psychological gamesmanship, offering a few clues along the way, but nothing that would suggest where this one is going.  Neil Jordan hasn’t made a film in 6-years, so something about this intrigued him.  Working with Huppert, who has over 120 film credits to her name, appearing in 20 films premiering in competition at Cannes, also more than 25 stage and nearly 20 television movie appearances, may have been the attraction, as who wouldn’t want to work with her?  She’s a French legend and icon, among the greatest to ever do it, still a force to be reckoned with.  That said, this is not among her better films, but is among her more trashy roles, as she is slumming in B-movie schlock film territory, brazenly going where few artists of her stature ever venture, as it’s considerably beneath her elevated rare air, as she won’t be nominated for any awards with this one, yet it’s to her credit that she’s willing to take on “any” role. 

Never one to shy away from horror films, this is a throwback to the era of films like THE SHINING (1980), DRESSED TO KILL (1980), FATAL ATTRACTION (1987), CAPE FEAR (1991) or BASIC INSTINCT (1992), where seemingly normal characters went off the rails in a ridiculously big way, becoming psychopathic avengers or killers, with overly familiar movie stars having naughty fun scaring the living bejeezus out of audiences.  While there tended to be Hitchcockian sexual undertones, that doesn’t exist here, instead relying upon an unknown factor, namely the death of a parent, which creates a certain amount of sympathy, making it that much easier to exploit the underlying vulnerabilities of the character.  Enter Frances McCullen (Chloë Grace Moretz), a Smith college graduate working as a waitress while living in a stunning Tribeca loft apartment gifted by the wealthy father of her best friend Erica, Maika Monroe from Robert David Mitchell’s urban zombie epic It Follows (2014), who feels like a Valley girl transplant from Southern California, speaking a girl lingo that seemingly only exists in the movies.  Surprisingly short on character development, we never learn much about anyone in this film, no back story, no other friendships to speak of, no social life to draw upon, basically a blank canvas that is sprinkled with various clues throughout, but everything is set in motion from a single seemingly innocuous event, the discovery of a handbag on the subway, with Frances intent on returning it to its rightful owner.  While Erica is all about stealing the cash and tossing the bag, Frances retorts, “That’s just not the way we do things where I’m from.”  Riding her bike across the bridge to Brooklyn (then leaving it unlocked), Frances discovers Greta (Huppert), a middle-aged widow who seems to get by offering piano instruction, playing Liszt as a past time, seemingly leading a lonely life, reaching out to Frances like a long-lost daughter, as her own is too busy living her life in Paris.  Suggesting she might get a pet dog for companionship, Frances agrees to help her pick one out, with Greta choosing the mopiest dog in the kennel, the most disinterested and least desirable, exuding no signs of friendliness, just one day away from being put to sleep.    

  

While these women are bonding, Frances freaks out Erica a bit by avoiding an invitation to a party, instead spending time with Greta, who Erica calls an “old lady,” which seems like misplaced priorities, with Erica berating her “She’s not your mother,” but Frances is actually calling her a friend.  That is, until she discovers Greta has a storage space filled with the exact same handbag, each one with a different girl’s name and phone number attached, signs of a deceitful plot with ominous implications, ignoring her altogether afterwards.  Greta ups the ante, flooding her cellphone with unanswered calls, showing up at work unexpectedly, growing desperate in her absence, showing signs of deteriorating mental instability.  Ignoring her altogether, Greta stands across the street from the restaurant where she works, remaining in that fixed position all day, then suddenly appears outside her apartment.  Calls to the police get her nowhere, as no one’s been threatened, where the police suggest that she simply ignore her.  Yet when she shows up with a restaurant reservation, she throws one hell of a hissy fit, played without an ounce of subtlety, turning demonstrably violent, where she has to be physically removed from the premises, hauled away in a paddy van, with Frances asking the police if she should still just ignore her?  She immediately files for a restraining order, but it takes months to obtain a court hearing, leaving her in a state of limbo.  Of course, things only escalate from there, as Greta turns up unexpectedly just about anywhere, where one of the best scenes in the entire film turns out to be a jolting shock of extreme fear that ends up a dream sequence, yet it magnifies the hold this woman has over Frances’ life.  Before long that hysterical fear becomes her reality, as Greta turns into a hidden monster with the most ridiculously vile motives, turning uglier by the minute, becoming a Gothic horror thriller so over-the-top that its shameless ambition seems designed to creep people out, yet Huppert, a true mastermind of lunacy, sunnily goes about her business, even dancing from the sheer joy of the evil she inflicts, as she’s a woman on a mission, undeterred by any and all obstacles, which she views as mere child’s play after a while, so easily manipulating others seemingly without effort.  Even Jordan regular Stephen Rea makes a brief appearance, but once the storyline takes on the psychotic deliriums of Greta’s deranged state of mind, the film becomes nauseatingly disturbing, too depressing to fall into the camp category, perhaps lacking the lesbian context it needs, especially since she plays the all too recognizable Liebestraum (Dream of Love) on the piano, Liberace Liebestraum.wmv - YouTube (4:34), the kind of lush melody featured in 30’s and 40’s heavily romanticized black and white love stories, instead regressing into the grotesque pleasures of torture porn, becoming little more than a crudely sadistic infantile fantasy.

It Follows

Maika Monroe at Cannes 2014 

IT FOLLOWS             C+                    

USA  (107 mi)  2014  ‘Scope  d:  Robert David Mitchell

From the director of THE MYTH OF THE AMERICAN SLEEPOVER (2010), a film that magnifies the adolescent experience of teens in search of love and sex, this Michigan native has shot a campy teen horror film set in the lavish Detroit suburbs.  Borrowing from other horror classics, including an 80’s sounding synth score right out of John Carpenter, the creep master of low budget horror films, none more influential than HALLOWEEN (1978), which reinvented the slasher film set in the safe suburban communities, introducing the idea that “you couldn’t kill evil,” Mitchell opens the film in the undisturbed quiet of a suburban setting when a young girl dressed only in underwear bursts from a front door racing down the street in terror.  Porch lights turn on as onlookers curiously peer out wondering what’s going on.  The girl runs back inside her own home (street address 1492, which coincides with the discovery of America) where her father asks if she’s all right before bolting out the door again without a word, hopping into a car and driving away.  In no time, however, we see her dead and mutilated body left on the beach.  Cut to the screen titles.  This is a film that enjoys doing riffs on other horror films, where it’s largely an homage to the horror genre itself, as the playful spirit throughout is meant for pure enjoyment, using sex as the trigger for the sheer terror that follows.  While this is a low budget, no frills effort that doesn’t rely upon special effects, instead it uses old-fashioned cutting and editing to heighten the element of surprise, using almost entirely unknown actors to leverage the story while recalling the paranoia established from early 1950’s sci-fi B-movies like the original THE THING (1951), a flying saucer ghost story where military experts are unable to eradicate the worldwide threat by this extraterrestrial creature from outer space, leaving the audience hanging on the final warning, “Watch the skies, everywhere!  Keep looking.  Keep watching the skies!”  Here the same message is translated to looking over your shoulder as something is following you. 

19-year old Jay, Maika Monroe from Labor Day (2013), is your typical teenage suburban girl, where her natural good looks attract plenty of male attention, as she’s used to being the object of desire, where normally she’d be fending off flirtatious advances.  Her first sexual encounter, however, with a guy named Hugh (Jake Weary) takes a strange turn for the worse.  Hopping into the back seat of Hugh’s car, she allows him to have sex with her, going into the trunk afterwards to get something, bringing back a chloroform-soaked rag where he drugs her unconscious.  Next thing you know she’s strapped to a wheelchair dressed in her undies where she’s forced to look upon a slowly approaching creature, where Hugh informs her that no one else can see this entity except her, but it will continually follow her until she has sex with someone else and passes this ghostly curse onto them.  Should she allow this creature to touch her, she will die, where the creature will then follow the previous host.  Having diligently informed her, he helps her escape and drops her home afterwards, relieved of the overriding tension he’d been carrying around with him.  For Jay, however, she begins to see phantom figures approaching her, terrifying, half-naked bodies that resemble ghoulish zombies, causing her to continually flee from unseen forces.  These creatures can only walk, however, while she can run or drive away from them, buying some time before they catch up to her.  With the help of her sister Kelly (Lili Sepe), along with a handful of friends, they attempt to comprehend her nightmarish visions, keeping her surrounded by their constant presence, trying to protect her from forces they can’t even see.  Her male friends are intrigued by the idea that she needs to have sex with someone else, scoffing at the idea that this could present problems, volunteering their services, exhibiting a kind of fake macho courage in the face of her rising fear, where eventually she is literally petrified.  Continually interchanging the viewer perspective, occasionally the audience can see the creatures (yes, there are more than one), while at other times they remain invisible, equally creepy either way, but also humorous in the way this continually pokes fun at the horror genre. 

Deliberately paced, infused with an ominous atmosphere of inescapable dread, using 360 degree pans to recreate the unsettling feeling of a continual presence of some invisible force lurking nearby, her friends drive her to a nearby lake where they curiously attempt to avoid the approaching terror while also having a little party fun of their own.  The mood quickly changes when Jay’s hair is mysteriously lifted up into the air, and when a friend attempts to intervene he is knocked silly, where they run and take cover in a nearby shed, but the forces attempt to batter the door down while the others can’t see anything.  In this way, the director reminds us of a similar apparition attacking Barbara Hershey in The Entity (1982), based on actual reported events where her son admitted to seeing his mother tossed around the room, and when he attempted to intervene, he was thrown across the room as well by an unseen force.  Like CHRISTINE (1983), these films are inspired by the effects of demonic possession continually haunting their helpless victims, where off-balanced camera angles reflect the victim’s deteriorating mental state.  Immersed in an atmosphere of teenage sexual confusion, where of course there are no adults anywhere to be seen, they are not only forced to confront their fears, but also face the hideous consequences of sex.  Like many horror films, however, the looming presence of panic is much scarier than actually showing a threatening monster, where it all leads up to a climactic swimming pool sequence where they inexplicably attempt to lure these threatening invisible spirits.  In a mix of Jacques Tourneur’s CAT PEOPLE (1942) and THE THING (1951), with a bit of LET THE RIGHT ONE IN (2008) thrown in for good measure, it all grows a bit ridiculous by the end when Jay’s friends devise a plan to eliminate the monster at a dilapidated indoor swimming pool on the other side of the tracks, an area in stark contrast to the sanitized suburbia of their homes.  While it’s obvious the director is throwing everything but the kitchen sink into this mix of the macabre and the terrifying, creating a demonic ghost story that is more about ghoulish vampires and the power of suggestion, but it’s always the kids themselves left to their own devices that must restore balance and order into their world after it’s been turned upside down.  Much of this Carpenteresque parody is a pale imitation of the real thing, where sex and horror have always been an unhealthy mix onscreen, though the idea of a girl trying to avoid having sex altogether is a novel approach, nonetheless while this has its moments, it never adds up to much, failing to get below the surface and feels more like a bunch of sequences thrown together. 

Labor Day

LABOR DAY              B                     

USA  (111 mi)  2013  ‘Scope  d:  Jason Reitman          Official site [Brazil]

While this is just an old-fashioned romance, told in the mythic Hollywood style where the prince in shining armor arrives on horseback and slays all the dragons, rescuing the fair maiden and earning her heart in the process, it does retain a certain fantasy element, where one finds this hard to believe, yet there’s also something oddly compelling about it.  Based on Joyce Maynard’s 2009 novel, the same author that wrote the source material for Gus van Sant’s dark satire To Die For (1995), this is another film with a major woman’s role, this time starring Kate Winslet as a divorced mother Adele suffering from severe depression (including signs of agoraphobia), as she’s afraid to leave the safety of her home, rarely ever leaving the house.  Compensating for her fears and anxieties is her 13-year old son Henry (Gattlin Griffith), who recognizes her loneliness, understanding that she never recovered from having her heart stolen from her when her husband left, “I don’t think losing my father broke my mother’s heart, but, rather, losing love itself,” so he willingly looks after his mom, taking care of her as much as he can, and runs all the household errands for her.  While the book is set in New Hampshire, the film was shot in various small towns in Massachusetts that convincingly retain the period look of 1987.  In the opening sequence, the camera glides through a seemingly neverending canopy of trees as we move further away from the posh suburbs out into the tree-lined street of a rural small town, where, interestingly, another actor is narrating the first person voiceover of Henry, the recognizable Tobey Maguire, who doesn’t figure into the film until the final ten minutes, seen as an older adult version of Henry, where many of his earlier thoughts read like a personal memoir.  Despite the high wattage star of Winslet as his mother, this relatively unknown kid carries the picture on his shoulder, as it’s all seen through his eyes.     

Persuading his mother to leave the house, the two spend the first day of the last weekend of summer together stocking up on needed school supplies, when Henry is pulled aside by a bleeding stranger, Frank (Josh Brolin), indicating he needs some help, and somehow manages to talk the two of them into allowing him to come home with them, placing his arm menacingly around Henry and telling Adele, “Frankly, this needs to happen.”  By the time they get home to sort things out, he tells them he’s an escaped prisoner, that he jumped out of a 2nd story hospital window while recovering from an appendectomy operation.  Promising to be out in the morning, hoping to catch a ride on a freight train, hearing a whistle off in the distance, the underlying tension is established in silence, where part of the unique power of the film is its wordless quality, and what little dialogue we hear is essential, while the rest is captured in a kind of quiet intrigue.  These harrowing moments are unsettling, as he’s inclined to tie them up, where this act of making Adele a prisoner in her own home is ironic considering psychologically speaking she’s already a prisoner.  The look of helplessness and fear on her face is palpable, but her concern is for Henry, so Frank reassures her, ”I’ve never intentionally hurt anyone in my life.”  The television news reports, however, suggest he’s been serving 18 years for murder and the police warn the public he could be armed and dangerous.  Instead he goes on a wordless montage of fixing things up around the house, one after another, and even cooks up something to eat, where he spoonfeeds Adele bite by bite, while at the same time the director serves the audience brief flashbacks of Frank’s past, where we’re able to see what landed Frank in jail.  Certainly one recurring parallel between Frank and Adele are their mutual thoughts of regret and sadness, where perhaps they’ve both been living their whole lives containing these haunting feelings of sorrow and loss.    

Frank’s ease around the house, instantly making himself helpful, becoming the man that’s missing for both of them, feels too good to be true, where neither Henry nor his mom want him to go, urging him to stay just a bit longer for his wounds to heal, but the other side of the coin is they both have to hide his presence from the rest of the world, where occasional contact with actual people send them into anxiety mode.  Henry is at an age where every girl is a godsend, and one literally falls into his lap, Mandy (Maika Monroe), an outsider teen who’s been badly scarred from her parent’s trauma-inflicting divorce, believing adults routinely get rid of kids to do what they want, which is have sex.  And while she’s busy describing the teenage apocalyptic philosophy of doom, which makes perfect sense to her, Frank and Adele are thinking about making a run for the border (like Bonnie and Clyde, according to Mandy), escaping to Canada where they can start a new life.  But as events fall into place, one of more more telling scenes happens when Henry spends Sunday with his Dad (Clark Gregg) and extended family, taking place at a Friendly’s family restaurant, which is an embarrassing depiction of what “normal” looks like in America, where adults are overly patronizing, to the point of being nauseating, while the kids are bored silly.  This brief encounter hovers like a cloud of soot and smog over Henry’s horizon, as this is the life he could be leading, and instead he’s got Bonnie and Clyde, where the love-starved Frank and Adele become infatuated, bringing Adele out of her funk, where taking a chance on Frank is dangerous, but he’s attentive to Henry, becoming a poignant coming-of-age story while also showing the great risks involved in romance.  While there’s a bit of schmaltz involved in the ending, the novelist Joyce Maynard once experienced an intense exchange of a flurry of letters in a relationship with a convicted murderer, suggesting ordinary people can be driven by impulsive decisions and reckless behavior, and that sometimes one must make a leap of faith to find love.