Careful

 

Director Guy Maddin 

CAREFUL                 A-                                                                                                        Canada  (100 mi)  1992  d: Guy Maddin

Watching Careful is like observing a dream from an ancient time.  A mash-up of mysteries and manners.  Guy Maddin, I believe, is one of the masters who is dissatisfied with today’s film landscape.  He likes to return to cinematic treasure chests and speculate on their various evolutionary paths.  Careful is a powerful declaration of resistance.                                           —Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Deliriously demented, certainly not like anything else you’ve ever seen, co-written with George Toles, a mentor and frequent collaborator, professor of film studies and drama at the University of Manitoba, yet filmed, directed, and edited by Maddin, who is also the production designer and sound editor, so this film has his imprint all over it.  Exploring, among other things, incest and the Oedipal complex, Maddin creates a playful subversion of genres, where he seems to be having fun with Freudian psychoanalytic theories, using color filters, hand-tinted color gels, sepia tints, and painted backdrops to explore anxieties and deep-seated repression.  His first color feature and most dialogue-heavy effort to date, the filmmaker’s cinematic obsessions deliberately resemble the look of silent films, complete with foggy lenses, jumpy editing, inconsistent film-speeds, missing frames, extreme camera angles, absurdly melodramatic dialogue, old costumes, bad film exposures, tinted monochrome, saturated color, and scratchy musical recordings, with a specifically composed musical score by John McCulloch.  You’d think you walked into a cinema of the 20’s and 30’s, when the silent era reigned supreme, as even after the introduction of talking pictures, the style was essentially the same.  For a movie adapting previous genres into a modern era film, this is shockingly original, absurdly funny, and a true work of art, a cinema of excess, inhabiting a world where hysteria and parody co-exist, remaining exhaustingly complex, leaving the impression of an alternate world strangely distanced from our own, where watching it can be a chore, as the thoroughly unsympathetic characters aren’t exactly developed into anything relatable or understandable, instead they feel more like stock storybook figures, caricatures even, like out of a children’s fairy tale.  With its preoccupation with shame and desire through a complicated story of three families caught up in incestuous relationships, this is all part of the film’s suffocating repression through a melodramatic lens, where the village’s central premise, that citizens must speak in near-whispers to avoid triggering lethal avalanches, serves as an elaborate metaphor for suppressed emotions and repressed desires, emphasizing how the characters’ extreme emotional control paradoxically traps and imprisons them.  In the fictional snow-covered, mountain town of Tolzbad, where the snow is always falling, yet due to its precarious position, even the slightest noise may trigger an avalanche, requiring everyone to remain quiet, never making a sound, as Maddin explores the tension between the propriety required of Tolzbad’s residents and the passions and frustrations which drive virtually all of the film’s major characters to their tragic ends.  Modeling itself on the German mountain film genre of the late 1920’s and early 1930’s, known as Bergfilm, which was a highly popular cinematic movement during the late Weimar Republic which celebrated the majesty of nature and human endurance in alpine settings, as popular to German audiences as Westerns were to Americans, like Arnold Fanck and Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s THE WHITE HELL OF PIZ PALÜ (1929), starring Leni Riefenstahl in a classic alpine survival tale, or Riefenstahl’s directorial debut, THE BLUE LIGHT (1932).  The irony here is that Maddin comes from the province of Manitoba, which happens to be the flattest region of Canada.  Curiously, both Maddin and Rainer Werner Fassbinder worked to ensure that the lead characters, even in the cheapest of films, are lit and framed like movie stars, while never afraid to utilize the most hackneyed of plot twists to advance the storyline.     

A key aspect to Maddin’s films, most of which receive state funding, is structured around artifice and recognition, film and memory, creating a fever dream of a world that relies upon the imagination triggering the root of our subconscious memories, as beneath this surface politeness and courtesy lies a moral rot of depravity.  To achieve that end, the filmmaker works with 16mm, 8mm, and even two-strip Technicolor, styles that would otherwise be considered obsolete, while also using set design, props, and costumes in a deliberately unnatural effect, highlighted by over-lit and saturated photography, alternating tinted monochromes with what looks like worn-out Technicolor, creating a netherworld that strongly recalls Robert Wiene’s THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI (1920), a seminal work of German Expressionism, while also resembling Carl Theodor Dreyer’s VAMPYR (1932).  Maddin also draws upon 19th century European literature, where the level of tragedy is so excessively over-the-top melodramatic, the more overwrought the better, while also utilizing various avant-garde film traditions from the silent era that vehemently reject a naturalist aesthetic, where the constantly unsettling and super-charged atmosphere, along with the use of high-contrast lighting, twisted sets, and histrionic performances, with dialogue delivered in a highly stylized way, are all associated with German Expressionism.  In this case, form really is the subject, as everything is magnified through that artificial lens, which is how Maddin develops his cinematic art.  His previous film, TALES FROM THE GIMLI HOSPITAL (1988), was rejected by the Toronto Film Festival, but premiered at a midnight screening in New York that drew audiences for an entire year, much like David Lynch’s ERASERHEAD (1977) had done years earlier, both developing cult followers, with Martin Scorsese and critic J. Hoberman both championing this film as well, which led to a regular position at The Village Voice as a film commentator, literally jumpstarting a literary career.  The fact that he writes his own films, while also controlling the visual and textural component of his films, with their uncanny recreation of archaic modes of the past, creates a rare cinematic fantasy with exaggerated visual tones and narrative excesses that can be difficult to decipher, yet his auterist art has become synonymous with a peculiar Canadian cinematic identity that is powerfully introspective, so deeply rooted in the imagination and a melodramatic sensibility.  Part of this may come from growing up in the winters of Winnipeg, where surviving the eternal darkness all winter long helps make these dead things come alive.  It’s important to note that you don’t have to be a film aficionado of silent cinema to appreciate how unsettling the whispered nuances of this film can be.  To this he adds surrealist elements, like the father as an infant losing an eye to an exposed pin on his mother’s brooch, getting maimed during a hug, which actually happened to Maddin’s father, literally pulled from his family history, which may also have influenced his 5-minute short ODILON REDON OR THE EYE LIKE A STRANGE BALLOON MOUNTS TOWARD INFINITY (1995), based on an actual Odile Redon lithograph from 1882, which was used in the first translation by Charles Baudelaire of Edgar Allan Poe’s poetry.  Maddin actually studied economics and began his professional career as a bank employee before leaving work to make his first short film, THE DEAD FATHER (1985), a surrealist, off-kilter horror tale, where his eccentric reputation has only continued to grow after that.  Maddin is one of one, where there is no one else like him, yet he’s an acquired taste.  However, if you see him in person, the man is fabulously entertaining and utterly hilarious.

Something hidden.  Go and find it.                                                                                Go and look beyond the Ranges –                                                                                      Something lost behind the Ranges.                                                                              Lost and waiting for you.  Go!

—The Explorer by Rudyard Kipling, 1898, quoted in the opening narration by Herr Trotta (Victor Cowie)

Beginning with an extended prologue that sets the tone of the story, told in two parts, with the cautionary introductory innertitle, “Careful, children, careful!” Tolzbad’s inhabitants are taught from childhood to whisper, suppress their desires, and live in quiet desperation to avoid disturbing the snow, subverting the typical male virility, as in Tolzbad, men are weak and live in the shadow of imposing women, namely their mothers and fiancées, exposing their inherent anxieties.  “The passions grow on high mountains and fling their red blossoms to the storm.  Perhaps the boy has mountain fever!  It begins innocently enough, with dreams of mountains, a peak round as a plump knee, or a crest like a frosted bosom white as goat’s milk.  Who could resist the temptation to climb?”  Like old tragedies, Maddin’s films have a love affair with ghosts, like the ghost of Hamlet’s dead father, or the spectral presence of Franz (Vince Rimmer), the attic-bound brother in this film, or the buried bodies unearthed from the frozen snow to the horror of the villagers.  Johann (Brent Neale) and Grigorss (Kyle McCulloch) are brothers and butlers-in-training, beloved by their mother Zenaida (Gosia Dobrowolska), who hates their brother Franz, whom they do not speak of and who has been exiled to the attic.  The ghost of their dead blind father (Michael O’Sullivan), described only as a hapless swan-feeder, appears to Franz to warn him of impending doom in the family, yet Franz, paralyzed and mute and covered in cobwebs, can do nothing, with the ghost complaining that Zenaida never loved him and harbored love for Count Knotkers (Paul Cox) instead, although forbidden to marry him by the Count’s mother.  Johann is engaged to be married to Klara (Sarah Neville), although Grigorss is secretly in love with her as well, but says nothing, while Johann develops an incestuous infatuation with his mother, spying on her through the crevices in the walls, watching her as she undresses and bathes, concocting a love potion that causes her to sleep while he undresses her and ravages her breasts, with a Canadian flag seen waving in the aftermath.  Horrified at himself afterwards, he does unthinkable gruesome things to himself before throwing himself off the mountain.  Grigorss becomes the Count’s butler, but grows disgusted when his mother Zenaida rekindles her love affair with the Count after his own mother dies, wasting no time, leading to an absurdly hilarious moment when Grigorss challenges the Count to a duel at the dinner table, believing he is dishonoring his family, with things only spiraling more out of control after that, evolving into an utterly demented melodramatic tale.  Does Oedipal cinema exist anywhere else like this, sons who struggle with images of fathers who are either too strong or too weak, sons desperately in love with their mothers, or daughters with their fathers, parents who destructively choose one child over another, fathers and sons in competition with the same woman, and the hysterical acting out of these family traumas.  All this and more are at the heart of this film, which captures a deeply disturbing psychological state of mind more than any recognizable narrative, described by Maddin himself in a tongue-in-cheek review in The Village Voice, “Careful is a pro-incest mountain träumerai shot in the two-strip Technicolor used in that holy year of 1929.”  This manages to convey everything the viewer needs to know about the village’s deep-seated repression in strikingly visual ways, using cut-out mountain landscape panoramas from small-scale models, which only begins to describe the full repertoire of visual tricks and techniques employed by Maddin, but what it really reflects is the passion and intensity brought by the filmmaker, who became the youngest recipient ever of the Telluride Film Festival’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 1995, while the director has maintained that his biggest honor to date has been the film’s screening in Paris as part of the hundredth anniversary celebration of the birth of cinema, which also took place in 1995.

Guy Maddin's Top 10 | Current  Criterion

Last Summer (L'été Dernier)

 

Director Catherine Breillat

LAST SUMMER (L'été Dernier)       B-                                                                                 France  Norway  (104 mi)  2023  d: Catherine Breillat

Since I’m an artist, I don’t have to be politically correct.                                                                —Catherine Breillat, Catherine Breillat: Asia Argento Is a Traitor and I don't ... 

The kind of film you’ll see made only in France, which has a tradition of summer movies that spin out of control in dizzying fashion, as it fits their sensibility of lurid provocation causing considerable outrage.  There’s a contentious aspect to all the films of this director, where fantasy always plays a large role, typically female fantasies in the context of a patriarchal society, and this is no different, as she enjoys exploring the edge of moral turpitude, literally normalizing taboo subjects, feeling very comfortable with the uncomfortable.  Described by Beatrice Loyaza in her Film Comment interview (Interview: Catherine Breillat on Last Summer) in the fall of 2023 as “the high priestess of errant female sexuality.  Throughout her career, she has continued to ruffle feathers, be it with her austere visions of (unsimulated) sex (Romance, 1999) or with her unflinchingly violent portrayals of sexual initiation (Fat Girl, 2001),” while actress Asia Argento, who worked with her on THE LAST MISTRESS (2007), fed up with her aversion to the #MeToo movement while publicly defending serial rapist Harvey Weinstein after more than 80 women made allegations of sexual harassment or rape against him, described Breillat as “the most sadistic and downright evil director I’ve ever worked with (French Filmmaker Catherine Breillat Calls Actress Asia ...).”  Coming after a period of not making any films in a decade, the 76-year old director, novelist, and European Graduate School film professor chose to do a literal French remake of May el-Toukhy’s edgy Danish film QUEEN OF HEARTS (2019), working for the first time with cinematographer Jeanne Lapoirie, who began her career shooting André Téchiné's remarkable Wild Reeds (Les Roseaux Sauvages) (1994), with a screenplay written by Breillat and Pascal Bonitzer, which premiered at Cannes in 2023.  The scandalous story recalls the moral transgressions of Woody Allen’s infamous love affair with Soon-Yi Previn, the adopted daughter of his former partner Mia Farrow, who discovered nude photographs of Previn in Allen’s home, yet they ended up in a marriage that still stands the test of time, despite a more than thirty year age difference between them, while also recalling the tabloid sensation of Todd Haynes’ 2023 Top Ten List #9 May December, which subverts the typical male predator role into a female.  Women and female desire have been a consistent element of Breillat's work, where part of equality of the sexes is an understanding that they’re both equally capable of carrying out the same kind of crimes, including crimes of passion, where certainly one of the goals of this film is to reverse gender norms.  In this regard, Breillat distinguishes herself, as she refuses to render judgment on either party, but instead presents a quasi-realist take on a particularly dark subject matter, as a torrid sexual relationship develops between a fifty-year old woman Anne (Léa Drucker, from Xavier Legrand’s 2017 Top Ten List #7 Custody (Jusqu'à la garde) and Lukas Dhont’s Close in 2022), and her self-absorbed, emotionally remote 17-year old stepson Théo (Samuel Kirchner, the son of actress Irène Jacob and younger brother of Paul Kirchner from Christophe Honoré’s 2023 Top Ten List #6 Winter Boy (Le Lycéen), who was originally cast in the role), bearing some physical resemblance to Björn Andrésen, the beautiful boy portrayed in Luchino Visconti’s DEATH IN VENICE (1971).  The French have a term for it, amour fou, an uncontrollable or obsessive passion, succumbing to the power of the flesh over reason, often with an accompanying sense of doom.  With no real audience connection to any of the characters, and her usual lack of subtlety or grace, not really her strong suit, Breillat turns the screws in making this as disturbing and as uncomfortable as possible, yet still quintessentially French, turning this into a bonafide horror movie, with a lie at the heart of the picture, intentionally left ambiguous, without a trace of melodrama, though it can feel contrived and over-the-top, bordering on bombastic, where Breillat’s characters have a history of making bad decisions and constantly lying to themselves, while the unsettling nature of the fallout can leave viewers with a sinking feeling.

Listed at #9 on Cahiers du Cinéma: Top Ten Films of 2023, and #5 by John Waters, this is an elevated family drama with a pernicious undercurrent of forbidden love, where it brings to mind Bernardo Bertolucci’s LUNA (1979), an incestuous love story between an opera singer (Jill Clayburgh) and her drug-addicted 15-year-old son, something Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky described as “monstrous, cheap, vulgar rubbish."  What makes this so abhorrent is Anne’s profession, as she’s a French juvenile rights attorney for sexually abused minors, so she’s used to seeing the traumatic harm inflicted by adults onto children, where the profound impact is not just heartbreaking, but emotionally devastating.  So she’s a gatekeeper for damaged youth, a protector from salacious and injurious acts, where the psychological damage is long-lasting and incomprehensibly toxic.  With that introductory backdrop, what follows is a cautionary tale that takes us down a rabbit hole of aberrant behavior.  Théo has been living with his mother in Geneva, but after getting kicked out of school for assaulting a teacher, this problem child comes to live with Anne and her husband Pierre (Olivier Rabourdin), along with their two young adopted Asian daughters Angela (Angela Chen) and Serena (Serena Hu), in an immense home on the heavily forested outskirts of Paris.  Pierre has business connections that require extensive travel, harboring a guilty conscience about not being there during Théo’s childhood, still having a distant relationship, with a brooding Théo remaining socially aloof, continually glued to his phone, seen moping in his room, and not really interacting with anyone.  His emotional volatility creates a negative impression, regarded as an irritant, where he just doesn’t give a damn about anyone else.  When Anne discovers he’s the likely culprit in a break-in, his self-centered attitude doesn’t sit well with her, so she attempts to set him straight, but in doing so opens herself up, spending time together during one of her husband’s prolonged absences, even allowing him to give her a small, homemade tattoo on her forearm, a completely unlikely scenario that leads to kisses and a passionate embrace, where it’s clear she has crossed the line of acceptable behavior.  As improbable as it sounds, she allows herself to get caught up in forbidden desires, suddenly reliving her lost youth in the pastoral bliss of summer, echoing Agnės Varda’s KUNG-FU MASTER! (1988), perhaps best expressed in a vintage Mercedes convertible drive out in the countryside set to the music of Sonic Youth, Sonic Youth - Dirty Boots (Revised Audio) YouTube (5:06), which is like an engine gearing up for a heightened impact.  This rebellious spirit emboldens them both, suddenly free to defy the odds and ignore all the warning signs, breaking down all moral boundaries, simply plunging into the forbidden zone, Here is an exclusive clip from French provocateur Catherine ... YouTube (2:20).  On the other hand, Anne is rarely seen without a glass of wine in her hand, potentially clouding her judgment, yet if audiences know anything about her it is that she of all people should know better, something we are constantly reminded of throughout the film.  Based on this knowledge, it’s hard to view her as a sexual predator, and she has multiple opportunities to break it off, but succumbs instead to her lustful instincts at the expense of everything else, all happening right under the nose of her husband, where this is a film that prioritizes the carnal part of the relationship rather than the havoc it could wreak, but the sex scenes play out almost entirely as close-ups on faces rather than naked bodies.  The moral hypocrisy is hard to miss, especially having seen the emotional fragility of the young girls Anne represents, yet she continually places herself in the most compromising positions, falling into an ethical free fall where rules are simply thrown out the window.  It’s hard to view this as anything other than arrogance and self-righteousness, as if this is her God-given right.      

The film is told almost completely through Anne’s perspective, allowing viewers to actually get inside her head, which adds a subversive layer to the experience.  And while this illicit couple sneak around behind the backs of adults, they are discovered by her sister Mina (Clotilde Courau), who has had her own difficult struggles in life and is truly disgusted by what she sees, as her sister is someone Mina could lean on for advice and support.  Théo doesn’t care if they get discovered, as he’s not connected to anyone or anything, but Anne has her family and career to think about, where she is jeopardizing both.  In a beautiful outdoor setting for lunch, the unsuspecting Pierre discusses taking his son for a little one-on-one time together, thinking it’s exactly what he needs, as we see Théo’s shirtless frame hovering in the background, like you see in the horror films, Last Summer (L'Été Dernier) new clip official from Cannes ... YouTube (1:31), suggesting Anne is in deeper trouble than she thinks, where the amped up tension is thick, knowing how this could open Pandora’s Box.  Upon his return, Pierre reveals his son’s startling allegations, but rather than confront the reality of her own behavior, Anne instead pretends nothing happened and doubles down on the cover up, coldly pretending it’s all a vile lie espoused by a mixed-up kid who’s trying to get back at his father for not being there for him.  The further down the road we go, the uglier and more loathsome it feels, revealing an unseemly side of the power dynamics of middle class entitlement, with Anne banking on her contention that no one will believe a troubled kid over a seasoned adult professional, where the irony is not lost on us, coming from a woman who advocates for minors, “Nobody will believe you.  You’re not credible.”  While that may be her viewpoint, it is certainly not that of the viewing audience, who are appalled at what we see, as she has betrayed not only her marriage and parental responsibilities, but also everything that her profession stands for.  Thoroughly capable of committing the same crimes as men, Anne privileges female pleasure in a way that is not only problematic, but treads rather murkily into rape territory, if not legally then certainly metaphorically.  In France, the legal age of consent is fifteen-years old, so the real taboo is incest, which applies to sexual relationships between children under 18 and their stepparents. Breillat portrays the situation with little to no judgment, even when things fall apart under the stress of outside scrutiny, but for viewers this becomes fertile grounds for horror, filled with self-deceptions, accentuated by Anne’s defiant lies and her insistent denial of any and all responsibility, essentially subverting the truth, completely blind to the ramifications, where in the end there is a general acceptance of the unacceptable.  That may be the real horror.  Who knew she would become the wicked stepmother, often seen in a devious light in fairy tales (The myth of the evil stepmother - BBC).  It shows that people of a privileged social class will resort to anything, lies, hypocrisy, or even smear tactics to defend their bourgeois lifestyles.  As a point of contention, Breillat’s own attitude towards this film bears some scrutiny, describing at a Cannes press conference that what transpires is “pure love” (Catherine Breillat Talks Taboo-Breaking Cannes film Last ...), as there is a certain romanticization in the relationship of Anne and Théo, though it couldn’t be less about “love,” as it’s so self-centered and destructive, exuding no faith in each other, or any existing humanity, with Breillat also suggesting there is no abuse, that “All of my characters are innocent” (State of Grace: Catherine Breillat on Last Summer), describing those who negatively pass moral judgment on their affair as “the ayatollahs.”  Similarly, she has spoken out against intimacy coordinators, describing them as “stupid” while also comparing them to the Taliban (Awful #metoo extremism is worse than McCarthyism).  In this instance, the director may be her own worst enemy, as her instincts for lacking any moral compass are a dangerous position for any artist, actually recalling the reaction of the Julianne Moore character in MAY DECEMBER, where a 34-year old teacher pleaded guilty to having sex with a 12-year old 6th grade student, yet in her mind she viewed statutory rape as a Shakespearean romance of star-crossed lovers, veering into a delusional psychopathic understanding, with French novelist Christine Angot similarly denouncing Breillat’s film as “an aestheticization of incest.”  As the Rohmeresque title indicates, this is one of Breillat’s lightest films, only showing what she wants us to see, yet by the end, the heavy storm clouds are lurking on the distant horizon.