Home Cinema
by Leonard Heldreth

Strong women dominate month’s film choices
Our films this month all feature strong women. These ladies do not show their strength by suffering and enduring; they take control, use their feminine wiles to survive, beat men at their own games and are still standing at the end, while their attackers, those who are still alive, are long gone.

The Perfect Crime
(El Crimen Ferpecto)
Released in America as The Perfect Crime, the original Spanish title of Álex de la Iglesia’s film is El Crimen Ferpecto, and the misspelling not only alerts the viewer to the zany plot of the film but also references Alfred Hitchcock, whose Dial M for Murder was released in Spain as The Perfect Crime.
Hitchcock’s films clearly influenced de la Iglesia’s film, especially in its black humor and growing claustrophobia as events close in around the lead actor. It also sets a scene on a ferris wheel, and a shot down an open elevator shaft is like a shot in Vertigo, complete with switched bodies.
The Spanish director, however, is much more madcap than Hitchcock, emphasizing the black comedy rather than the suspense. While Hitchcock’s corpses keep reappearing just when the hero least expects them, the ones in de la Iglesia’s films show up with hatchets embedded in their scorched and smoking heads and begin talking to the lead actor.
In The Ferpect Crime, Rafael (Guillermo Toledo) is a suave womanizing bachelor who presides over the women’s wear department of YeYo’s, a large Madrid department store. He believes in seizing the good life, sometimes at night in the store with his female clerks, and the only thing standing in his way to total success is Don Antonio (Luis Varela), the man in charge of the menswear department. Only one of them will be promoted to floor manager, and Rafael is determined he will be the one.
Indeed, it does turn out to be him, but only after a series of incidents have dispatched Don Antonio to the incinerator and made Rafael the object of blackmail by Lourdes (Monica Cervera), the least attractive clerk in the women’s wear department. Pushed down the slippery slope by Lourdes, Rafael gradually sees his most prized possessions–including his bachelorhood–slide away. What to do? Murder, of course! The rest of the film follows Rafael’s attempts to escape from Lourdes, but she is far more than he bargained for, and the concluding sequence ties together a number of loose ends and gives the last twist of the ironic knife.
Cervera is outstanding as the mentally off-balanced Lourdes, and she switches emotional stances faster than Rafael can follow–one minute she’s loving and the next minute she has a knife at his throat. And she expects a lot of sex. Guillermo Toledo is fine as Raphael, and his smug self-importance is like that of Marcello Mastroianni in the classic Divorce, Italian Style. The Madrid setting with its emphasis on style makes a colorful background for the action, and the ongoing motif of clowns reaches a colorful peak at the end.
De la Iglesia’s background is as a cartoonist, so don’t expect a lot of character development, but he creates a bright, brash comedy that moves rapidly and sprays out jokes faster than a machine gun. Fortunately, the cast knows how to make the most of what they’re given.
One problem with the film is that the director sometimes doesn’t seem to know what to do with the situations he has developed. The ferris wheel scene, for example, has a lot of potential but just doesn’t go anywhere.
Nonetheless, there are so many humorous situations in the film that the successful ones more than offset the failures. Anyone looking for madcap entertainment with lots of black humor and some Hitchcock suspense over hidden bodies should take a look at this Spanish film with English subtitles.

Black Book
(Zwartboek)
Rachel Stein, a.k.a. Ellis de Vries, the heroine of Black Book, also knows what she wants and goes after it, but as a Jew hiding in Holland from the Nazis, her options are limited. However, her energy, intelligence and willingness to play a Mata Hari role helps not only her own survival but also aids the resistance fighters.
Paul Verhoeven, the director of Black Book, started making films, such as Soldier of Orange, in his native Holland but moved to Hollywood to make a succession of big commercial films—Robocop, Total Recall, Starship Troopers, Basic Instinct and Showgirls. Now back in Holland, Verhoeven completed a film that he has been working on for twenty years, and it’s a sexy, violent, no-holds-barred look at a resilient young Jewish woman caught up in the last days of World War II in Holland. It displays Verhoven’s technical skill, his complex characters, and his ability to move a plot so fast the viewer can hardly keep up.
With the exception of framing bookends set in 1956 in Israel, Black Book is set in 1944. Rachel (Carice van Houten) is hiding out with a Christian farm family that requires her to learn and recite a New Testament verse each day before she can eat. One day, while she is away from the house, an American bomber scores a direct hit on it, and Rachel takes refuge with a young man on a sailboat.
They arrange to be transported to safety, but are ambushed. Rachel escapes and is soon working with the resistance movement, finally ingratiating herself with the head of the Gestapo and singing for Nazi parties while she plants microphones and gathers information.
Sebastian Koch (the writer in last month’s The Lives of Others) plays Gestapo chief Ludwig Müntze, and he handles the role well, especially when he realizes his bedfellow is a Jew. Halina Reijn is excellent as Ronnie, who goes with the Germans or liberating Canadians or anyone who will take care of her.
The plot twists and loyalties shift almost faster than the audience can keep up. This is not a traditional war film with black-and-white characters; everyone here is ambiguous and those most trusted are often the most untrustworthy. Verhoeven apparently stirred up a storm in Holland because of his portrayal of some of the Dutch as being Nazi collaborators and most of the Dutch as being as anti-Semitic as the Germans.
The plot sometimes strains credibility, but it moves on so quickly that these weaknesses are overlooked. In the opening scene, for example, would a Jew in hiding from the Nazis be very far away from her shelter, coincidentally just at the time a bomb hits the house? The opening sequence in Israel also may be a structural flaw because the audience learns from it that at least two of the main characters have survived the war, and the suspense is diminished somewhat.
On the positive side, the film avoids the stereotypes so common to war films, and it raises a number of significant questions, such as how far would you go to help your country, especially if people would jump to all the wrong conclusions? It also implicitly questions all of the recent war films that flaunt their heroism and single-minded characters.
Black Book (the title comes from a book that has the names of the collaborators and resistance fighters) is violent, sexy, surprising, fast-moving and solid entertainment. Despite its running time of 145 minutes, you will not be bored. The film is in Dutch with English subtitles.

Inland Empire
David Lynch makes movies that often baffle his audiences. Allusive, surrealistic, circular and filled with obsessive images, films like Eraserhead, Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive have been hailed as masterpieces and enigmas—Rorschach tests for the viewer.
While some of Lynch’s films have been relatively accessible—The Straight Story and even Blue Velvet—his most recent film, Inland Empire, is squarely in the tradition of his most baffling and yet memorable films.
To free himself from commercial restraints, Lynch financed and distributed the film himself; he used a relatively small Sony PD-150 digicam, shot the movie on videotape, and edited it using home-movie computer software. The result is an uncompromised David Lynch film that often has a grainy, low-light look; in some ways the deterioration of image quality parallels the breakdown of the heroine’s mind, especially in the last part of the film.
What is it about? Good question. Trying to figure out the plot is like working a jigsaw puzzle that not only may have some pieces missing but may have some pieces mixed in from similar but different puzzles. Some of the pieces have to do with a famous actress named Nikki Grace (Laura Dern) trying to make a comeback playing a character named Susan Blue in a film titled On High in Blue Tomorrows.
The film is directed by Kingsley Stewart (Jeremy Irons) whose helper is Freddie Howard (Harry Dean Stanton), a delight to watch as he keeps trying to borrow a few dollars from the cast and crew. The male lead in the film-within-a-film is Billy Side (Justin Theroux), an actor with a reputation for seducing his costars, who plays the part of Devon Berk.
As filming on Blue Tomorrows progresses, the director reveals that it is not an original screenplay, but a remake of a Polish film that never was completed because the lead actors died under mysterious circumstances. Also, as Blue Tomorrows progresses, the distinction between the actors and the parts they are playing begins to blur. At one point Nikki says to Billy, “This sounds like a line from our movie.” Supporting characters include Nikki’s enormously wealthy and powerful husband who will undoubtedly kill Billy if he catches him with Nikki, and Billy’s wife Doris (Julia Ormond).
Also, time and space do not follow traditional patterns. In one scene during a read-through, cast and crew hear someone behind a flat in the background, but the intruder runs away; later, in a different scene, the audience realizes that the person making the noise was Nikki who was watching herself in a time-warp.
This part of the plot is never resolved but is replaced at times by additional plot lines. The film opens with the visit of a mysterious European visitor (the fascinating Grace Zabriskie) who lives “down the road” and predicts that Nikki will win the part for which she has auditioned.
Then three six-foot rabbits in human clothing discuss various unrelated matters on a stage set, and now and then an unseen audience reacts, laughing at lines that would not appear to be funny. Women dressed like prostitutes appear in rooms and talk among themselves or walk the streets in Hollywood or Poland or dance to “The Locomotion.” Dern, dressed as a tough Polish prostitute, climbs several flights of dark stairs to confess her adventures to a man who looks a little like Berthold Brecht.
Dern, dressed differently, seems to live in a run-down apartment with her husband and child. A weeping woman sits in a dark room watching various things, sometimes herself, on television. Laura Dern, in one of her roles, is stabbed and dies, vomiting blood on the Hollywood Star Walk while three street people discuss the best way to get to Pomona over her dying body.
All of these plot strands are intercut with each other, and the film ends with most of the female cast dancing and lip-syncing to Nina Simone’s version of “Sinner Man.” Lynch says the plot is about “A woman in trouble.” Is that enough about plot?
Motifs run through the movie—burning a hole in a piece of silk with a cigarette and then looking through it (like the camera going into the ear in Blue Velvet), an ongoing discussion about whether the time is half-past nine or after midnight, doors opening into different places, depending on who is opening them—but it’s problematic whether these add to the meaning or distract from it.
Clearly, Inland Empire (the title apparently refers to our subconscious mind) is more like a dream than a traditional work of art. It follows images, not narrative order and moves from one story and scene to another with little logical connection, just as dreams do. The only way to watch this film is simply to go with it and to enjoy the flow of its images, which are fascinating, often disturbing, but almost always interesting, despite the film’s length of nearly three hours.
If you’re familiar with Lynch’s films, you’ll know by now whether you want to sit through this one at least once; if you are not, this film is probably not a good place to begin.

Death Proof
If Lynch’s Inland Empire exemplifies the extreme of art-house cinema, Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof exemplifies (deliberately) the extreme of vulgar exploitation films. Last year Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez (Sin City, Spy Kids) teamed up to make a film called Grindhouse that consisted of two shorter films, Planet Terror (directed by Rodriguez) and Death Proof (directed by Tarantino).
The idea was to recreate the exploitation double-feature bills that used to run at older theaters, movies that were cheaply made and full of sex, violence, bad acting and cheap special effects. (During high school and college I worked at several such theaters that routinely ran this type of fare).
To add to the illusion, they hired other directors to make fake previews, and they scratched the film, put in change-over marks, cut out some sections and inserted bad splices. In short, they tried to create the illusion of film that had clattered through the projector countless times and was just barely holding together for one more afternoon matinee.
They even omitted one reel, claiming it was lost. It was clearly homage to the kind of films they had seen and loved when growing up. Unfortunately, the typical twenty-first century movie-goer was not interested, and the project, as neat as the idea seems, died at the box office.
Now the films, in revised form, are becoming available on DVD. Although originally it was the second film on the double-bill, Tarantino’s Death Proof has been released first, apparently in more than one edition. In the version I saw, which is available locally, the additional previews and several of the supplements cited by reviewers were missing, but twenty-four minutes of additional footage had been added back in (part of the “missing reel” from the theatrical release), although part of it is in black-and-white.
The film is Tarantino’s attempt to make a muscle-car movie with a car chase that rivals the best ever made, and he gives it a first-rate try.
The film clearly breaks into two parts. In the first section, several young girls in skimpy outfits chatter at each other in typical Tarantino dialogue as they drive around town, meet some friends at a bar, and plan to visit a beach house. Stalking them is Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell) in his souped-up and reinforced Chevy Nova. The film’s title refers to Mike’s car, which has been re-built to survive the crashes required of a stuntman’s car. The first part of the film ends with one of the most horrific auto collisions on film.
In the second part of the story, a new set of four girls appear, including two stunt-girls, one of whom is a trained driver and packs a gun. The other, a New Zealand kiwi, has cat-like reflexes as well as the technical savvy to drive hard, take risks and punch out anyone who tries to assault her. When Stuntman Mike stalks these girls, the outcome is an entirely different ballgame.
Kurt Russell is really excellent as Stuntman Mike, possessing the charm to ingratiate himself with the girls and the brutality to make his killer role believable. All of the girls are good, but outstanding is the New Zealand stuntwoman Zoë Bell playing herself. She does all the stunts in the movie and manages to do a decent job of acting also.
This film uses no computer generated enhancements, so shooting the chases at 100 mph was done live, and anyone who enjoys a car chase will find this one exciting. The concluding scene, where three of the girls catch up with Mike, will elicit cheers from all the women in the audience. Top
—Leonard G. Heldreth

Editor’s Note: All films reviewed are available on DVD or VHS from local stores.

 

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