Place Vendôme (1998)

Place Vendôme (1998) fits the bill for French neo-noir in that the key female characters are glamorous blondes while the men are all weathered looking mutts. The cinematography feels very 1990s “movie for adults” in the dark hues of the interiors, and its overall polished feeling, reminiscent of a Grisham or Le Carre adaption from this era. And though it alludes to being a thriller in tone, Place Vendôme is more about intrigue, and how people will act in circumstances, and the sense of double-dealing and double-crossing in the world of high-end diamond-selling.

Mostly the film is a dramatic showcase for lead actress Catherine Deneuve, who plays the widow of a diamond merchant. We are introduced to her staying in a clinic, an alcoholic prone to fits of depression, struggling with social engagements and discussed by her husband’s staff as a “scary” train-wreck. After her husband’s death, Deneuve’s character begins to sharpen through the grief, particularly the discovery of precious diamonds he has squirrelled away. She starts to shake things off and return to her previous skills as a diamond seller, even as people around her are making moves to obtain the diamonds in question.

I was pulled into the movie through Deneuve’s fantastic performance, and the quartet of characters including a younger employee (Emmanuelle Seigner), a dodgy repo man (Jean-Pierre Bacri), and a mysterious figure from the past (Jacques Dutronc), eventually all connected by affairs past and present. Building to a simmering plot initiated by diamond rivals who have been ripped off, the film surprises in the very end by choosing to be sincere rather than fully suspenseful. In the end, this is an elegant melodrama that might test your patience, or understanding as the plot is very obfuscated in its unfolding. I enjoyed watching it, particularly the acting and the sense of classiness director Nicole Garcia takes to it.

Available to stream on Kanopy. Recommended.

The Boys Next Door (1985)

“Everything looks like MTV.” Cruising down a main strip in Los Angeles, the two teenage boys – Roy (Maxwell Caulfield, off the box office disappointment of Grease 2) and Bo (Charlie Sheen, pre-Platoon) – take the street scene all in with glee, yelling at the punks and catcalling the ladies. Director Penelope Spheeris, and her cinematographer Arthur Albert, capture the authenticity of the streets in The Boys Next Door (1985), and the night-time LA depicted is accentuated by a sickly green glow of the street lights and the pink-reddish glare of the neon signs. Out-of-towners who have recently graduated from high school, Roy and Bo, seem like a pair of regular guys: jeans and white t-shirts, drinking beers and chasing girls. Their interest in pranks and their snotty vibe have made them toxic to the rest of their high school. Roy, in particular, has some “stuff inside him”, he confides to Bo, and eventually that “stuff” comes out when he beats a petrol station attendant half-to-death. Recent graduates and bound for factory work, their impulsive jaunt to Los Angeles eventually becomes a nihilistic killing spree.

I’ve always been keen to see The Boys Next Door, a halfway point between Spheeris documentary The Decline Of Western Civilization and the comedy hit Wayne’s World, but not being a huge true crime fan (which I assumed it was; it’s not, a fictional story scripted by future X-Files writers Glen Morgan and James Wong), and knowing the darkness of this movie, I was reluctant to seek it out right away. I’m glad I watched it finally. Distributed by Roger Corman’s New World Pictures, and humming with a soundtrack of LA punk and proto-heavy metal, which often scores the disturbing violence, The Boys Next Door is a descent into meaningless murder and crime, with great lead performances from Caulfield and Sheen (his presence echoes his father’s film, Badlands). Kept tight to a 90 minute running time, and a slow escalation that is intercut with two detectives following the series of crimes (Hank Garrett and Christopher McDonald), it’s an unsettling movie that also captures 1980s L.A. nightlife. With Spheeris’ interest in punk rock and music, there’s a compelling theme where the boys find the punks weird and off-putting, and even a police detective rails against the way that punk girls are dressed, all part of the media panic about that subculture as violent and disturbed, when the real violence here is being perpetuated by a couple of good-looking “ordinary” boys. Available on Tubi. Recommended.

Don’t Torture A Duckling (1972)

The copy of director Lucio Fulci’s Don’t Torture A Duckling (1972) on Tubi that I watched felt like it was an older DVD transfer uploaded as the image quality was desaturated and a little fuzzy, which added to how the Italian village of Accendura comes across in the movie. The rocky hills seem almost yellow and the town centre, which is made of white stone, feels further visually drained of life.

Aside from the presence of sex symbol Barbara Bouchet (from The Red Queen Kills Seven Times) – playing the daughter of an absent rich industrialist, moved back to her hometown to kick her drug addiction – this giallo thriller feels different to the others shot in Rome, or taking place within the fashion or publishing industry. There’s not a lot of glamour in this provincial existence and that’s further compounded by the string of child murders that upset the town’s quiet existence, and add an eerie atmosphere to the film’s thriller mechanisms. As young boys turn up strangled and bashed, the police and an outside investigator pursue leads and a few suspects, each one causing the town’s mob mentality to rise up. Even as a newspaper man (Tomas Milan) and Bouchet’s character eventually become the film’s main investigators, there doesn’t feel like a fixed protagonist and everyone feels included within its procedural narrative. One of the most striking characters is Florinda Balkan (from Fulci’s A Lizard In A Woman’s Skin), harried and unkempt, observed in the opening scenes digging frantically in the dirt upon a hill and finding the bones of a baby’s skeleton. We find out later that she is an outcast who believes in witchery and black magic, and there are hidden secrets among the townspeople, as well as a latent capacity for violence.

Don’t Torture A Duckling has that narcoleptic quality, which I do enjoy, of giallo thrillers; usually I find giallos a bit sleep-inducing due to the drawn-out, convoluted mysteries, and yet here there’s a clarity to what’s happening even as the identity of the killer is held back until the very end. For the majority of its length, I thought this was good, a solid thriller, and was wondering a bit why it’s held in high regard for Fulci fans. Apparently this is one of his first films to get stuck into gore and body horror, and there’s a clear and striking sequence halfway through where Fulci’s brutality is on display, a very upsetting moment that underscores his critique of small town mentality. And then I was like, oh I get it, this is a strong Fulci moment! The other clear highlight is the very ending, more because of its absurdity as it collapses tones between an image of gore-laden violence and sentimental music by Riz Ortolani, a strong conclusion that speaks to the specific quality Fucli has as a horror filmmaker that would be expanded upon in his later masterpieces like City Of The Living Dead.

Even if a body looks like a fake dummy, as long as it can be demolished to show skull and blood, that’s cinema, Fulci-style! Recommended.

Violent Cop (1989)

A brawl in the street in slow motion. Cop and gangster wrestling on the pavement in front of neighbourhood boys frozen as bystanders. Mellow jazz scoring the violent image of a baseball bat striking down upon a cop’s head, resulting in a geyser of blood spatter. A chase results, and continues by foot and by car through the day time city streets, mellow jazz blaring away. The chase goes longer than anticipated, allowing for comic moments and sustained tension, ultimately resolving in further violence. This is one of my favourite sequences from Takeshi Kitano’s debut as a director, Violent Cop (1989).

The film’s opening scenes feature teenagers beating up a homeless man, and later we see children throw cans and bottles from a bridge at a passing barge. Violence is everywhere and the childish nature of it remains persistent as Kitano aka Beat Takeshi walks onto screen as the title character, a violent cop who is barely tolerated by his department, and remains a quiet, churlish presence. Annoying his rookie partner and fellow cops with his gambling habits and constantly borrowing money from them. Intense and implacable from his face, occasionally breaking into a sneer of a smile, Kitano’s character often resembles a schoolyard bully who never shook a sadistic delight in a pratfall.

Kitano’s comedy impulses are very clear as a filmmaker, yet this is a hard-hitting dramatic film that offered a break from what Japanese audiences saw Kitano as at that time, a popular TV comedian and host. Here, the gags are slowly stripped back to concentrate on the antagonism with a sadistic yakuza lieutenant, Kiyohiro (Hakuryû). What would define Kitano’s cinema style (with later masterpieces such as Sonatine and Hana-Bi) is already apparent: stillness punctuated by sharp, repugnant violence. And as it lays out the cop movie Dirty Harry clichés, Violent Cop feels drained of catharsis, and is simply an escalation of brutality with no winners. The lighting in the warehouse climax is quite something, and the conclusion cynical to the separation of cop and crimimal. Recommended.

Liebestraum (1991)

Liebestraum (1991) takes its title from the Franz Liszt composition; we hear a swing-era version playing on a turntable when a couple are murdered during their after-hours affair. The titular piece of music is one fetish object in director-writer Mike Figgis’ neo-noir narrative, but it is supplanted another fetish object – the building itself. A cast-iron building called The Ralston and abandoned for decades after the double-murder which took place in the 1950s. Nick (played by Kevin Anderson – resembling a baby-faced version of William L. Petersen’s Manhunter look) is visiting Elderstown to meet his dying biological mother (Kim Novak). He is also a professor of architecture who is drawn to The Ralston – it’s across the street from his hotel – and he bumps into an old colleague, Paul (Bill Pullman), who has been hired by the city to tear it down. Nick wants to write about the building before it’s gone and he gets permission to explore its interiors. He meets Paul’s wife, Jane (Pamela Gidley), who is a photographer and helps to document the building; there is also a clear attraction between them that mysteriously relates to the murder from the past. Similarly, Liebestraum the film is like that cast-iron building: it invites viewers to basically tour through its neo-noir architecture and soak up its style. This is a definite mood piece and follows in the tradition of Figgis’ first film, Stormy Monday. Your enjoyment will really depend on whether style and tone are enough for you, since the mystery isn’t strongly compelling on its own. It’s more about the atmosphere.

Liebestraum falls within the window of movies no doubt influenced by David Lynch (before Quentin Tarantino would be the go-to crime flick homage-king), even sharing a few Lynch costars (Gidley from Fire Walk With Me) and future costars (Pullman with slicked-back hair and yuppie menace prefigures his future Lost Highway role). Figgis composed the synth score which has that Angelo Badalamenti feeling, and if this was a TV series like Twin Peaks rather than a movie, it feels like more would be done with intriguing supporting characters like the sleazy alcoholic sheriff (Graham Beckel) or the eccentric, mysterious millionaire (Zach Grenier). The cinematography by Juan Ruiz Anchia is great: red neon lighting for the bar/diner at night, characters in dark shadows for interior scenes, and the inside of the building filled with mannequins and art deco design for maximum mysterious effect. Even if the movie builds to a certain ambiguity, its climax nicely brings together the past and the present, conveying things through image and music rather than dialogue. While not all of the film’s portent and intrigue pays off, I enjoyed wandering around its neon-noir vibe. Anderson and Gidley both have a certain vulnerability that makes them engaging beyond their looks; though I wanted more of Pullman in slick yuppie asshole mode. Streamed a copy uploaded onto YouTube. Recommended.