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.

Pulse (2001)

I don’t know how director Kiyoshi Kurosawa and his collaborators pull this off, but in an opening sequence of Pulse (2001) where we observe a young woman visit a friend’s apartment, cutting from her travel in a bus interior to walking down a street to walking up the apartment block stairs, all of this is rendered as eerie and unsettling. She is always alone in the frame and everything feels empty. Emptiness is a feeling explored to unsettling effect in this J-horror movie, which much like Kurosawa’s previous masterpiece, Cure, unnerves through absence and suggestion more than jump scares and extended violence.

When people start dying strangely, taking their own lives after withdrawing from the world, several characters notice the connection to computers and the internet, specifically a website that displays grainy video footage of people in their apartments. While the technology might have vastly improved in the prevailing decades since Pulse’s release, you can’t beat the creepy noise of an internet dial-up tone and that technological screech. The lo-fi quality of the technology displayed, the basic monitors and the pixelated images on the computer screen just add to the creepiness. When a character enters something called “the Forbidden Room” and comes face-to-face with a ghost, it is a masterclass sequence that gets under the skin. Much like other Japanese horror movies of this era, the horror is in being in the presence of a ghost and the slow advance towards you.

Unexpectedly veering towards the apocalyptic in its second half, and losing some of the sustained tension, Pulse still remains an effective horror movie, which is more about the horror of loneliness, disconnection and nothingness. I also appreciated Haruhiko Kato’s slacker energy as a character which serves him well through the growing chaos. And if Cure made the visual of a black “X” against a wall a creepy sight to behold, the use of red tape against doorways is also a great use of imagery. Available to stream on Kanopy and Tubi (US). Recommended.

Pacifiction (2022)

The white suit. When commissioner De Roller (Benoît Magimel), an official of France working in Tahiti, rides on a boat towards a surfing competition as part of his duties, he waves to a couple of people on the shore. It struck me how the white suit De Roller constantly wears in Pacifiction (2022), which seems both suave in a Bryan Ferry kind of way and also harkening back to classic French colonialism, is an iconic look. He wants to be noticed on the island, even from afar across the water. A recognisable look as he makes diplomatic rounds. Magimel is a handsome guy but he also seems a bit out to pasture, robust and slightly corpulent, which completely suits this character, continually snacking as he sits down to meetings, knocking back drinks at bars. He also continually wears tinted shades, even indoors, with an open tropical shirt, and we follow his shaded/shady perspective for the near three hour length of this languid epic.

I was compelled to watch Pacifiction after watching a few interviews with director Albert Serra and hearing about his signature approach to filmmaking. He shoots with three digital cameras for coverage, and there’s no direct communication between cast and crew. Scenes are open for actors to inhabit without hitting marks, and he even discussed how Magimel was not given the full script, and would often be fed lines through an earpiece – not so much because the actor didn’t learn his lines – but a conscious move to have the actor in a state of arrested concentration. As we observe De Roller move from night club to official meetings and receptions, eventually hearing rumours of the French government resuming nuclear testing on the island, and becoming increasingly paranoid that he is being slighted by this, past the hour mark I understood that the movie wouldn’t have any action per se, or any conventional release of tension. Everything is at a low boil as De Roller wanders the frame, often alone in a master shot. Pink hues of sunset, lush greens of the vegetation, the rolling waves of the blue water. Often tinted in post-production. A lone figure in a postcard landscape, smoothing his hair back, smiling to himself, trying to see evidence of a secret submarine through binoculars.

With French sailors congregating in a nightclub called Paradise, the staff in briefs and underwear, white cotton and silk translucent in the purple neon lights, there’s an aura of seediness in Pacification. But the film never shows anything directly, implying through sound and oblique angles. Magimel is a fantastic presence, a tour guide into powerlessness, and the foreboding vibes grow in the final act as we seem stuck in an endless night of exhaustion and suspicion. Keep the suit jacket on, mon ami, even as the sweat collects upon your forehead.

Available to stream on Mubi (US). Recommended.

Bastards (2013)

Cascading rain in close-up against a building at night as moody synth from the Tindersticks plays over the soundtrack. The opening shot to Claire Denis’ film, Bastards (2013), hooked me in and visually established its neo-noir vibe. One of my favourite shots later in the film was of a woman, Chiara Mastroianni – seen from a distance – in a raincoat walking up the street late at night to buy cigarettes, neon lights reflecting in the pavement from afar, which has that woozy noir romanticism. This is the point of view from Vincent Lindon watching her from a balcony, smoking a cigarette without a shirt. His weary-looking mug and taciturn masculinity fills in the character of Marco, a sailor brought back to Paris, assisting his sister Sandra (Julie Bataille) in the wake of her husband’s suicide. Marco’s niece is in hospital, Justine (Lola Creton) found wandering the streets naked and bloody. What happened to her is a mystery, but the blame is squarely placed on a wealthy businessman Eduard (Michel Subor) who had loaned money to the family business, a shoe factory. Revenge is in the air as months later, Marco moves into the same building as Eduard and meets his wife, Raphelle (Mastroianni), an attraction growing between them.

While Bastards is classifiably neo-noir, the story is not beholden to archetypes and conventions. Even as the plot slowly unfolds through the characters, revealing more of the rot underneath everything, Denis allows everything to breathe and feel organic, of and in this world. I had read that Bastards was a bleak affair, and it does not provide catharsis, ending on a sickening, uncomfortable sequence that feels evil. Yet even within this nihilism, there are human moments. The tactile pleasure of sex between two characters, and the pondering over a watch as gift expressing something more within this affair. A friend providing assistance when someone shows up at their doorstep early in the morning. Small glimmers of tenderness within an encroaching darkness. With the tendency towards not expressing everything in dialogue, allowing observation and scenes to float, the fatalistic momentum doesn’t feel so forced, even if there’s ultimately no way out. Also featuring regular faces from Denis movies such Alex Descas and Gregoire Colin. Available to stream on Tubi (US). Recommended.

Merry-Go-Round (1981)

“… generally considered a failure – but what a failure it is!” A quote from the Mubi “our take” description accompanying Jacques Rivette’s Merry-Go-Round (1981), and if you do any cursory reading around the film’s making you can understand why even the director himself considered it a “failure”. The third of four planned movies he was making in quick succession, Rivette suffered a mental breakdown during filming, and only completed it on the encouragement of his actors; one of the two leads, Maria Schneider (from Last Tango In Paris, The Passenger) also was undergoing health issues and could not complete filming. Why watch a failure then? There were two Rivette movies on Mubi that I hadn’t seen, and I tried watching the pirate revenge movie Noirot but couldn’t get into it (I will try again). I am keen to see more Rivette movie and understand his whole thing more: the sense of games, theatricality, surreality, improvisation and play. And wanting the more contemporary option – contemporary to its time (though it was actually completed in the late 1970s and only released in 1981).

Merry-Go-Round has the skeleton of a thriller buried within and it flirts with genre trappings – fights, shootings, double-crosses – but for the majority of its two-hour plus running time, it’s not too bothered about getting there, which I’m sure will test some viewer’s patience. Two strangers to each other – Leo (Schneider) and Ben (Joe Dallensandro) – meet in a French hotel. They have both received telegrams to meet Elizabeth (Daniele Gegauff) there; Leo is Elizabeth’s sister, and Ben is Elizabeth’s boyfriend. As Leo and Ben pursue Elizabeth’s whereabouts through directions and clues, they become embroiled in a plot involving the disappearance of Leo and Elizabeth’s father, presumed dead, and a lost of sum of money (four million francs). However, what you mainly observe is Leo and Ben travelling between country townhouses, most of them abandoned, searching and talking between rooms. This is a rough movie with the dialogue occasionally mumbled and inaudibly recorded. Intercut to the narrative are two parallel tracks. One track is a dream space where the characters are being chased: Ben through the woods, Elizabeth on a beach (though replaced with another actress, Hermine Karagheuz). The other track intercut with the main narrative is footage of two musicians Barre Phillips and John Surman performing the downbeat jazz score in a room. The sense of exhaustion to the film emanates from the repetitive dream sequences, the sense of constantly rushing, or falling in the sand.

Yet the film is still intriguing and compelling, particularly with the combined presence of Schneider and Dallensandro, both wearing double denim, like a pair of 1970s burn-outs on a scavenger hunt, Schneider’s withdrawn quality contrasting against the Dallensandro’s New York street tough aura. I knew of Dallensandro a bit – “Little Joe” from the Warhol scene – but this was the first film (aside from The Limey) I was watching him in from this period, pony-tail swagger amongst all the French cast. A noirish film running on fumes and improvisation, but that still finds moments of grace and artistry, particularly by the time of its one-two punch denouement. Recommended, to a degree.