Le Navrie Night (1979)

When it comes to art cinema, and slow cinema, I often think of an ideal viewer that must exist who is 100% alert and awake, and intellectually keyed into the symbolism and poetics that might take place. But then again, why should I judge myself against an ideal viewer that doesn’t exist? If you fall asleep, you fall asleep. Rewind and re-watch. If something goes over my head, I can just zero into what makes me think, or feel. Or even just appreciate the aesthetics, and the intention. That something like this strange art film exists.

Late at night and I couldn’t sleep, lying in bed listening to music, before I decided to decamp into the living room and start watching something. When I selected the Marguerite Duras film to watch, Le Navrie Night (1979), from the Rarefilmm website, I was hoping it would fit the circumstances. And in the first five minutes, I knew it would. The opening narration talks about the stillness in a night, the silence, and the proceeding film feels like it lives in that stillness, despite how talky it is. Cameras pan across empty spaces and the story is about two lovers who only communicate over the phone during the night. It was an ideal circumstance to watch, sleepless in the morning hours and existing in the film’s poetic reverie.

Duras is an author and her approach as a filmmaker seems to prioritise the power of words, taking a postmodern approach to the medium. There are a lot of distancing effects. The story is told mainly by voice-over with Duras telling the narrative, not from a first person perspective but describing the characters in third person. A country estate is the location of the film shoot, and we see the film lights in the corner of the room. Three actors are assembled (Bulle Ogier, Mathieu Carriere, and Domnique Sanda). They ask questions to the off-camera director of the stories being told, and one by one we see them getting make-up applied in close-up as they sit in silence. But they don’t play the roles written. They are mainly visual points of interest in the frame as the story is told over the narration. Sitting, or standing, as the camera pans around the house’s interior. Though a writer by trade, Duras and her collaborators also create great film images. There’s a slow shot of a camera panning down the seine river at dusk which I thought was especially beautiful.

The story? Two people fall in love over the phone, and their relationship is only carried out through late night telephone calls. There are complications involving sickness and class, and the effect is hypnotic. It is slow cinema and I did have to pause the film and fall asleep on a couch before resuming. The micro-nap was satisfying and when I woke up, I returned to Le Navire Night and continued watching. I didn’t necessarily feel a strong connection to the story of the lovers, their trials and tribulations, the confusions and the doublings of identities. I was more taken in by the way the story was told, the empty spaces outside, or in the outskirts of Paris, the slowly panning camera as the voices talk over the images. Or the actors standing in the frame. Or the wooden table lit gloriously within the darkened living room. Duras and her crew create an overall mood and an atmosphere of haunting loneliness, and the hook of a spoken word, even if it’s faceless and transmitted across time and space. 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.

Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988)

Clive Barker’s Hellraiser is obviously a horror classic, and it was something I only experienced for the first time during last year’s Halloween. With a horror icon in Pinhead (Doug Bradley), whatever dated effects are to be found in there are made up for by the film’s perverse, sadomasochistic fervour; this wasn’t just a slasher, but a bloody tale where people wanted to be torn apart by the blurring of pain and pleasure. Now I liked Hellraiser but I had more fun with its sequel, Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988), which picks up immediately after the events of the first film, focusing on the sole survivor, the innocent Kirsty (Ashley Laurence) whose family was torn apart, and then ripped apart by the insatiable desires of Uncle Frank (Sean Chapman) and her step-mother Julia (Claire Higgins), summoning cenobite demons through a magical puzzle-box. Set in a hospital where Kirsty is being treated by doctors and questioned by cops, the sinister brain surgeon Dr. Channard (Kenneth Cranham) secretly desires knowledge of this powerful netherworld and is looking to exploit Kirsty’s trauma for answers. There’s also another mute patient, Tiffany (Imogen Boorman), and what do you know, she has a gift for solving puzzles! Hellraiser II isn’t perfect; the first half contains a lot of recapping of the previous film and the hospital setting can’t help but recall a Garth Meranghi vibe. Yet once Julia is summoned from a blood-stained mattress and eventually the action shifts to the Cenobite dimension – a vast, grey maze with matte painting imagery and repetitious stone hallways – this thing kicks into high gear. While there’s definitely an air of chasing what A Nightmare On Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors conjured, the result is an adult fantasy horror that feels like a messed up (or even more messed up) version of Labyrinth; as if you would actually see the Furies rip off limbs rather than get distracted during a song and dance. Ashley Laurence was great in the lead, a sympathetic and resourceful protagonist, basically trying to save her and Tiffany from this endless nightmare. Also Claire Higgins is terrific as Julia who goes even harder as a character in this film, and Cranham is particularly good in the early scenes as the officious, sinister Channard. My favourite detail was how Channard and Julia find themselves dressed up when they are indeed hell-bound, resembling a classy couple from some Ealing Studio comedy but just taking a tour of an inter-dimensional hellscape. Directed by Tony Randel from a story by Barker; Christopher Young contributes the bombastic, gothic score. And to think I had always avoided this because of the half star review Roger Ebert gave it; sorry to break it to you, my good man, but this was one sick-ass movie that I had a blast with. Available to stream on Amazon Prime. Recommended.

Un Flic (1972)

Grey buildings standing imposingly on a French coastline. An incoming storm whips the ocean and rain washes over deserted streets. A car moves slowly with four men in trench-coats and hats. They stop on a street corner and through the mist is a bank with its lights on, just about to close for the day, and the street lights turn on in the distance. This is the eerie opening to Un Flic (1972; A Cop), the last film directed by Jean-Pierre Melville. I love his masterpiece, Le Samourai, and only recently caught up with Le Circle Rouge; Un Flic is his third collaboration with actor Alain Delon, though this time he switches from playing a cool, silent criminal to a weary, silent cop (named Coleman). Melville’s trademark cool and elegant approach to the crime genre becomes emptied out here. There are empty streets in key scenes and empty people for protagonists. As Delon does the rounds, visiting crime scenes in his car with his subordinate, we observe Richard Crenna as Simon, leader of the thieves who rob the bank and are planning a further elaborate heist. Quite a thing to see Rambo’s colonel in the Le Samourai trench-coat, dubbed into French, and his youthful yet craggy face blends right in with the jaded looking criminals. The third part of this triangle is Catherine Deneuve as Crenna’s girlfriend, a nightclub hostess, who is also having an affair with Delon’s character. Yet Melville doesn’t seem to care about any emotions exchanged; everything is another empty transaction. Hard to tell if the artificiality on display – such as the painted backdrops of certain scenes and the very obvious models during its sustained, wordless second act heist involving a helicopter dropping Crenna onto a train to steal precious cargo – is part of the intended aesthetic? Or is simply an older filmmaker not bothered that a real helicopter is intercut with a wide shot where it looks like a child’s toy? Films like Le Samourai and Le Circle Rouge have an artistic tension in their bored observation, watching process and having characters say less with words and more through precise actions. There is similar tension in Un Flic but also a resigned nihilism, emphasising the law side of the coin as a hollow proposition. There’s a drained, blue-grey early-morning ambience to Un Flic, and the result is that it feels much more alienated than the Dirty Harry inspired Euro-cop movies that would follow in its wake (some of which would star Delon). I also loved the striking editing of people exchanging looks, head-on close-up shots cutting back rapidly between each other, indicating more emotionally and visually than the few words said. Available to stream on Kanopy in Australia. Recommended.

Psycho II (1983)

Now this is a legacy sequel! Psycho II (1983) was actually a box office hit, from what I’ve read, and exists nicely at this cross-section of eras and influences: obviously 1960s Hitchcock, but also 1970s Network TV Mystery Of The Week and 1980s Slasher Sequels. While an unnecessary sequel to a genre-defining classic twenty years later is a tall order, the collaborators involved included Australian director and Hitchcock acolyte Richard Franklin (Road Games, F/X 2), and screenwriter Tom Holland (director of the original Fright Night), who both pay respect to the original while telling their own story.

After the events of the first movie, Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) is released from imprisonment and deemed sane by the court, with the help of his psychiatrist (Robert Loggia). Returning to his old house and presiding over the Bates Motel – now run by a sleazy manager (Dennis Franz) – Bates reintegrates himself into society by working at a diner where he meets a downtrodden waitress (Meg Tilly). All the while, Crane (Vera Miles), sister to the murdered Marion Crane, is protesting Bates’ release, someone is calling Bates as his dead mother, people are going missing, and Bates’ own sanity is under stress.

Psycho II understands the tragic key to Anthony Perkins’ iconic performance, that boyish likability and that you want the best for him despite his past murderous deeds, and Perkins, returning to a role that no doubt he would have had trouble shaking its iconic associations, knows it thoroughly, giving another excellent performance. The relationship with Meg Tilly’s character is so well constructed and performed, remaining genuinely touching to me, even throughout all the twists and turns of the plot. The original Psycho is honoured and referenced by the sequel while finding its own memorable and often surprisingly ghoulish moments. And your sequel can’t lose with stars like Dennis Franz and Robert Loggia in them! Jerry Goldsmith provides the score, offering a haunting, melancholy theme alongside the revival of Bernard Herrmann’s music. Rented off iTunes. Recommended.