The Duke of Burgundy; The Mend; Phoenix; The Hateful Eight

Peter Strickland, 2014

#3, 2015 Skandies

Wow. If there’s anything I am less interested in watching than a dom/sub movie, it’s a surrealist dom/sub movie. I got about twenty minutes into this before pausing it to read some reviews and find out whether the remainder would be more of the same. Apparently it is more of the same. So I bailed. I guess I was slightly amused to spot a mannequin among the members of the audience at the moth sound lecture. (Yes, this is a movie with such a thing as a “moth sound lecture”.) Still gets a zero.

Myna Joseph, Russell Harbaugh, and John Magary, 2014

#5, 2015 Skandies

An improvement: I got nearly halfway into this one before giving up. Again, it’s hard for me to imagine a place I would less like to be than a party in a small apartment crammed full of New Yorkers vaping and drinking, and the first half hour of this movie contains a 23-minute sequence that is nothing but that. What follows (a human trainwreck squatting in said apartment for a week) is not much of an improvement. I did smile at this exchange, when the trainwreck’s girlfriend explains to the apartment’s proprietor what they’re doing there:

She: “We are going to leave. We would be home now, obviously, but, um, our building has bedbugs.”

He: “You have bedbugs? Did you bring⁠—?”

She: “No, we don’t, the building… my super swears that it’s not bedbugs, but… radon.”

He: “Wow. Those are two really different things.”

That actually might be enough to get this movie a one.

Hubert Monteilhet, Harun Farocki, and Christian Petzold, 2014

#6, 2015 Skandies

I finished this one! Though in this case it was because, when I checked the reviews partway through to see whether I should continue, they said that the movie is basically all build-up to its final scene, which won the “Best Scene” Skandie with more than double the number of points received by the runner-up.

spoilers start
here

It turns out that this is actually a high-concept movie, but the concept doesn’t kick in until well after my impatience had. We’re in Berlin in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Nelly is a singer, considered Jewish by the Nazis though it’s not a big part of her sense of self, whose husband Johnny gave her up in the dying days of the war in order to save himself. At Auschwitz she is shot and a Nazi caves her face in, but she survives, and with the inheritance she receives from her many dead relatives, she is able to afford reconstructive surgery. This is all backstory: the movie actually starts with the surgery, Nelly’s adjustment to her liberation from the death camp, and her dealings with the woman who has made arrangements for her recuperation, an activist named Lene who urges Nelly to move to Palestine as part of an effort to launch a Jewish state there. Midway through the movie, the actual plot gets underway. Nelly tracks down her husband, who doesn’t recognize her, but who proposes a scheme: she looks enough like his dead wife Nelly, he says, that with a few weeks of coaching, she could pass for her! Then they could split her inheritance! Nelly, still smitten with Johnny and full of excuses as to how he couldn’t really have done what everyone said, goes along with the plan, as the “coaching sessions” allow her to spend more time with him. Calling herself “Esther”, she impresses Johnny with how accurately she can “mimic” Nelly’s handwriting and how quickly she “learns” who Nelly’s old friends were. Eventually Johnny decides that the time has come to stage “Nelly’s return” for their acquaintances. But upon discovering that Johnny had divorced her the day before turning her in, Nelly upends his plans in that much-vaunted final scene: at the gathering, she sings a song that she had discussed with Lene in an early scene. Johnny, accompanying her on the piano, recognizes her voice, sees her Auschwitz tattoo, and stops playing as his face falls.

I can see why this movie has received the accolades it has, but it didn’t really work for me. There’s too much meandering before any narrative momentum is established, and everything hangs on the final scene, which in turn hangs on the song… but we get no shock of recognition from hearing Nelly sing, since it’s the first time she’s done so in the film. I did recognize that she was singing the song we’d heard at the beginning of the movie, but those sorts of callbacks generally feel pretty mechanical to me. And for me the song didn’t stand on its own merits. So that leaves the face. And my reaction to the face was, “Hey, look at that actor making a face.”

Quentin Tarantino, 2015

#8, 2015 Skandies

Might as well just call this one “Reservoir Dogies”. Mostly one location, a bunch of guys pointing guns at each other, but this time it’s in the O‑o‑o‑ld West. Actually, this is what you might get if you threw a bunch of Tarantino’s previous films into a blender: the premise of “a bunch of paranoid guys with guns in a room” from Reservoir Dogs, the genre conventions from Django Unchained, the tense conversations and eccentric performances from Inglourious Basterds, the time jumps from Pulp Fiction, the audacious running time of Kill Bill, and the unrelenting, gleeful brutality of Death Proof and basically everything else Tarantino has ever done. In his previous four films, the pattern behind the brutality was that, first, it was visited upon the goodies, who thereby received an imprimatur to heap any amount of brutality upon the baddies. The innovation of The Hateful Eight is that, as the title suggests, there really aren’t any goodies except for a handful of incidental characters. Even the guy who seems to have more of the film’s sympathy than the other members of the primary ensemble either is or fantasizes about being a rapist. So the brutality just flows freely, without even the limited strictures at work in those previous films. I’m afraid I will be giving this film a more hateful score than an eight.



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