Chinatown

Jack Nicholson stars as JJ Gites a private investigator in 1930s Los Angeles who, despite both his sleazy profession and the fact that he's the spitting image of Alexandre Cabanel's The Fallen Angel when captured in a similarly defeated repose, is completely above board. In fact, Chinatown - written by Robert Towne and directed by a despondent Roman Polanski, following the murder of his pregnant wife Sharon Tate but before he fled to France with a charge of unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor hanging over him - cannot unfold quite the way it does if Gites isn't unusually committed to uncovering the truth. This gumshoe doggedly picks at LA's rapacious ruling class as a way of reconciling his own part in a cruel hatchet job. Hired by a middle-aged, moneyed woman to trail after her husband Hollis Mulwray, who she believes is having an affair with a much younger woman, Gites dutifully complies. The paparazzi-style photographs that the PI hands off quickly find their way into a local newspaper, much to Gites' consternation.  

The trailed husband, the Chief Engineer at the Department of Water and Power as it turns out, is found dead in a storm drain; meanwhile Faye Dunaway has arrived at Gites' office claiming to be the real Mrs. Mulwray. Better experienced than described, Chinatown is a guided tour around a powerful, emerging metropolis and the spectral forces who wield both appalling wealth and act with an unconscionable barbarity; power brokers who are, quite apparently, immune to the legal and moral laws that govern everybody else. Dunaway's Evelyn Cross-Mulwray, who would seem to be a manipulative femme fatale, an archetype inextricably linked with film noir, is instead a deeply tragic character. What we learn of her relationship with her much older husband and her father, John Huston's Noah Cross, conjures up despair rather than reassurance. Evelyn's life a commodity that has been traded back-and-forth between men who would presume to own, basically, everything. As Gites presses closer to understanding why Los Angeles is experiencing a manufactured drought, he demands of the creaking Cross what more he could possibly want in this life. The elderly millionaire's answer, delivered and repeated in haste, is that he wants to own the future. And, watching his enormous, arthritic fingers curl greedily around a screaming child's face, you believe him. 

Jerry Goldsmith - Love Theme from Chinatown (Main Title)

Cinema Noir by Bendik Kaltenborn

Mai Yamane - Tasogare

The Return

The Return, director Uberto Pasolini's adaptation of The Odyssey, forgoes mythical beasts and seafaring voyages, preferring to interrogate ideas of permission in fraying, familial relationships. Ralph Fiennes stars as Odysseus, the Ithacan king who washes up naked and newborn on his homeland's shores twenty years after abandoning his wife and child to go off to war then, according to the whispers that precede him, live with another woman. Posing as a beggar, Odysseus slowly circles his former household as unruly noblemen take full advantage of his absence. Trapped in the palace are Juliette Binoche's Queen Penelope and Charlie Plummer's Telemachus, the mother and son being pulled in different directions by the presence of these greedy suitors. Penelope is tired and wavering, apparently at least somewhat taken with Marwan Kenzari's Antinous, a ringleader among these slavering dignitaries who is proving to be the least boorish of a bad bunch. 

The would-be couple's dealings, which largely revolve around Antinous promising to divert attention away from Penelope's twilight deceptions, are suggestive of a much more equitable relationship than perhaps the Queen has been used to. With Antinous as her husband Penelope could expect to be a partner rather than a beloved subject, it seems. Comparatively, Telemachus, who has never known his father, boils with resentment; speaking to his mother with a level of reproachment that hints at a possessive, even sexual jealousy. He calls her a whore for transgressions that exist only in his head then, later, demands to be part of the contest that will decide Penelope's new husband. This unusual, even Oedipal arrangement of the young prince is underlined when, following Odysseus' resumption of rule, Telemachus leaves on his own adventures, declining to stay with his newly complete family. Odysseus, for his part, welcomes this absence. 

Before he's back in his marital bed though, the disguised and dawdling Odysseus must reckon with the idea that, actually, he isn't welcome home at all. Speaking to Penelope as a transient claiming to know her husband, Odysseus is pressed to answer questions about the sack of Troy. Did the King of Ithaca kill women and children? Did he give his men permission to pillage? Did Odysseus join in with these outrages? Did he indulge himself in rape? Odysseus' stunned silence here speaks volumes. Pressed to act only when the squatting noblemen make an attempt on Telemachus' life, Odysseus reveals both his identity and a gnarled, tightly knotted physique. As indirect and circuitous as the preceding 90 minutes have been, Pasolini's description of the climactic archery contest is thrilling. Odysseus' approach to the stringing of the bow he left behind demonstrating not just his physical strength but a thoughtful expertise when handling an uncooperative weapon; while his cold-blooded, almost mechanical murder of the defenceless suitors offers an alarming insight into how the Ithacan King may have dealt with the cowering citizens of Troy. 

keio けいお - Satisfaction [bump]

Dredd Good vs Evil (for Gosh! Comics) by Mike McMahon

ALISON - Alpine

Fleaureque - Kosmos

Possession

We are assured, repeatedly, during Andrzej Żuławski's audio commentary for Possession that this film is, as horrifying as it sounds, autobiographical in nature. The piece a spitefully arranged reaction to the dissolution of the writer-director's marriage to actress Małgorzata Braunek and the blame that he, and Żuławski isn't afraid to share this, apportioned to her. On the same track, which is really more of an extended interview with film scholar Daniel Bird, a combative Żuławski even goes as far as detailing the marital difficulties experienced by cinematographer Bruno Nuytten and lead actress Isabelle Adjani. The pair, he implies, grew apart during the film's emotionally gruelling, low budget shoot. Aside from any interest prickled by ancient gossip beamed-in from a bygone era, this detail feels critical to understanding the hypnotic appeal of such a savagely candid film. It isn't enough that Adjani's doe-eyed Anna is, despite her obvious and sustained mania, stunningly beautiful. She is portrayed as actively intoxicating to orbit. 

An interlude in which Anna's husband, a sad sack former spy played by Sam Neill, is sent a short reel of film shot by her guru-cum-affair partner, Heinz Bennent's Heinrich, neatly encapsulates the tensions experienced by an audience wavering between rapture and revulsion when beholding Adjani's performance. In this clip Anna, presiding over a troupe of young ballet dancers, prowls the room, moving from girl-to-girl. She barely acknowledges her students, maintaining eye contact with the camera - knowing that she is the subject of this short and drawing power from being so permanently considered - while she harshly manipulates a shrieking girl's limbs. Nuytten's hand-held camera pushes in on this scene, the frame filled with Anna's pleading, mock innocent stare and that of a wailing, distressed child. We are being asked, directly in this moment, not to focus on the genuine horror that Anna is almost casually creating. We are to look past the sobbing face of an innocent and focus only on the woman, the trusted teacher, who is very deliberately conducting these would-be ballerinas with scathing words and physical pain. 

This confrontational approach to deceit is crucial since Anna shares many of her scenes with men who she is attempting to emotionally manipulate in some way or other. Be that her husband; their long-suffering child, Bob; the heartbroken Heinrich; or the pair of snoops who turn up, unannounced, to the rotting hovel in which Anna shelters her darkest, bloodiest secret. Adjani's Anna is, we discover, constructed in layers, with each of these men only able to access a particular level of attention or information which always leaves them wanting more. None are permitted to possess a complete understanding of Anna or her actions. She withholds, violently at times. Equally though, Anna's hold must extend beyond the figures dancing on a flat, two-dimensional screen to the viewer themselves. Nuytten and Żuławski's startling camera work makes our involvement explicit. Our perspective is essentially voyeuristic: a prowling, encircling presence that sweeps at and around these hysterical figures as they bite and claw at each other. Possession rubs our faces in domestic neglect and an escalating, apocalyptic sense of violence. The viewer is incriminated then, judged as a participant for daring to peak into these lives. Perhaps, since we're privy to scenes and sequences outside of the experience of Neill's Mark, we can delude ourselves (at least for short spell) that we have a more complete view of this relentlessly complex woman but, as Italian special effects artist Carlo Rambaldi's presence in the opening credits begins to take shape, it becomes clear that we're just as clueless and susceptible to manipulation as the rest of the people that Anna gleefully deludes. 

Kazuki Tomokawa - Doushita

The Odyssey by Dani Torrent

The Avalanches - Blue Shadows ft. Karen O

Ludwig Göransson - Hades

The Odyssey

Writer-director Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey is, as expected from the creator of the temporal pincer movement, a non-linear telling of the ancient poem that is steeped in queasy memory and elided thought. As with the director's own Oppenheimer, this Odyssey hinges on an individual who seems, for all appearances, to be an emissary from a forthcoming, dreadful new era of human extermination. Where J. Robert dreamed of quivering, sub-atomic galaxies, the lost king Odysseus chats candidly with the cosmic entities that bridge the hemispheres of his brain. Their faces are anchored in his own failings, while the thoughts they prompt demand consideration of his unholy ingenuity. Both Oppenheimer and Odysseus' visions relate to the application of an original but fundamentally terrible new thought, ideas that have rolling consequences; waves that crash and echo far beyond the sand on which they were plotted. The equivalent here to Oppenheimer's fission-based nuclear weapon is The Trojan Horse itself, a deception that works so well because, we are told, it undermines the most basic tenants of human decency. 

The sacking of Troy then isn't organised as a great or ingenious victory; it's a crime that damns mankind. Somewhat of a piece with the director's breakthrough film Memento, in that the present for Matt Damon's mislaid monarch is a fog of unconscious, reflexive action (he scours a blasted beach for signs of his ship or crew) and winding conversations with a woman, Charlize Theron's bronzed Calypso, in which critical information is deliberately withheld, prolonging his agonies. While Tom Holland's Telemachus steps away from a household packed with seditious suitors to brave a trip to Sparta, in the hope of hearing word of his absent father (finding little to nothing), a stirred Odysseus answers his child's queries but only for our benefit. Odysseus giving detail to a horrifying voyage premised on a desire to physically split with the ungrateful allies who share their wrongdoing. By straying from the shipping lanes, Odysseus inadvertently abandons himself and his crew to the Gods and the elements they personify: Zeus in the ferocious thunderstorms above them, Poseidon in the churning waves beneath. 

The light of knowledge that prompted Odysseus to pack himself into a holy object - apparently a gift for petty Gods, intended to curry favour - is absent on this expedition. In this section mankind's brightest, most devious mind is confronted with how much he doesn't, cannot know. Nolan's film then taking the island-hopping form seen previously in Don Chaffey and Ray Harryhausen's Jason and the Argonauts, only absent the certainty or good-natured bonhomie that kept the Argonauts from Jason's throat. In Nolan's telling Odysseus meets the men he has failed, including Elliot Page's Sinon, and is then cursed to know, by figures who emerge from black sands, how events can play out. The decisions he will be pressed to make and how lives will be lost on each path. Forced to treaty with powerful supernatural forces - from Samantha Morton's Circe, a witch who can remake men in the slovenly image of beasts, or a massive, one-eyed man who is Francisco Goya's Saturn Devouring his Son rendered in, as behind-the-scenes images would have us believe, Royal de Luxe-style puppetry - horror in Nolan's Odyssey is not just the unknown but the unknowable. All around them are thought and method that exceed the grasp of these pillaging sailors. 

Finally returned to Ithaca, Damon's king prospers again by deception, breaking another siege - this time of his own palace - by exploiting the social norms of the day. He enters his household as a beggar, a disguise that we are told is beloved of earthbound Olympians. Telemachus, desperate for any connection to a father who has been transformed into contemporary myth, repeatedly voices entreaty that acknowledges that the person he is speaking to has displayed some aspect, so beyond the norm, that it raises suspicion that they are Godly. Odysseus, again, uses this human reverence for something beyond themselves to his advantage. Anne Hathaway's Queen Penelope may weep at the straining sound of an unstrung bow; Odysseus tearing apart the challenge he has conquered only to clatter the jerry-rigged debris against the fleeing bodies of his enemies but the lasting impression of Nolan's film is its description of hubris. Damon's Odysseus as a man arrogant or foolhardy enough to consider himself in terms that are not instinctively beneath Greece's vengeful pantheon. Odysseus as an agnostic in the age of antiquity who, when judged against governing Gods who personify aspects of human life, makes a case for himself as a new deity of deceit. A line drawn from Prometheus, the fire-giver, and the failed sculptor Dolus to Odysseus. A figure so powerful he can even deceive himself. 

idialedyournumber - Limbs

Sonatine by Alexye

Dry Cleaning - I Have the Key

Phoebe Bridgers - Lost Boys

The Snow Woman

The striking Shiho Fujimura stars as The Snow Woman, a gliding wraith that stalks the frigid depths of a feudal forest, freezing elderly snoopers when they dare to bed down in abandoned cabins for the night. Rather than hold this supernatural character at arm's length, director Tokuzō Tanaka's film (clocking in at a concise 79 minutes), welcomes her into the household; describing her pained attempts to maintain a consistent emotional presence in the human realm. Beautifully shot by Chikashi Makiura, The Snow Woman largely elides location work, and any verisimilitude such a practice can confer, preferring to stage its spontaneous blizzards on a succession of cramped, delicately lit sound stages. This beatific falseness reflective of a central character who works extremely hard to maintain their own staged, and temporary, reality. 

Besotted with the apprentice sculptor who wandered into her chilly domain, Fujimura's Snow Woman disguises herself as a beautiful, ageless woman and quickly ingratiates herself with the widow of the man she flash-froze, all to win her beloved's heart. Based on a folk tale included in Lafcadio Hearn's Kwaiden: Stories and Studies of Strange Things, the spell of The Snow Woman is that this paranormal presence is, essentially, both sympathetic and, unless threatened, benign; a lonely creature that really only represents an aspect of nature that just so happens to be associated with death. Yuki, as she is known to her husband, simply wants to be in love and raise a family. The outside forces determined to degrade or undermine this partnership then seethe with jealousy: the brutish local lord who wants The Snow Woman for himself or the ancient medicine woman who blisters Yuki's pearlescent skin with boiling, ceremonial waters.