Review: Purple Noon (1960)

Purple Noon (Plein Soleil, 1960)
Dir: René Clement
Starring: Alain Delon, Marie Lafornet, Maurice Ronet

'Is insincerity such a terrible thing? I think not. It is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities.'

(-'The Picture of Dorian Grey', Oscar Wilde.)

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René Clement's beautifully lush adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley - the first of two (the second being Anthony Minghella's 1999 version) - is a lissome ode to the luxuriant power that wealth yields, weaving a story both repelled and seduced by uninhibited greed and its benefits. Revelling in the hypnotic beauty of 1960's Rome, it sets the same desirous gaze as Ripley at the playboy's life; the jewel-toned summers and sparkling seaside resorts, the drunken gamblers in their white linen suits, the preening women to be gained as objects of desire - in much the same manner as a car or a yacht. Delon as Ripley is truly an identity defined by consumption; he exists merely through the prism of Greenleaf, coldly calculating until he can inhabit his friend's persona. His motivations seem less guided by traditional obsession or jealousy (as Matt Damon's version of Ripley suggests) than by blind, chameleonic ambition. Delon's almost blinding good looks function as both charming aid to his crimes and suggest his frighteningly empty malevolence. His Ripley is less precise and more carefree than his 1999 portrayal; his own star persona and appearance so closely matches that of the tanned, languishing playboy that he appears entirely at ease as an interloper - and perhaps this makes Mr. Ripley even the more talented.

A particularly telling scene is one in which, casually strolling through a seaside market, Ripley inspects some of the more grotesque fish for sale. With a smirking nonchalance - having just committed a murder at sea - he laughs at Greenleaf's watery fate, and relishes in the strange, morbid wonder of inspecting the creatures who will soon be feasting on his old friend. He remains unaware that there is nothing Neptune hates more than the hubris of a handsome man - and the film's conclusion attests to this with an awful irony.

Review: Shock Corridor (1964)

Shock Corridor (1964)
Dir: Samuel Fuller
Starring: Constance Towers, Peter Breck, Hari Rhodes

' As to those who refuse to be oedipalized in one form or another, [...] the psychoanalyst is there to call the asylum or the police for help. The police on our side -- ! Never did psychoanalysis better display its taste for supporting the movement of social repression, and for participating in it with enthusiasm.'

(-'Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia', Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari.)
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Shock Corridor, made in 1964, holds a mirror to the turmoil and vast social changes of its historical moment - but undoubtedly it also looks back askance at the McCarthy years, aggressively indicting 1950's political conformism and hypocrisy. As in 1975's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, the protagonist (a journalist, played by Peter Breck) enters an insane asylum under spurious pretences; and like Forman's film, the central metaphor is that of America as insane asylum. The 1950's were, in America, the age of Freud and of psychoanalysis; thus, Fuller uses every available psychological excuse to justify his excesses. Corridor is, at its heart, a pulpy noir melodrama, complete with heavily-stylized chiaroscuro and tight close-ups of its leads' anguished faces. Constance Towers (given considerably less to work with than she is in the equally wonderful Naked Kiss) plays a lovesick stripper, her bizarre, feather boa-bedecked dance sequence searing itself onto one's memory. DP Stanley Cortez, (of The Night of the Hunter fame) is responsible for the recurring, nightmarish visuals, ensconcing that so-entitled corridor with an eerie light, its repetitious appearance as haunting as any aesthetic nuance of the film. The trio of mentally-ill patients that our journalist interloper encounters are substitutes for the larger ailments in American society - the young black patient (unsettlingly played by Hari Rhodes) a particularly stunning choice and genuine smack-in-the-face to audiences of the time. These American 'illnesses' link both to a sick society in microcosm as well as a blanket assumption about what sort of 'deviant' behaviour is considered dangerous - and then labelled as such, to be removed from the body politic. In this respect, Fuller also critiques the golden calf of psychoanalysis; as a tool for the repression of dissent. And yet, in spite of the deeply political overtones of the film - Fuller's typical free-wheeling, sensational style allows plenty of time for attacks by gangs of roving nymphomaniacs. What a movie.

Review: Spring Breakers (2013)

Spring Breakers
Dir: Harmony Korine
Starring: Selena Gomez, James Franco, Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Benson

Spring Breakers' aesthetics are somewhere between Terry Richardson chic and MTV music-video vulgarity; a meticulously designed sheen of cars, sunshine, guns, and breasts played both for voyeuristic pleasure and for savage satire. Its four stars - practically interchangeable with the exception of Gomez' dark-haired Faith - have their tanned limbs and supple young flesh bathed in honeyed light, brightly dressed in candy-coated pastel shades; like beautiful, carefully dishevelled Tumblr girls. Even their later, comedic scene in pink balaclavas seems over-determined to appear hiply iconoclastic; their pretty surfaces are fashionably of-the-moment. Early in the film, one of the girls sensuously rubs a wad of cash, saying, "Seeing all this money makes my p*ssy wet!" If you could call this an ethos, then that may well be the ethos of Spring Breakers' protagonists. Their aggressive narcissism, sexual fixation on violence, and the superficial pathos the girls repetitively indulge in - speaking in constant cliches, as if they'd collectively never had an original thought - all point toward Korine's deeply pessimistic view of American youth, of the perverse intersections between sex and violence ubiquitous in our culture. Frequently mentioned is the pitiful desire to escape life through self-destruction, as if it could somehow attend to the inherent boredom and dissatisfaction of such a lobotomised existence. Undoubtedly, there is something of a self-righteous stance to this assertion; not puritanical, certainly, but one which takes the moral high ground. I can't pretend that this evident morality is clearly cut or even heavily suggested; the film remains ambiguous, which perhaps saves it from the apparent hypocrisy of condemning something whilst simultaneously enjoying the pleasures of depicting it.

Liquor, drugs, and nudity are par for the course; but the constant close-ups of bouncing and jiggling female flesh seem to shift subtly from naughty fun to, perhaps through its repetition, something repulsive; almost farcical, ridiculous. The young women aren't really characters in the proper sense; they are so vacuous that the only real traits or emotions in them seem to be ruthlessness and lust, whether it be for sex, money, or the thrill of video-game violence. Franco offers slightly more in a sleazy, darkly funny, and surprisingly empathetic turn as Alien, the drug dealer who befriends the girls. Interestingly, for a film packed with parties, arrests, and robberies, Spring Breakers has a strangely dreamy quality, as if borrowing from Sofia Coppola or Wes Anderson's disconnected, surrealistic style. Paired with its dizzying selection of flashy, vulgar edits, it only heightens the strange, somnambulant effects of the film; it's as if you haven't slept in days.

In spite of its self-reflexivity, some will argue that the film's continual objectification of women and stereotyping of African-Americans is harmful, even as satire; I can understand the viewpoint when Korine so accurately mimics the style of misogynistic, flashy media. For argument's sake, I will say that it's not necessarily telling us anything new; and that the overt lecherousness of the camera does nothing more to inform me that pop culture is morally and spiritually bankrupt. I am fully aware that many women will find the invasive, fetishistic camerawork - of the sort that divides close-up shots of body parts so frequently, it is difficult to discern what belongs to whom - hateful and disgusting. I agree, of course; I merely contend that this gratuitousness is precisely the point. It remains - to all perhaps but the poor souls whom the film is really about - a deeply unsettling portrait of contemporary youth, and how terribly it has capsized in the murky waters of amoral, corporatised, and anti-intellectual influence.