THE GIRL KING (2015)

Any Swedish actress who takes on the role of Christina, her nation's most famous queen, has big shoes to fill. Greta Garbo most famously essayed the role in a 1933 Hollywood film, while Liv Ullmann took her turn in a 1974 British film. Each could claim to be one of the most famous and acclaimed actresses in the world when they played the role. Malin Buska can't say the same, though like her predecessors she performs the role in English for Finnish director Mika Kaurismäki's history play. While Garbo's Queen Christina and Ullmann's The Abdication were prestige pictures in their day, I suspect that Buska's Girl King is aimed at a niche market. Here, what is only hinted at by Garbo's infamous kiss of a lady-in-waiting becomes almost the main subject of the film. I say almost because The Girl King aspires to be more expansive in its portrayal of Christina as an Enlightenment intellectual and a woman ahead of her time. Unfortunately, it leaves you with the impression that the queen was a pretentious brat.

 

Christina was raised to rule despite her gender and grew up a tomboy who apparently never reconciled fully with her femininity and the expectations it created. Like Elizabeth I of England Christina resolved to be a virgin queen, going so far as to adopt an heir to the throne rather than make one herself. Like many women of her time, she had at least one special female friend, Countess Ebba Sparre (Sarah Gadon), but as in those cases it's unclear how intimate (by our standards) the women were with each other. By our standards, at least, it seems odd for Christina to flirt with Ebba at one moment, and with the Catholic Church in the next. Then in another moment she's assisting Rene Descartes (Patrick Bauchau) in a dissection of a cadaver's brain, revealing the pineal gland which the philosopher declares the physical seat of the human soul, while nobles and courtiers huff and hurl. Buska lacks Garbo's innate gravitas (I haven't seen Ullmann in The Abdication) and by giving her too many interests the filmmakers make Christina look flighty rather than enlightened.

 

The Girl King suggests that Christina's abdication was precipitated by the discovery -- apparently in the nick of time -- of her sexual attraction to Ebba, who is kidnapped and quickly married off to a blond, blank nobleman. Her Catholic hobby is an additional deal-breaker but the film's message seems to be that she can no longer be queen if she can no longer live and love as she chooses, so she'll go to Rome and hang out with the Pope instead. I guess he could commiserate about the celibacy, or perhaps explain alternatives to the new exile. The movie ends with Christina's abdication ceremony, culminating with her crowning of the new king and her shucking off the royal robes to march off in a man's costume, saying in effect that she's free, though to do what is left an open question, since she isn't able to take Ebba with her. It's closer to history than the Garbo film, in which Christina's great love is a Spanish nobleman, but that's pretty much its only advantage over the 1933 picture.In the end, I doubt whether Girl King is romantic, tragic or titillating enough for its presumed target audience, and it's most likely less of all these things for everyone else.

On the Big Screen: CAROL (2015)

While Patricia Highsmith's novel The Price of Salt was reprinted at least once under the title Carol, it surprised me that Todd Haynes went for the alternate title for his film of Phyllis Nagy's adaptation of the book. This was never going to be a blockbuster, so I don't assume that the studio feared people confusing The Price of Salt with a diatribe against the high cost of living. Moreover, under its original title Highsmith's novel (originally pseudonymous) is virtually a canonical novel. My assumption was that The Price of Salt is a more pre-sold title than the bland Carol. So why the latter rather than the former? I couldn't tell you until I saw it and saw how Christmassy the thing is. It's Christmassy down to the period setting. December 1952 is for all intents and purposes contemporary with the 1940s setting of some of our most echt American holiday films like It's A Wonderful Life or A Christmas Story. Carol has the strange effect of reaffirming rather than subverting the notion of that period as our golden age, even though its intent clearly is to expose a cruel repression underway in those years. Its romanticism subverts any subversive intent, but the film's virtues don't really depend on subversive intent or effect. That's a good thing, since subverting the repressive sexual-moral consensus of the 1950s sixty years later would be like shooting a dead horse in a barrel. With that battle largely won, Haynes and Nagy can concentrate on character development and a convincing recreation, rather than a deconstruction, of a time when just about anything seemed possible in the U.S.A. Cinematographer Edward Lachman and the film's production designers nail the look of the period, making all the right choices of color and design. As a kid in the 1970s I saw vestiges of this world all around me and Carol matches my memories of them. Another good choice was the decision to film in Super 16mm, a more intimate format that suits the romantic story and makes the narrower frame more like a window opening directly into the past. For me, making this a nearly impeccable period piece was nearly half the battle.

The other half is the story, of course. That's pure eyes-meet-across-a-crowded-shop-floor romance, the eyes belong to posh shopper Carol Aird (Cate Blanchett) and doll-department clerk Therese Belivet (Rooney Mara), the latter sporting a Santa hat and helpfully suggesting, against the grain of the time, that Carol buy her daughter a train set instead of a doll. Nowadays Scott Lang's daughter in Ant-Man has a train set in her room, but Thomas the Tank Engine is something different from the deluxe affair Therese recommends, and I suppose the choice is a sort of signal beyond what these women's eyes told each other. Carol is married but estranged; she's already had an affair with a childhood BFF (Sarah Paulson) but her hubby Harge (Kyle Chandler) is desperate to reconcile, or simply to possess Carol. At stake is custody of the Aird's daughter, but despite the risk Carol is drawn inexorably to Therese, choosing a road-trip with her over spending the holidays in Florida with Harge and their little girl. Therese has a boyfriend she has no real feelings for and a BMF who encourages her to pursue her photographic vocation. Carol's Christmas gift of a pricey professional Nikon kit helps clinch Therese's identification of her with a better future for herself on every level, but her connection with her new friend transcends such calculations.

Things can't go easy in those days, but Carol is smart (presumably following the novel) in not having its heroines persecuted for their sexuality as such, but having their consummation exploited (by a private eye played by Cory Michael [Eddie Nygma] Smith) to give Harge leverage in the Airds' custody fight. On another level Carol herself is persecuted for her choices, but her subjection to inquisitorial psychoanalysis -- the story rejects the crude notion, articulated by Therese's boyfriend, that there's some psychological problem "in the background" of homosexuals --  is kept behind the curtain and is only referred to in the film. From here the film heads for a sort of Capracorn climax as Carol gives a big speech during the pre-hearing custody negotiations in which, after having ditched Therese in a panicked effort to keep her daughter, she effectively sacrifices her claim to the child, or most of it, rather than give up either Therese or her own nature. It gets positively Chaplinesque at the end, which is a wordless exchange of glances that confirm, despite all, the original exchange at the start of the film.

Like many films these days, Carol is just a little non-linear, opening with a scene that actually comes, when we return to it, very late in the story. But Todd Haynes is enough of an artist to eschew the "x months earlier" blurb that many filmmakers rely on rather than make the point cinematically without spelling things out. I still haven't seen Haynes's best known-film, Far From Heaven, for which Carol is already seen as a companion piece, but a knack for critical period recreation shown there and reconfirmed in his Mildred Pierce miniseries allows us to take Carol and Therese as authentic creatures of their time. Cate Blanchett can take care of the rest easily enough but Rooney Mara holds her own with the master thespian and takes a big step toward fulfilling the promise shown in The Social Network. There's been some controversy with the coming of awards season over critics and Academy members being steered toward considering Mara as a supporting actress rather than an equal to Blanchett. I can understand the complaint given how much screen time Mara has and Therese's nearly co-equal status with Carol in the story. It's really only the custody scene that seems to put Blanchett ahead, but I don't really have a problem (unless Mara does) with putting the two stars in separate categories. Shouldn't people who really like this film want both of them to win something? I have to admit that I haven't seen much this year to compare them with, but right now Blanchett and Mara are my favorites for distaff acting honors this year, and Carol is one of the best films I've seen in 2015.

MAEDCHEN IN UNIFORM (1958)

Like the U.S., Germany had a "pre-Code" period of film production. They call it the Weimar Republic, and the repression that followed was considerably more sweeping than what befell America. During Weimar Germany was part of the global vanguard of cinema, and plenty of envelopes were pushed. One of the last milestones of the Weimar era was history's reputed first-ever "lesbian" film, Leontine Sagan and Carl Froelich's Mädchen in Uniform. For screenwriter Christa Winsloe, this was just the latest of many titles for her play, which started life as "Yesterday and Today" and morphed into "Sickness of Love" before acquiring its more familiar fetishistic label. The 1931 film survived Nazi suppression and its name endured enough in memories that there was probably no alternative to using the same title when Geza von Radvanyi remade the story in 1958. The uniforms are school uniforms, of course, but on first hearing the title you might expect something more military, and that impression wouldn't be entirely accidental. We first see the students of the film's girls' school marching in formation, and the faculty emphasizes repeatedly that the girls are being trained to be the wives and mothers of soldiers. That doesn't exactly make them Spartan women but it does impose a perhaps-unnatural discipline on the girls. Whether or not the definitive title implies that the militaristic discipline, not to mention the all-female environment, has something to do with Manuela von Meinhardis's dangerous attraction to her teacher Fraulein von Bernburg is open to question, but the story definitely looks like a critique of Prussian culture in general.

I've never seen the original film, and I can't say whether the remake is toned down the way a 1958 Hollywood film might be toned down from a Pre-Code original. But whatever your expectations might be for a "lesbian" film, the Radvanyi version comes across as little more than an adolescent crush. Manuela (Romy Schneider) is sent to boarding school after the death of her beloved mother. She's looking for another mother figure, and perhaps more, when she encounters von Bernburg (Lilli Palmer). She's not alone in her idolization of the stylish schoolmarm, who endears herself to the students by kissing each one of them on the forehead at bedtime. She feels she's getting special attention, however, when the teacher lends her a shift; Manuela sleeps with her head on top of the thing, while a slightly older student seethes with jealousy.

I've just taken a look at the 1931 movie and in the equivalent scene there Bernburg kisses Manuela on the lips. Not so here. Score one for Pre-Code German cinema.

Whatever Manuela's feeling is channeled in an alarming direction when she's cast as Romeo in the class production of the Shakespeare play. From what we see, the play's not only translated but bowdlerized, since it ends with Romeo and Juliet wed. It's a triumph for Manuela that turns to disaster as, intoxicated by both artistic success and spiked punch, she avows her love for von Bernberg in front of a scandalized faculty before passing out.

The remake creates a sentimental tragic mood from the beginning with Manuela's visit to her mother's grave, while a heartbreaking hymn plays constantly on the school's carillon. The very architecture of the school foreshadow's Manuela's fate. The main hall is dominated by a central staircase that winds up at least four floors. From the moment Manuela first looks over the railing to the floor far below, you anticipate someone taking the short way down. The payoff comes after Manuela is disciplined for her outburst and von Bernburg prepares to leave the school. Radvanyi milks the moment for every drop of suspense. Manuela sits dejected near the bottom of the stairs and looks upward to the top railing. The camera follows her all the way up the stairs as the soundtrack adds a sinister undertone to the carillon theme. Then what?

Not for this film the lethal catharsis of Hollywood's near-contemporary contemplation of lesbian attraction in The Children's Hour. While Manuela apparently takes the dive in Winsloe's original play, the Radvanyi film has a thuddingly anticlimactic wrap-up. Von Bernburg holds Manuela's attention long enough for her classmates to pull her off the railing. As she recovers in hospital, the stern headmistress softens and urges Von Bernburg to stay on, but the teacher refuses, arguing that she would only be an obstacle to Manuela's maturation. She leaves and that's the end. It leaves you wondering what the moral was, or if there is one. Palmer gives a necessarily enigmatic performance, while the 20 year old Schneider, already a star thanks to a series of films about Empress Elizabeth of Austria, is convincingly adolescent and earnest. You believe in her attraction to Palmer, and you could buy the attraction being mutual without that necessarily being the case. As time makes the story seem less daring, this version should at least endure as a colorful, sentimental, twofold period piece -- a reflection of the attitudes of 1910, when the story's set, and 1958, when the film was made.

DVR Diary: THE EVIL WITHIN (1970)

Always a weaker rival to Turner Classic Movies, the Fox Movie Channel more or less gave up on the competition earlier this year when it began showing contemporary movies with commercials in prime time. From early morning to mid-afternoon, however, FMC still shows the old stuff commercial-free, and if anything they've delved deeper into their library than before to broadcast obscure oddities. For example, here's a Filipino-directed crime melodrama shot in India and starring one of the subcontinent's biggest stars, the late Dev Anand, alongside future blaxploitation actor and S.W.A.T. star Rod Perry, who sings the picture's title song. Directed by Lamberto V. Avellana, The Evil Within's first reel promises more craziness than the picture ultimately delivers. We follow a stocky fellow known only as "The Fat Man" on a series of fatal rounds. Without preliminaries, we open with him stabbing someone. In short order he leaves a trail of bloody bodies in his wake. He may be an implausible fighter but he's a charismatic attacker, often screaming before he strikes. If he's the antagonist we may be on to something -- but eight minutes into the picture, he's shot in the back and killed in perfunctory manner by the minions of Hakim, a more ordinary figure who now settles into the primary villain role. The Fat Man was a Syndicate enforcer and his death signals a power play for control of the opium racket. That brings in Anand (playing "Dev") and Perry (playing "Rob"), the latter having survived a rare non-fatal encounter with the Fat Man during that brief, glorious rampage. One powerful clan runs the drug trade, buying the opium from the mountain tribes and shipping it out to the wider world. The clan is riven by family feuds, and for a while it looks like our heroes will play the Red Harvest game of playing criminals against each other. The crooks need little prodding in this direction, their rivalries ultimately complicated by a lesbian love triangle that leaves Dev himself in a shotgun-toting rage by the end of the show.

It's hard to keep track of the villains in this one; just as Hakim abruptly eliminated the Fat Man, so he, too, is dispatched with little ceremony midway through the picture, after cajoling Dev's girlfriend of the moment into betraying him by promising her money so she can go to England. Without a strong core villain or a coherent menace of some kind it's hard to hold interest in this sort of story, and it doesn't help that Avellana brings very little energy to the action. In his defense, Fox Movie ran the movie "formatted to fit your screen," possibly subverting his compositions, but the story itself moves sluggishly. If this English-language picture was intended to put Anand over globally, it didn't work. The actor was fluent in English, earning a college degree in English lit, but his delivery is blandly urbane, almost more philosophical than witty, and he was probably too old for his action-romance role by this time. This film is Perry's on-screen debut and he provides little more than -- excuse the expression -- color. His presence may have made the film more marketable during the Seventies, but IMDB doesn't indicate if the film was ever released in American theaters. One interesting aspect of his role is the throwaway acknowledgment that Rob is a Muslim; challenged to swear an oath on his presumed Christian faith, he tells a tribesman that he's of the faith that "looks to the desert."  More colorful are the locations used, especially the luxurious fortress where the film's final act takes place, but Avellana never manages to make the action live up to the setting. All the materials are here for an exotic, eccentric spectacle, and it isn't hard to envision a Bollywood director, a blaxploitation specialist or any number of other Filipino filmmakers making more of it than this crew does. Still, the fact that The Evil Within played on American cable television is remarkable, and it reminds us that Fox Movie Channel is still worth watching -- or at least its schedule is, on the chance of discovering something as extraordinary as it is obscure.

Wendigo Meets WE ARE THE NIGHT (Wir sind die Nacht, 2010)

About a third of the way through Dennis Gansel's film -- at the point when novice vampire Lena is urged to put aside her qualms about blood-drinking and "just let go," my friend Wendigo turned to me and said, "This is Near Dark." A few minutes later, when the four vampire women went on a shopping spree, I suggested, "This is Near Dark meets Sex in the City," and Wendigo agreed. Moments after that, as the ladies raced their stolen luxury cars through a tunnel, we decided it might really be Lost Boys meets Sex in the City. It got more Near Dark-y again when one of the characters got trapped outside her car and caught on fire. But let's backtrack a little.

What makes Wir sind die Nacht a German Near Dark? Wendigo says that a cast of ruthless amoral vampires dragging a hapless human into their life of fun and murder made it so, at least for a while. That's basically the formula of Lost Boys as well, though the Schumacher film portrays the unlife more as a joyride than a crime spree. Overall, Wendigo would say the Near Dark analogy is closer because the German vamps are far more gratuitously destructive than Kiefer Sutherland's crew -- but he feels that you could go either way. The fact that the predators are all beautiful women who consume conspicuously makes it a bloodthirsty Sex in the City and gives it an identity of its own within vampire cinema.

Gansel gives us a mythos backstory in which the world's female vampires -- there are no more than 100 of them on Earth -- exterminated their male counterparts because the men were bossy and stupid. These are somewhat conventional vampires, invisible in mirrors and vulnerable to sustained sunlight. The one rule they have that we know of is that they'll keep vampirism within the gender, which gives the whole story a homoerotic potential that Gansel largely steers clear of. Our heroine Lena (Karoline Herfurth) is a guttersnipe pickpocket who raises the eyebrows of boss vampire Louise (Nina Hoss) when she tries to get her dirty self into the nightclub Louise runs. Something about Lena's eyes gives Louise hope that this time, she'll have found a soulmate, or the nearest thing to one since her maker was destroyed (or destroyed herself) on a beach many years earlier. Wendigo wondered whether Louise had felt the same way about her two established galpals, onetime silent starlet Charlotte (Jennifer Ulrich) and ditzy Nora (Anna Fischer). They're all just friends now, though Charlotte gives signs of growing sick of it all, but Louise clearly wants more from Lena, who once vamped gets a supernatural skin treatment and hair extensions along with the expected strength, speed and power to defy gravity. These vamps can walk on ceilings and jump from airplanes without parachutes. But somehow Lena isn't having fun.

Wendigo liked that the film didn't go for either of the obvious directions. Louise and Lena do not become lovers, nor do they become mortal enemies in a revenge feud until the very end of the picture. Not that he has any objection to lesbian vampires, but he liked that being vampirized didn't automatically turn Lena (or Nora, who has a crush on a mortal bellboy) into a lesbian -- which makes things difficult for Louise. This is a glamorous but not romantic vampire film in which vampirized people can't shake lose the baggage of their lives. This is most poignantly shown in Charlotte's subplot, which has her visiting a hospital where her now-elderly daughter lies dying, and deciding afterward to take a walk in the sun. Unlike in some stories, vampirism here doesn't mean losing your soul. Lena is, unusually, a "noble vampire" from the get-go, constantly struggling against the impulse to kill for blood. As Wendigo notes, in fiction a noble vampire doesn't usually start out noble, -- not even Edward Cullen did -- but has an early career of murder prior to a moral transformation. Lena is very much like the heroes of Near Dark and Lost Boys in her scruples, but in the two American films the hero is presumed not to have fully transformed, while Lena has as far as we can tell. She never drinks straight from a vein, except possibly at the very end of the film. Through her, We Are the Night has it both ways, showing the vampire lifestyle as superficially cool while the heroine rejects that coolness.

Perhaps scandalously, Lena rejects the women-only vampire lifestyle for romantic love with a man, to the point of violating the great taboo and guaranteeing a shitstorm for herself in any imagined sequel. The most scandalous thing about this is that the hero, Tom the policeman, is as densely inane as any human male lead in a vampire film dating back to David Manners. Tom is a handsome cretin, a veritable dummkop who admits to becoming a cop because he likes to run around chasing people. He's utterly outwitted by the mortal Lena and seems to have nothing to offer the immortal Lena, except for being a hunk. I guess we have to accept that that's enough.

We watched a dubbed, edited for language version of We Are the Night on FearNet On-Demand. Wendigo felt that the dubbing was okay for the most part -- we'd like to see more dubbing of foreign films to give them a fair chance in the U.S. market and pre-empt Hollywood remakes -- except for the actress who voices Lena in English. She simply sounds too perky -- and too old, Wendigo adds -- for the tough urchin we see on screen. He thought the opening sequence, in which Louise's crew slaughters the crew and passengers of a jetliner and ditch in mid-air with their shopping bags from Paris, was an inspired introduction to the vampires. It established each woman's personality while stressing how alien all three are to humans. He liked the effects and art direction that let the vampires walk on ceilings and walls, as well as little bits like Charlotte putting a cigarette out in her own eye. He also liked most of the action scenes -- though some suffered from the fragmented confusion common to overedited action scenes everywhere. One drawback to watching the thing dubbed was that we lost some of the German-ness of it, particularly an awareness of some of the landmarks that we suspected should have been obvious to us, but weren't. Whether the dubbing actors should have spoken with German accents is a question for another time. But We Are the Night, with its flaws, is decent enough to have broad appeal for horror fans in any language.

Here's an English-language trailer from production company RatPackFilm's YouTube channel.

MISS ROBIN CRUSOE (1954)

Sometimes you can't trust your cable guide. Mine told me that Turner Classic Movies was going to be running Luis Bunuel's Oscar-nominated version of Robinson Crusoe starring Dan O'Herlihy. Apparently I'll have to watch that here if I really want to see it, because what TCM ended up showing the other day was something that might well have appealed to the arch-surrealist of cinema: a gender-bending adaptation of Defoe raging with sexual subtext.

After teasing us with a male narration of the logbook of a doomed vessel, a woman's voice takes over to inform us that she, Robin Crusoe (Amanda "Miss Kitty" Blake), a young woman who got aboard in male drag, and one wretched man survived the shipwreck to reach an apparently deserted island. The man instantly attempts to force himself on Robin, claiming to have never been fooled by her imposture, but she manages to shove him off a cliff after he chases her up a hillside. Robin settles into her new routine as queen of a realm of one, proving quite a competent survivor and builder. A monkey is her sole companion until the inevitable day when black tribesmen appear to carry out an execution. They intend to put two women to death -- for what offense??? -- by tying their legs to bent tree limbs and tearing them in half. Robin manages to rescue one of the women (Rosalind Hayes) while the executioners focus on their first victim. She then fends off an attack on her treehouse by the aggrieved men with her musket and pistol, the woman joining in by chucking back some of the spears the men have flung at them. Like her literary model, Robin names her new companion Friday, noting the day's connotation as a day of freedom -- did Friday Foster get he name for the same reason?

Robin retains enough eurocentric civilization to take offense when Friday performs a mysterious death ritual over their foes, brandishing (freshly?) shrunken heads on sticks, but the black woman responds with servile gratitude (at least) when reprimanded. They teach each other skills, Friday warning Robin off the island's poisonous fruits, for instance. Eventually, Robin starts work repairing a rowboat so she and Friday can strike out for civilization, but the project is hardly under way when a second shipwreck deposits a sole, male survivor on the island. Robin wastes no time letting Jonathan (George Nader) know who's boss, reminding Friday -- who may have needed no reminding -- that "All men are bad." Ms. Crusoe suspects that Jonathan will try to steal her tools or her boat, and her suspicions make Friday violently hostile toward the man. She nearly kills Jonathan when he sneaks to the Crusoe place to borrow her saw, then gleefully watches him chomp on some that poisoned fruit. Stumbling on the scene, Robin is horrified and urges Friday to whip up the natural antidote that fortunately exists. An uneasy truce settles in as the women nurse Jonathan back to full health, neither fully trusting him but each, perhaps, tempted by him. Friday seems quick to adopt Robin's new opinion that this man, at least, is "good."

A very awkward courtship ensues as Jonathan tries to win Robin to womanly ways, wondering whether she always has to be the captain of everything. She despises girlish affectations, informing Jonathan that she's wearing flowers in her hair "only to please Friday," -- but she quickly clarifies that her friend considers them a good-luck charm.  But Jonathan, despite his hopeless chauvinism, proves still more tempting in what looks like blue store-bought swim trunks. Things come to a head when Friday lights a huge bonfire and performs a ritual of uncertain significance -- at first I thought that she had burned the rowboat -- while Jonathan seems insanely to swim out to sea, only to return to shore. Robin watches both spectacles, confessing a strange attraction to Friday's "savage" spectacle. What might otherwise be written off as director Eugene Frenke's incompetence creates a very ambiguous moment when you can't tell whether Robin is going to go to Jonathan on shore or Friday by the fire. She opts for Jonathan and a From Here to Eternity moment -- but the next morning he and the rowboat are gone.

By themselves again, Robin seethes and Friday tries to console her, subtext rising its closest to the surface when Friday strokes the sleeping Robin's hair. From there, events rush to their climax, Jonathan returning and setting a big fire on shore just as the tribesmen return, apparently after vengeance on the women. Robin is ready to kill Jonathan, who has wisely armed himself for his return visit -- and has the drop on him when she hears Friday's screams. To spoil things for the sake of closure, Robin and Jonathan rescue Friday and the trio fight off a small army of tribesmen until a naval vessel appears to investigate the bonfire and scatter the savages. At the darkest moment, Robin promises to marry Jonathan, and appears to fulfill that promise by the end -- but it's worth noting that, despite all my expectations, Friday does not die and is presumably still around in England as our heroine's body servant or in some related capacity, if you get my drift....

Miss Robin Crusoe is a triumph of content over form, which is fortunate considering how often the form stinks. Frenke, more often a producer (he made a more reputable desert-island picture, John Huston's Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison, in that capacity), was directing for the fourth and last time, and it makes you dread the first through third attempts. Nicely photographed locations are laughably integrated with the fakest-looking soundstage sets, while Frenke has difficulty ending scenes. Many end with an abrupt blackout, as if footage had suddenly been excised. Apart from the score by Elmer Bernstein, who was helping films as bad as Robot Monster punch above their weight musically, this is a clumsy affair. But sometimes, especially in the Code Enforcement era, it was the films lacking in classical smoothness that allowed repressed ideas to crack the surface of cinema if not break through entirely. Did Frenke mean for this film to have so much lesbian subtext, or was the whole movie a sort of Freudian slip? I won't venture an answer right now, but at least I can say that Miss Robin Crusoe more than made up for missing the Bunuel. I'm sure it'll prove inferior on every level once I see the film I originally wanted, but it was entertaining as hell.

Wendigo Meets DAUGHTERS OF DARKNESS (1971)

It's been more than a decade since I last showed my friend Wendigo Harry Kumel's Euro-vampire film, which I'd just bought on VHS in a letterboxed director's cut. Wendigo remembers being disappointed with the film. He'd expected more sex scenes with more overt lesbianism and a greater resemblance between Delphine Seyrig's "Countess Elizabeth Bathory" and the legendary Blood Countess whose name she bears. I'm to blame, in part, because I'd talked it up pretty big based on what I'd read about the film in the fan press. Now, however, Wendigo wanted to appraise it as a vampire film, not a cult sex film. While some of its flaws are still pretty obvious, he finds that he appreciates the movie more on a second viewing.

It was this or the Overlook: Daughters of Darkness's honeymoon hotel.

Kumel's subject is one of the world's worst honeymoons. Stefan (John "Willie Loomis" Karlen) and Valerie (Danielle Ouimet) are just married and staying uneasily at a hotel in the seafront town of Ostend. It's off-season and the hotel is largely deserted, except for the late-arriving Countess Bathory and her sullen companion Ilona (Andrea Rau). The concierge recognizes the Countess but can't believe his eyes; she's the spitting image of a woman who stayed at the hotel forty years earlier. To Valerie's dismay, Stefan and the Countess share a lurid interest in her namesake, the reputed murderer of hundreds of girls in the name of eternal youth. That's just the latest thing to bug the new wife; it also irks her that Stefan won't take her to meet his mother -- we learn later that he has good reason for his reticence. This early alienation between man and wife makes both appear vulnerable to the Countess, who stokes Valerie's jealousy while ordering a reluctant Ilona to seduce Stefan. Ilona would clearly rather bite the man's neck, but she'd also rather be free of the Countess. Freedom, such as it is, comes when she freaks out in a shower and manages to kill herself with a straight razor. At that point, Bathory makes her play for her real target, Valerie....

Countess Bathory (Delphine Seyrig) has a choice of targets to try her Dracula moves on.

Wendigo deems this a relatively uncharacteristic Euro-horror, until the very end. It had a strong, linear, character-driven storyline for a European film, with little in the way of "dream logic" and music that actually seemed to fit the mood of the story, but it has what seems to him a typical Euro finish: an abrupt act of violence followed by an illogical epilogue with a twist that makes no immediate sense.  For the most part, however, Daughters strikes a healthy balance between style and "substance" (character development, plot). Much of the substance comes from John Karlen's performance as a selfish, dishonest, abusive person who struck Wendigo as more evil, in some ways, than the vampires. Stefan is a bigger, more habitual liar than the Countess, who after all has just one big secret to keep. He quickly proves himself an unfit husband and in a way as much a threat to Valerie as the Countess is. You can see why it wouldn't take much prodding for Valerie to choose Bathory as the lesser of two evils.

Daughters makes no great strides in vampire mythos. The vampires bare no fangs and make no transformations, but they have several traditional vulnerabilities, particularly to sunlight and, as Ilona proves, to running water. Wendigo believes that this is the first time a vampire has been defeated by throwing her under a shower. There's very little blood drinking, and the little we get comes late in the game after a slow build-up of suspense that makes the moment more dramatic. Wendigo notes that Euro vampire movies generally aren't fetishistic about displaying vampire powers. Too often in Anglo-American films you can imagine the writer or director marking off their checklists of abilities displayed and effects deployed. By comparison, the Europeans tend to take supernatural powers for granted without needing to make a big deal out of their use, or they take an eccentric approach to them like this film's play with mirrors. The Countess can use mirrors, and we see her hands reflected, but we never see her face in the glass. You notice that enough to wonder what you might see there if you had the chance.

The glamorous life of the vampire; Ilona gets the dry heaves.

With a strong ensemble cast and patient plot development, Daughters now impresses Wendigo as an above-average vampire film that he can recommend readily, albeit with reservations. He did not find it "slow," as some online reviewers have; maybe he's grown more patient with age. If the film has a grave weakness, however, it's Kumel's direction of action, particularly the three violent death scenes. Ilona's death by straight-razor impalement (?), Stefan's double wrist-cut by the halves of a broken bowl (??), and the Countess's car-ejection (from the back seat) and tree-impalement are all implausibly and ineptly staged. We're not sure why these scenes play so poorly; having seen no other Kumel films, we can't say if he has a chronic weakness or a problem with this particular script. Maybe it's a mark of art that you can't do action well, but we doubt it. But since Daughters of Darkness isn't primarily an action-horror film its lapses, however laughable, can be forgiven. It remains an intriguing and attractive film of disturbing beauty, even if some of its transgressive element has been lost over time. Don't expect too much in the sexual or sapphic line, but do expect a sensuous shiver or two.

Here's a slightly repetitive and spoilerish English-language trailer, uploaded to YouTube by KXKWarriorV.

THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT (2010)

Lisa Cholodenko's film has been nominated for four Academy Awards. It's one of ten nominees for Best Picture, and Cholodenko is up for co-writing the screenplay, but not for direction. It strikes me as a movie that probably wouldn't have made it into the traditional five-film field, though that says less about the film than about the Academy's biases. My own biases would probably argue against a Best Picture nomination. The subject doesn't seem dramatic or momentous enough to suit my sense of cinema as spectacle. On the other hand, other people apply a single standard of compassionate humanism to all media, and a lot of such people are likely to be moved enough by The Kids Are All Right to make a case for it. Our common ground, I'd suggest, is acting. The stars make it a spectacle, though not of glamor. Annette Bening and Julianne Moore have drastically de-glammed themselves to play a middle-aged lesbian couple here, though Mark Ruffalo is arguably glammed up as the laid-back sexy sperm donor who complicates the heroines' family life. Bening and Ruffalo have been nominated for Oscars, while Moore's omission suprises me. If anything, she gives the most showy performance, and gets to make a big speech of a sort, but maybe she came on too strong for some viewers.

For Your Consideration

Paul (Ruffalo) was the donor for both of Nic (Bening) and Jules's (Moore) children, each woman bearing one. The eldest, Joni (Mia Wasikowska), is preparing to go to college, while Laser (Josh Hutcherson) has dubious taste in friends and a growing curiosity about where he came from. He convinces Joni to call the sperm bank and find out about their "donor," but his name can't be revealed without his permission. Paul is curious about his tangental heritage and agrees to meet the kids. He's a restaurant owner (the place is called WYSIWYG, the name being a kind of warning flag) and organic farmer, but not quite the achiever "Moms" had imagined when reading his profile way back when. Inevitably Paul meets the parents, and as inevitably complications ensue. With perhaps equal inevitability, the complications resolve themselves in time for a sort of happy ending with the family dispersed but also restored.

Paul (Mark Ruffalo) is stunned to learn he's a "donor." Below, he meets the kids.

The story asks for trouble by having Jules fall for Paul and enjoy a brief affair, but Cholodenko and co-writer Stuart Blumberg insist that this isn't about gender. Sexual arousal, we're told early, is often counterintuitive. Nic and Jules, for instance, get turned on by "gay man porn," while Laser's discovery of this fact closes a farcical first act during which Moms wondered whether he was gay. For the record, we never know one way or the other. In any event, we're supposed to see Jules's attraction to Paul as more emotional than sexual, though they screw enthusiastically. He gives her something affirmative that Nic, a doctor and a sort of judgmental achiever, can't currently give her comparatively underachieving wife, who sees Paul as a kind of kindred spirit. She insists on her homosexuality all the while, taking out her guilty feelings on a haplessly nosy gardener who offers another possible moral to the story. Jules accuses him of taking drugs, but he attributes his sniffles to allergies. With such allergies, why is he a gardener? Because he loves the flowers, he says. Apply analogies as you please.

Something felt both right and wrong about the way the story wrapped up. On one hand, the reconciliation of Nic and Jules seems too predetermined, too easily sparked by the big speech about marriage as a marathon that Moore gets to make. There was no way that this film was going to end with the man breaking up a lesbian couple. On the other, I give Cholodenko credit for not giving Paul a soft landing. He falls hard for Jules, breaking up with his hot girlfriend because he wants to take the next step and finally have a family. He burns that bridge only to get Jules's door slammed in his face, albeit by Nic -- though Jules herself blows him off decisively on the phone. While Nic is probably right to think of him as an "interloper," it's hard to think of such a genuinely nice (if thoughtless) guy as a villain, and it feels genuinely sad to see him angry and frustrated, throwing his helmet at his motorcycle, in our last glimpse of him. Maybe the moral for him is that anonymous transactions, even if human beings result, should remain anonymous.

This is the first time I've seen Ruffalo, the next Incredible Hulk, since he made an indelible impression on me in David Fincher's Zodiac. Cholodenko's film gives me a better sense of his range and his ability to keep a questionable character likable. The fact that he seems implausibly like a refugee from the Seventies I blame on the writers. Of the cast, Bening is the one being pushed hardest for an Oscar, though her chances against Black Swan's Natalie Portman don't seem that good. As I hinted earlier, I was actually less impressed by Bening than by Moore. I found Nic a one-note character, a control freak and borderline drunk, though this may be so against type, if Bening can be said to have a type, that it can be seen as an acting triumph. I will give her credit for one great scene, a dinner party at Paul's place where she struggles to transcend her distrust of him by hogging the conversation, effusively praising his cooking and his record collection, all the while waving a kitchen knife to cumulatively menacing effect -- and that's before she goes to the bathroom and finds Jules's hair in his drain. It's a strong performance, but I still say Moore was better. As for the younger actors, the title of the film says it as well as I can.

I've now seen seven of the ten Best Picture nominees. While none of them is the actual best picture I saw from 2010 -- that's still Oliver Assayas's Carlos -- Fincher's The Social Network leads the Oscar field in my book. I'd put The Kids fifth out of the seven I've seen, ahead of Inception and Black Swan. That may not sound like a high ranking, but it's at least an honorable mention.

INTIMATE CONFESSIONS OF A CHINESE COURTESAN (Ai Nu, 1972)

Shaw Bros. saddled Chu Yuan's (or Yuen Chor's) remarkable film with a title reminiscent of Victorian erotica, perhaps hoping to sell it as erotica in English-language markets. The film definitely does have its erotic moments, but when it counts, sensuality takes second place to savagery in this revenge epic and, if anything, makes the savagery more savage.

Chinese audiences know the film by the name of its heroine, which is first mentioned at a murder scene. A man is dead in his own home, partly covered in snow falling through a hole in the roof. His butler explains that the victim had just recently entertained Ai Nu, a noted courtesan. An extended flashback follows, forming the first act of the film. Ai Nu (Lily Ho) is one of a number of young women recruited forcibly from the countryside to become courtesans at the elegant brothel of Madame Chun Yi (Betty Pei Ti). Chun wants her girls flawless and virginal. Finding that one of her minions had deflowered one of the girls en route, the madame kills him with her bare hands. She can literally put her fist through your body. She enjoys it, too, especially the taste of blood afterward.

Betty Pei-Ti as Madame Chun

Another thing Chun enjoys is the company of women. This ultimate exploiter of women happens to be a lesbian, apparently keeping some of the girls as her personal concubines, unless all of them take turns at the task. She's a Chinese amazon, stunningly beautiful and masterfully violent. She takes a special interest in the spunkiest and most defiant of the new recruits, poor little Ai Nu. It's not clear how soon her interest becomes sexual, because she doesn't scruple at selling her virginity to the highest bidder among four wealthy old men, regulars at the brothel. The winner submits a blank check; he can get away with it because his son's the provincial governor. All four men get their turn at Ai Nu, tying her up, whipping her, forcing themselves upon her, the brutality of it accentuated by freeze frames and harsh sound effects just before the act is done each time.

Madame Chun with bed-warmers (Ai Nu not included)

Afterward, Ai Nu tries to hang herself in her cell; the suicide attempt is scored with Leonard Bernstein's music from On the Waterfront. She's rescued by a mute male housekeeper who had tried to show her kindness earlier, after Chun had ordered her flogged. Now he reveals that he can speak, but had taken a vow of silence in atonement for errors that had cost him the love of his life. The hero of the film seems to have revealed himself as he promises to help Ai Nu escape the brothel. But he can't get her past Chun and her private army. The hero has a few skills himself, but he's no match for the madame nor her major-domo Bao Hu (Lin Tung), the master who trained her. Our would-be hero is promptly expiring on the snowy ground, urging Ai Nu not to kill herself or otherwise throw her life away, because then who'd be around to avenge him? As she sobs over his corpse, Chun gives her a simple choice: die now, or live on Chun's terms. Ai Nu chooses life.

Lily Ho (left) gives Betty Pei-Ti a fateful elbow nudge during a training exercise

Chun sets about remaking Ai Nu in her own image, teaching her kung fu and swordsmanship and taking her to bed. Once we learn this, the scene at the murdered man's house repeats itself and we return to the present, following Constable Ji (Hua Yueh) as he investigates Ai Nu's link to the victim. He discovers an imperious, arrogant beauty, far removed from the terrified country girl we first saw. When he demands that she prove that the victim was alive when she left him, she challenges him to prove that he wasn't. Now, we suppose, the hero has arrived, but we'll learn soon enough that this film doesn't have a hero.

As Ji finds his investigation impeded by the social standing of the victim's circle, Ai Nu carries out a spree of revenge on the four men who first violated her. She varies the m.o. to keep people guessing, tying one up and setting him on fire to avenge his tying her up, but allowing another to love himself to death with three insatiable women and an overdose of aphrodisiacs. Finally, Ji finds her practically red-handed with the fourth victim, whom she'd whipped to death in a room locked from the inside as the constables desperately try to break in. Denying nothing, she only dares him to follow her to the real criminals. She leads the constables to the latest shipment of fresh females for the brothel, which she attacks. Leaving Ji to mop up, she races back to the brothel, where Bao Hu has been warning Chun about Ai Nu's dangerous intentions. Chun won't believe a word of it. She and Ai Nu are like one and the same person! Why not? Chun has created a peer for herself; that may have been the only way she'd ever find someone she could truly love. So when the constables arrive to storm the brothel, and Bao Hu with all his men insists that Ai Nu has betrayed them all, Chun can only stand by her woman at all costs.

There's a moment when the women warriors stand back to back, gravely outnumbered, and one gives the other an affectionate elbow in the side, and the other returns the gesture. It's like William Holden saying, "Let's go," and Warren Oates answering, "Why not?" It's a Wild Bunch moment, or a Sword of Doom moment if you want to keep the context Asiatic. It's the moment before Armageddon as the two women psyche themselves up for an amoklauf.

And before long it's down to Bao Hu against the women, a hopeless situation. But he doesn't go down without an epic bloodbath and a crippling blow, slicing off Chun's arm just as she's run it through his body up to her elbow. A bit of a setback, that, but Chun takes it like a trouper, worried only that Ai Nu might stop loving her now that she's a little handicapped. Of course not, Ai Nu coos. She won't stop loving Chun -- because she never did love her. It was -- duh!!! -- all a ruse to set up her revenge against all her oppressors, with the worst one saved for last. It was a nice plan, but for all that revenge is something you kinda have to boast about, this isn't exactly something you should admit so bluntly to someone who still has one good arm....

Ai Nu has an emotional ferocity and a raw romanticism that I've rarely seen in Hong Kong action films. The fantastic martial-arts context takes the transgression of lesbianism and elevates it (or degrades it, depending on your political sensibilities) to the level of a supernatural attribute. Chun and Ai Nu are the most beautiful women and the mightiest warriors in the picture, as if their sexuality (however insincere it may be on Ai Nu's part) gives them extra power, particularly in a setting where no man seems to have a conventional domestic relationship. The men are either patrons of prostitutes like the four old men, or they're emotionally damaged characters like Bao Hu and the erstwhile mute, or else sexlessly ineffectual like the constable. Given the men around them, lesbianism looks less like mere deviance (though its deviance gives the film an extra charge) than the natural recourse of naturally superior women.

The brilliant thing about Kang Chien Chu's screenplay is the way he turns Chun from an outright villainess into a tragically clueless, noirishly romantic antiheroine. The madame -- what a sap! --has clearly fallen deeply and sincerely in love with her deceiving Galataea, and after the women slaughter all around them, you can't help but feel that Ai Nu isn't righteous but just a little mean to hit Chun with the truth at a vulnerable moment. Another moment will come, however, to make us wonder how sincere Ai Nu was about her insincerity -- and there'll be consequences for that, as well. It all works, maybe just because this is my king but also, as I hope any viewing would prove, because Betty Pei Ti and Lily Ho have real chemistry and throw themselves passionately into their roles. Chu Yuan does all he can to make them majestic and malignant all at once while maintaining a suspenseful balance between pastel sensuality and livid brutality.

Intimate Confessions is arguably part of Quentin Tarantino's universe, with the business of lopping off arms possibly having a direct influence on Kill Bill. I think I saw something else here that I saw there as well; the way Ai Nu completes Chun's sentence for her at a crucial moment reminded me of the eerie exchange between The Bride and O-ren Ishii in which one finishes the other's sentence ("Silly rabbit...Trix are for kids") in a way that suggests that the cereal slogan was a shared catchphrase. That moment always leaves me thinking that there was a subtext of something between the two assassins in Tarantino's film, and it may be that Ai Nu is the something, or a key to it. But this is all just stuff for speculation unless Tarantino has actually identified Ai Nu as an influence. Whether it influenced him or not doesn't change the fact that Intimate Confessions influenced me. It's now one of my favorite Hong Kong martial arts films.

The following DVD trailer barely scratches the surface, but it'll do until you see the movie. Triphibian uploaded this copy to YouTube.

Wendigo Meets THE VAMPIRE LOVERS (1970)

Wendigo doesn't remember when exactly he first saw Roy Ward Baker's Hammer production. The earliest viewing he can remember was an unusual broadcast on our local PBS station on a Saturday night -- unusual for showing the film, if not uncut, than without the nudity cut out. He's unashamed to admit that the nudity, which he had heard of from his monster mags, was a major draw. He was also intrigued by the idea of a whole series of Hammer films he hadn't yet seen, dealing with the evil Karnstein clan. He knew the Karnstein name from the two unofficial tie-ins Hammer made, Vampire Circus and Captain Kronos, Vampire Hunter. The actual trilogy -- Vampire Lovers was followed by Lust for a Vampire and Twins of Evil -- was hard to find back in the Eighties. By the time Wendigo saw the first film, he had read its inspiration, Sheridan LeFanu's Carmilla. The movie proved surprisingly faithful, especially compared to adaptations both of us have seen subsequently. The nudity was no shock for him, since the underaged Wendigo had seen Old Dracula at least a decade earlier at one of the last local grindhouse theaters -- he hadn't expected that to be a nudie film, nor did the grandmother who brought him there, but he took it in stride.

What was new, to him, in The Vampire Lovers was the blatant lesbian angle. As he puts it, that element slapped him in the face in a way he'd never experienced before, having seen Dracula's Daughter long before he could infer anything salacious from the title character's conduct toward her female victim. He'd seen it in print, of course, and knew from history how the Elizabeth Bathory legend had influenced Le Fanu. So lesbianism doesn't strike him as an alien implant in vampire cinema. As an "unnatural" act, as it was perceived by the genre pioneers, it was probably a natural fit. Homosexuality in general as a "sterile" relationship defined exclusively in sensuous terms seemed analogous to the victim's romance with the vampire, and the lesbian angle plays on male fears of both the seductive succubus and the romantic friendships of 19th century women. Wendigo suggests that the lesbian seductress archetype has over time transformed the image of the male vampire from rapist to sensual seducer in his own right. On the other side of the equation, feminine weakness seemed to make a female victimized by another female a natural horror subject. There's a misogynist aspect to the archetype, a presumption of omnivorous female sexuality, that's probably still there even when guys consider lesbianism cool. But there's also a fantasy of female empowerment involved, though whether that's a guy's or gal's fantasy is unclear.

Kate O'Mara and Ingrid Pitt are positively glowing after their encounter upstairs.

Wendigo readily admits that he was turned on by The Vampire Lovers, and especially by its star, the late Ingrid Pitt, at the head of a cast of Hammer hotties. They may all be a few years too old for their roles -- Pitt is about a decade too old for hers -- but they leave Wendigo in a forgiving mood. He regards Pitt as one of Hammer's most attractive stars, and she became more attractive to him as she embraced her place in genre history as an enthusiastic commentator and author. In Lovers, Carmilla has a dominant, mocking, feline quality, like a cat toying with mice before devouring them. There's an appropriate inexpressive, poker-faced quality to the character despite her protests of great feeling; Pitt gives off a vibe of an undead creature going through the emotional motions toward a selfish goal. Hammer could have gone too far to make Carmilla a sympathetic character, but Pitt maintains a predatory attitude that keeps you mindful of her villainy. It makes Wendigo think that Pitt would have made a great wicked warden in some women-in-prison film of his imagination.

For all her dominant quality, however, Pitt's Carmilla is not a master vampire. She answers to a character known only as the "Man in Black," presumably the head of the Karnstein clan and the counterpart to "Count Karnstein" characters in later films -- though he could also be seen as the Devil himself. This is a departure from Le Fanu, for whom Carmilla is the last of the line, aided only by a lackey who poses as a mother or maid. That may undercut her power in some eyes, but Wendigo suggests an analogy making her Darth Vader to the Man in Black's Emperor. Carmilla may ultimately be a stooge, disappointingly answering to a man, but she remains formidable in her own right and a dominant power over her victims. Still, there's something sexist about the insertion of this mysterious mute man, as if the idea of an autonomous female master vampire might have been too subversive for Hammer. It's especially odd, given how he's established as the true master, that he's unscathed at the end of the film. It's a unusually open-ended outcome for a Hammer film. If the Man in Black is meant to be the head of the Karnstein clan, leaving him "alive" is almost an announcement of a sequel, though if he's the Devil he could just be some floating element who still ought to have been brought back for a final bow. Wendigo doesn't consider him a bad addition, but does think him an unnecessary one.

John Forbes-Robertson is a passable Man in Black, but Johnny Cash is scarier.

While The Vampire Lovers is probably the best-known film version of Carmilla, it wasn't the first. Hammer came late to the subject, preceded by Carl-Theodor Dreyer's very loosely-inspired Vampyr, by Roger Vadim's nearly-as-loose and much worse Blood and Roses, and the Italian Crypt of the Vampire, which admirably builds plot complications around a fairly faithful core to make a mystery out of the story. Wendigo was recently quite impressed by the stylishness and creativity of Crypt of the Vampire, which he finds visually more impressive, even in black and white, than the mostly set-bound Lovers. Hammer has the advantage, however, in casting, with Peter Cushing as the vengeful General as well as Pitt (while Crypt has Christopher Lee in a mortal role), in scale of sets, extras and costumes, and in more overt sexuality than the merely suggestive Crypt. If gore counts, Lovers's two decapitations are another advantage over the merely creepy Crypt. Some corny crossings (a dagger hilt? really?) are mild demerits, however.

Vampires should know never to bother even coming near this guy.

Cinema's greatest vampire slayer plies his trade in The Vampire Lovers.

Hammer also makes the most of color just as Crypt does with monochrome. Ultimately, The Vampire Lovers' superior fidelity to the original story noses it ahead of Crypt in Wendigo's estimate. It's all to Ingrid Pitt's credit that her picture holds up on fresh viewing against impressive competition. We moved this picture to the top of the to-do pile to honor her memory, and the film did just that. It remains a milestone of British horror and vampire cinema in general.

In memoriam Ingrid Pitt (1937-2010)

This copy of the Vampire Lovers trailer, which stragely lays off the lesbianism, was uploaded to YouTube by Lv99Slacker.