…or Ferpect Crime is a low-rent blast, starting out as a sleek sort-of-obvious satire about a department-store Lothario but slowly creeping toward Grand Guignol black comedy and finally ending in a garish burst of surrealist comedy. This ain’t for everybody. But it looks grand (director Alex de la Iglesia got an initial boost from Almodovar, and they share an eye and taste for the cartoonish taken seriously–or vice versa). Its meanness is slowly sapped away by an obvious love for those “freaks” and “uglies” it mocks.
I’m having trouble nailing it down, but it was fun. Imagine if Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny got caught up in a bleak noirish erotic thriller, and then had it out for one another. I’m rushing to my queue to line up some more of his stuff.
Saw another de la Iglesia film–La Comunidad, or Commonwealth, another black comedy that veers into cartoon silliness and Hitchcockian pastiche. After an amazing title sequence, I expected non-stop energy, but the film unfortuantely slows down a little, and could stand to be trimmed. But it’s never boring, and it builds steam. Plot: Carmen Maura plays a down-on-her-luck realtor who, while selling an apartment, comes upon a stash of money. Thinking to take it, she is put upon–in ways outlandish, and increasingly violent–by the rest of the tenants, who had planned to take it for themselves. There are enough amazing sight gags and shots to satisfy anyone, and Maura (from Almodovar’s Women on the Verge) is an astonishing comic actress; she has a scene where she walks through her options out loud to herself, lighting cigarette after cigarette.
It’s blissful. I’m going to keep looking for this guy’s work. He has a picture about a band of disabled superheroes attacking the ‘perfects’ in a future world (Accion Mutante), and another very weird-looking comic noir about a comedy/singing team called Dying of Laughter, and a nasty comic road movie based on Barry Gifford’s writing (the guy behind Lynch’s Wild at Heart) called Perdita Durango that also looks grand….
So, on my long-term quest to see all of de la Iglesia’s films, I caught Dance with the Devil, the renamed Perdita Durango which works as a kind of revision of Wild at Heart. Adapted, as I mentioned in the post above, from Barry Gifford’s novel, the movie feels a little like a sequel but even more like a return to that universe from another perspective. We have two lovers with an absurdly-inflated sense of romantic passion on the road, dealing with assorted North American freaks (and in Barry Gifford’s world, everyone is a freak), committing crimes but coming to some sort of moral recognition against an even bleaker, nastier perspective.
This film is far messier, and ultimately less effective–but it has some of the same pleasures. Black black humor and perverse violence: one strand of the plot involves the killing of two white college kids in a Santeria ritual, each of whom is raped/abused by our respective protagonists; another the transportation of a truckload of human fetuses to Vegas (for use in cosmetics). A man is graphically run over, twice, by that truck.
It also has some excellent acting, by leads Javier Bardem (as Romeo Dolorosa) and Rosie Perez (as Perdita Durango); I got the film to see Bardem, actually, after seeing him in this trailer for the new Coen Brothers film. Screamin’ Jay Hawkins is an accomplice; a thinner but equally nasty James Gandolfini is a lawman after them. Alex Cox–an aesthetic and I think spiritual forefather, more so than David Lynch–has a supporting role.
I gotta say this had all the ingredients for the kind of stew I savor, but it really doesn’t come together. Certain scenes never coalesce in terms of tone; the sense of confusion is sometimes exacerbated by poor dialogue and obvious editing confusion. (There are times where some minor thing is happening that we have not been informed about. Sometimes that seems a deliberate bit of filmmaking prestidigitation; a little girl crying on a couch while the main badguy blathers to his colleague is suggestive of evils we haven’t seen. But other times, it’s plain ol’ continuity fuck-up.) This was clearly low-budget, and shot on the run.
But it also had an insane–and occasionally infectious–energy. Bardem has a great scene discussing spirituality with Duane, his intended white victim. And the film’s attention to the sleazy pop underbelly of the Americas does, unlike Lynch’s film, really zero in on the collisions of race, culture, and class. Obviously not in any pedantic way — the main (and funny) touch is to have the heroes decide to off white kids, for nor good reason beyond their gueroness, and to have the white kids, for no good reason (beyond their whiteness?), try to talk themselves out of the dangerous situation by proclaiming their knowledge of how “our people” had hurt “your people.”
I’m not sure anyone but me would like this. But I think de la Iglesia is a really fascinating director, and he could very easily break out with some film in the future–he’s got oodles of talent and not a smidgen of self-censorship.
Accion Mutante is very low-budget, I think de la Iglesia’s first film, and as briefly noted above it’s a vaguely dystopian thriller about a band of terrorists with disabilities who carry off wildly violent/unsuccessful kidnappings, until halfway through the film there’s a successful killing and we head to a mining planet with no women (except, now, the kidnapped heiress has Stockholmed into a perceived relationship with the head kidnapper). It is as goofball as it sounds, and did I say low budget? It’s obviously shot on a dime.
But what a dime, and what garishly lovely cinematography (even when the budget seemed to only have enough for a couple of stray 40-watt bulbs), and for all its pleasures in violence the film maintains a tone of generous, playful silliness. I referenced Looney Tunes up above, and that sensibility seeps through all of de la Iglesia’s films; or maybe the comparison is Joe Dante, who I also love, mixed in with Almodovar and Lynch. It’s pulp pop surrealism of high order. (And even when de la Iglesia’s films don’t quite work fully, they’re still never boring.)
i’ll add a comment here so mike doesn’t feel he’s talking only to himself. hi mike.
We’re in it together, G!
I know Gio is waiting for more about de la Iglesia, so: The Last Circus (originally Ballad of the Sad Trumpet) distills its tonal and thematic objectives in the imagery flashing through the opening titles–clowns, Franco, fascists, movie monsters, Popes and cardinals and Jesus on the cross. Oh, and a grandly melodramatic soundtrack.
Javier’s father–like his father before him–is a clown. During a performance, artillery drowns out and shuts down the children’s laughter, and the anti-fascist rebels storm in and recruit all the men. “Recruit”–force at gunpoint in to taking up arms. But, lacking arms, they hand the clown a machete, and he races through a violent battle scene, big red nose, blond curls and a floral dress, blade scything through air and necks and limbs.
That should give you a good sense of the film: grotesque outsized violence, taken seriously but inflated into operatic excess. And whatever “point” is being made operates less through narrative or rational meaning than visual associations, linkages, allusions. The film flashes forward to the early ’70s, a country still under Franco’s thumb, still repessed yet bubbling with rage. Javier is now a tubby sad clown, newly-hired at a circus. He falls for the acrobat wife of the lead clown, a vicious sadist (who informs Javier that if not a clown he’d have ended up a murderer).
The film won’t bear up to much rational decoding of its meanings–but the stew is consistently spiced, and the visual relations evoked in the title provide a compelling, crazed, collagistic energy to the Grand Guignol of its central love triangle and revenge. And it is batshit loony fun. It ends atop a huge cross crafted atop caves full of victims of Franco, two clowns with mutilated faces knifing one another while government forces fire upon them and a rocket-fuelled motorcycle flies through the air seeking to rescue the acrobat, dangling from the edge….
Or put it this way: if this doesn’t excite you, skip the film….