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Leonard Heldreth
Oh, the horror
Two of the films this month are horror films, one is a carefully paced
thriller and one is a remarkable variation on the serial killer pattern.
The Host
The Host is a film for those who enjoyed the mutated monster movies
of the ’50s and ’60s—films like Them with its giant
ants, Tarantula, Reptilicus, It Came from Beneath the Sea, The Beast
from Twenty Thousand Fathoms, Godzilla and dozens of others turned
out in the shadows of the atomic bomb and radiation mutation. Like
these films, The Host focuses on the human relationships caught up
in the monster’s activities, in this case, the dysfunctional
Park family who run a noodle shop on the banks of the Han River.
The creature of The Host (the original Korean title is simply “Creature”)
is an amphibious beast about the size of a large bus with stubby legs
that let him move rapidly on land or sea. He also has a prehensile
tail that lets him swing between the supports of a bridge and do gymnastic
backflips as he swings along.
The result of mutation from chemicals dumped into the Han River on
orders of a U.S. military supervisor (Scott Wilson), the creature
swims out one day onto the riverbank and starts devouring the people
who are picnicking there. Among the people is Gang-du (Kang-ho Song),
the oldest Park son, who keeps falling asleep and has badly bleached
blond hair, and a daughter of grade-school age named Hyun-seo (A-sung
Ko).
Gang-du tries to drag Hyun-seo to safety when the creature attacks,
but he stumbles and then realizes he is dragging the wrong child;
the creature is now waving Hyun-seo around in its prehensile tail
as it heads back to the water.
Grandfather Hee-bong Park (Hee-bong Byun) bewails the loss of his
granddaughter but tries to protect Gang-du from the attacks of his
unemployed brother Nam-il (Hae-il Park) and his sister Nam-joo (Doo-na
Bae), an Olympic archery champion who keeps freezing up in competition.
The family has to lay aside its squabbling and unite to try to save
the granddaughter, who indicates in a cell phone call she is alive
in the monster’s lair.
Complicating matters is a U.S. serviceman who has broken out in a
rash after touching the creature, and the official position of the
United States and South Korean governments is that the creature is
a host for a dangerous virus (hence the title of the U.S. release).
The Americans are the bad guys, the bunglers, throughout the movie,
planning to release a biological poison called Agent Yellow that will
kill everything in the sewers, including Hyun-seo if she still is
alive.
Korean director Joon-ho Bong keeps the pace moving and plays his characters
for both suspense and laughs. The loss of Hyun-seo is mourned at a
mass demonstration, but during the weeping, the family members, in
front of her picture, get into a fight about who misses her most.
In another example, a small boy keeps peeing himself every time he
hears a loud noise or is frightened, and his brother tells him to
hurry along because it’s raining and no one will notice.
The film is full of food references that play the characters off against
the monster. The Park family sells fried crabs and other seafood at
its stand, and later in the film, when Gang-du opens a seafood can,
the things in it could be cousins of the rampaging creature, who is
busy dining on humans and regurgitating their bones.
Trapped in the creature’s lair, Hyun-seo and a boy pass the time
by discussing what food they want when they get out. There’s
even a scene in a trailer shop where the Park family is eating, and
then the creature tips it over and tries to eat them. It’s not
exactly a dog-eat-dog world, but you get the picture.
There is, of course, the final confrontation between the family members
and the creature, and a little coda a few months later wraps up some
loose ends in ways Stephen Spielberg never would have done, but this
is Korean entertainment, and the humor, like the creature, often has
a bite.
If you enjoyed the old monster movies, you won’t want to miss
this well-done modern example of the genre, especially when the creature
is so cool. See it now before the American remake, already scheduled,
makes a mess of a good narrative. The movie is in Korean with English
subtitles.
The Aura
Argentine director Fabián Bielinsky’s first feature, Nine
Queens, was a slick and thoughtful thriller about a rare stamp (reviewed
here in May 2005), and The Aura is even better. Unfortunately, Bielinsky
died at age forty-seven, a few months after this film was completed,
and there will be no more of his edgy, carefully-paced films about
people caught up in situations beyond their control.
The unlikely hero of this film is an unnamed taxidermist (Ricardo
Darín) who doesn’t like to kill animals and whose wife
has just left him.
He fantasizes about pulling off the perfect heist, with everything
going by the clock, but he lacks the initiative and brutality to carry
out his plans. He also suffers from epilepsy, and the seizures may
incapacitate him unexpectedly. Before they occur, he sees an aura,
hence part of the meaning of the title.
To get away from his empty apartment, he joins his friend Sontag (Alejandro
Awada) on a hunting expedition to Patagonia. In the woods, he accidentally
shoots a man named Dietrich, who is planning a robbery of a casino
in a few days, and, through various not too plausible actions, he
manages to replace Dietrich in the robbery plans. Of course, further
developments complicate the robbery, and the tension builds.
The men are staying at hunting cabins owned by Dietrich (whose body
remains in the woods unfound), and Dietrich’s young wife, Diana
(Dolores Fonzi), and her brother Julio (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart)
add further character involvement.
An additional character is Dietrich’s dog, a black shepherd who
adopts the taxidermist as his new master after thoroughly sniffing
him; the dog is a sheep killer, showing up late in the film with blood
on his mouth and throat.
The conclusion of the film is a fascinating study in characters and
unexpected actions.
Darín is excellent as the taxidermist; his mournful face and
slow movements seem to make a mockery of his criminal ambitions. The
others are solid in supporting performances, and the photography—often
in washed out greens, greys and silvers—coveys a stark contrast
between the urbanized wasteland of the city and the equally threatening
hunting camps of the forest.
The contrast between the taxidermist’s fantasies and the reality
of the criminal situation are deliberately confused, as the audience
is first shown the way the taxidermist imagines something would happen
and then shown the way it actually happens. One of the film’s
strengths is the way it parodies the “Big Heist” films in
which everything depends on split second timing; another is the appearance
of the dog at selected intervals, implying a wild card or an element
that can’t be predicted, just like the onset of the seizures.
In one sense, the title may refer to the criminal role the protagonist
has taken; in a description of his seizures to Diana, he speaks of
it as if he were entering another world and the temporary freedom
he finds there. Also, Bielinsky does not feel obligated to tie up
the loose ends, e.g., Diana’s letter to her brother remains unopened
on the table at the end, and other concluding elements, while not
critical, are not elaborated upon.
The Aura is a solid thriller from a director who was just establishing
an international reputation at his death. It’s a tense, original
film that is well worth seeing; it is in Spanish with English subtitles.
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer is one of the most original and challenging
films of the year. The director is Tom Tykwer, a German whose earlier
films—Run, Lola, Run; The Princess and the Warrior, Winter Sleepers
and Heaven—make an impressive and consistently memorable body
of work.
Perfume is his first film in English, so perhaps it will be the one
that brings him more attention from the English-speaking public who
can’t handle subtitles. On the other hand, anyone who can’t
handle subtitles probably wouldn’t find this film interesting—for
better or worse, it has that “foreign film” sensibility.
Tykwer, Bernd Eichinger and Andrew Birkin wrote the screenplay based
on the 1985 novel by Patrick Suskind, which has a cult following and
inspired Kurt Cobain to write the song, “Scentless Apprentice.”
The challenge of the novel was to convey in words the olfactory experiences
of the main character, and that problem was compounded in film, which
relies on images to convey its meaning. A narrator, John Hurt, helps,
but it’s still difficult, and the film shows visuals that correspond
to the smells (flowers, rotting fish, tanned hides) and a couple of
times creates a fantasy setting to convey what the characters are
smelling. The film is fantasy (or at least heightened reality), and
the scenes all seem just slightly overdone, as though the colors had
been slightly exaggerated in the processing. Even the ugly effects,
such as the scars on the boy’s face and the red birthmarks on
the sides of his body, are gorgeously ugly. The effect seems appropriate
for a film entitled Perfume.
After an opening sequence, this long film (134 minutes) flashes back
to the streets of Paris in 1738 with the birth of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille
(Ben Whishaw). Grenouille has two extraordinary qualities—his
sense of smell is a thousand times more sensitive than that of the
average human, and he has no scent of his own. Grenouille’s life
is traced through his time at Madame Gaillard’s orphanage, his
sale to a tanner as an apprenticeship, and his purchase as a helper
by a perfume maker, Giuseppe Baldini (Dustin Hoffman), who teaches
him that the greatest perfumes have thirteen elements or notes. His
departure from each of these people—his mother, the mistress
of the orphanage, the tanner, and the perfumer—is followed by
their meeting untimely and violent ends.
Seeking the way to preserve the smell of a human being, specifically,
a beautiful girl, Grenouille walks to Grasse, the perfume capitol
of France. After various experiments, he finds the way to distill
human smell is to wrap the person in animal fat and distill the aroma
the fat has absorbed; unfortunately, he has to kill the necessary
thirteen girls in order to cut off their hair and wrap them in animal
fat. (Too bad he didn’t live in the twenty-first century; he
could have sold the process as a kinky spa treatment and had more
customers than he could have rendered.)
The townspeople and their aristocratic leader, Antoine Richis (Alan
Rickman) object to the murder of their daughters, and eventually Grenouille
is caught and sentenced to death by torture. However, there’s
many a slip on the road to the rack, and the film’s ending is
most memorable. One critic, of course, saw Christ imagery everywhere,
but let that be; one could also say that perfume is a metaphor for
the cult of celebrity, for the timid life unlived, for love being
the essence of life. There is a moral, intoned by Hurt in voice-over
narration, and it has something to do with being able to love and
be loved. But morals, accurate or not, usually have little effect
on a movie’s success, and Perfume survives any attempt to pigeonhole
it.
Wishaw portrays Granouille as a true psychopath. He is not loved and
cannot love: just as his body has no odor, so his mind has no feelings.
He desperately wants to be recognized, and his obsessive quest for
the ultimate perfume is part of that desire for recognition. Despite
the character’s repellent actions and unfeeling behavior, Wishaw
conveys the urgency of his obsession, and the audience cannot help
feeling pity for him.
Hoffman is good as the perfumer, although we never forget that we
are watching Dustin Hoffman. Rickman is as good as he can be in a
part that doesn’t really demand much of his talents. The supporting
roles are nicely done, but it is the sets, costumes and visuals—the
great French landscapes, the collapse of the bridge shop, the rich
fecundity of the street scenes, the bloody newborn baby—that
dominate the film and lift it above the typical period reconstruction.
Perfume is not a film everyone will like, but I predict it will become
required viewing for serious filmgoers and a major work in the canon
of a director whose originality and technical proficiency are moving
him rapidly into the ranks of Kubrick and Bergman.
The Abandoned
Released only briefly in theaters and then on DVD as part of Lions
Gate film series, “8 Films to Die For,” The Abandoned is
a little better than many recent horror offerings from around the
world, but still leaves a lot to be desired. The isolated setting
and farmhouse sets are great, the acting is adequate and the plot
makes almost no sense. If you can get by just on visuals, some of
them fairly graphic, you may enjoy this film.
If we stick to the part of the plot that makes sense, it concerns
forty-two-year-old Marie Jones (Anastasia Hille), a film producer
from the United States, who receives a message from Russia that she
has inherited a farm there from her mother. She goes to Russia to
find out more about her mother, meets with Andrei Misharin (Valentin
Ganev), a lawyer, and hires Anatoliy (Carlos Reig-Plaza), a driver
to take her to the abandoned farm.
Arriving there at dusk (not smart), she gets out of the truck when
she hears strange noises (even less smart) and starts to explore the
old, two-story house with only a flashlight (how smart is that?).
The truck drives off, leaving her at the house. While exploring, she
finds Nicolai (Karel Roden), a man who claims to be her twin brother
and who says he arrived a couple days earlier after receiving a similar
message about an inheritance. The two of them explore the decaying
house, encountering doppelgangers of themselves with blank eyes, and
every time they try to hurt the doubles, they injure themselves instead
(cute idea, but nothing is done with it).
Then the problems begin for the viewers as the unanswered questions
begin to proliferate. This situation usually is indicative of plot
branches that were part of the main story at one time but got lopped
off either in production or in editing, leaving only an unsightly
protuberance on the main trunk of the plot—what is in that basement
room where they heard noises but never got around to exploring? Is
the truck that brings Marie to the farm the same truck as the decaying
wreck they find behind the house? And what is the significance, other
than shock value, of all the doppelgangers, including the semi-invisible
one on the steps leading up to the office building? All of these spin-off
plots (to switch metaphors) just spiral out and fall on the warped
floor of the old farmhouse without advancing the main narrative. First-time
Spanish director Nacho Cerdà, who cowrote the script with Karim
Hussain and Richard Stanley, needed at least one more writer to pull
this mess together.
On the positive side, the forest setting on an island in a river in
Russia builds a lot of tension. The old rambling house–two-stories,
a basement, and some add-on sheds—is beautifully realized and
quite scary. The ghost in a modern office building is a nice touch.
Even the acting is competent, although Marie at her age shouldn’t
be making all of the same stupid mistakes that characterize the blonde
bimbos in Hollywood movies—going up the stairs when she shouldn’t,
going into the basement for no good reason, dropping the flashlight
all the time and doing all the other dumb things that any sane human
being with minimal intelligence would never do outside of a movie
sound stage.
That’s about it. If you have lots of time, The Abandoned is no
worse than a lot of TV sitcoms, and the sets are more realistic. The
film is in English, as if the dialogue made any difference. Top
—Leonard G. Heldreth
Editor’s Note: All films reviewed are available on DVD or VHS
from local stores. Reviews of earlier films cited can be found at
www.mmnow.com
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