Needless to say, a hell of a second day. Two great films about language, power, and obfuscation in very, very divergent styles:
Kynodontas / Dogtooth
Hard to know where to begin w/ Dogtooth. I guess it’s kind of about how we can be suffocated to death by protection. It is just so giddily, aggressively odd and unsettling. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s absolutely singular. Like if Lars von Trier, Michael Haneke and Samuel Beckett tried to make a film based vaguely on the recent story of Austrian psycho Josef Fritzl and his family. It is a very funny film on a lot of levels, none of them indicative of sound mental health. A family where nobody is named. Father is some kind of industrialist, working in a factory that produces God know what. He keeps Mother, Older Daughter, Younger Daughter, and Son (those are their names in the credits) locked up in the house and its adjoining yard (w/ a pool!). He has created a world for his children w/ an absolutely berserk psychic topography, filling them w/ completely insane ideas about how things work. The children are told that they will die if they leave the compound. The only way to survive is in his car. They will not be allowed to learn to drive until they have grown something called a “dogtooth.” They are told that their mother is pregnant w/ twins and a dog. Words have all kinds of twisted meanings and gnarled logic rules the day. Vaginas are “keyboards.” A “pussy” is a dining room light. “Zombies” are a kind of yellow flower. The film is episodic and shot w/ lengthy takes, mostly close-ups. When there are establishing shots they don’t work like establishing shots. The close-ups and medium shots have a quality of interchangeability. The montage is very odd yet totally precise. Scenes and sequences develop their own geographies slowly but surely, like a world the viewer is building in their own brain as the sensorium tries to situate itself, sounds from one scene overlap onto another, often the sound cuts out all together, and the whole film has the quality of a patchwork w/ holes in it, much like the language within the film, which is in a constant state of being modified and expanded upon, bumping into walls, hiccupping, stop-start lurching, knitted together by the experimentations and odd game-generating activities of the adult toddlers, developmentally stalled as they are, intractably bound up in polymorphous perversity and unable to direct their sexual drives toward any kind of utilitarian end, so constantly searching, fumbling, spazzing, playing around. This family has developed its own semiotic realm at once confused, elaborate, and wickedly amusing. This sense of language functioning from a degree-zero is very reminiscent of Beckett’s plays. Apparently if you speak Greek, a really upset Greek guy told me after the screening, Dogtooth is even stranger. We never have any idea why Father keeps up this ridiculously complex charade, how exactly Mother figures in, or how a man capable of thinking the way Father does is able to pass in the outside world. Invariably the film is partially about that. How little we know of guys in suits who keep their cards close to their chests. The only time we see him communicating at the office it is to explain to a co-worker why his wife doesn’t like having visitors. But the outside world is not entirely held at bay. Father brings home a blindfolded female security guard named Christina from the factory whom he pays to regularly fuck the Son (who looks like a young Russell Crowe if you kept him in yr attic for a few months), until she starts bribing Older Daughter to lick her keyboard in exchange for gifts like a hair band that sparkles in the dark and hair gel. Older Daughter persuades Christina to trade her two video cassettes for a week in exchange for a final keyboard licking, because what the fuck does she need w/ hair gel? Father finds the tapes, duct tapes one of them to his hand and then repeatedly bashes Older Daughter over the head w/ it. Later he beats her so nastily w/ the VCR I think the fat girl I was sitting next to actually started crying. At this point Christina is no longer allowed in the house, blindfold or no blindfold. So Father gets the idea that Older Daughter should have to fuck Son. The ensuing sex scene, awkward and uncomfortable (you think?) produced the first wave of very loud and vociferous walkouts from the audience. There is levity, however: cutting away from the sex to the two of them lying next to one another in bed, Older Daughter tells Son: “you do that again, bitch, I’ll tear yr guts out!” Later Older Daughter, apparently pretty fucking sick of the status quo at home, smashes her own face to smithereens w/ a small dumbbell in front of the bathroom mirror, spitting her teeth in the sink. Again, a thunderous wave of walkouts. Older Daughter, bloodied-up in her nighty, missing a bunch of teeth, hides in the trunk of the car. The family searches for her to no avail, barking like dogs to ward of the murderous cats that they figure must have gotten her, Father having warned them that a cat can eat a person whole after Son disemboweled one w/ hedge clippers subsequent to its having happened to hazard onto the lawn, Younger Daughter calling out “Bruce!” as per one of the many games the girls have concocted in which Older Sister moves around the room and sits in various places and positions, moving her head in recognition of the name Bruce. The next day, nothing resolved, Father drives to work and parks out front. He goes into the factory. The camera holds on the car’s trunk for an inordinate period of time. Nothing happens. I’m guessing Older Daughter probably suffocated in there. The end. Holy shit! Nice!
A-
Politist, adj. / Police, Adjective
Another in the ongoing vanguard of dryly comic and methodical Romanian films focusing on institutionality and individual estrangement, Police, Adjective, by 12:08 East of Bucharest director Corneliu Porumboiu, brings a whole new meaning, along w/ its title, of course, to the expression “arguing semantics.” A slow, methodical film about onerous policing (verb) in the director’s hometown of Vaslui, suggesting the drudgery of the work and the alienating character of the urban landscape, and shot in the style film theorist Laura Mulvey called “liminal” in relation to Chantal Akerman’s hyper-minimalist masterpiece Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, meaning that it resists temporal elision and perspectival fragmentation in favor of fixed perspective and a focus on the drawn-out duration of actions and gestures in real time (which in turns means that much of the Palm Springs audience was bored as fuck and not shy about verbalizing it to those sitting close by, requiring them to be repeatedly shushed and, failing that, threatened and asked to just please go home already by yr humble reviewer). We follow bored and increasingly annoyed plainclothes cop Cristi as he follows a trio of teenagers involved in covert hash smoking, trailing them to and from nondescript buildings and urban hangouts, often spending hours waiting for something to happen, smoking cigarettes and passing time. He occasionally prepares and goes over at length various detailed (and very funny) reports on the very little that he is accomplishing. This dryly humorous, caustic, and ultimately sad and trenchant film spends a lot of time focusing on down time in between minor interactions, most of which have to do in one form or another w/ the vicissitudes of language, law, and authority as each relates to the other. Though the powers that be are anxious for Cristi to close the case and bust the kid who is passing around the joints, Cristi believes that it is wrong to punish the kid for an essentially harmless crime, is suspicious of the other kid, who he terms “the squealer” and who is nominally ratting on his own pal, and thinks the cops should just sit tight until the suspect’s older brother, whom Cristi suspects of being the source of the drugs, returns from one of his regular trips to Italy. He kills time avoiding having to agree to set up a sting and arrest the kid. He argues w/ a co-worker about why the portly co-worker would suck a foot tennis, claiming that there is a law correlating an individual’s sucking at football and the consequent certainty of his sucking a foot tennis. The two argue the semantics of this “law.” Later a half-drunk Cristi argues w/ his pretty grammarian of a wife over the lexicographical implications of a cheesy song she insists on repeatedly watching on YouTube. When he finally confronts his captain w/ his refusal to set up the sting, the captain uses a dictionary to dialectically manipulate language to undermine Cristi, forcing him to define word after word – “conscience,” “law,” “moral,” “police” – until Cristi has been turned completely inside-out. The film details how Cristi is alienated by pointless, deadening labor only to be subject to the manipulation of language to authoritarian ends in a process which disempowers and confuses him, divesting him of agency and forcing his complicity. Language is a heavily polarized chess game, grounded in this case in a political culture not long removed from its totalitarian origins. Police, Adjective is as dry as a coal miner’s cough, but it is very funny and incredibly astute. It is very much another commendable achievement in the ongoing renaissance of one of the most flourishing and singular national cinemas currently in existence.
A
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