Remember My Name (Alan Rudolph, 1978)

Anthony Perkins and Geraldine Chaplin in Remember My Name

Cast: Geraldine Chaplin, Anthony Perkins, Berry Berenson, Moses Gunn, Jeff Goldblum, Timothy Thonerson, Alfre Woodard, Marilyn Coleman, Jeffrey S. Perry, Alan Autry, Dennis Franz. Screenplay: Alan Rudolph. Cinematography: Tak Fujimoto. Film editing: William A. Sawyer, Tom Walls. Music: Kenneth Wannberg, Alberta Hunter (songs). 

Casting Anthony Perkins as a construction worker sets up the kind of cognitive dissonance that permeates Alan Rudolph's Remember My Name, which has to be classified as a kind of screwball film noir. It was intended by Rudolph as an homage to the "women's pictures" of the '30s and '40s that starred Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, and Barbara Stanwyck and that peaked in the 1950s in the oeuvre of Douglas Sirk. Geraldine Chaplin plays Emily, who has just been released from prison where she served a term for killing her ex-husband's lover. Perkins plays the ex, now married to Barbara (Berry Berenson), and Emily is intent on stalking them and getting retribution. She manages to make their lives not exactly miserable, but certainly unsettled. It's a film full of offbeat characters, including Mr. Nudd, the young manager of the store where Emily gets a job. He's played by a very young and very skinny Jeff Goldblum. There are also memorable bits by Alfre Woodard as Emily's superior at the store and Moses Gunn as the security officer of the apartment complex where Emily lives. Both the store and the apartment house seem to be transition zones for ex-cons re-entering the world. Remember My Name teeters between the comic and the serious, with the balance tipped slightly toward the latter by the fact that it's set to a song score by the blues/jazz singer Alberta Hunter, whose contribution is one of the chief reasons, along with a great performance by Chaplin, for seeing the film. 

Talk to Her (Pedro Almodóvar, 2002)

Javier C'amara, Leonor Watling, Rosario Flores, and Dario Grandinetti in Talk to Her

Pedro Almodóvar won a well-deserved Oscar for his screenplay -- an award that's rarely given to someone writing in a language other than English -- and was nominated for best director for Talk to Her. It's an extraordinarily challenging film -- even for Almodóvar, who loves to challenge filmgoers -- that works on several levels. First, it's an absorbing narrative about the boundaries between life and death: The protagonists, Benigno Martín (Javier Cámara) and Marco Zuluaga (Darío Grandinetti), are both in love with women who are in comas, unresponsive but undeniably still present, trapped between life and death. Second, it's a film about the boundaries between the sexes. At least two of the characters have jobs that are traditionally held by members of the opposite sex: Benigno is a nurse, and Lydia González  (Rosario Flores) is a bullfighter, and each has encountered the stereotyping that labels them as anomalous. Benigno is easily stereotyped as gay: He studied nursing, cosmetology, and hairdressing so he could take care of his mother, with whom he lived until her death. And he is trusted with the intimate care of the beautiful, comatose Alicia (Leonor Watling) because he is thought to have no sexual interest in her. But even Marco has "feminine" characteristics: He cries easily, for one thing. In the first scene of the film, he is seen sitting next to Benigno at a performance of Pina Bausch's Tanztheater piece, Café Müller, with tears rolling down his face. Benigno, who doesn't yet know Marco, is moved but dry-eyed, and he recalls Marco's  tears later when he tells his fellow employees about the performance. Benigno and Marco finally meet after Lydia is gored by a bull and left in a coma. She is hospitalized just down the hall from Alicia, and Benigno advises Marco to talk to Lydia -- advice he scorns because he's been told that she's brain-dead. Benigno, on the other hand, believes that Alicia listens to him and even mysteriously consoles him: He knows from an encounter with her before the accident that left her comatose that she was a dancer who loved traveling and silent movies, so he tells her about dance performances he attends, reads to her from travel guides, and describes the movies he sees. One of the movies is called The Shrinking Lover, and Almodóvar creates it for us: A female scientist (another gender-role switch) creates a potion that causes her lover to shrink, and in a final, Buñuelesque scene, we see the tiny lover's body disappear into her enormous vagina. Shortly thereafter, Alicia is found to be pregnant, and although it's never confirmed that Benigno raped her, he is sent to prison. The extraordinary thing about Talk to Her is that Almodóvar manages to keep all of the elements of his film in a delicate balance, so that even the absurd and surreal moments maintain plausibility, and the bittersweet ending feels integral to what has gone before. The tone of the film is lightly melancholy where it might have been crude and sensational, and it's maintained by a lovely score by Alberto Iglesias and a beautiful sequence in which Caetano Veloso sings "Cucurrucucú Paloma," about a man weeping for his lost lover, as a tearful Marco recalls his love for Lydia. The excellent performers also include Geraldine Chaplin as Alicia's dance teacher.

 

Peppermint Frappé (Carlos Saura, 1967)

Peppermint Frappé sounds like it should be a teen beach party movie, at least until you see that it's directed by Carlos Saura and dedicated to Luis Buñuel. Then you know it's going to be a somewhat kinky story with darkly comic overtones. It opens with a middle-aged man cutting pictures of fashion models out of magazines. He's Julián (José Luis López Vázquez), a physician who runs a radiology clinic with the help of his nurse, Ana (Geraldine Chaplin), who is as quiet and conservative as he is. Then he's reunited with a boyhood friend, Pablo (Alfredo Mayo), whose life is virtually the antithesis of Julián's: Pablo has been living an adventurous life in Africa, he drives a Corvette, and he has just married the smashingly pretty and vivacious Elena, who is also played by Chaplin in a tour de force performance. Eventually, Julián's jealousy of Pablo and desire for Elena will take an increasingly predictable course, as his obsession leads to an attempt to remake Ana into Elena. Not that Saura's film is ever really predictable: As a director he has too many tricks up his sleeve, so that things always stay a little off-balance, especially when Julián invites Pablo and Elena to his weekend retreat in the country, which is next to an abandoned spa where Pablo and Julián used to play as children. Saura's use of setting is masterly in this sequence. The title refers to Pablo's favorite cocktail, a crème de menthe-based concoction served over crushed ice; it's a particularly venomous shade of green not found in nature. And yes, it plays a part in the denouement. López Vázquez and especially Chaplin give terrific performances, but the movie doesn't add up to much more than a showcase for them and Saura's skewed way of telling a story.