Mandabi (Ousmane Sembene, 1968)

Ynousse N'Diaye, Makhouredia Gueye, and Isseu Niang

Cast: Makhouredia Gueye, Ynousse N'Diave, Isseu Niang, Mustapha Ture, Farba Sarr, Serigne Diayes, Thérèse Bas, Mouss Diaf, Christof Colomb. Screenplay: Ousmane Sembene. Cinematography: Paul Soulignac. Film editing: Gilbert Kikoïne, Max Saldinger.

When we first see Ibrahim Dieng (Makhouredia Gueye), he is having his head shaved and his nose cleaned. Then he strolls through the streets of Dakar, immaculate head held high, the very image of smug prosperity. He is anything but prosperous, of course: He is stone broke, having been unemployed for a very long time, supporting himself, his two wives, and seven children with a combination of handouts and loans, sustained mainly by his pride and a Micawberish sense that something will turn up. That something turns up in the form of a money order from his nephew, a street sweeper in Paris, and it will be the undoing of Ibrahim. Most of the money his nephew sent is not his: Part of it is to go into the nephew's savings, part to his mother, Ibrahim's sister (Thérèse Bas), who is a formidable force herself. The little left over goes to Ibrahim, and the thought of it elicits a brief period of delight -- one of the wives even makes up a song about the money order. But when word of it gets about, Ibrahim is immediately set upon by creditors and handout seekers. Mandabi (which means "money order") is a tragicomic film about postcolonial Africa, its people strangled by governmental corruption. Ibrahim is caught in a Catch-22: He can't cash the money order without an identity card. He can't get an identity card without a birth certificate. He can't get a birth certificate without some form of identification. The bureaucracy that frustrates him is both Dickensian and Kafkaesque. Ousmane Sembene tells Ibrahim's story with sympathy, but also with a smart distancing from the character, whose faults he makes all too clear. The only problem I had with the film is that it ends with a didactic speech by a character delivering the message: People should work to end the corruption that results in such misery. But Mandabi wasn't made for me, but for people like the ones it portrays. It was the first feature made in Wolof, the indigenous language of Senegal, which Sembene chose over French, the official language imposed by colonialism. "Message movies" may be tiresome to us Westerners, but they were an important tool for filmmakers like Sembene. 

Neptune Frost (Anisia Uzeyman, Saul Williams, 2021)

Cast: Cheryl Isheija, Elvis Ngabo, Bertrand Ninteretse, Elane Umuhire, Dorcy Rugamba, Rebecca Uwamahoro, Trésor Niyongabo, Eric Ngangare, Natacha Muziramakenga, Cécile Kayirebwa, Diogène Ntarindwa. Screenplay: Saul Williams. Cinematography: Anisia Uzeyman. Production design: Cedric Mizero, Antoine Nshimiyimana. Film editing: Anisha Achyara. Music: Saul Williams. Costume design: Cedric Mizero.

Neptune Frost is ... well, what is it? An American-Rwandan anti-colonialist, anti-capitalist queer sci-fi musical about the confluence of the autochthonic and technology? If you go looking for more descriptives, you'll encounter concepts like "cyberpunk" and "Afrofuturist" that seem appropriate but also insufficient to characterize the film. And don't expect any spoilers here; I couldn't go into particulars on the plot if you forced me to. It starts in a coltan mine: That's the ore from which the stuff that helps run our computers and cell phones and whatnot is refined. It's a "conflict mineral": Wars, trade and otherwise, are fought over it. And then the story moves, through the peregrinations of our protagonists, Neptune, played by both Cheryl Isheija and Elvis Ngabo (the character is intersex), and Matalusa (Bertrand Ninteretse, aka Kaya Free), to an e-waste dump that becomes a hacker community that takes over the world's computers. Confused? Just go with it: This is an extraordinary movie, both in the watching and in the backstory of how it was made. There is poetry and wit here that needs more than one viewing to assimilate. For example, the name Matalusa is a Joycean pun: "martyr and loser," and by the end of the film it becomes Matalusa King -- Martin Luther King. It's full of music and color -- a special nod to Cedric Mizero's costume design. Maybe it's not a film for everyone, but I am dazzled and baffled by it.     

Party Girl (Daisy von Scherler Mayer, 1995)

Parker Posey in Party Girl

Cast: Parker Posey, Anthony DeSando, Guillermo Díaz, Donna Mitchell, Liev Schreiber, Omar Townsend, Sasha von Scherler, Becky Mode, Simon Verhoeven. Screenplay: Harry Birckmayer, Daisy von Scherler Mayer, Sheila Gaffney. Cinematography: Michael Slovis. Production design: Kevin Thompson. Film editing: Cara Silverman. Music: Anton Sanko. 

With its larky portrayal of the Manhattan club scene of the 1990s, Party Girl reminded me of those "swinging London" movies of the 1960s, like Richard Lester's The Knack ... and How to Get It (1965). You might even think of Parker Posey as the Rita Tushingham of the '90s. But The Knack now feels tired and dated, while Party Girl remains fresh. Or maybe I feel a special affection for Party Girl because I spent my youth mastering the Dewey Decimal System instead of partying, and it's nice to see a movie that validates my lifestyle, even ironically. Party Girl also is ethnically and sexually more diverse than those '60s movies were, or could have been. The odd thing is that a lot of critics of the time didn't get it. A British reviewer bosleycrowthered, "If bad behaviour and smugness were truly charming, Party Girl might be as much fun as it thinks it is." And even Roger Ebert dismissed it, saying that Posey's character's "life is disorganized, ... but the script could nevertheless organize its approach to her, so the audience wouldn't feel as confused as she is most of the time.... But the movie never pulls itself together." Which I think misses the point: Why ask for an eight-course meal when what you really want is a falafel with hot sauce, a side order of baba ganoush, and a seltzer? 

When a Stranger Calls Back (Fred Walton, 1993)

Cast: Carol Kane, Charles Durning, Jill Schoelen, Gene Lythgow, Kevin McNulty, Cheryl Wilson, Jerry Wasserman. Screenplay: Fred Walton. Cinematography: David Geddes. Production design: Chris August. Film editing: David Byron Lloyd. Music: Dana Kaproff. 

I haven't seen When a Stranger Calls, Fred Walton's 1979 film, but I gather that it helped launch the horror movie trope "the phone call's coming from inside the house!" There are no calls coming from inside or outside the house in Walton's sequel, When a Stranger Calls Back, because the phone line has been cut. (The film was obviously made before the ubiquity of cell phones.) The setup is a standard one for horror movies: A babysitter is terrorized by a mysterious stranger. In this case, Julia (Jill Schoelen) is a high school student called in at the last moment to sit for a couple's two small children, who have already gone to bed by the time she arrives. As she settles in, there's a knock on the door, which she cautiously answers from inside, not unlocking or opening the door. The voice outside explains that his car has broken down and he'd like to use the phone to call for help. She volunteers to make the call herself, and after some back and forth, he reluctantly agrees, giving her the information she needs. But when she goes to the phone, the line is dead. Still wary, she lies to the man outside, claiming that she made the call, but hoping he'll go elsewhere for help. Walton handles this part of the film efficiently and effectively as things gradually escalate until Julia realizes that the man is inside the house. Fortunately, the parents arrive just in time to save her, but they discover that the children are missing from their upstairs bedroom. Then the film falls apart. Five years pass, and Julia is now a college student. Still suffering the effects of the earlier incident, she begins noticing strange things happening in her apartment. The police are dismissive, but they call on a counselor from the college to help. She turns out to be Jill Johnson (Carol Kane), who was the victim in original film. Jill has good reason to trust Julia's instincts and calls in John Clifford (Charles Durning), the detective from her case. But the convergence of the separate experiences of Jill and Julia muddles the narrative, as both women become terrorized by the new bad guy. And then the movie comes to a thuddingly ridiculous end, as Clifford figures out that the guy must be a ventriloquist. As any 10-year-old kid who has ever tried it knows, ventriloquists rely on visual misdirection: moving the dummy's mouth while keeping theirs nearly motionless. They can't really "throw" their voices, as the movie suggests the guy outside Julia's door did. When a Stranger Calls Back was made for television and first appeared on Showtime, then was released on video. Despite some creepy moments, I suspect that it would have been laughed out of theaters. 

Broadway Melody of 1940 (Norman Taurog, 1940)

 

Eleanor Powell and Fred Astaire in Broadway Melody of 1940

Cast: Fred Astaire, Eleanor Powell, George Murphy, Frank Morgan, Ian Hunter, Florence Rice, Lynne Carver, Ann Morriss, Trixie Firschke. Screenplay: Leon Gordon, George Oppenheimer, Jack McGowan, Dore Schary. Cinematography: Joseph Ruttenberg, Oliver T. Marsh. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Blanche Sewell. Music: George Bassman, George Stoll; songs by Cole Porter. 

"Glorious Technicolor," as a song in Silk Stockings (Rouben Mamoulian, 1957) dubs it, was the hallmark of MGM's musicals, starting with The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939). The fourth and final iteration of MGM's series that started with the Oscar-winning (but now laughably antique) The Broadway Melody (Harry Beaumont, 1929) and continued with Broadway Melody of 1936 (Roy Del Ruth, 1935) and Broadway Melody of 1938 (Del Ruth, 1937) was supposed to be in color, but uncertainty about the European market where war was breaking out caused the studio to cut back on the budget. But who needs Technicolor when you have talent like Cole Porter, Fred Astaire, and Eleanor Powell, especially in the big shiny black set for the finale, with Astaire and Powell dancing to "Begin the Beguine"? We probably won't see the likes of that again ever. For that matter, who needs a plot? Most movie musical screenplays were just threads to string the gems on, and the one for Broadway Melody of 1940 is no exception. Astaire and George Murphy play a down-and-out dance team, one of whom gets a chance at the big time, performing with Powell in a new Broadway show. The problem is that there's a mixup about which one is owed the big break. Astaire's character is the one picked by the talent-scouting producer (Frank Morgan), but through the kind of mishap that mis-happens only in the movies, the co-producer (Ian Hunter) thinks that Murphy's character is the one he's chosen. Both guys fall in love with Powell's character, of course, and everything has to be sorted out. Norman Taurog had a good hand with this sort of comedy, thankfully, and Morgan's befuddlement, which also involves an ermine cape that he lends his dates, is moderately amusing. The only flaw is that the movie follows the tradition of its predecessors in inserting vaudeville-style specialty acts between the musical numbers, so we endure extended routines by a juggler and a comic soprano before Astaire, Powell, and Murphy can sing and dance again. This was the only teaming of Astaire and Powell, and each was reportedly intimidated by the other. Powell's dance style was more athletic and acrobatic than Astaire's, and it's demonstrated spectacularly in her solo number "All Ashore," but any fears that their styles might not mesh were put to rest by their duets to "I Concentrate on You" and "Begin the Beguine." Murphy gets shown up by both, and he looks ridiculous dancing on tippy-toes in the "Between You and Me" duet with Powell, which may be why he quit hoofing and went into politics.

Trouble Every Day (Claire Denis, 2001)

Béatrice Dalle in Trouble Every Day

Cast: Vincent Gallo, Tricia Vessey, Béatrice Dalle, Alex Decas, Florence Loiret Caille, Nicolas Duvauchelle, Raphaël Neal, José Garcia, Hélène Lapoiwer, Marilu Marini, Aurore Clément. Screenplay: Claire Denis, Jean-Pol Fargeau. Cinematography: Agnès Godard. Production design: Arnaud de Moleron. Film editing: Nelly Quettier. Music: Tindersticks. 

Claire Denis has steadily resisted linear storytelling and expository dialogue, preferring to trust audiences to pay attention, to assemble the narrative of her films themselves. The result has been films touched with greatness like Beau Travail (1999) and White Material (2009) that invite viewers to experience their stories with greater immediacy than if they were spoon-fed the relationships and motivations of the characters. But sometimes this demand on the viewer backfires, as I think it does in Trouble Every Day. Watching the film can be a visceral experience, a descent into transgressive behavior that's made more disturbing because Denis treats it so coldly. Shane Brown (Vincent Gallo) and Coré Sémeneau (Béatrice Dalle) are both afflicted with extreme versions of a malady, apparently contracted in Guyana, that causes them to become violent when sexually aroused. Shane has his mostly under control, it seems, except that he's newly married and on his honeymoon. To protect his wife from his impulses, he masturbates, once interrupting their intercourse to jerk off frantically. Coré's case has advanced much further: Her husband, a physician (Alex Descas), keeps her locked up, but she escapes to have sex and then bite vampire-like into the throats of her victims. Shane has come to Paris to see Dr. Sémeneau, who has been researching this disorder. After Trouble Every Day culminates in one of the most brutal rape scenes ever staged in a film, we're left with only the suggestion that sex and violence are intimately related, hardly a novel idea. It's one treated in, for example, the two movies called Cat People (Jacques Tourneur, 1942, and Paul Schrader, 1982). Critics were mostly harsh when it was released, yet some revisionism has occurred, possibly because Denis is unquestionably a filmmaker who must be taken seriously. But unlike her best films, Trouble Every Day lacks the payoff of experiencing something meaningful. It ends up being only an intellectualized horror movie. 

Repeat Performance (Alfred L. Werker, 1947)

Louis Hayward and Joan Leslie in Repeat Performance

Cast: Joan Leslie, Louis Hayward, Virginia Field, Tom Conway, Richard Basehart, Natalie Schafer, Benay Venuta, Ilka Grüning. Screenplay: Walter Bullock, based on a novel by William O'Farrell. Cinematography: L. William O'Connell. Art direction: Edward C. Jewell. Film editing: Lewis Sackin. Music: George Antheil. 

When Repeat Performance ended, I thought, "That was different. I wish it were better." The premise is a good one: the time loop, usually the stuff of sci-fi movies and seldom of noirish melodramas. And who hasn't wished to live a year (or day or week or month) over, knowing what you know now. That happens to Broadway star Sheila Page (Joan Leslie), who shoots her husband, a blocked playwright and alcoholic philanderer named Barney Page (Louis Hayward) just before midnight on New Year's Eve in 1946. She flees into the night, wishing that she had the year that had led up to the shooting to live over again, sure that she could prevent what had just happened. Well, sure enough she can. As New Year's Day arrives, she discovers that it's not 1947 but January 1, 1946 again. And that she's not wearing the nightgown that she threw a coat over when she ran from the apartment, but instead the new party dress she bought for New Year's. Of course, she can't convince anyone else what has happened, though she does manage to interest her Gay Best Friend, the poet William Williams (Richard Basehart), with her story that he's going to meet a woman, Eloise Shaw (Natalie Schafer), who will have him committed to a mental institution. She also knows that in the first 1946 she and Barney went to London where they met a playwright, Paula Costello (Virginia Field), who wrote the play she starred in but also started an affair with Barney. So can the past be course-corrected? Would there be a movie if it could be? What Repeat Performance needs is a somewhat better script and much better actors. Leslie doesn't make Sheila into a credible figure: She's too much the suffering wife and not enough the resourceful woman who rose to the top on Broadway. And Hayward gabbles some of the soap operatic dialogue and never shows us what Sheila saw in Barney in the first place. The best performance in the movie is Basehart, who handles the coded role of the gay man well enough to let the audience glimpse his secret life. To its credit, the screenplay handles the coding well, too, although we never find out why he was committed to the asylum: Something happened in a toy store, it seems, so maybe we're supposed to infer that William was a pedophile rather than gay. (Although in 1946, the two were often regarded as synonymous.) But despite these flaws, Repeat Performance is a watchable, if frustrating, movie. 

Paprika (Satoshi Kon, 2006)

Cast: Voices of Megumi Hayashibara, Tōru Furuya, Tōru Emori, Katsunosuke Hori, Akio Ōtsuka, Kōichi Yamadera, Hideyuki Tanaka, Satomi Kōrogi, Daisuke Sakaguchi, Mitsuo Iwata, Rikako Aikawa, Yasutaka Tsutsui, Satoshi Kon. Screenplay: Seishi Minakami, Satoishi Kon, based on a novel by Yasutaka Tsutsui. Cinematography: Michiya Katô. Art direction: Nobutaka Ike. Film editing: Takeshi Seyama. Music: Susumu Hirasawa. 

Almost from the beginning, motion pictures, with their ability to move rapidly through time and space and their frequent embrace of the irrational, have been associated with dreams. The development of animated movies only heightened the identification, and makers of animated films have always been ready to embrace the dreamlike. Satoshi Kon's extraordinary anime Paprika is not only dreamlike, it's also about the dream state and its psychological potential. The word "psychology" etymologically means "the study of the soul," and nothing gets closer to the soul -- whatever that is -- is than dreams, unfettered by reason and mundane actuality. So Kon's film is about an invasion of the dream state, predicated on the idea that technology might eventually allow one to enter other people's dreams -- an invasion of the soul. Kon finds the dreamlike not only in movies or television, but also in other manifestations of the imagination like circuses and parades and toys, and ultimately in the internet, which Paprika herself identifies as one of the "areas where the repressed conscious mind escapes." Paprika is an avatar in the dream world of Atsuko Chiba, a psychiatrist who is using the newly developed DC Mini, technology that allows her, as Paprika, to enter the dreams of her patients. But when one of the developers of the DC Mini begins using it for his own nefarious purposes, the boundary between dreams and waking life is breached, with phantasmagorical consequences. Dr. Chiba and Paprika have to find a way to repair the breach. Any summary of the film is inadequate because there's something recursive about Paprika, a dreamlike movie about movies (and other things) as dreams.            

Champagne (Alfred Hitchcock, 1928)

Betty Balfour and Gordon Harker in Champagne

Cast: Betty Balfour, Jean Bradin, Ferdinand von Alten, Gordon Harker, Jack Trevor, Claude Hulbert, Marcel Vibert, Hannah Jones, Clifford Heatherley. Screenplay: Alfred Hitchcock, Walter C. Mycroft, Eliot Stannard. Cinematography: Jack E. Cox. Art direction: C. Wilfred Arnold. 

Champagne is flat. Still, thank you to the Criterion Channel for the opportunity to see one of the Alfred Hitchcock films I hadn't seen before. Hitchcock himself disowned the movie, hating its cobbled-together script and disliking his leading lady, Betty Balfour, whom, according to Stephen Whitty's invaluable The Alfred Hitchcock Encyclopedia, he called "a piece of suburban obscenity." Balfour is not that bad, I think, though she resorts to cutesy mannerisms and she's obviously more in love with the camera than with her leading man, the bland Jean Bradin. The movie is a romantic comedy about an heiress whose pursuit of her man involves flying to mid-ocean to meet him on an ocean liner headed for France. When they reach Paris they quarrel and break up, whereupon she decides to live it up until her father (Gordon Harker) arrives to tell her that he's lost his fortune. She looks for work and lands a job as a "flower girl," handing out flowers to male patrons at a rather sketchy restaurant. A slightly sinister man (Ferdinand von Alten) whom she met on the ship takes an interest in her, but her boyfriend arrives, wanting to make up. A surprise twist makes everything all right. Without much to work with either in story or cast, Hitchcock, with the aid of cinematographer Jack E. Cox, turns his attention to some innovative camerawork, at least providing us with something to watch as the plot grinds on. Some of my disaffection for the movie may lie in the fact that it's a silent film without musical accompaniment, perhaps owing to copyright issues. Although the music supplied for silent films today is often sub-par, it at least distracts one a bit from trying to figure out what the actors are saying between intertitles. 

Body Snatchers (Abel Ferrara, 1993)

Gabrielle Anwar and Billy Wirth in Body Snatchers

Cast: Gabrielle Anwar, Terry Kinney, Meg Tilly, Billy Wirth, Reilly Murphy, Christine Elise, R. Lee Irmey, Kathleen Doyle, Forest Whitaker, G. Elvis Phillips. Screenplay: Raymond Cistheri, Larry Cohen, Stuart Gordon, Dennis Paoli, Nicholas St. John, based on a novel by Jack Finney. Cinematography: Bojan Bazelli. Production design: Peter Jamison. Film editing: Anthony Redman. Music: Joe Delia. 

Abel Ferrara's version of Jack Finney's novel The Body Snatchers is nothing if not economical. The economy extends to the title: Don Siegel's 1956 version and Philip Kaufman's 1978 one were called Invasion of the Body Snatchers; Ferrara even drops the definite article. The story, too, has been pared down. Ferrara's version sets the story on a military base in Alabama instead of the urban California of the previous films. It also shifts the focus to a teenage girl, Marti Malone (Gabrielle Anwar), who comes with her family to the base when her father (Terry Kinney) is sent there by the EPA to investigate chemical pollution. The dynamic of a rebellious adolescent in a military culture is perfect for the conflict between individualism and conformity, the theme that unites all of the versions of Finney's story. In addition to her father, Marti's dysfunctional family consists of her stepmother, Carol (Meg Tilly), whom she dislikes, and her young half-brother, Andy (Reilly Muphy), who annoys her. Andy is the first to sense that something is seriously wrong in their new home when, during an art class at day care, all the other kids produce identical finger paintings. As they hold up their paintings, the teacher murmurs approvingly at each one until she comes to a halt at Andy's, which is unique. She clearly disapproves. One by one, the fact that people are being somehow replaced by identical but emotionless beings becomes clear. Ferrara is not particularly interested in the mechanics of invasion and transformation that took up more narrative space in the previous films. We get some nicely disgusting body horror scenes, but the response of Marti to the alien takeover is what drives the plot as she teams up with a handsome young helicopter pilot named Tim (Billy Wirth) to fight off the invaders. Tim's stoic military manner keeps us unsure whether he's not already one of the pod people, an ambiguity that persists until the end of the movie. Body Snatchers is a good rethinking of material whose previous versions are now considered classics. The source material was mined again for a fourth version, The invasion (Oliver Hirschbiegel, 2007), which starred Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig but bombed with the critics.