DONNER, PARTY OF ONE

Shelter fro slaves working on the salt plants of Bonaire, Leeward Antilles

Jan Schoonhoven

General notes:

A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY (1991, Taiwan) was maybe a bad choice to start with, since it could only go downhill from there! It's the GODFATHER of movies about juvenile delinquents growing up in the shadow of regime changes. But this was also my first Edward Yang movie, so at least I have more of that to look forward to.

Wim Wenders' UNTIL THE END OF THE WORLD (1991...literally everywhere) had been sitting in my Criterion queue for ever and ever, so this was the perfect time to check that box. It's not a masterpiece, but I basically enjoyed it, and I was shockingly affected by some of it; it exacerbated my baseline nuclear paranoia terribly, and the thing where everyone gets cripplingly addicted to the dream recorder struck me as bizarrely prescient for a movie from 1991. Sam Neill's dialog about this will surely stay with me: "I'd always cherished the beginning of the Gospel According to John, 'In the beginning, was the word.' I was now afraid the Apocalypse would read, 'In the end, there were only images.' I didn't know the cure for the disease of images..." Like...shut up Sam Neill, I can quit Tumblr any time I want!!!

ON THE SILVER GLOBE (1988, Poland) is another long one for which I'd been waiting for "the right moment." The incontinent philosophical rambling that floods Andrjez Żuławski's POSSESSION is less blackly comic here and may wear on some viewers, but the film is visually gripping throughout, and let's face it, this is the costumer's movie. Like holy shit, wow. Anyway I didn't mean to pick two movies in a row where some lost pioneers have to restart society at the end of the world, but it certainly created a vibe.

...a vibe which continued, somewhat more subtly, into THE BEAST (2023, France/Canada), which is sort of a time-traveling rom com parody? Am I describing this correctly? Maybe not. Lea Sedoux experiences a series of repetitive, doomed romances across several far-flung eras, from the dubious comfort of the dystopian ultra-mechanized future. There's some commentary on the alienating, dehumanizing effects of AI here that feel clumsier and more obvious in this movie from 2023, than they do when they emerge as precognitive gasps of the future in the Wenders film, but whaddayagonnado.

I thought I had seen Paul Thomas Anderson's THE MASTER (2012, USA) before, but I didn't remember a single thing about this! Just shows you can't trust me. But this is a creepy, interesting movie about (among other things) cult abuse, whose main flaw is that Philip Seymour Hoffman's portrayal of a L. Ron Hubbard stand-in is so thoroughly, realistically pretentious and irritating that it becomes really hard to be in his presence all the way to the end.

Chen Kaige's FAREWELL MY CONCUBINE (1993, China/Hong Kong) is another one that was sitting in my queue just waiting for the day when I had 3 hours to burn. Far be it from me to say that this universally beloved cultural monument is not good, surely it is, but it's also schmaltzy and conventional, and it got me thinking about how the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar (a ludicrous category, but anyway) naturally tends to go to the foreign film that most resembles a Hollywood movie. Knowing that A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY was submitted but not even nominated drove me crazy, especially since the winner that year was an Italian film that hasn't endured in memory, and whose schmaltzy and conventional qualities were heavily criticized even at the time. I know, I know, who's surprised.

Béla Tarr's WERCKMEISTER HARMONIES (2000, Hungary) is hard for me to discuss because, embarrassingly, I didn't always "get it". I need to watch more Béla Tarr movies I think, I like a lot of movies that are clearly indebted to him. This brooding, atmospheric, pre-apocalyptic fable came to my attention for the ridiculous reason that I got into the band Wrekmeister (sic) Harmonies when I saw them perform a live score for THE BROOD, after which they were selling the coffee they roast (?!). It was really good!

At this point I started to realize that among the movies I had already watched and the movies in my queue, I had a few too many Eastern European and/or Slavic apocalyptic art films in the mix, so I tried to mix things up with MANDERLAY and SOUTHLAND TALES -- which would carry on certain themes, despite me -- but found both of them too annoying, and of a jarringly lower quality than the foregoing selections. By chance I came upon Mervyn LeRoy's HOME BY DARK (1958, USA) which also didn't meet the accidental high standard I had created, but I always have time for dreary melodramas about crazy ladies and their various gaslighters.

My penultimate movie was also a random discovery, but it went with the program! I had never heard of Kazuhiko Hasegawa's THE MAN WHO STOLE THE SUN (1979, Japan), which is a solid, darkly funny thriller about a guy who builds an atomic bomb in his apartment. I can't believe this director only made two movies! This one is a sharp satire and a highly competent action movie, and if I were Bunta Sugawara who plays the hardboiled cop, I would be enormously grateful to have been in a movie that just makes me look so fucking cool. Maybe the toughest tough guy I have ever seen in a movie, toughness that escalates to the point of insanity in the end -- just great.

Finally I went back and rewatched SOUTHLAND TALES (2006, USA/Germany). I knew I wasn't going to like this, even though I really want to respect it for being so audacious. I just don't know what the fuck it wants from me. Among other problems (and for me practically everything was a problem), it is overloaded with more concepts and suggestions than it could ever develop and resolve. And there's something suspiciously conservative about it, possibly owing to Richard Kelly's Christianity; maybe I'm being unfair there, but the feeling nagged at me. It's funny how this director could give us a movie like DONNIE DARKO that is defiantly mysterious but still manages to be unbearably moving, and to make you feel like you got the message...and then SOUTHLAND TALES is pumped full of fussy details and oppressive explanations that never acquire coherence, and the whole thing is just clogged up and exhausting to wade through. Oh well, at least I wasn't surprised.

Girl riding a goat

John Gilbert (1817–1897), “Hymn to the Night”

illustration from “The poetical works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow”