Three Films Make A Post: Practice Doesn’t Always Make Perfect

Piercing (2018): Visually heavily influenced by the classic giallo (even the one sheet has the appropriate colour), Nicolas Pesce’s film, is placed somewhere between horror, general weirdness, and a very dark comedy about the ways people navigate their darkest desires. The whole thing is classed up by having Mia Wasikowska and Christopher Abbott going through all the stylized and ambiguous motions they are supposed to go through with the proper amount of suggested darkness and mystery. As an exercise in tone and style, the film is highly successful, evoking the mental states of its characters through sound and vision; I’m just not sure it really succeeds at doing as much with this as it could, not really seeming to go anywhere.

Ella Enchanted (2004): With a script that involves the talented hands of Karen McCullah and Kirsten Smith (who can make teen comedies do really clever and charming stuff and make it look it easy) I was expecting a bit more from this mock fairy-tale version of Cinderella about a young woman (Anne Hathaway) cursed/gifted with the inability to refuse an order, living in a fairy-tale land that does it damndest to evoke The Princess Bride (they even hired Cary Elwes) but is much too beholden to randomness and genericness to get there. But then, there are three other writers listed too, so it’s anyone’s guess how much of what made its way on screen is their fault. Tommy O’Haver’s direction is competent but also corporately bland in a way that is not a good fit for any comedy, and most of the film just barely gets by on Hathaway’s charm. The feminist subtext isn’t terribly involved, and too many of the film’s clever ideas aren’t actually.

Holy Smoke (1999): This comedy/psychodrama directed by Jane Campion, in which Harvey Keitel plays a charming asshole deprogrammer hired to brainwash Kate Winslet’s character back from her love for an Indian guru is usually treated as one of the director’s weaker films, and it is relatively easy to see why, even though a weaker Campion film is still better than anything various male big name critical darlings deliver on their best days (cough, Woody Allen, cough).

But there is a reason why comedy and Campion-style psychodrama are not usually genres that are combined - they don’t really come together well at all, and the film has quite a few moments when the comedic parts and the deep, tour-de-force character exploration (wonderfully portrayed by Winslet and Keitel) seem to belong to completely different worlds, or into completely different movies. This problem is certainly exacerbated by how awkward quite a bit of the film’s humour is.


And still, even though it is sometimes a struggle to get through the funny bits, Campion’s willingness to let ambiguities and complicated contradictions in and between characters stand and explore these spaces between them while keeping the social and all that comes with it in mind is so admirable, her ability to let certain things stand unresolved because they are not truly resolvable is so great that I’m rather okay to have to fight with the film a bit.

Three Films Make A Post: This is the moment when 32 lives are laid bare!!!

Frank & Lola (2016): Matthew Ross’s sort of psychological thriller (in the way certain Chabrol thrillers position themselves to the genre) is a rather frustrating film in so far as the film nearly comes together as something very special but instead ends up as a demonstration of talent that doesn’t quite take on the shape of a successful film. Certainly, Ross has visual style yet also – not always a given for stylish directors – trusts his actors to do their work, getting fine performances out of Michael Shannon and Imogen Poots, and then applying his powers of pizazz to enhance them. Yet still, the film never quite comes together as the psychosexual noir love story it is selling itself as, never quite making its characters coherent enough to work. The film makes a habit out of leaving just the wrong things ambiguous, emphasizing just the wrong moments; it’s like an instrument that’s always just a little bit out of tune.

Sweet Virginia (2017): Turning this into an inadvertent double feature, Poots also features in Jamie M. Dagg’s rural neo noir about murder plans gone wrong, love hidden, and friendship betrayed that among other things teaches us that you probably should not hire a random crazy fuck-up to murder your husband, nor do so before you are actually sure there’s any money to pay the guy. While Poots’s husband murdering ways are getting the film’s plot going, it actually concentrates on Christopher Abbott as Elwood, the guy she hired to do the deed, and Jon Bernthal as former rodeo rider turned broken (with so much rage and violence locked away) motel owner Sam Rossi. There’s not much here anybody looking for an original plot will find interesting, but that’s really not the point here; rather, this is a film interested in exploring its characters together with its audience, turning the rote clichés they could be into people, and then telling its dark story about betrayals and violence in an off-handed manner that never quite hides how dark some of the undercurrents here are. That much of what happens is obvious and feels inevitable isn’t a flaw but part of the film’s point.


La peau blanche aka White Skin (2004): This French Canadian arthouse (in the slow French style) horror film directed by Daniel Roby about two students encountering what you can read as female vampires, succubi, or cannibals is a bit of a mess. At times it seems to want to explore the meaning of Blackness in French Canada, 2004, while keeping its main black character in a supporting role; at other times, it seems to try to explore the idea of obsessional love, and the terrors and joys of the love of family; there may also be something about the morals of cannibalism in it. However, while Roby’s direction is generally artful, he never actually decides what exactly it is he is talking about, going off in different directions for little reason and never really arriving anywhere concrete, resulting in a feeling of insubstantiality that fits a film that acts so cerebral rather badly.