Three Films Make A Post: Something has put the fear of death in the living and sent the dead running for their lives

The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet (2013): It seems somewhat obvious to compare Jean-Pierre Jeunet to Tim Burton: both directors have very distinctive styles, both have aesthetics deeply rooted in the grotesque and the strange. But unlike Burton on his bad days, Jeunet seems to be easily able to find the volume knob for the grotesque and the weird and fit it to the necessities of the narrative he’s telling. T.S. Spivet is a case in point, for it shows the director mellowing the grotesque into the whimsically strange while keeping his ability to create a world not really like our own that still feels perfectly logical and following its own rules and which is rooted in recognizable human feelings. So this is not just a film that’s great to look – and sometimes to gawk excitedly – at but also an example of that mythical “heart-warming” quality, a quality Jeunet – as is his wont – reaches without ever seeming to stretch for it, and that never feels in conflict with the film’s stranger elements but rather a part of them.

Christine (2016): Antonio Campos’s 70s period piece about a reporter for a local TV station who ends her own life in front of a running camera thanks to a toxic cocktail of clinical depression, rejection, male chauvinism, her frustration at the state of the world (which always looks even worse when you’re suffering from depression), stupidity, and the tragic inability of the people who do love her to actually enable her to seek help (not that this would have been easy at this point in time). You might say it is a bit of a downer, but it is also a film that stretches to let Christine be more than just a freak we gawk at and watch die inside and outside, that attempts to understand Christine not just as that thing we know as “a depressed woman” but as a living breathing person who is/was more than just a mentally ill woman with a sensationalist exploitable end. Rebecca Hall’s central performance is highly nuanced, insightful and utterly humane.

U Turn (1997): In comparison, Oliver Stone’s neo noir is not much of a film, even though it is one of the director’s best – and certainly least annoying – ones. Stone’s direction is expectedly showy and nervous, the characters are absurd caricatures utterly divorced from actual human beings or even what we usually accept in movies as human beings, and the plot is a series of tonally wildly wavering episodes about how horrible everything and everyone is. I’d call it a nihilistic film, but for that, I’d have to take Stone’s habitual posing seriously. As it stands, I’m more reminded of The Big Lebowski’s “Autobahn”.


The thing is, I also find the combination of the overblown direction, the great actors (and Jennifer Lopez) playing cardboard cut-outs as loudly as possible, the noir clichés and the badly digested philosophy highly entertaining, running on an energy that might be Stone’s typical screeching about how awesome and deep he is (which he isn’t) or just the result of a group of people having a wild time making a really silly film.

In short: The City of Lost Children (1995)

Original title: La cité des enfants perdus

A strongman named One (Ron Perlman) tries to rescue his little adoptive brother who first ends up in the hands of a pair of Siamese twins who have a very Dickensian idea of the kind of work orphans are to be put to, and then in that of rather fittingly named mad scientist Krank (Daniel Emilfork) – Krank meaning “sick” or “ill” in German. Krank steals the dreams of children while hiding away with his clones (all played by Dominique Pinon), a woman of short stature and a brain in a tank on an oil platform. One finds help in the clear preference of this particular cinematic universe for helping out the kind hearted in the end, as well as in the form of Miette (Judith Vittet), one of the twins’ orphan pick pockets.

Encountering certain movies at the wrong time in your life can paint a director in a very wrong light for years to come. Case in point for me is Jean-Pierre Jeunet (here partnered with Marc Caro as co-director). After an early grumpy encounter with Delicatessen I had the man pegged as a perpetrator of films of shrill yet pointless weirdness, and boy, was I wrong. Not that Jeunet’s films – with or without Caro – aren’t weird and sometimes indeed a bit shrill, but his is very much a weirdness with a point and a personality, born from an aesthetic sensibility that takes elements of the grotesque (always a main strand of the fantastic here in Europe, and particularly in France), poetic realism (not even I can watch this film without being reminded of certain parts of Marcel Carné’s aesthetic though seen through the sideways lens of Jeunet’s and Caro’s world view), pulp, fairy tale and proto-steampunk and mutates them into an organic whole.

The City is a film that consciously uses artificiality and artifice not to distance the viewer from itself but to put her in a heightened state of responsiveness necessary to really share into its vision. Cinema as a form of hypnosis is a bit of an old cliché, of course, but that’s the kind of magic Jeunet and Caro are aiming for here, an idea of cinema as something that sucks its viewer completely into a world of its own.

Because the film does this so well, it can tell a story full of improbable coincidence that is really fate having its say without looking embarrassed. The whole affair takes place in a world where everything and everyone is more or less visibly skewed (unlike our world where these things are often a bit better hidden) but where kindness and graciousness can dwell in the grotesque and the strange, too (which also might provide a bit of hope for our world).

Among the way, there are moments only a fool wouldn’t describe as poetic, of strange ideas turned strangely beautiful, and of the beautiful turned strange. While they are at it, the directors seed more than just a tiny bit of thematic work about families (chosen, fated, or just accidental) and the way they can form, deform or reform their members without ever falling into the deadliest trap for the cinema of the fantastic where the fantastic is only a metaphor.

Three Films Make A Post: Cruel, devious, pure as venom. All hell's broken loose.

Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain aka Amélie (2001): Keeping up a sense of romantic whimsy for nearly two hours of running time without either falling into the pits of treacly hypocritical mock naivety or just knocking it all over with a cynical snarl at the end is a difficult proposition, but Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s film makes it look so easy. He’s got the perfect foil for his project in his lead Audrey Tautou who inhabits her slightly skewed world with so much charm it is astonishing the whole thing doesn’t become sheer kitsch; but there are layers (not to confuse with hundreds of sight gags, which are also in it) to the film, its script and her performance that make kitsch impossible, accepting the existence of darker tides while rejecting them. From there stems actual sympathy for the sad, the slightly lonely and the mildly strange characters that dominate a film that never gives up on its hard-won romanticism in the moments when darker realities are obvious.

Incarnate (2016): While it’s certainly not the most exciting horror movie around, at least director Brad Peyton’s film does have more ideas of its own than your typical possession movie – or rather, ideas it borrowed from Dreamscape, Inception and so on. Unfortunately, the film doesn’t do terribly much with the idea of having its exorcising protagonist entering the dreams of the possessed, mostly avoiding surrealism and only going for a very mild bit of mindfuckery late in the game. I’m not sure if the budget or a lack of imagination were the problem there, though the presence of Aaron Eckhart and Carice van Houten among the cast suggests this had decent resources. It’s certainly entertaining enough for what it is, but with a bit more ambition (and perhaps an ending that doesn’t ignore all the rules the film has set up before) the film might have been rather more than that.

Havenhurst (2016): I keep things underwhelming with this thriller by Andrew C. Erin. It looks fine, it’s certainly done with a degree of competence, it features a solid lead performance by Julie Benz, yet the plot is obvious, the ideas in it used a thousand times before, often in better films. For a thriller, there’s just too little tension, and while the film does attempt to pair its more outré horrors with themes like child abuse, drug abuse and alcohol abuse, it doesn’t have anything to say about any of them that does read like actual insight, turning them into plot devices. And plot devices, are just not terrible interesting by themselves.