The Green Fog

THE GREEN FOG   ***1/2

Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson

2017

IDEA:  A pastiche reimagining of Vertigo, comprised entirely of clips from other San Francisco-set movies.

BLURB:  One of Maddin’s fleetest and most purely joyful creations, The Green Fog finds the director turning to the found footage format to plunder the collective cinematic imagination. Instead of his usual phantasmagorias, Maddin (alongside wavelength-sharing collaborators Evan and Galen Johnson) constitute this febrile realm out of pop-cultural representations of San Francisco, one of the most eternal US cities in visual art. Through a feverish assemblage of interlaced Hollywood classicism and kitsch, the filmmakers condense and loosely recreate the narrative arc of Vertigo, from rooftop police chase to final thudding plummet. But the specifics of Hitchcock’s opus – which would color the proceedings even had it been ignored completely, such is its permeating trace – are not as important here as the themes and motifs that underpin it: obsession, repression, fetishism, voyeurism, grammatical recursions, understood by both Hitchcock and Maddin as equally primal to the psyche as to the cinema. As such, The Green Fog is a film made of films that ineluctably speak about film, in an ad infinitum discourse. Its extensive, humorous use of nested clips reinforces this structure, suggesting an endless feedback loop, a hall of mirrors without a beginning or end. Where is the reality and where is the dream? Is there even a way to tell them apart? And is it possible anymore to watch a pensive, implacable Chuck Norris with anything but smirking reverence?

The Naked Kiss

THE NAKED KISS   ***

Samuel Fuller

1964

IDEA:  After running away from her pimp, a prostitute ends up in a seemingly idyllic suburb and becomes a nurse at a children's orthopedic hospital.

BLURB:  True to Samuel Fuller’s caustic, impertinent ways, The Naked Kiss is a subversive twisting of film noir codes. The dissipated postwar milieu is still here, but its moral rot is totally disguised by the patina of everytown Americana. Into this artificial suburb, Fuller drops Kelly, a former prostitute first seen beating and fleeing her pimp in the film’s jolting opening scene. In another, more familiar context, Kelly would be the de facto femme fatale, setting poisonous sexual traps. In The Naked Kiss, Fuller introduces her as an agent of insubordination and danger, only to then reveal her true, almost comically opposed position as a virtuous reformer. As the layers of Grantville get peeled back, and its golden boy philanthropist is revealed to be a child predator, Kelly’s taboo-ness, her socially vilified out-of-place-ness, is recast as something nearly holy: a whore and a mother, a bitch-slapping demimonde and a steward for justice. She’s the foil to the feckless male characters, as any femme fatale must be, but she confounds our expectations by being totally righteous in her crusade. And when she makes her ambiguous exit, she wanders off like a distaff Ethan Edwards, a result of failed assimilation that suggests the values of a hooker are above most of the stuff that passes in an allegedly civil society.

The Last of England

THE LAST OF ENGLAND   ***1/2

Derek Jarman

1987

IDEA:  A dystopian collage of England colored by Thatcher's reign.

BLURB:  “Made in England,” the credits say, not with gratitude but with an implicit forlornness and contempt. For Jarman’s apocalyptic opus is a cri de cœur for a nation descended into political tyranny, a caterwauling lament in restless montage. Jarman’s images flicker and convulse in symphony with a baroque soundscape, creating a dyspeptic tapestry of military violence, working class poverty, and societal collapse. The skies are always the same shade of hellish, irradiated red-pink as the fires that blaze across the film’s largely decimated landscape; the overall dystopian vision bursts with iconography of World War II, the Troubles, and the AIDS crisis, yet remains vague enough that it seems practically timeless – a sobering reminder that such sociopolitical havoc never dates. As expressed formally in The Last of England, it only accelerates, as the film transitions from its relatively becalmed, poetry-narrated beginning to frenetic, wordless thickets of audiovisual chaos. This may be Jarman’s most aggravated, guttural, and resigned work, but like all his greatest films, it’s perked up by a countervailing defiance pushing back at the walls of oppression. Whether it’s a dizzying bacchanalian dance, gay canoodling atop the Union Jack, or Tilda Swinton rage-shredding her way out of her wedding dress, The Last of England speaks with a form of invigorating creative resistance that burns bright in the face of seeming hopelessness.