Careful

CAREFUL   ***1/2

Guy Maddin

1992

IDEA:  In an Alpine village where all residents must be extremely quiet to avoid setting off an avalanche, two brothers train to become butlers while competing for the affection of the same woman.

BLURB:  In Guy Maddin’s cinema of psychosexual delirium, unconscious drives and anxieties are never hidden and rarely subtextual: they always rush unabated across the surface, their primitive origins unearthed in tandem with the archaic filmic idioms the director has made a career of recreating. Careful is one of his early peaks, as well as a great exemplification of how he animates his psychoanalytic preoccupations – hyperbolically, absurdly – at the level of the text. Here, Maddin conjures an early Technicolor-style burlesque of lurid Freudianism, replete with overlapping Oedipal dramas, elaborate castration fantasies, death wishes, and, always, neurotically repressed desires fit to burst. The last point finds its ingenious geographic manifestation in the film’s Alpine town, wherein acting on one’s feelings – even so much as a sneeze – might literally unleash a deadly avalanche upon the community. This being Maddin, whose characters always fail spectacularly at suppressing their sweaty impulses, there’s little question that such feelings will erupt. As caution and propriety are repeatedly, perversely breached, Careful builds in hysteria, its biliously tinted frames and arch, deadpan dialog giving it the tenor of a waking fever dream. For Maddin, that’s just what cinema is – and often life, too.

Boxing Gym

BOXING GYM   ***1/2

Frederick Wiseman

2010

IDEA:  A look at Lord's Gym in Austin, Texas.

BLURB:  Boxing Gym is a film of rhythms. To a degree greater than typical for Wiseman, it foregrounds physical routine over institutional detail, immersing the viewer in an environment characterized by its kinetic and sonic textures. This approach is largely apropos for a study of a gym, which lacks many of the intricate bureaucratic and social dimensions that Wiseman is so good at peeling back in portraits of more complex institutional spaces. That’s not to say Boxing Gym is deprived of socioeconomic, gender, and racial insights – the gym’s melting-pot clientele guarantees its reflection of not just Austin but America – only that the film privileges the effects of a more surface-level materiality. Diminishing the role of dialog, Wiseman returns to the repetitive images and sounds of athletic labor: the smack of gloves against punching bags and focus mitts, the beep of the timer, the dancelike footwork of practice drills. These actions grow nearly incantatory under Wiseman’s steady gaze, transcending their practical function to become something closer to meditation, experienced both individually and among likeminded neighbors. Boxing Gym may be lighter on penetrating social revelations than other films by the director, but its quotidian audiovisual symphony still manages to get at something tactilely profound about the work of focused recreation.

Funeral Parade of Roses

FUNERAL PARADE OF ROSES   ***

Toshio Matsumoto

1969

IDEA:  The young, genderqueer Eddie copes with the effects of his traumatic childhood while navigating love and betrayal in Japan's underground transvestite culture.

BLURB:  Funeral Parade of Roses is a definitive work of the late 60s, not only for its emphatic engagement with countercultural politics, but for its freewheeling, liberated mélange of formal experimentation. Matsumoto positively doubles down on the puckish stylization and distancing meta-cinematic gestures of his French and Japanese New Wave peers, swelling his aesthetic arsenal with all manner of modes and techniques: vérité documentary, flicker film, slapstick comedy, Freudian melodrama, youth film, soft psychedelia, camp. The cumulative effect of this madcap pastiche is often exhilarating, reaching boundary-obliterating peaks of invention in alignment with the characters’ fluid gender identities. The constant dismantling of the film’s representational mechanisms and the quicksilver transformations of its form thus serve to posit a conception of the self as something constantly being remade and performed. Such a thesis is hardly radical, and despite its decadent, sensuous expression in Funeral Parade of Roses, rarely expands beyond a general philosophical truism. What is most novel and enduring here is what exists in the eye of Matsumoto’s whirligig storm: the unfettered reality of a queer Japanese underground, witnessed beneath and through the spectacle as the face of inchoate but headlong generational change.

Distant Voices, Still Lives

DISTANT VOICES, STILL LIVES   ***

Terence Davies

1988

IDEA:  A mother and her three children grapple with domestic abuse and other daily social realities in postwar England.

BLURB:  Davies’ debut attempt at cinematically distilling the phenomenon of memory, Distant Voices, Still Lives takes its birfucated title descriptors as spectral, organizing aesthetic principles. From its first lingering frame, in which the sounds of children are dissociated from their absent bodies, to the recurring tableau frames that embalm the characters in the frozen sepia of an irretrievable past, the film evokes something of the form and affect of a family album. Plot or linear time are inhibited by the floating, pre-lingual structure of memory, generating sideways, emotionally intuitive connections between communal singalongs and domestic violence, family mirth and marital malaise. Unlike the similar, subsequent The Long Day Closes, Davies’ debut is unmoored from any diegetic point-of-view, making its vignettes and the ideas that underlie them seem almost too diffuse, as if they might only make real sense to their author, who remains always conspicuously outside the vaporous body of the film. Somewhat frustratingly, Distant Voices, Still Lives thus plays as a wholly personal, painfully private film-souvenir: for Davies, its reconstructed memories call up the absent people and things the audience can only meagerly perceive.