last night's double feature: dominique is dead and valerie and her week of wonders

Dominique is Dead: (1980. dir: Michael Anderson) A few years after they collaborated on the laughable but nonetheless good-time Logan's Run, Michael Anderson teamed up again with Jenny Agutter, she of the ludicrously wooden acting style (to be fair, she's really at her worst in Logan's Run, as if she's just a teensy bit embarrassed). Dominique is a twisty-turny thriller from the "Is It Supernatural or Human Connivance?" realm, and it's packed full of cracking good British actors with little to do, alongside Cliff Robertson in the lead, whose natural stoicism works effectively against a hyperventilating script.

Jean Simmons is the eponymous Dominique. Her husband may or may not be trying to drive her to suicide, and her ghost may or may not later be trying to pay him back in kind. I stuck around to the end to find out, but Anderson really seems much more interested in playing around with Dario Argento's lighting kit than he is in telling a story, filling each night-time room with great splashes of primary colours through which the actors move as through a dream. I'm glad he had fun with that, and it's pretty to watch, -- although the film quality is so degraded that sometimes it looks like those Kodachrome snapshots from the sixties, where everything has bled into a mud of muted olives and oranges and very little else, and that's a shame, since it was mostly what this movie had to offer. Instead of growing tension, we get folks going up and down a shadowy staircase and back and forth through color-splashed hallways. In the end, although the writers did what they could to tie up all the ends, it still seems far-fetched in the way that Vast Government Conspiracies do (they can't keep a personal email bad-mouthing a foreign dignitary private, but the alien-dissecting lab under Roswell employing multiple scientists over the decades is still indeterminate?)




Valerie and Her Week of Wonders: (1970. dir: Jaromil Jires) Now travel with me back in time one decade further, hop with me across the pond then trek inland a spell where we happen upon one fabulously weird surrealist piece of Czech hippie-vision. It's not your typical flower-power kind of hippie, though; it's the sallow-faced long-hair at the party who doses you with Purple Owsley then mindfucks you into taking your clothes off. You wouldn't call it a horror film; rather, it's a girl's coming-of-age story, complete with the darkness, horror and cursed foreboding which balance the promise of sensual joy. I don't know where this director came from or went, but this movie, crazy as it is, moves with a firm hand at its rudder, as if he knows exactly where it's going all the time, even when we-the-spectators don't know exactly where we are or have just been. Valerie herself moves like Alice or Red Riding Hood with trusting ease through the high strangeness that is her onslaught of pubescence: a world of vampires, a Were-Weasel who may or may not be her father, incest, lustful priests, repressed grandmothers, virgins cursed with marriage, marriage likened to the vampiric bond, and a chicken plague. It's got the groovy sensuality of hippie times, but the interwoven darkness saves it from feeling outdated and tired like most flower-child memorabilia from stateside.