SPOILER ALERT
Neither the Sea nor the Sand: (1972. dir: Fred Burnley) I love these strange, low-budget British films from the seventies. You never know what you're going to get. The blurb I read made it sound giallo-ish (massively toned down, of course; we are Brits here, not Italians), with a woman perhaps going mad on one of those lovely, rocky coastlines, perhaps with a hint of the supernatural at work.
What I got was so much more! Anna (Susan Hampshire. If you are English, you remember her from a thousand and one telly appearances. She was my first Becky Sharp; I was a small child, and I did not find her charms sufficient to balance the villainous aspects of the character) is vacationing on Jersey in the dead of winter to escape her dead-end marriage. She meets the inevitable handsome, mysterious islander, Hugh (Michael Petrovitch), with whom she spends every last moment until time to go home. The sexual revolution seems not to have reached the Jersey shores yet, so the affair consists of banal conversations over campfires, tedious walks on the beach and visits to local tourist attractions. This all goes on for a very long time, interspersed with some darkly forboding talk about death and dead souls beneath the sea. When she at last decides to cast in her lot with him entirely they fall into bed and madly in love simultaneously, and their mutual joy is crossed only by Hugh's elder brother's horror at the match. (Frank Finlay plays the brother. Thankless role, but he's a peach.)
So far, so dull. To escape the brother's disapprobation, the lovers abscond to a different seashore, this one in Scotland, although it looks pretty much the same as the one in Jersey. While there, they (tediously) pledge their undying love and enjoy long frolics amongst the rocks (why are happy love affairs always so boring to watch?) until Anna's darkly magnificent lover Hugh falls dead on the beach.
And now we get the to the interesting bit. It looks like it's going to turn into a story about grieving, but then Hugh returns. Or, anyway, Hugh's body starts walking around in the middle of the night, following Anna everywhere, unable to look away from her. Normally, one would wonder at this point how much of this is happening only in Anna's head. That angle is disallowed by the script, which shows us objective viewpoints from allegedly normal people who see him, too. When she finally gets him home (a long, humdrum process, as death has robbed Hugh of any grace or facility in the use of his limbs and fingers, and he can no longer speak, but communicates with her telepathically), the brother hits the nail on the head when he posits that the sheer force of Anna's love has trapped Hugh's spirit in his now decaying body, and furthermore that this is folly which can only lead to calamity.
Perhaps I've said too much. The joy I had from the film lay in witnessing what vapid madness lay round the next bend, and now I'm afraid I've spoiled that for you. In any case, I won't tell you any more. Just that Michael Petrovitch is a lovely zombie, and kept reminding me of Conrad Veidt in Caligari.
AND MORE SPOILERS
Iguana: (1988. dir: Monte Hellman) Hellman, best known for the underground classics Two-Lane Blacktop and Cockfighter as well as a heavily-lauded but little-seen duo of Jack Nicholson Existential Westerns (the Shooting and Ride the Whirlwind), returns in a different decade with the strangest offering of them all. Hellman films always explored the psychodynamics of interpersonal power, the slippery intricacies of dominance and submission, of who gets to be alpha dog and for how long and why beta dog rolls over to bare his belly willingly. This one takes those questions to the very utmost, to the point even at which the characters never come to life, remaining rather puppets animated only by the hand of the debate. Maybe it's the lack of a real star like Nicholson or Warren Oates which leaves this movie writhing unborn in its amniotic sac, but it's an interesting failure, nonetheless.
Everett McGill is the monster of the title, a harpooner on a whaling ship whose facial disfigurations lead him to be mistreated by his shipmates (and, we are led to understand, by humanity at large). He jumps ship and declares himself king of a deserted island. In the beginning, he is a worshipper of the Voudoun loa; the first shot of the film shows us the veve he has tattooed on his arm, and one of his early punishments involves being branded in the belly by a white-hot metal voodoo amulet. After sufficient disappointment, he topples his altar, scrapes the tattoo off his arm and declares himself sole god of his world. Then, any soul unlucky enough to wash up on his shores becomes shackled and mutilated and enslaved to his will, and they are surprisingly myriad. Included in his little enclave of unfortunates is a servant (played even more lacklusterly than usual by the generally lackluster Michael Madsen), an intellectual, a mute non-entity, an arrogant captain, and a beautiful seductress. They all submit so passively to the monster's tyranny that it is both depressingly realistic and deadly to the plot. There is rebellion, yes, but most of it half-hearted. The intellectual can only rebel with words; he has not the physical courage to take a physical risk. The arrogant captain eventually makes a stand, smashing his shackles and escaping, but is so physically exhausted by the effort that he is easily vanquished. The seductress, who has been well introduced to us as the smartest, most interesting character in the piece, foregoes her chance to rebel, seemingly out of her underground desire to be mastered and humiliated. (Ay, caramba. Did Sam Peckinpah direct this?)
In the end, it is strange enough to interest, and the colours of the thing are beautiful. The last shot is particularly gorgeous, with its quiet hymn sung over the top. But a story without living characters is a story destined to languish, gasping for breath on its particular beach, and this one does.
No comments:
Post a Comment