One Deadly Summer: *SPOILER ALERT* (1983. dir: Jean Becker) The French (in decades past, anyway. I'm not sure they persist, as I've given them, for the most part, up) have loved to give us films about a gorgeous woman who is so crazy, so entirely ratfucked by neurosis, that she is sexually available (although never emotionally so) to even the homeliest man who exhibits a little persistence. The trade-off is that by the end of the film his life will be ruined, but what sex he will have until then! What wonderful obsession! "She was too wild," this particular fellow admits, resigned, in the end, "too animal." Ah, yes. We are to be feared and tamed, we women. We must learn this lesson from the French, over and over, it seems.
No one is better than Adjani at playing crazy, even different kinds of crazy. I'm trying unsuccessfully to think of a film in which she plays a normal person. It's just not her place in the French zeitgeist. And this kind of crazy, this kaleidoscope-shifting from spoiled brat to careless seductress to terrified innocent to stalking predator, she's a master. When she makes the shift into genuine little girl, you'd swear she really was ten years old. When she squints, you'd swear she really was badly near-sighted. The brilliance of Adjani, though, doesn't excuse this movie. Rape is a plot-point in many French films from that time, and Becker does not shy from showing it to us. Indeed, there is a certain Gaspar Noe-ish voyeurism about the whole venture.
The movie begins inside the head of the smitten fellow (ridden by lust, not by love), and I nearly turned it off, mad at having been suckered into thinking I'd be watching a movie about a woman, instead finding just another movie about a man's image of a woman and how he manipulates her into his bed. About a half hour in, though, the narrative voice jumps, without warning, from his head into hers, and then into her mother's, then his aunt's, etc. It's a bold device, albeit lazy, since a better director might be showing us these things instead of spelling them out diegetically. This little girl's craziness has its roots in the tragedy which her mother survived, a rape which fathered her, but the issue is not really between mother and daughter (although the 20-year-old still finds solace at her mother's breast. Yes, we get to watch it. The French will do anything to titillate you, if you're a heterosexual man) but between her and the father who adores her and yet will not give her his name since she is not of his loins. This seemingly minor reluctance on the part of an otherwise loving father creates in the little girl an unbridgable abyss, resulting in a psychotic episode on her part which changes all their lives forever.
And so we have that enigmatic, French thing: a film about a woman who is unbearably strong, in that she single-handedly ruins the lives of everyone around her, and unutterably weak, her desperation for father-love finally driving her into the patriarchal hands of the insane asylum, where she can, finally, relax.
Cold In July: (2014. dir: Jim Mickle) This is a good movie. It's an interesting story well-told. Sam Shepard gives his wonderful, dry, interesting line readings, and shares a good buddy-chemistry with Don Johnson. Michael C. Hall is convincing as our everyman, and I love all things Nick D'Amici.
I tell you what I'm done with, though: movies that use the bodies of nubile young girls, non-characters, not allowed to speak, not allowed to wear more clothes than a Victoria's Secret model, they use these girls in scenes meant simultaneously to rouse up dicks and rationalize the self-righteous blood-bath which will follow, laying waste to the bad guys. They say it's in the name of justice for these ravaged girls, but really it's about movies wanting to titillate men with rape scenes then titillate them some more with bloody, righteous massacres. And I'm getting to the point at which I'm done with that, no matter how well done it is.
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