BLACK VALENTINES: In the Realm of the Senses

NOTE (1): Apologies for the smartarse captions. Between ‘The New York Ripper’ and ‘In the Realm of the Senses’, I had to do something to retain my sense of humour.

NOTE (2): SPOILERS. If you honestly don’t know how this one ends, stop reading now.

There’s a Bill Hicks routine where he talks about the frustration of watching a pay-per-view porno movie only to find that the adult content has been cut out, so that “you don’t see the woman at all but you do get the hairy bobbing man ass”. Hicks advocates that “I’d leave those fucking scenes in, just for, you know, continuity. I don’t think the plot and dialogue alone are enough to carry these movies.”

Here’s how the continuity works in Nagisa Oshima’s ‘In the Realm of the Senses’:

Non-fucking scene

Fucking scene

Non-fucking scene

Fucking scene

Fucking scene

Fucking scene

[repeat interminably]

Auto-eroticism scene

Dismemberment scene

Or, in only slightly more detail: ex-prostitute Sada Abe (Eiko Matsuda) begins work at the home of merchant Kichi Ishado (Tatsuya Fuji); they begin an obsessive sexual relationship; Kichi sets her up as his mistress, even conducting a bigamous marriage; Sada becomes increasingly possessive of Kichi, even though she still services the odd client; Kichi and Sada’s lovemaking gets more desperate and violent; they practice auto-eroticism; he dies; she cuts his willy off.

Oh, by the way, it’s based on a true story.

With its scenes of fellatio, penetration, people strangling each other while in flagrante, and something done with a hard-boiled egg that wouldn’t find in Delia Smith’s “Complete Cookery Course”, ‘In the Realm of the Senses’ was, to put it mildly, controversial. Censorship laws in Japan were so draconian at the time of production that even making the film was difficult, let alone showing it. The film was made under the auspices of it being a French production. Footage was sent to France to be developed and edited. When premiered in Japan, the scenes of unsimulated sexual activity were optically altered to blur out the, ahem, man bits and lady bits in a forerunner of pixelating.

Despite finding favour with critics, censorship issues plagued the film outside of Japan. Its initial release in the UK, for instance, meant that it was certified only to be shown at private filmclubs rather than grant it any mainstream distribution. Re-certificated in 1989, it got the 18-rating allowing mainstream distribution and home video certification, but only after a particularly notorious scene was reframed to remove an image that might otherwise have been considered child pornography.

Even with this scene rectified, we still have the gaggle of geishas, turned on by Kichi and Sada’s “honeymoon” exertions, holding down one of their own number, disrobing her and none-too-gently administering a dildo. Or Kichi, seconds after Sada has taken her leave of him, throwing up the skirts of his portly and somewhat matronly housekeeper and, ah, proving himself a back door man.

So: the age old question. Is it art or is it porn? It’s artfully done, certainly. The direction is focussed and controlled, the cinematography atmospheric, the performances very good. Fuji in particular captures the louche charm of an amoral sensualist who gradually abandons everything in his life (and finally his life itself) for the pleasures of the flesh. Matsuda brings an almost frightening intensity to Sada, a lithe and perpetually oversexed creature from the id.

But it’s got the kind of scenes – quite a few of them, actually – that would only have been seen in pornographic films at that period in time. And, frankly, even in today’s post-‘Brown Bunny’, post-‘9 Songs’, post-the-internet-as-a-delivery-system-for-porn climate, ‘In the Realm of the Senses’ still has the power to shock. Yet, put up against your average John Holmes or Nina Hartley starrer, it’s quite clearly a different beast. This isn’t a case of Kichi turns up to fix the plumbing, Sada opens the door dressed in a basque, Kichi unbuckles his toolbelt, Sada slips into something a little more naked and fifteen minutes of bedroom athletics ensue, scored to either a sleazy saxophone solo or the buttock-wobbling sonority of a wah-wah pedal being given some hammer.

‘In the Realm of the Senses’ does investigate the dynamics of extreme dependency in a relationship solely defined by sexual attraction. By the time Sada has taken to strangling Kichi to increase their carnal pleasure, the act seems almost banal. This is Oshima’s great achievement: he realizes that the darker, more painful and more obsessive his protagonists’ sexual relationship gets, the less meaningful the sexual act becomes. Ultimately it means nothing, and Kichi’s butchered penis, against which Sada curls up as the film ends, provides as nihilistic an image as cinema has offered.

BLACK VALENTINES: The Image

Remember that scene in Edgar Wright’s ‘Hot Fuzz’ where Nicholas (Simon Pegg) and Danny (Nick Frost) are discussing a woman of a certain standing in the community, and they touch upon her predilection for the mature male? The dialogue goes something like this:

DANNY: She was in my year at school. Always had a thing for her.
NICHOLAS: She clearly has a thing for older men.
DANNY: Hey, now you come to mention it, I too have reason to believe she favours the older gent.
NICHOLAS: Really? How so?
DANNY: Marcus Carter’s big brother said he’d fingered her up the duck pond.

You can take Danny’s little homily two ways: either the fingering occurred in the geographical location of a duck pond, or the “duck pond” (used as a metaphor for the, uh, map of Tasmania) was the biological location up which he fi— … well, you get the point.

Linguistic nuances notwithstanding, this scene sprang to mind twenty minutes into Radley Metzger’s ‘The Image’ when Anne (Rebecca Brooke) is taken to a place of horticultural interest and, not to put to fine a point on it, gets fingered up the rose garden.

(To those readers who still frequent these pages in the hope that one day I will again write intelligent reviews of classy films using non-colloquial language: please bear with me. To my mother, in the unlikely event that she ever buys a computer and gets internet access: sorry, ma!)

The point is, once I heard Nick Frost’s voice exclaiming “He fingered her up the rose garden”, I became increasingly unable to take the remaining hour or so of ‘The Image’ (a.k.a. ‘The Mistress and the Slave’, a.k.a. ‘The Punishment of Anne’) seriously. Which made it hopelessly funny, since Metzger’s approach to the material is so desperately, desperately serious.

While there’s no doubt that Metzger was both a pioneer of adult cinema (films like ‘Carmen, Baby’, ‘The Lickerish Quartet’ and the determinedly non-classical-music related ‘The Opening of Misty Beethoven’ helped take blue movies into the mainstream) and one its most accomplished practitioners, ‘The Image’ represents a strange and (it has to be said) semi-successful attempt to imbue a porno flick with the aesthetic of a European art movie.

Based on a novel by Catherine Robbe-Grillet (writer, sometime actress and wife of ‘Last Year in Marienbad’ director Alain Robbe-Grillet), ‘The Image’ is narrated by Jean (Carl Parker), a writer – although if his novels are as ponderous as his voiceover, he probably makes Marcel Proust look like Raymond Chandler – who attends a soiree at which blandly pretentious people flit about saying blandly pretentious things and is quite bored by the whole thing until he bumps into an old flame, Claire (Marilyn Roberts). Claire is in the company of a stunningly attractive but curiously reserved young woman, Anne.

Jean quickly discovers that Claire and Anne’s relationship is defined by a dynamic of power and subjugation, the sexual element of which is characterized by – … oh, fuck it. Let’s not prettify things. Anne is Claire’s slave. Claire gets off on dominating, humiliating and controlling Anne. Correctly intuiting that Jean would quite like the opportunity to do the same, Claire essentially pimps out her bee-yatch (in a manner of speaking) to the furtherment of Jean’s carnal desires.


The novelistic origins of the material are explicit in the ten chapter titles which intersperse the loosely delineated narrative arc. The first chapter is called “An Evening at the X...’s”, the banality of the phrase counterpointed by the suggestiveness of the “X” and its accompanying ellipsis. The title of the final chapter – “Everything Resolves Itself” – could almost suggest a light romantic comedy, the lovers glibly paired off, the obstacles removed and the audience applauding as the good-natured laughter subsides.

Which brings me back the unintentional humour. The po-faced solemnity with which Metzger gets his arty European funk on is funny in and of itself, and that’s before you get to the portentous screeds of waffle that Jean intones in voiceover, for all the world as if he were reciting a shopping list. This is probably a good thing, since there is precious little in the parade of explicit set-pieces – which range from whippings to urination to enforced acts of fellatio – to inspire much merriment.

But, as I said earlier, the odd juxtaposition of pornography and arty stylizations is at least semi-successful. For the most part, the film has an elegant look to it (this slips a little in the fellatio scenes, but if there’s a way of making a penis look even remotely elegant on screen, then I sure as hell don’t know about it). The main set-pieces are driven by character dynamics and Metzger certainly goes some way towards exploring the nature of dominance and submission and how these interlinked polarities (if that isn’t a contradiction in terms!) are incorporated into a relationship. It’s a bloody sight more successful than Just Jaekin’s ‘The Story of O’ in this regard.

And then there’s Rebecca Brooke. A beguiling and enigmatic actress with a background in theatre, she’s about as far removed as possible from what you’d imagine an actress in an adult movie to conform to. Given little dialogue, for the most part naked and used for Claire and Jean’s pleasure, her characterization of Anne is imbued with a fragile yet resilient humanity. Like Christina Lindberg in ‘Thriller – A Cruel Picture’, she single-handedly bootstraps an essentially cynical (albeit well-made) piece of exploitation and redefines it, purely by the strength of her performance, as something iconic.

BLACK VALENTINES: Love Exposure

Ever watched a movie that’s kept you waiting fifteen or twenty minutes for the opening title credit? To the point where you figure they may as well not have bothered.

Sono Sion’s demented epic ‘Love Exposure’ flashes its title up onscreen after 58 minutes.

True, ‘Love Exposure’ clocks in at an evening-consuming four hours (though I’ll wager it’s one of the zippiest four hour movies you’ll ever see; ‘La Belle Noiseuse’ moved nowhere near this fast), but it does give the impression of that first hour being something of an introduction. A curtain-raiser before the main business of the film gets underway.

This is both a stroke of legerdemain and mildly frustrating, since that first hour delivers a smorgasbord of inventive satire, lowbrow humour, inspired set-pieces and demented iconography. Although things get deeper, edgier and even more irreverent as the remaining 180 minutes unfold, it’s this first section that remains the most entertaining.

It details the travails of goody-two-shoes Yu (Takahiro Nishijima), beginning with the death of his devout Christian mother. As a coping mechanism, his father devotes his life to the church and is eventually ordained a priest. Even priests can be tempted though, and he falls prey to the flighty, demanding and provocatively dressed Keiko (Yuko Genkaku). Yu distrusts her and is right to. She eventually leaves him for a younger man. Yu’s father employs a different coping mechanism this time: he projects onto his son, bullying him into endlessly making confession.


One problem: the well-mannered and resolutely virginal Yu has no sins to confess. To appease his father, however, he pleads guilty to stepping on ants, not kicking some kids’ ball back to them when asked and refusing to help a little old lady across the road. All lies, incidentally. Out of frustration and the desire to communicate with his old man even through the weird medium of a confessional, Yu decides to sin. He gets involved with a street gang, commits minor acts of vandalism, does a bit of shoplifting and gets in fights. He discovers his truly calling, however, by stalking girls in mini-skirts and snapping them with his digital camera. Specifically, employing an aesthetic approach which might best be termed “upskirt shots”.

The scenes where he trains in the surreptitious art of the, ahem, upskirt shot – and, later, takes to the streets like a whirling dervish, pouncing, darting, back-flipping and sliding as his camera clicks away and his portfolio of panty pictures proliferates – are way way way funnier than they have any right to be. In fact, scenes of a teenage lad attaching a camera to a bungee so that he can whip it under the micro-skirt of a sailor-suited oriental nymphet and photograph her strawberry-patterned underwear with neither her knowledge or permission ought by any reasonable standards to fall somewhere between creepily objectionable and desperately sad.

But snap my man-muff with an instamatic if Sion doesn’t turn this stretch of the film into one of the funniest extended sequences I’ve seen in quite some time.


Yu quickly styles himself “king of the perverts” and gets quite the following. He happily goes to confession and gets slapped around the head by his dear old pa. Yu’s delighted; they haven’t been this close for ages. He redoubles his efforts. But one unavoidable fact begins to wear him down: for all the panties he takes snaps of, he never gets turned on. Then one day, dressed in a wig and a women’s trouser suit (long story) he meets the coquettish Yoko (Hikari Mitsushima) and it’s love at first boner. Yup: a single glance of her in her sailor suit, about to kick seven kinds of shit out of a bunch of guys in a street brawl (even longer story) and Yu experiences the first raging woody of his misspent life.

Unfortunately with the fight over, and Yu too mortified to remove his disguise (he acts the part of a woman, calling himself “Miss Scorpion”), Yoko skips away head over heels in love with Miss Scorpion and decides that she’s a lesbian. Oh, Yoko’s also the stepdaughter of Keiko and she’s at war with every man on the planet on account how her dad used to … well, yeah, you can probably guess the rest of that one.

The brawl, it turns out, was both orchestrated and observed by the manipulative (but no less comely in a short skirt) Aya (Sakura Ando), a dangerously seductive type who recruits followers for a religious cult called The Zero Church. And Aya has just decided that a fallen priest “redeemed” by their “faith” will be just the thing to boost their profile and attract more recruits.

‘Love Exposure’ is, first and foremost, a treatise on the arbitrary nature of sin and the dangers of religious cults. It’s also about sexual confusion, the awkwardness of first love, tranvestitism, friendship, the peculiar dynamics of the family unit, voyeurism, deceit, rivalry, pornography (one particular plot twist has Yu working for an adult film production company called Bukkake-Sha) and rebellion against establishments, be they religious, quasi-religious, social, educational or institutional.


There are a few lapses into melodrama, particularly in the final hour, and digital cinematography often has the flat, unlovely look of a home movie. But none of that detracts from the fact that ‘Love Exposure’ is a unique, often exhilarating and unexpectedly poignant piece of work, directed with supreme confidence and boasting full throttle performances from its mainly young cast. The soundtrack is great, alternating between infectious J-pop and classical. Yu’s duck-to-a-water induction into the art of the upskirt is scored to the best use of Ravel’s ‘Bolero’ since Torville and Dean laced up the ice skates, while the slow movement of Beethoven’s 7th provides a heartfelt accompaniment to the deeper moments.

‘Love Exposure’ comes on like an hallucinatory hybrid of ‘Holy Smoke’, ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’, ‘Cyrano’ and a bizarre Japanese version of ‘Fight Club’ (except with panty-peeping instead of bare-knuckle smack-downs) as if co-directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky and the guy who made ‘Vampire Girl vs Frankenstein Girl’ while out of their skulls on a fat line of coke cut with icing sugar and ground up communion wafers.

And if that doesn’t give you some idea of the film, ponder on this: I wrote that last paragraph stone cold sober but high as dragon-shaped kite, riding the pure buzz of a film that reminded me why I fell in love with movies in the first place.

BLACK VALENTINES: The Loved Ones

In this character-driven, low-budget Australian indie movie, desperately insecure high school student Lola Stone (Robin McLeavy) plucks up the courage to ask hunky but emotionally troubled Brent (Xavier Samuel) to be her date at the prom.

Still reeling from the death of his father in a car crash six months earlier – and ridden with guilt that he was driving at the time – Brent finds solace in pot, heavy metal and self-harm. Despite his insularity and tendency to disappear into the outback, his devoted girlfriend Holly (Victoria Thaine) does her best to help him reconnect with life.

For all his inability to communicate, Brent is loyal enough to Holly to sensitively turn down Lola’s offer. Meanwhile Brent’s best mate Jamie (Richard Wilson) pines for goth bad girl Mia (Jessica McNamee), little realizing that her don’t-give-a-shit exterior masks her own unspoken heartache.

Okay, assuming you’d not heard of (or possibly seen) ‘The Loved Ones’ before, and taking into account (a) the title, (b) the above synopsis, (c) its Antipodean indie status and (d) the presence of Kasey Chambers’ lachrymose ballad “Not Pretty Enough” on the soundtrack, you’d easily be forgiven for thinking that you were in for an hour and a half of angst-addled adolescents sitting around feeling sorry for themselves, with perhaps a big emotional meltdown in the second act and a feel-bad finale just to make sure it goes over well at Sundance.

Kudos, then, to writer/director Sean Byrne that what he delivers instead is the sickest, funniest, most original horror movie not made by a European director in ages. Imagine a rom-com absurdist torture porn movie: ‘Hostel’ made by Nora Ephron, or ‘When Harry Met Sally’ directed by Eli Roth. Imagine, if you will, ‘When Lola [insert psychotic act here] Brent’. Imagine if Leatherface had a daughter who was obsessed with pink and totally divorced from reality and who decided one day that Brent would be just the strapping young lad to make her life complete … and imagine if Daddy dearest (John Brumpton) took it upon himself to make it all come true for his precious princess.

Welcome, dear readers, to the pastel coloured and extremely violent world of ‘The Loved Ones’, where the screams are agonized but the music is cutesy, where the blood runs red but the prom dress is pink.

Although Byrne might not seem to do anything particularly new on a purely narrative level – although the way he links the Brent/Lola and Jamie/Mia strands is neatly done – the advances he makes with the genre are numerous. Firstly, it doesn’t look as grubby, grainy, murky and moribund as most films of this ilk. In fact, the cinematography is pretty damn gorgeous in places. Secondly, there’s wit aplenty to alleviate the darker moments (oh, how welcome would some tombstone humour have been in the ‘Saw’ franchise or any of the Platinum Dunes remakes?) Thirdly, Byrne actually gives a shit about his characters, and presents us with teenage protagonists who are more than just grungy ciphers. Even the obligatory sex scenes are handled with aplomb, one sensitively directed, the other played for laughs but realistic in its awkwardness.

And best of all, ‘The Loved Ones’ isn’t the usual male psycho/terrorized woman routine (a la ‘Hostel 2’, ‘Captivity’, ‘P2’, ‘Eden Lake’ etc etc). Here we have the frankly wonderful McLeavy giving one of the best balls-to-the-wall performances in ages as the demented Lola. In fact, my only real complaint about the film is that the DVD cover has Samuel’s name above the title and no mention of McLeavy. Sort it, Optimum Releasing – Robin McLeavy has “next big thing” written all over her and ‘The Loved Ones’ is her show from start to finish.

BLACK VALENTINES: Thirst

Let’s try a scenario on for size: boy meets girl; obstacles prevent them from being together; boy and girl get together any way; a major obstacle puts their clandestine relationship under strain; things change between them.

Old as the hills, right? Seen it all before.

Now let’s layer in a little context. For “boy meets girl” read “priest meets married woman”. For “obstacles” … well, hell, he’s a priest and she’s a married woman. For major obstacle, take your pick from: (a) the priest is also a vampire; (b) the married woman is treated as a slave by her adoptive mother, the sickly and simpleton son of whom she has been forced into marriage with; (c) the married woman would quite like the vampire priest to kill the hell out of the sickly, simpleton husband and, oh yeah, turn her into a vampire while he’s at it; (d) the priest is really having a hard time with the whole being a vampire thing, let alone getting into the husband-disposal business; or (e) all of the above.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to ‘Thirst’. It ain’t fucking ‘Twilight’.

In fact, it ain’t like any other vampire film you’re ever likely to see, and – yes – I am including the works of Jean Rollin, Jose Larrez and Harry Kumel in that rather bold statement.

The reason I feel confident in making said statement is that ‘Thirst’ is directed by Chan-wook Park, and the man doesn’t make films like anyone else, period. Chan-wook Park is a trail-blazing cinematic talent as unique, maverick, instantly identifiable and (quite possibly) as bonkers as Werner Herzog. This is the man who completely deconstructed and re-imagined the vigilante genre in his jaw-droppingly awesome trilogy ‘Sympathy for Mr Vengeance’, ‘Oldboy’ (one of the greatest head-fucks in the whole of cinema) and ‘Lady Vengeance’. This is the man who made the jaw-plummetingly one-of-a-kind ‘I’m a Cyborg … But That’s Okay’, a film that plays out like ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ meets ‘The Terminator’ on a first date where they go and see a revival of ‘Brief Encounter’. Then drop acid. While on another planet.

Which is a long-winded way of saying that Chan-wook Park does things a tad differently. And he certainly does the vampire movie very differently. I’ve already said that it ain’t ‘Twilight’. Well, it ain’t ‘Nosferatu’, ‘Dracula’, ‘The Lost Boys’, ‘Near Dark’, ‘Let the Right One In’ or ‘True Blood’, either. To start with, our vampire isn’t an aristocrat, a frat boy teenager, a hardass redneck, a creepy Swedish kid or a Suth’n gennelman with a penchant for barmaids in the kind of tee-shirt/hotpants ensemble that makes your average Hooters girl look like a nun. No, siree, our partaker of the type-O negative is one Father Sang-hyeon (Kang-Ho Song). He doesn’t get infected by a bite to the neck courtesy of another vampire, but from a blood transfusion after he falls victim to a supposedly incurable disease whilst ministering to a mission hospital dedicated to those dying from it. Once turned, he doesn’t go out into the dark and shadowy, latching himself to the first available throat and slurping it down like an alcoholic locked in a brewery overnight. Au contraire, he hangs around hospitals, siphoning off the odd half pint here and there from comatose patients. No neck/teeth interface, either; he simply lies on the floor and lets an IV tube and gravity do the work for him.


The romantic element of the film is just as offbeat. Tae-ju (Ok-bin Kim) initially comes across as a downtrodden and mistreated heroine, the kind of put-upon waif you could imagine stepping living and breathing from the pages of a Catherine Cookson novel. She then turns into a shag-happy femme fatale type. And not gradually, either. By the end of the film …

Ah, but that would be telling.

There’s so much I want to say about ‘Thirst’, from the awesome set design (particularly when … oh bollocks, that would be telling) to the stunning admixture of tension, blackly comic absurdity and curious poeticism in the scene where Sang-hyeon and Tae-ju … but that, also, would be telling.

And then there’s the denouement. Which I mustn’t tell you about, even though I want to scream a detailed description of every wonderful, inspired and straight-up demented moment of it from the highest rooftop. It’s something you just have to see for yourself. It’s pure genius and could only have come from the mind of Chan-wook Park.

Which is an apt description of his entire filmography.

BLACK VALENTINES: Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom

Hello, boys and girls. Welcome to Uncle Agitation’s smiley happy movie club. Today we’re going to be watching Pier Paolo Pasolini’s ‘Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom’. Hands up who wants to know what the title means.

Well, kiddies, Salò is a lakeside town in northern Italy. At the end of the Second World War, it was the last outpost of Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship. ‘The 120 Days of Sodom’ is a book by a French writer called the Marquis de Sade. He principally wrote about – …

No, Little Johnny, not Marky Mark. Marquis de Sade. It’s from his name that we get the word sadism. Which is what he principally wrote about. Hands up who knows what sadism means. Well, kiddies, some people get their jollies from – …

On second thoughts, let’s send the kiddies home before Social Services turn up. All under eighteens out of the room? Good. Let’s crack a beer, order a pizza and get down to a full and frank (not to mention decidedly adult) conversation about ‘Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom’.

(Umm, actually cancel that pizza order. I don’t think any of us will have much of an appetite by the end of this article. And hold the beer as well. We’re gonna need something a lot stronger!)

De Sade’s ‘The 120 Days of Sodom’ is an unfinished work which concerns four noblemen who, tiring of life, decamp to an isolated chateau with the intention of killing themselves. The mechanics of this suicide pact, rather than involving such traditional fare as hanging, poison or cutting implement/vascular system interfaces, are a protracted and total abandonment to carnal pleasures. Yup, these boys decide to fuck themselves to death.

As if to prove that you can go further than even the Marquis de Motherfucking Sade, Pasolini updates the story to 1944 and replaces the four aristocratic degenerates with the President (Umberto Quintaville), the Duke (Paolo Bonacelli), the Bishop (Giorgio Cataldi) and the Magistrate (Aldo Valetti) – they are referred to only by their titles – therefore upping the ante on de Sade’s commentary on the corruption of the upper classes to include the corruption of the state, the church and the law. Which is basically a fuck you to just about everyone in a position of power or authority.

Prez, Duke, Bish and Mags (sorry ’bout the contractions, but I’m 400 words into this review and I’ve not even got started on a synopsis yet) are introduced announcing their intention to marry each others’ daughters and thereby “sealing our destinies forever”. At this point, should the newcomer to ‘Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom’ decide to hit the off button, eject the DVD and slowly back away, I would consider them very wise to do so. By doing so they’d avoid themes and imagery the likes of which would make the kind of stuff I sat through during the Winter of Discontent look like an episode of ‘Pingu’. (Put it this way: I’ve seen ‘Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom’ once – eight years ago – and there are aspects of it that still make me feel physically sick to think about. ‘Cannibal Holocaust’, by comparison, is something I watched three months ago and can now consider objectively without wanting to hurl.)

So, having discussed the, ah, ins and outs of the mutual daughter-marrying scenario, our boys round up a group of peasant youths as well as shanghai-ing some girls from a convent. They inform their captives that heterosexual acts are punishable by dismemberment and religious acts by death. These ground rules established, Prez, Duke, Bish and Mags humiliate and assault them in just about every manner possible, be it sexually, physically, emotionally or psychologically. They are stripped and leashed, forced to act like dogs and eat scraps from bowls.

It gets worse.

Much worse.


Whippings and sodomy ensue. As do enforced acts of urolagnia and caprophilia. The sanctity of marriage is mocked, the “bride” and “groom” (sometimes opposite sexes, sometimes not) are led through the ceremony for the amusement of their captors, only to be denied consummation thereafter (“that flower belongs to us”). Oh, and they’re generally raped at the beginning of the ceremony.

‘Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom’ is the ne plus ultra of cinematic ordeals. Make it through the two hours of Pasolini’s rub-your-nose-in-the-shit exposition of man’s inhumanity to man and it puts the bete noires of the last decade or so into perspective. ‘Funny Games’ – kid’s stuff! ‘Eden Lake’ – hah, more like ‘Carry On Camping’! ‘A Serbian Film’ – puh-leeze, there’s at least quarter of hour that’s non-offensive! ‘Irreversible’ – what, only the one rape?

By any definition, Pasolini’s swansong (he was murdered by a rent boy shortly after completing work on the film) ought to be the last word in exploitation cinema – a venal, sickening, taboo-destroying, vomit-inducing, virtually unwatchable exercise in the most bestial excesses of filth and depravity ever committed to celluloid. (To anyone arriving at these pages by searching “venal, sickening, vomit-inducing excesses of filth and depravity”, just fuck off back to the porn sites, okay?) But, like ‘A Serbian Film’, there is a political agenda behind the movie and a genuine aesthetic to its execution and as such it demands to be approached on a higher level than, for instance, ‘Ilsa, the Wicked Warden’.

In the scenes where the captives, thoroughly depersonalized, exhibit either a disturbing complaisance or turn against each other (informing on minor or entirely invented infringements in order to curry favour with their overlords) Pasolini organizes his material into a shattering indictment both of fascism and those who collaborate. Taken with those awful, gut-wrenching mockeries of the marriage ceremony (a defilement and utter rejection of love and tenderness), ‘Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom’, the film emerges as Pasolini’s condemnation – equally – of bourgeois complacency and fascist inhumanity. Even if the visual catalogue of depravities are every bit the equal of de Sade’s nihilistic source material, Pasolini’s directorial aesthetic is unambiguously one of political and social denouncement.

BLACK VALENTINES: PERSONAL FAVES: Short Cuts

Raymond Carver had a genius for writing succinct and emotionally precise stories capturing those transient moments at which relationships are defined or destryoed. Robert Altman had a genius for multi-layered narratives and to-die-for ensemble casts. ‘Short Cuts’ is the cinematic alchemy that resulted from the transition of Carver’s prose to the big screen.

Using the framing devices of a flight of helicopters over L.A. by night at the start of the film (they’re releasing insecticide against a mayfly infestation) and a small earthquake at the end (an extra tremor sent through the protagonists’ already tumultuous lives), Altman charts the disconnections, interrelationships, joys, miseries, camaraderie, bereavements, myriad failings and small redemptions of a couple of dozen disparate characters from various walks of life and social strata.

Affluent couple Howard (Bruce Davison) and Ann Finnigan (Andie MacDowell) – he a TV anchorman, she a brittle lady of leisure – have their lives thrown into touch-and-go uncertainty when their son runs out in front of a car and is knocked down. The (blameless) driver is harassed waitress Doreen Piggott (Lily Tomlin), whose limo driver husband Earl (Tom Waits) drinks too much and gets riled when she receives attention from other men at the diner. Doreen’s daughter Honey (Lili Taylor) is married to wannabe movie FX artist Bill Bush (Robert Downey Jr), a roguish type with a wandering eye, whose best mate Jerry Kaiser (Chris Penn) is an embittered pool cleaner married to phone sex worker Lois (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and driven to distraction by the smut she disinterestedly talks to her callers.


Stopping off at the diner to shoot the shit before they take off on a fishing trip are Stuart Kane (Fred Ward), Vern Miller (Huey Lewis) and Gordon Johnson (Buck Henry). Stuart’s wife Claire (Anne Archer) works as a clown at children’s parties as well as appearing at the children’s ward of the hospital the Finnigans’ son is taken to. It’s here that Howard has an unexpected reunion from his wayward father Paul (Jack Lemmon). Meanwhile, Claire tears Stuart a new arsehole when he returns from his four day fishing trip and confesses that he and his buddies found a dead body of a woman in the water on the first day and left her there while they got on with their fishing.

Vern gets back to discover that his son has taken in a stray dog. Said pooch was abandoned by philandering motorcycle cop (and pathological liar) Gene Shepard (Tim Robbins) after an argument with his wife Sherri (Madeleine Stowe) which was exacerbated by the dog chewing on Gene’s leg. Sherri spends a lot of time either on the phone to or posing nude for her artist sister Marian (Julianne Moore), who is married to jealous and antagonistic surgeon Dr Ralph Wyman (Matthew Modine). Dr Wyman works at the hospital where the Finnigans’ son is being kept under observation; in the next room, and restored to health thanks to the doc’s ministrations, is the son of blues singer Tess Trainer (Annie Ross), who lives with her depressive cellist daughter Zoe (Lori Singer) next door to the Finnigans.

Have I missed anyone out? Oh, yes. There’s Betty (Frances McDormand), estranged wife of helicopter pilot “Stormy” Weathers (Peter Gallagher), with whom Gene is having an affair. And there’s Andy Bitkower (Lyle Lovett), the chef from whom Ann orders a birthday cake just before her son is knocked down; in the immediate aftermath, such social niceties as collecting and paying for said cake slip her mind and Andy, incensed, embarks on a campaign of nuisance phone calls.

In the meantime, Claire and Stuart are invited to a barbeque hosted by Ralph and Marian, the timing proving less than auspicious as both couples are virtually at breaking point in their relationships; nonetheless, the fragile equilibrium the end of the evening finds them at suggests that there might be some chance of conciliation. Other characters don’t fare so well.

Infidelity and incompatibility are the hallmarks of many of the relationships depicted, but Altman’s (and Carver’s) overarching theme is connection. The ways, however tenuous, in which lives overlap – sometimes shatteringly, sometimes by the most whimsical turn of circumstance. And it never feels laboured or contrived as in, say, Paul Haggis’s over-egged ‘Crash’ (for my money one of the most inexplicable Oscar faves in recent years).

Like life, Altman’s film is a thing of contradictory experiences, seemingly random and messy but inextricably interconnected. Sympathetic characters take wrong turns (no spoilers) while a self-obsessed knob-head like Gene comes through at the end and does the right thing by his family. Several characters find solace in the oblivion of alcohol. Some live in the past. Some dream of the future. Some struggle with the tribulations of the here and now. The song that Tess sings over the opening credits – “Prisoners of Life” – pretty much sums it up.

And the crazy thing is – for all that ‘Short Cuts’ trades in bleak subject matter (it contains as much cheatin’, drinkin’, death, heartache and suicide as your average C&W album) – it’s often screamingly funny. Sherri disinterestedly clipping her toe nails while she talks dirty to a caller. Gene bullishly retrieving the dog from its new “owners”. Stormy’s systematic destruction of Betty’s living room interrupted by a vacuum cleaner salesman. Doreen and Earl whooping it up as the earthquake hits, almost joyously embracing the possibility that “this is the big one”.

With more masterpieces on his CV than most, ‘Short Cuts’ might well be Altman’s warmest and wittiest statement on the human condition, no matter how terribly pragmatic that statement might be. As human beings, we royally fuck each other up … but we can’t do without each other.

BLACK VALENTINES: Dogtooth

‘Dogtooth’ – a film whose title becomes horribly apparent as it progresses – begins with a woman teaching her three children some new words. The first indication that something is just a little bit wrong is the kids’ ages: they’re all in their mid to late teens. The second is the definitions of the words she’s teaching them. “Sea” apparently has nothing to do with the ocean; it’s a type of chair. “Telephone” is a salt shaker. And if, like me, you thought “zombie” was a shuffling undead creature, well we were both wrong. It’s a “small yellow flower”.

Later, as the kids soak up the sun outside, a plane passes overhead. Their mother throws a small toy plane from an upstairs window. The kids race to find it, there being some kind of competition attached to the retrieval of what they earnestly believe are objects that fall from the sky.

By this point, even the hardiest aficionado of such cinematic surrealists as David Lynch, Alejandro Jodorowsky or Luis Buñuel would have to admit that there’s definitely something not quite right with this particular family.

It soon becomes apparent that they’re not allowed outside the property. A fictional prodigal sibling who suffers on the other side of the wall is presented as a cautionary tale. When it suits their control-freak entrepreneur father, he “kills off” their sibling, blaming the death on a cat. It gives him a good excuse to train them to hold the perimeter on all fours, barking like dogs.

What this blandly manipulative individual can’t control, however, is the onset of hormones, and he resorts to paying one of his female staff to take care of his son’s sexual needs. He takes all possible precautions, including driving the woman to and from the residence blindfolded. Nonetheless, she brings external influences into the family’s otherwise hermetically sealed environment. The businessman dispenses with her services and decides – SPOILER ALERT (and, uh, SOCIALLY DEVIANT BEHAVIOUR ALERT, as well) – to offer his son the choice of his two sisters.

Oh, did I mention that ‘Dogtooth’ is a comedy?

A comedy, granted, in the way that Herzog’s ‘Stroszek’ is a comedy. Or Lynch’s ‘Eraserhead’. Perception, “normality” and accepted norms – not just social and/or moral, but the norms of how we expect a movie to function – are skewered to the point of absurdism. Whether one laughs, howls or runs screaming from the cinema is entirely a matter of personal response.

What makes ‘Dogtooth’ so simultaneously funny and horrifying is that writer/director Yorgos Lanthimos never gives us a why. The film is a metaphor, no doubt about it – but for what?

Again, it’s a matter of personal response. It works as an exposition on Phillip Larkin’s observation that “they fuck you up, your mum and dad”; certainly, it presents an effective warning on how parental overprotectiveness can distort and damage the worldview of their offspring. Or you could take it beyond that and consider it a response to Josef Fritzl case – the film becomes far more disturbing with this reading in mind. Or there’s the wider metaphorical implication: the film as a treatise on how governments cultivate a climate of fear and misinformation the better to control the citizenry.

‘Dogtooth’ is one of the most enigmatic things I’ve seen recently. The performances are amazing, the cinematography off-kilter, and the entire aesthetic a testament that Yorgos Lanthimos is indisputably a truly original talent.

Omni vincit amor (allegedly)

So the first month of this new year draws to a close. Already, fractionally, the evenings are that little bit lighter. February takes her place in the calendar tomorrow. Shop windows are already bedecked with swathes of pink crepe, flowery designs and cuddly toys holding out ersatz roses. Spring is just round the corner and a young man’s thoughts turn to romance.

Well, fuck that shit here on The Agitation of the Mind! Granted, I’m a happily married man and I love Mrs F completely, but I’ve never seen the point of lining the pockets of florists and card shops who have decided to whitewash the fact that February 14th is actually the anniversary of Valentine’s death. He was beaten with clubs, then beheaded. Yeah, put that on a fuckin’ teddy bear!

Valentine, along with St Marius, aided Christians persecuted by Claudius II, and for this he was put to death. He is now the patron saint not only of betrothed couples, happy marriages and lovers (does this mean he’s the patron saint of extra-martial affairs, too? surely a conflict of interest!), but also of epilepsy, fainting, plague, bee-keepers and travellers. I get mixed messages from this. Okay, I can see how swooning ties in with all the hearts and flowers rigmarole, but epilepsy, plague, bee-keepers and travelling? Sounds like a recipe for ‘The Swarm’ by way of ’28 Days Later’ with a dash of ‘The Crazies’ thrown in for good measure.

Here at The Agitation of the Mind, yours truly has not achieved any form of martyrdom and subsequent deification (and having seen Pascal Laugnier’s ‘Martyrs’, I don’t fucking want to, either!), therefore cannot lay claim to the title Patron Saint of Cynicism. Nonetheless, I’m going to indulge in some spectacularly black-hearted programming and populate the fortnight leading up to Valentine’s Day with a series of films skewed towards the darker side of human relationships.

Expect duplicitous dames, femmes fatale, sexual shenanigans, hanky panky and at least one bout of slap and tickle where the slap aspect is definitely predominant over the tickling. Welcome to two weeks, starting from tomorrow, of black valentines.