Monthly Archives: January 2015

Drama, Imaginary German Cinema

#117 – Pass into Heaven’s Arms, The

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(1976, WGer, 100 min) Dir Roland Sacher. Cast Harvey Keitel, Isabelle Adjani.

Tough American mountaineer Jack Maggit (Keitel) has secured permission to enter China to search the Himalayan Mountains for the fabled valley of Pannak Coor, the mystical opening into the earth that eluded his famed explorer father, eventually driving him mad. Maggit sees this as his last best chance of wresting his family’s name from his father and securing himself a lasting legacy. Desperate to claim the glory for himself alone he permits only his wife Alison (Adjani) to come with him and document the trip. This set up takes all of five minutes at the film’s head with lots of methody shouting in a New York apartment before they leave, slamming the door and the film cuts to the Tibetan plateau where the echo of the slamming door melts into the sound of the wind as the two distant specks that are Jack and Alison are dwarfed by the mountains around them. It’s odd though, for Sacher, as the start of the film is much more like what one would expect from the director – enclosed spaces and lots of acting – and the rest of the film is altogether more sweeping, epic and visual than is common in his oeuvre. That’s not to say that it doesn’t work and that there aren’t a couple of scenes of intense emotion (and shouting) to be had either because it does work and there are plenty of acting moments for Keitel to chew on too. The film’s ending is another story completely, turning from a David Lean film into a Alejandro Jodorowski one when the valley is found and visions of inverted rainbows and glowing green spider webs that bind the world start flying about.

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Twitter: @MadeUpFilms

 

Drama, Erotic, Imaginary French Cinema

#116 – Love is the Death

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(1990, Fr, 94 min) Dir Catherine Dominique. Cast Amanda Pan, Joseph DiMatt, Jean Fillet.

When a director steps away from the camera for years, maybe decades, it can’t help but induce longing in their fans. Will they ever come back? What kind of films will they make if they do? News of projects possibly incoming, possibly abandoned, float to the surface every once in a while and the appetite is whetted once again. Generally – not always but generally – when a long MIA director returns to the fray it’s a disappointment. Alas it is my sad duty to reveal that Catherine Dominique’s energence from obsurity is exactly that – a disappointment. I’m not going to even bother with a synopsis or even to deliniate the disappointments that litter the film merely to say that the decade she spent away from the camera living did much to dull her once unimpeachable instincts with the resulting film almost indistinguishable from the standard straight to video softcore product. At a recent retrospective Catherine herself was sanguine about this, her last film to date: “Maybe one day I will try I again, who knows? I remember halfway through this, you know, and I look across at everyone working away, so serious, and I think to myself – who gives a fuck? Not to offend to anybody but I thought, well, that I’d said all that I needed to say and that was that.”

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Twitter: @MadeUpFilms

Drama, Erotic, Imaginary French Cinema

#115 – Falling Blossom

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(1981, Fr, 101 min) Dir Catherine Dominique. Cast Allegra Biscotti, Serge de Foy, Jean Fillet.

The peak of the latter half of Dominique’s career and the last film she would make until 1990’s Love is the Death, Falling Blossom would also, if you removed all of the sex (which, sensitively handled and beautifully shot though it might be, is still pretty filthy), be a perfectly heartbreaking coming of age story. Allegra Biscotti, here in her first film role, confirms Dominique’s unerring eye for a beautiful lead actress as the titular Blossom, growing up in her family’s country house in the French countryside of the 1930’s. She becomes besotted with a local artist called Phillipe (de Foy, of Claude Claude fame) and through a campaign of borderline stalking manages to snare him, the two of them falling into passionate love over the course of this one hot, sweaty summer. Alas once summer is done Blossom must return to the city and Phillipe, staying behind, gives in to the ghosts of the old war he fought not so long ago while simultaneously fighting the premonitions of a new one looming on the horizon. Everything came together for Dominique here, perhaps now that the greater excesses of her work have been purged. Not that she would agree: “This is me,” she has said, “And so is that. There is no difference.”

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Twitter: @MadeUpFilms

Erotic, Horror, Imaginary French Cinema, Imaginary Spanish Cinema

#114 – Baroness Lesbos

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(1978, Fr/Sp, 99 min) Dir Catherine Dominique. Cast Ewa Rohm, Adrianna Belle, Hans, Peter Allison.

Originally titled The Mother of All Sin this is the one film of Dominique’s she seems incapable of standing behind, despite what even she admits are some moments of beauty studded throughout. “It was taken away from me by the bastard producers,” she told me at a 2010 retrospective in Berlin, “They cut it and take out what they don’t like. They film more things and put them in too. Even they take it’s name. I find it hard to look at still, you know?” As you might expect what was taken out was atmosphere and what was added was sex, but that’s not what upset Dominique: “The actors – Adrianna and Hans and Peter – they all work with me before so they refuse to not work with me. All they have then is Ewa, who I never wanted anyway.” That’s not all they had – they also had another woman in a blonde wig pretending to be Adrianna Belle but who looks so unlike her it completely sinks the back half of the film which is a shame as the first half is as strong as anything she has made with fantastic use made of the sunsets along the Spanish coast. Dominique would be back on solid ground three years later with the crown jewel of the sexploitation half of her career – the beautiful and romantic Falling Blossom.

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Twitter: @MadeUpFilms

Art Film, Erotic, Horror, Imaginary French Cinema

#113 – Bête érotique avec quatre jambes, La (Four Legged Sex Beast)

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(1974, Fr, 88 min) Dir Catherine Dominique. Cast Beau Modeste, Jean Fillet, Peter Allison.

A midway film from Dominique, straddling her earlier art house efforts and her later sexploitation work, the amusingly titled Four Legged Sex Beast concerns the porcelain Modeste as the powdered and perfumed Lady Pea who is being transported to the home of the man that she is being married off to by her father when one of the carriage wheels breaks on the rutted country road, stranding them in the dark woods. As night falls first the coach driver is taken screaming into the night and then her father too. It’s only a matter of time before whatever it is that’s out there returns for Pea. Of course the beast wants something more than meat from her too – the last twenty minutes of the film form the notorious extended sex scene that saw the film quietly banned in a lot of places. But what is the nature of the beast? Is it a real life Sasquatch type or is it the physical manifestation of Pea’s suppressed sexuality? Who knows! The only film starring the beautiful Modeste, filmed as she rested on the cusp of fame after the one-two hits Je Suis un Tracteur and Petit Chat de Fourrure stormed the French charts and before the suspicious snorkelling accident that took her life. Her performance is limited to be sure but the camera just can’t take it’s eye off her.

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Twitter: @MadeUpFilms

Drama, Imaginary British Cinema

#112 – Happy New Year, Detrasta Melovian

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(1973, GB, 86 min) Dir Adrian Fisher. Cast Eddie Mitchell, Sandra Gladstone, Tony Cousins.

The tale of young Alan Henry, who passes his time over the Christmas holidays in his boring seaside hometown of Yorrip by inventing saints, complete with illustrations of them being martyred. New Year’s Day he decides is the holy day of Saint Detrasta Melovian who was killed for not renouncing her faith in 1386 by having the top of her head sawn off in Bulgaria. Soon enough he finds himself accompanied by the forcibly trepanned imaginary saint on his walks along the beach where he goes to escape his quarrelling parents. This was Fisher’s first feature film after a tumultuous time with the BBC and the freedom of the big screen is palpable. It’s final image, of Alan back at school looking out of his classroom window at his Detrasta Melovian flying in slow circles over the building with Hovum’s Felestra swelling on the soundtrack, is surely one of the most ecstatic religious images produced in all of British cinema. A gentle and quietly confident debut from a director who would go on to prove himself an understated and underappreciated talent.

www.imaginaryfilmguide.com

Twitter: @MadeUpFilms