Category Archives: Drama

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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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

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.

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Twitter: @MadeUpFilms

Drama, Erotic, Imaginary US Cinema

#102 – Invitation to Sin, An

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(1976, US, 95 min) Dir Art Blitzen. Cast Angela Raider, Morty Handlon, Sissy Pfister.

Another exercise in inappropriate sexploitation from ‘Artless’ Art Blitzen. Despite no one liking it, 1974’s What Did They Do To Patricia was a success, perhaps for those who enjoyed The Exorcist and Deep Throat but wanted one film that would do the job of both. Newly emboldened by this random occurrence, Art indulged in that vice which strikes the surprised successful – that of an inflated ego. An Invitation to Sin was to be his classy film, the one that transcended the smut genre and oozed across and into the mainstream. Fair intentions but unfortunately for Art his nickname wasn’t ‘Artless’ just because it was a fun play on his first name, he really had no idea about aesthetics at all. So what’s the package? An Invitation to Sin centres around a young woman’s mysterious invitation to a masked ball at a country estate where she becomes embroiled in a seemingly endless orgy where every kind of vice and perversion is indulged. The concession to class seems to rest solely on the fact that the setting is a country estate and that the characters dress in fancy period finery (though what exact period that is supposed to be is left somewhat vague). Despite the awfulness the film was another success for Blitzen as there really is a lot of filth in it. The bad news is that that led to more films but the good news is that his next one was his own personal Heaven’s Gate – the science fiction sex odyssey Sex Beyond the Stars.

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Twitter: @MadeUpFilms

Drama, Erotic, Imaginary French Cinema

#101 – Fusil Rose, Le (Pink Musket, The)

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(1976, Fr, 98 min) Dir Catherine Dominique. Cast Adrianna Belle, Jean Fillet, Hans.

Riding the crest of the wave started with Emmanuel, Catherine Dominique traded in art house experimentation for feminist sexploitation with Le Fusil Rose. “Emmanuel, we all hated,” she said in 2010 at a retrospective in Berlin, “I wanted to make a film where the woman make the choice, you understand? Like me, in life.” A discussion of Dominique’s life is better left for a review of Madame D, the documentary about her, but it’s hard to miss the parallels between this and it, even though Le Fusil Rose centres around a female highwayman character and not a twentieth-century film director. Like Dominique, the Pink Musket is in reality the sweet and mild daughter of a landowner. The both of them dressed up to go out at night and take what they wanted  from men – Dominique using the power of her body over them and the Pink Musket her weapon. Both also had the law on their tails but for Dominique it was for the provocations of her art and unlike the Pink Musket it never came in the form of Jean Fillet and his swimmer’s physique. At the end of the film he and the Pink Musket come face to face in a battle of physical strength that is far removed from the kind that you would expect at the end of a Clint Eastwood movie for example. Brazenly erotic and unashamedly political it’s great to see Dominique enjoying a resurgence of interest in recent years.

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Drama, Imaginary British Cinema

#99 – 99 Red Balloons

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(1993, GB, 101 min) Dir Adrian Fisher. Cast Alan Paul, Peter Capaldi, Susan Trevlyn.

The threat of nuclear annihilation had only just dissipated when, ever the contrarian, Adrian Fisher produced this, a strange kind of love story to the spectre of mutually assured destruction. It’s 1984 and Harvey’s parents are building a bomb shelter in the back yard. He’s doesn’t see this as some dire portent of doom however – on the contrary he finds the prospect of nuclear war very exciting, dreaming of a bright and beautiful mushroom cloud filling the skies over his hometown and telling his teacher that his classes don’t matter because he and all the other children will be dead before they’re grown up. When a teacher finds his notebook filled with drawings of atomic explosions, crumbling buildings and irradiated corpses with their skin melting off they naturally call in his parents who it turns out are just as pessimistic as their son. Of course this being a Fisher film the fantastical is never far away with their neighbour across the road being, as Harvey sees it, a Soviet communist spy who, again as Harvey sees it, must be encouraged to endanger everyone’s life and trigger the inevitable apocalypse. This was produced on the back of the surprise success of By the Light of the Blood Moon and the bigger budget is certainly visible. The titular song gets a good workout too, embodying Harvey’s ideal of happiness in destruction.

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Twitter: @MadeUpFilms

Drama, Horror, Imaginary Irish Cinema

#91 – Peat Cutters, The

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(1992, Ire, 91 min) Dir Fintan O’Driscoll. Cast Stephen Rea, Colm Meaney.

Bluff, bolshie Pat (Rea) and quiet, thoughtful Michael (Meaney) are peat cutters in the West of Ireland beginning another day’s shift in the bleak midwinter morning, the uniformity of the grey sky overhead mirrored by the open vastness of the bog around them. Their day is only just begun when Michael turns over a sod to find the leathered face of a long dead bog person within. As there’s nothing they can do with the body until they’re picked up at the end of their shift they leave it in the ground where they found it and go back to their work. Pat laughs off their find but Michael seems shaken by it and takes to speculating about it. Then he starts to talk about a figure, just on the horizon, that Pat can’t see and Pat can’t laugh that off. A spooky little number that gives away little and uses its location, which is like a blasted void or like limbo, to its fullest with director O’Driscoll – who is best known in the theatre – showing a knack for image making alongside his expected strengths with the actors. It’s refreshing to see both leads playing against type too, apparently as a result of a last-minute switch the week before shoot started.

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Comedy, Drama, Imaginary US Cinema

#90 – Duke of St Elizabeth’s, The

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(1998, US, 119 min) Dir John Falco. Cast Peter Fonda, Edward Furlong, Steve Buscemi, Elliott Gould.

For about five minutes there at the tail end of the nineties John Falco was the Happy, Texas of film directors – much feted but little seen. Much like Happy, Texas he failed to live up to the hype but how could he have when The Duke of St Elizabeth’s was to be his introduction to the film world? It’s not a bad film, not by any stretch, but it’s a gentle, ambling comedy drama completely devoid of conflict and edge – it’s no Reservoir Dogs or Pi to be sure. Along with the previous year’s Ulee’s Gold (which was also much praised and little seen) this was supposed to seal the deal for Peter Fonda’s return to mainstream filmmaking but for a comeback the man seems curiously disengaged as burnt out rock legend Bob Stranger who has been in residence in St Elizabeth’s Rehabilitation Centre since 1983. It’s possible this alienation is intentional but I can’t say it works, especially as he’s supposed to be bonding with young speed freak Eddie (Furlong). The rest of the cast contribute well enough with Buscemi’s recovering coke addict and Gould’s tired psychiatrist coming out the best of a good bunch. Poor Falco though – he wasn’t even big enough in those fifteen minutes to warrant inclusion in the occasional ‘Where Are They Now?’ articles but seems to be doing well enough these days in the world of television.

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Art Film, Drama, Imaginary French Cinema

#89 – Dans la Vallée Ouverte avec le Soleil (In the Open Valley, with the Sun)

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(1968, Fr, 97 min) Dir Jean Anno. Cast Patrice Melaud, Sandy.

A very of its time wigged-out hippy film, shot in France’s arid Biscot valley with a soundtrack of droney jams provided by Parisian proto proggers, Le Mog. Hunky young Patrice Melaud is, like, totally stifled by his bourgeois existence in the suburbs where every apartment block is like a cage, man. Into his life comes the free, keen and mononymous Sandy who, with frequent nudity and skills with the flute, leads him out to the totally amazing commune where she lives. From then on its dreamy montage a go-go as the beautiful young couple frolic in the countryside with their lovely hippy chums. Of course it’s ’68 and beyond the screen are the May riots and Vietnam so the film has to end, like Bonnie and Clyde the year before and Easy Rider the year after, in blood and fire with the Man and his fascist storm trooper policemen raiding the commune and, like, totally killing everyone to bits while Le Mog wail doomily in the background. In case you hadn’t already guessed this is a very sixties film and your ability to enjoy it will depend very much on your tolerance for the wishy-washiest kind of hippy nonsense and while there are salvageable aspects to the likes of Zabriskie Point, Jean Anno is no Antonioni.

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Black and White, Drama, Imaginary Australian Cinema, Science Fiction

#76 – One Huge Beach

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(1955, Aust, 95 min, b/w) Dir Ralph Robinson. Cast Rod Taylor, Diane Cilento.

Max (Taylor) lives alone on the beach in his shack overlooking the tide. Every morning he goes out to fish for food and see what’s been tossed up by the surf. One day finds a metal pod of some kind and through the glass portal on the front he can see that there is someone inside. He drags it back up to his shack and eventually breaks it open to reveal the young woman (Cilento) inside who wakes once the seal is broken. He nurses her back to health and returns from his beachcombing one morning to find her awake and sitting up. She is Valeria Pross and as she tells it she was put into what she calls her “lifeboat” back in 1975 when the war started. Max is confused – he doesn’t know of any war. “What year is it now?” she asks him but he doesn’t know. “But how did you get here?” she tries but incurious Max just shrugs. “My parents had me,” he says, “But they’re dead now.” She convinces him to join her in setting off from the beach in search of civilisation but, as they find, the whole world has been laid to waste by the nuclear war they have survived, turning it into an unending landscape of impassive irradiated sand – sand that is slowly killing her but that Max has grown up immune to. “You mean,” says Max, sifting a handful and furrowing his brow, “You mean the whole world has been turned into one huge beach?” But of course for him there is no loss – he’s never known it any other way.

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Twitter: @MadeUpFilms