Scott Tobias: The New Cult Canon -- Irma Vep

The New Cult Canon: Irma Vep
by Scott Tobias
The New Cult Canon (The A.V. Club)

"It is visually beautiful, but the editing is so self-destructive that it's as if Hopper had slashed his own canvases." —Pauline Kael on Dennis Hopper's The Last Movie



After reading the quote above many years ago, I felt I had to see Dennis Hopper's The Last Movie immediately—not because it might be visually beautiful, but because I was excited to see an artist slash his own canvases. What possible impulse could lead a filmmaker to sabotage his own work? And what does a film wind up looking like when it's completely torn apart and we can see the pieces of a more conventionally "cohesive" work lying on the floor? It's a very punk-rock thing to do, but it's also what film critics do by trade—pick apart and examine all the individual pieces that go into the whole, and occasionally slash a few canvases when necessary.

Turns out I couldn't really abide The Last Movie—which was more just a mess than the purposeful mess I was hoping for—but in 1996, Olivier Assayas' Irma Vep brought out the knife and happily slashed away. In that respect and many others, the film is a true torchbearer of the French New Wave—playful, restless, full of invention, and born of an overwhelming discontent for the status quo. At a time of artistic crisis, when French cinema was in danger of losing its identity to popular American imports, Assayas issued Irma Vep as a wake-up call to an industry that was slipping into compromise and irrelevance. Much like our Graham Greene-inspired friend Donnie Darko, when he floods the school and burns Patrick Swayze's house down, Assayas performed an act of creation by destruction. He also made film criticism seem sexy—which, as one of the pasty-faced legions who make a living from it, I can respect as no mean feat.

At the center of the movie—and a movie this scatterbrained needs a strong center—is Maggie Cheung, one of the world's most glamorous stars, playing herself. (Assayas later married her, temporarily cementing his status as the world's hippest film director. They divorced three years later, but it was amicable enough for Assayas to cast her as a Courtney Love/Yoko Ono type in 2004's Clean.) When we first see Cheung, she's stepped into the middle of a French production office and nobody seems to notice, which is just the first sign of how terminally chaotic the industry has become. No one picked her up at the airport and no one seems to even expect her, even though she's been chosen to play the lead role in a production slated to shoot imminently. She tries to apologize for being three weeks late, due to overruns on her latest Hong Kong film, but who would know to accept her apology?

Cheung has been cast as the lead in a remake of Les Vampires, Louis Feuillade's landmark 10-part serial from 1915 about a devious villainess who leads an underground thieving operation called The Vampire Gang, and steals jewels while wearing a form-fitting black catsuit. To most, it's a baffling choice to cast a Chinese actress in a role so quintessentially Parisian, but then again, there's nothing that looks wrong about Maggie Cheung in a latex catsuit. The director, René Vidal, is well past his prime; and since he's played by Jean-Pierre Léaud—the legendary Antoine Doinel from François Truffaut classics like The 400 Blows and Stolen Kisses—we can probably assume that he's a creatively stilted New Wave holdover. Whatever the case, René can't really come up with a coherent reason for remaking Les Vampires, but he tells Maggie that he saw her martial-arts film The Heroic Trio in Marrakech, and he hired her because she looked like a dancer. (Poor Maggie then has to give Réne the bum news that all those action sequences were really done by stunt doubles.)

And so it goes. Shooting doesn't go well. The one scene we do see get filmed in the movie-within-a-movie gets ruined by the actors cracking up… for the 24th take in a row. Réne storms out of dailies, raging about how his movie is "shit," and has a nervous breakdown. Meanwhile, wardrobe assistant Zoé, played with winning hyperactive charm by Nathalie Richard, develops a crush on Maggie, who doesn't pick up on her advances. Both Réne and Zoé project their fantasies onto her—and who can blame them?—but Maggie doesn't fit comfortably into the roles they want to her to play. If there's one word to describe Maggie's odyssey in France, it's awkward: Having to deal with the language barrier is one thing (she speaks English, but no French) and feeling alienated in a foreign land is another, but more than that, she's thrown in the middle of other people's crippling dysfunction. It's a wonder she doesn't catch the next flight out of De Gaulle at any moment.

There are innumerable great touches, big and small, in Irma Vep, which is organic and alive like few movies ever are. (It was shot on the fly in three weeks, and the spontaneity shows.) But the one sequence that everyone who's seen the film remembers is a restless Maggie slipping into her catsuit after hours and skulking around the hotel like Irma Vep in the movie. Only this time, she embodies the role effortlessly—she's sexy, mysterious, resourceful, and liberated in a way that she couldn't have been in Réne's stale, pointless remake.

To Read the Rest of the Essay

Scott Tobias: The New Cult Canon -- Donnie Darko (2001)

Donnie Darko
by Scott Tobias
The New Cult Canon (The A.V. Club)



In embarking on the mammoth, open-ended project that is The New Cult Canon, I face the scary and exhilarating prospect of a journey with no set course and no planned destination, but there was never a question that I'd be leaving port with Richard Kelly's Donnie Darko. To my mind, Donnie Darko is the quintessential cult movie of the last 20 years: Here was a much-hyped washout at Sundance that fell to a second-tier distributor (Newmarket), which released the film to middling reviews and feeble arthouse box-office (barely half a million when all was said and done). The film was left for dead until, miraculously, word of mouth started to swell and an audience steadily grew and rallied around it. The Pioneer Theater in New York ran it as a midnight movie for two years—this at a time when the midnight movie itself had long been left for dead. And DVD sales were so robust that Newmarket attempted to re-release the "Director's Cut" theatrically. (It tanked a second time, too.) The movie has inspired a level of obsession that separates cult phenomena from the everyday hits that wither past opening weekend.

I saw Donnie Darko three times in the theater: Once at the press screening, where I was apoplectic to find many of my fellow critics shrugging their shoulders; a second time during its two-week run here in Chicago, where I saw it with maybe five or six other people in the theater; and a third time at the Gene Siskel Film Center, where it kept coming back month after month to packed houses, including the near-soldout showing I attended. (And on a weeknight, no less!)

Why did I and so many others keep shuffling, zombie-like, to see this movie again and again in the theater? It certainly isn't perfect—films this crazily ambitious, from a first-time director no less, are rarely flawless—but Donnie Darko accomplishes perhaps the one thing I value most in cinema: It creates a world to get lost in, so particular and full of life that other concerns (in this case, an overstuffed mind-bender of a plot that has never quite cohered for me) fall by the wayside. And though I'll probably be defining cult movies a million different ways in this column, that's likely the common denominator, because once you have the ins and outs of the story figured out, what's the point of seeing a movie a second or third or hundredth time? The world of the film is paramount.

To Read the Rest of the Essay

Scott Tobias: The New Cult Canon -- Morvern Callar (Lynne Ramsey, 2002)

The New Cult Canon: Morvern Callar
by Scott Tobias
The New Cult Canon



Lynne Ramsay's 2002 film Morvern Callar was the inspiration for this column, because for all its bleakness and deliberate frustrations, I can think of no cooler movie. It's a wonder that theaters didn't have doormen standing behind velvet ropes, determining who was hip enough to step into its world of enveloping disaffection. Based on Alan Warner's novel, which was part of a brief flowering of Scottish literature in the wake of Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting, the film is an adaptation with a high degree of difficulty. It's one thing to adapt someone like James M. Cain, whose steamroller plots are action-packed and give off a lot of surface heat; it's another to capture a character's internal life, which is usually the exclusive province of novels. Working with a plot that could fit comfortably on a cocktail napkin, Ramsay has to rely almost entirely on cinematic effects—and Samantha Morton's revelatory performance—to decipher a woman who's so deep in an existential funk that her behavior is always curious and sometimes extraordinarily callous.

Before getting into the movie itself, a few words on Ramsay: To my mind, Lynne Ramsay is one of the most talented filmmakers in the world, even though she only has two features to her credit, and nothing since Morvern Callar. Ramsay has a background in photography, and in her movies, it's clear that she's a photographer first and foremost. Each frame is immaculately composed, and unusually focused on the minute details that are more characteristic of photographers than film directors, who are usually concerned with the bigger picture. After making a series of acclaimed short films, Ramsay shot her stunning 1999 debut Ratcatcher, which might have been another piece of UK kitchen-sink miserablism if not for Ramsay's extraordinary eye for finding poetry in the everyday. (Incidentally, three of Ramsay's shorts are collected as bonus features on Criterion's Ratcatcher DVD.) Though Ratcatcher wallows in the horrific world of its 12-year-old protagonist—a Glaswegian apartment-dweller in the early '70s who lives in the stinking squalor of a garbage strike—it nonetheless has moments of real beauty. As I said in my review of the DVD, "Just when Ratcatcher seems overly content to bathe in Euro-art squalor, Ramsay counters with passages so breathtakingly lyrical and improbably optimistic that they shake off the oppressive pall that too often passes for hard realism."

In recent years, Ramsay has suffered some discouragement in getting her third film to the screen. She won the rights to Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones while it was still an unpublished manuscript, and watched it slip away from her as the book became an unexpected phenomenon. True to form, Ramsay reportedly loved the grim premise for the book—about a little girl who's raped and killed, and then watches the aftermath from heaven—but disliked its second half, which she found too sentimental. She worked for more than a year to craft a screenplay more to her liking, but the rights eventually went to the all-powerful Peter Jackson, who's currently filming it for release next year. Ramsay was later attached to direct an adaptation of We Need To Talk About Kevin, Lionel Shriver's brilliant book about a mother grappling with her son's Columbine-like rampage. To me, it sounds like the ideal fit, but that project appears to have died on the vine, since I've heard nothing on it since 2006. So for now, there's only Ratcatcher and Morvern Callar, and hopefully a young filmmaker who isn't too discouraged to keep pushing new boulders up a hill.

For High Fidelity types like myself, the mix-tape has always been an important (if somewhat feeble) form of romantic expression, the pop-damaged equivalent of sending a bouquet of flowers. And Morvern Callar features the mix-tape to end all mix-tapes, with tracks from bands like The Velvet Underground, Can, Boards Of Canada, Broadcast, and Aphex Twin, among others. Morton's eponymous heroine receives her mix-tape in the cruelest fashion: As one in a series of Christmas gifts given by a boyfriend who has just committed suicide. (She also receives a leather jacket, a Walkman, and a lighter.)

As the film opens, Morvern is curled up on the floor next to her boyfriend's corpse, with Christmas lights pulsing like a disco around them. He's left her a note on her computer screen: He apologizes. He tells her he loves her. He encourages her to "be brave." He also leaves behind a completed novel and a list of possible publishers to solicit, as well as his ATM card for money to pay for the funeral. Clearly bruised by her boyfriend's cruel departure, Morvern doesn't follow through on the dead man's wishes, to put it mildly. She changes the byline on the novel to her name, and rather than using the cash from his bank account for a funeral, she buys tickets for her and her party-animal friend (and supermarket co-worker) Lanna (Kathleen McDermott) to vacation in Spain.

To Read the Rest of the Essay and View Film Clips