Prizzi's Honor (1985)

 

Familiens ære

Gangster comedies is an odd sub-genre. Gangsters are a tough lot, brutal and trigger-happy while comedies are intended to be fun. Considered seriously, these two concepts match very poorly, yet there is an abundance of gangster comedies around. They require an uneasy balance, but when that balance is struck right, they can be excellent. “Prizzi’z Honor” aim for a darker humour, to an extent where I am not entirely certain I would call it a comedy anymore.

We meet Charley Partanna (Jack Nicholson) at a wedding in New York. This is a mafia wedding and Charley is a hitman for the Prizzi family. He is associated with the family through his father. At this wedding Charley spots a woman that immediately catches his interest. Through some research he manages to find her and it turns our that he and Irene (Kathleen Turner) has a lot in common and they immediately become a couple with the little issue that she lives in California. And is Polish, not Italian. And is a hitman too.

There is a complicated plot around a casino in Las Vegas belonging to the Prizzis getting swindled for a large sum of money. Charley is sent out to kill the perpetrator and retrieve the money, only to find out that the target is married to Irene. She is very apologetic, returns half the money and claims she was about to get a divorce anyway. All fine, Charley and Irene get married.

This suits Maerose Prizzi (Anjelica Huston very poorly. She used to have a relationship with Charley and still thinks she has a claim on him. She tells her father, Dominic Prizzi (Lee Richardson) that Charley took advantage of her before the wedding. This pisses off Dominic so he hires a hitman to take out Charley. The hitman is Irene.

Irene and Charley now work as a team, and they successfully kidnap a rich banker for the Prizzis in another complicated plot. Unfortunately, Irene shoots a police captain’s wife in the process and eventually the Prizzis, led by the old Don Corrado (William Hickey) decides Irene is a liability.

I got very confused in those convoluted schemes of the Prizzi family and while that likely made me miss key details, the bottom line was clear enough. Charley either belongs to the family or to Irene and therein lies both the comedy and the tragedy of the story. Is Charley a naive stooge being played both by the family and Irene? Or are Charley and Irene simply caught in a game they cannot control? Irene is certainly smart enough to understand that her situation is precarious, but does that makes her mercenary or careful?

From the helicopter perspective the setup is comedic. The Prizzis are so mafia cliché it almost hurts, the confusing schemes with hitmen turned on hitmen and people turning up at the wrong places. Yet, it is never overtly comedic, more played out as a natural consequence of circumstances.  These circumstances included that Charley and Irene met and fell in love.

Although Charley and Irene are both hitmen, and therefore morally on a big minus, it is difficult not to sympathize with them. Their care for each other seems quite genuine. That makes it the more painful to watch things unravel for them and the comedy sours. This turn is more tragic than comedic and this I guess is what makes it a dark comedy.

I must admit I never got entirely into the movie, but that is likely because mafia movies are not really my thing. Nicholson and Turner are both great in this movie. When are they not? Their presence in any movie is a big asset to the movie. William Hickey as the old Don Corrado Prizzi is also stellar, so I only blame the premise of “Prizzi’s Honor”. It was highly acclaimed though, with eight Academy nominations and one win (Anjelica Huston as Supporting Actress) and four Golden Globe wins.

 

The Quiet Earth (1985)

 

The Quiet Earth

This is a curious little movie. “Little” I say because it is obviously made on a shoestring budget with clunky and cheap, though effective, special effects, but it also shows that you can get far, very far, on a good idea.

A man, Zac Hobson (Bruno Lawrence), wake up one morning like any other. He is alone. As he is getting to work, he realizes how alone he actually is. There is nobody at the gas station, nobody on the roads, just empty cars left at random. Zac is getting freaked out about it, but wherever he looks it seems that people have just been there and now they are gone.

Zac heads to a research station where he evidently works. We, very gradually, learn that he is a scientist involved with a project called “Flashlight”, to setup some sort of global energy grid to power everything and that it is this project that has evidently gone wrong.

Over the next few weeks, as Zac realizes how truly alone he is, he vacillates between enjoying himself being allowed to do anything he wants, and utter desperate depression and madness. Humans are social creatures and only when truly alone we realize that.

Eventually Zac encounters Joanne (Alison Routledge). Exhilarated that they are not alone, they set out to look for others and Zac starts to seriously look into the cause and effect of the “Effect” as they call the event that made everybody else disappear. Eventually, they also encounter Api (Pete Smith), a Māori who come across as a bit paranoid. They come to the conclusion that they all had just died when the Effect happened and this is why they are left. Zac finds out that the Effect will occur again at a certain time so they must blow up the research facility.

Watching “The Quiet Earth” as a science fiction story is both exciting and frustrating. Exciting because the sense of being left alone in an abandoned world is very powerful. Through dubbing, all external sounds have been removed, and everything looks as if it has just been deserted. A boiler still cooking, water tap still running and so one. People just... vanished. What do you do then? But it is also frustrating because as a science fiction plot, so much is left unexplained and cryptic in a very unsatisfying manner. Especially towards the end, instead of getting some sort of closure, we, the audience, are left with even more questions. Ultimately, I am left with the feeling that the science fiction plot is unimportant and is only there as a setting for the characters.

Accepting that, “The Quiet Earth” works very well. When Zac is alone, we explore how it feels to be completely alone. When he meets Joanne, we are presented with the question, what you would do if this other person was truly the only other man/woman in the world? What are the dynamics in that? And finally, having a third person come in, what does that do to the interpersonal dynamics? It is the old story of two men and one woman is one man too many. This is the true strength and real story of “The Quiet Earth” where the science fiction plot merely creates the stage for it to play out.

As mentioned in the header, working on a shoestring budget forces people to be inventive and creative and this is such a good example. All the good stuff in “The Quiet Earth” was made with more idea than money. A truck barring the road, a baby stroller left alone, or a boiler cooking dry are all simple, cheap but very effective effects. Keeping the cast down to three people is another way. The computer effects look awful, but then again, this is 1985, anything on a computer looked terrible.

Ultimately, this is an unsatisfying science fiction movie, but a very effective and successful study of human nature and that is of course the end purpose of science fiction.

 

Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985)

 

Edderkoppekvindens kys

Something special often happens when movies (and novels for that matter) narrow down. Reduce the number of characters and/or the set to a single or very few locations and it forces the movie to focus on the dialogue and the acting. Some of the most memorable movies have done exactly that to great effect. “Kiss of the Spiderwoman” is largely about two men sharing a prison cell, so we get a good opportunity here for something special.

The two men are Luis Molina (William Hurt) and Valentin Arregui (Raul Julia). They are in a Brazilian prison during a military dictatorship, Valetin because he is an opposition revolutionary (or just opposition, everybody in opposition is a revolutionary to a military dictatorship) and Luis because of homosexual advances on a minor (or just homosexual advances as that is often criminal enough to a right-wing authority).

The two are an unlikely match, but over the bulk of the movie they become friends, earning each other’s mutual respect. Luis keeps telling of an old movie, he loves, in great detail, a movie we then see while he talks and for nothing better to do Valentin listens. This movie takes place in Paris during the war, about a cabaret singer falling in love with a Gestapo officer.

For about 80% of the movie, this is all that happens. This is a slow burner and to me, it seemed to be repeating itself a number of times. Valentin gets tortured a bit, Luis tells some from his movie, some from his private life, a bit of arguing and back to the torture. I may have zoned out a few times because this part gets a bit blurry for me.

Then, with a jolt, we learn that Luis Molino was placed in the cell by the prison warden to gain information from Valentin, and that of course changes our perspective. Is he going to rat on his prison mate or have they become friends for real?

Let us is start with the positive. As mentioned in the opening, this format allows for great acting, and this is what we get. William Hurt as the homosexual Luis Molina, is exceptional. The movie appears to have some status in the gay community, and this is largely down to Hurt and his multi-dimensional portrayal of the openly gay Molina. It earned him an Academy award. Raul Julia is less spectacular, but his job is also mainly to play up against Hurt and that he does sufficiently well.

We also get an interesting ending, with some important decisions on Luis Molina’s part. It feels a bit like a swan song, but it is delicate enough to work.

What does not work, at least not for me, is the humming through the first hour and a half. The movie seems to go nowhere, and I had serious problems paying attention. Not for lack of acting, but for lack of story. This is supposed to be the core of the movie, but I have problems even recalling what happened in this part. There may be a progress in their relationship, we may be learning a lot about Molina, but the pacing is glacial. If I had not been committed to watch the movie, I would likely have simply stopped watching after an hour. Instead, I stopped every time I felt I was dozing off, to continue when my head was clearer.

“Kiss of a Spider Woman” was made for the theatre and that shows. It has that “kammerspiel” property, but in this case it also becomes a constraint for the movie rather than an asset. The scenes of Molina’s stories break the prison and although they serve as an analogy for what is happening in the cell, they also feel as that much filler. An escape from the constraint of the format.

This is not a movie I feel inclined to watch again, but for a single watching it is worth experiencing William Hurt go all in as the effeminate Luis Molina. I can also imagine this is an important movie in the gay community. There are not that many movies that include homosexuality as more than a stereotype.

Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985)

 

Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters

There are hard to find movies and then there are really hard to find movies. I had almost given up finding “Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters”, which would make it the first, but finally, on a dodgy streaming service, hiding under being a trailer (at 2 hours...) I found it. I honestly do not mind paying for the movies I watch, and it pisses me off that I have to go to such extremes to watch something. At least the site did not insist on showing me advertisement for porn.

There is a rule of thumb on the List that that movies that are hard to find have disappeared for a reason, read: not worth watching. Luckily, we are not there. “Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters” is an interesting movie and certainly a different movie, but it is not an easy movie.

“Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters” is a biopic, but quite unlike any biopic I have ever watched. Yukio Mishima was an author and playwright who was active from the forties until 1970 where his career ended most spectacularly. The biopic focuses on the essential theme in both Mishima’s writing and his life. A theme that hails the values and aesthetics of the samurai caste. The purity, the sacrifice, the stoicism and the idea of the glorious death.

While the movie takes us from his childhood to the fatal day in 1970, it also takes us on a tour through this world of Mishima, illustrated by enactments of some of his plays. While I do not understand all these plays are trying to tell, it is clear that they say a lot about Mishima, the way he thought and the message he tried to raise in his writings.

This all culminates in the fourth chapter, which is not a play, but Mishima (Ken Ogata) trying to convert his words into action, fiction into reality. In this enactment, he and some of his students take over an army base, proclaim their traditionalistic and militaristic program in an attempt to start a coup and then kill themselves, Mishima famously committing seppuku.

This format is better felt than understood and better to watch than explain. It is immersive, but also oblique because it does not explain anything. Even the narration (by Roy Scheider) is poetic rather than explanatory, enforcing the sense of experiencing Mishima rather than understanding him.

While this all takes place in Japan with a Japanese cast, it is more of an American production, with Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas as executive producers and direction by Paul Schrader of “Taxi Driver” fame. I understand that the official Japan has an issue with Mishima and hence this film and sees him as an embarrassment and maybe he is, but as he is presented in the movie he also represents an idea and aesthetic that is very much Japanese. I guess there is ambiguity in that.

As a biopic I found it very interesting because it never tries to reduce the person portrayed to something we, mere mortals, can comprehend, but tries, for better or worse to show us what made him special. A very difficult art that most biopics miss. For that alone this is worth watching, even if you get lost in everything else.