The Fly (1986)

 

Fluen

With David Cronenberg at the helm, you know you have entered the land of body horror movies, and there is probably none more iconic than “The Fly”. The transformation from man to... something unspeakable... aborted my earlier attempts at watching this back in the nineties, so while I have watched the first part a few times, this was a first for completing it.

Ronnie Quaile (Geena Davis), a journalist, and Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) meet at a social event. Seth is socially awkward but keen to make an impression on the pretty journalist, so he invites her home to his lab/apartment to show her his invention: Two teleportation pods.

They fall in love, and she documents his progress getting the machines to work on living things, something that has in the past not worked so well. Just at the machine is ready Seth is overcome with jealously and alcohol when Ronnie goes to see her former boyfriend/boss. He decides to test the telepods on himself... and is successful. Except, he was not alone in the pod. A fly had entered the pod and merged with him upon recreation.

While Seth is at first feeling invigorated, the fly part of him eventually starts to manifest itself and Seth is turning into an entirely new creature, a Brundlefly. Needless to say, this causes some strain on the relationship between Seth and Ronnie.

This is a movie with a lot of flaws in the plot and the script. There were several times where I was wondering how many times they read through the script before starting filming. How exactly was it that Davis’ character developed so solid a relationship with Goldblum’s character in so short a time that she kept coming back to him as he was transformed at the risk of her life? How was it that teaching the computer about the poetry of flesh would stop it turning living things inside out? Or what about the million microbial lifeforms also riding along with human beings? Should they not be fused into the primary creature as well?

All this is sort of irrelevant because this is not why you watch “The Fly”. You see it because Jeff Goldblum is turning into some strange fusion of human and fly and that is done with emphasis on all the gory details. I cannot think of a more explicit and scary transformation in movie history, though my experience on body horror is a bit limited, and it is all done without CGI. Even those early phases where weird hairs start to grow from his back or he is experiencing these strange bursts of energy and strength, are scary. But it gets so much worse. Things coming out of his nails, his ears are coming off, he vomits acids to digest food externally before sucking it in and all the while his behaviour is getting increasingly excentric.

Even today, this was a tough ride for me. This is disgusting and fascinating in equal measure, a slowly unfolding disaster, a nightmare playing out right before our eyes. “The Fly” won the Academy Award for Best Makeup and that was one of most deserved wins in the history of the awards.

The rest of the movie has a nice wrapping too. Davis and Goldblum are excellent actors who gets the most out of a mediocre script (they were a couple at the time) and Howard Shore did a nice soundtrack. It just does not change that the one thing you think about when they movie is done is that horrid creature Seth Brundle becomes. For this, “The Fly” is movie history and this is classic David Cronenberg.

It is also why this is a must-see movie, but not right after dinner. Not if you like to keep your meal on the inside.

The Name of the Rose (1986)

 

Off-List: The Name of the Rose

The third off-List movie of 1986 is “The Name of the Rose”. The is a movie I remember watching and liking back in the nineties, based on a book by Umberto Eco that I also liked tremendously. I do not remember which I experienced first. To me the two memories have blurred together and that to me is a sign of a successful adaptation.

It is the year 1327 (before the great plague) and church people of several orders a meeting at a renowned but remote monastery in the mountains of Italy. The point of the meeting is to discuss what sounds like a trivial detail, but something these church people find tremendously important. One of the visitors is William of Baskerville (Sean Connery), a Franciscan monk with a novice, Adso (Chistian Slater), the narrator, in tow. William has a reputation for solving mysteries so when monks are mysteriously dying in the monastery, the Abbot (Michael Lonsdale) asks William for his help, especially as the timing with illustrious visitors coming, is not so great.

William is indeed quite the detective and by applying logic, observation and what went for science in those days, he is making progress. He is not helped, though, by the fact that the deaths seem to be following the prophecy of the end of the world and that voices in the monastery, especially the old, blind monk Jorge (Feodor Chaliapin Jr.), are busy calling it the work of the devil or God’s punishment. Things are not getting easier when the inquisition arrives in the form of Bernardo Gui (F. Murray Abraham), an old enemy of William and a man good at finding easy and convenient solutions with the help of torture and superstition.

The clues are leading William to the secret library of the monastery. It is hidden inside a labyrinth in a colossal tower. There is a book here that seems to kill and William is set on finding the answers despite the opposition he is facing. While Bernardo Gui is busy burning heretics and witches, William and Adso are fighting for their lives in the tower.

It is possible to reduce “The Name of the Rose” to a detective story and it would still be an exciting one. William of Baskerville is a hint at both William of Occam (Occams razor!) and Sherlock Holmes. Add some James Bond and some gory murders and we are pretty much home.

But this is so much more. There is a lot of authenticity in the sets and the environment and for a history buff like me this is first rate. This is dirty and grimy and with a sense of detail that feels real. Not the Hollywood interpretation of medieval times, but the ugly reality of actually going back there.

Mostly, though, “The Name of the Rose” introduces to us some of that religious idiocy that was so pervading in those times. William’s deductive methods are completely at odds with the church tyranny of Bernardo Gui. The sentiment that knowledge should only be preserved, not developed and that some knowledge is too dangerous because it might challenge church authority are so symptomatic of the infallibility of religion and the sway the Catholic church had over people of the time. It is not terribly different from other totalitarian systems throughout history, but sometimes you need to see it play out in a remote historical setting to really appreciate the scope and consequence of it. It is horrific and unfair, it is a power play and it is a lose-lose situation in which the individual is powerless. The peasants are depicted as dirty brutes, wallowing in their pigsties of hut, never speaking but in grunts. It is the perfect picture of how the monks in their arrogance are looking down on the peasants and demonstrate perfectly their hypocrisy when they themselves are squealing around like headless chicken in the face of the threat of the devil among them.

It is quite clear what the position of the movie is on the church, and this is also how I remember Umberto Eco’s book. Yet there is this love of the detail, of the achievements of the monasteries and the culture they did represent without which this story would never have been made.

This is a clever movie that requires something of its audience and gives back so much. There is an intellectual element here that makes this a rewarding but also frightening experience to watch. Dogma is dangerous at any time, but especially religious dogma when religion has the power to enforce its will.

Needless to say, this is still a fantastic movie and one that has not lost a step since 1986. I am surprised to not find it on the List, it really does belong there and at least I can include it on mine.

The Decline of the American Empire (Declin de l'Empire Americaine) (1986)

 

Generationen der blev væk

It took me quite a while to wrap my head around “Le Déclin de l'empire Américain”. Not that I did not understand what was happening and I did find it funny, but the big why was eluding me. I may have come closer, but it is just possible it is one of those movies you respond to without knowing exactly why.

On a summer day outside Montreal, we are following two groups. The men, Remy (Rémy Girard), Pierre (Pierre Curzi), Claude (Yves Jacques) and Alain (Daniel Brière) are preparing a dinner party at the home of Remy while the women, Dominique (Dominique Michel), Louise (Dorothée Berryman), Diane (Louise Portal) and Danielle (Geneviève Rioux) are at the gym.

All eight are associated with the university, mostly on the faculty and all of them consider each other friends. With two exceptions, they are rapidly approaching middle age.

For the bulk of the movie, we listen to the conversations of the two groups, which in both cases revolves around a single topic: Sex. Most of them seem happy to share their philandering which covers every variation under the sun. Remy and Pierre stand out for having an entire industry of affairs, including within the friend group, with the only difference that Remy is married (to Louise).

As the stories are told, we see them in flashbacks and it is clear that many of the women’s stories feature Remy, though nobody tell Louise. She knows he has something going when he is travelling, but is certain she is enough for him when he is in town. That does not prevent her from having affairs though.

Claude is homosexual, but not particularly different and Danielle actually work as a prostitute next to her history studies.

For the last third of the movie the two groups meet for a dinner party and a few revelations.

The thing that strikes me with this movie is the gap between talk and reality. All their talk is of fantastic sex and adventurous escapades, yet when we see what actually happened it is usually less than fantastic and Remy, the usual male act, is rather pathetic and hardly a Don Juan. In fact, the sex and affairs seem more out of boredom than anything else.

Secondly, they all talk about sex and affairs as very liberated people. As if everything is fine. Yet, when the price comes, when the infidelity is revealed or in Claude’s case, a mysterious sickness, the pain and the regrets are the same as any other person. Pierre is happy screwing around left and right but he knows he will never get any children. The carelessness is not at all as careless as they want to make it seem.

Maybe the hypocrisy is what makes the movie funny or maybe it is that schadenfreude that these privileged people with their high ideals and liberated talk are as vain, stupid and conventional as the rest of us.

For me, that last part when they have to face up to reality was the bast part and it did make me laugh quite a bit. As comedies go, this is more high-brow than the common fare and requires more of the viewer. Especially, it is important to follow the dialogue. But it is a rewarding movie to watch, and I understand it spawned a few sequels, whom I only know by title, but will be inclined to watch.

I also was a bit envious of the meal they were having. That dish looked good.