The Punishment

 

True Britt

The Punishment
aka La punition
France/Italy 1973 
Directed by Pierre-Alain Jolivet
Lira Films
Mondo Macabro Blu Ray Zone A/B/C

Warning: Some big spoilers.

Before going into The Punishment, a podcast had said that it’s very strong and brutal stuff in terms of its S&M content so, I was a little trepidatious at first. However, while the mental brutality of the film is at least paying a little lip service to the edginess which could be found in some of the scenarios, I’d have to conclude the film is pretty tame and not, in any way, a study of sexuality which has anything to say, or even understands, the mental state of those who embrace elements of the BDSM scene (as it is called today) in their own persona. And, of course, like most scenarios crafted around this strand of sexuality... even the most positive ones... it generally looks at the content with a bias of non-consensuality. 

So what we have in The Punishment is a film which is more about a manifestation of Stockholm Syndrome than anything else. 

The film stars Karin Schubert as Britt, a woman who comes from a small village and is taken under the wing by a ‘couple’ (Amidou as Raymond  and Claudie Lange as François) who work for a wealthy man who will pimp her out as a prostitute in his sex club. The film starts off with Britt and Raymond fleeing one of his wild parties after the owner has been murdered there. They go on the run and the story is told mostly in flashbacks, cross cutting between the experiences of Britt under control of this rich man and Britt and Raymond on the run from one of his killers (although, it turns out, neither of them committed the murder themselves).

So after Britt ‘behaves badly’ when a client rapes her at a party, she is imprisoned in a kind of hotel brothel in Lyon, where she is locked in a room which is pretty much a dungeon room, to be the submissive for a series of clients who want to indulge their sadistic tendencies with her. Next door to her is another woman who seems to be in a much worse condition (she can hear her screams coming through the wall)... and by the end, Raymond feels sorry for her and frees both girls... but not before she has almost developed a taste for her treatment at the hands of the customers.

And it’s not the most interesting or graphically told story, although the problematic and stunning Karen Schubert does spend most of the film either naked or in fetishistic and revealing costumes. I say problematic because, due to problems with her son who later died on her, she turned to making hardcore pornography in the 1980s to help raise funds for him and, after his death, her mid-90s second attempt at suicide succeeded. But, aside from her tragic arc in real life, she was at the heyday of her career here and she gives a really good, somewhat icy but no less impressive performance as Britt. 

And the film is helped by some wonderful shot compositions which involve lots of verticals in the various rooms and some nice placement of mirrors to focus on people in shots and bring two characters together in an interesting way, so they can both be in different places in a room but you can still see both sides of the conversations in some places. And there is... I almost don’t want to say it because it’s become such a cliché in my reviews but, it’s still the best comparison I can think of... a nice colour palette which is Bavaesque in its execution, where characters are bathed in red, for example... and then pitched against another colour like green in the next shot. 

There are some nice ideas too... such as a pinball machine in an art gallery/amusement arcade/bar having a sculpture of woman’s legs coming up and out of the machine where the flippers are, so a person playing the table gives a simulation of sex with a pair of legs seemingly wrapped around the player. 

It also has some interesting moments of violence which are hard hitting and not connected to the violence perpetrated on Britt in the hotel brothel. Such as a girl pushing a bottle into somebody’s face and, without ruining the ending, a close up of a persons head with a blood squib going off in close up as they are shot... both make for somewhat shock moments in their placement in the movie, not being juxtaposed with the tame version of the sexual violence on show elsewhere in the film. 

Ultimately, I kinda liked the movie in spite of myself and was bowled over by both Schubert and the wonderful mise-en-scène of the piece, which even has one of those opening credits sequences often found in spaghetti westerns and the occasional giallo, where quick scenes from the film are posterised into two colours and put up as a kind of psychedelic accompaniment to the cast and crew typography. 

If I had one big criticism of The Punishment, though, it’s that the trauma inflicted on Britt doesn’t seem enough to make her accepting of the treatment she suffers. One or three isolated incidents do not really represent the slow, psychological degradation we see in her performance... or at least, not credibly, I thought. Slowly and surely would have won that particular race a little more believably, I would have thought.

So yeah, that’s me done with The Punishment, I think. I didn’t like it as much as similar films using this kind of theme such as Femina Ridens (reviewed here) or Scacco Alla Regina (reviewed here) or even The Image (reviewed here) but it was at least nice to see an attempt made to craft a film which was trying to tackle the subject matter in a head on direction, even if I don’t feel it was trying to look at that content in a sympathetic light. Not one I’d recommend to too many people but, again, for cinephiles it’s nice to look at.

Pleasure

Pleasure Crews

Pleasure
Sweden/Netherlands/France 2022
Directed by Ninja Thyberg
Mubi

Pleasure, directed and co-written by Ninja Thyberg, is a really interesting look at the US porn scene. In terms of content, it’s a little like the wonderful movie Boogie Nights... but with all the humour taken out of it. So what you end up with is a fairly chilled portrayal of a Swedish model going by her new ‘stage name’ Bella Charry, as she flies into the US to make her fortune shooting porn movies. On her voyage she is put through the ringer, so to speak... as we see her transformed from ‘naive, erotic starlet on the make’ into something less humanised and much more like the people who take advantage of her, to a certain extent.

That’s all I’m going to tell you about the plot and I’ll also say that there’s not a lot of compromise on the limits of the approach to the material. I mean, it’s not (quite) what you’d see in various extreme, hard core porn films but the dramatisation is close and, of course, since the director is using a less simplistic agenda in terms of the way the camera frames, reveals and hides certain information... well, although the content is slightly less extreme than the porn shoots it’s trying to emulate, it certainly feels way more because the crew is much more subjective about what the director is trying to say, rather than just using the material to arouse.

The film is filled with men and women who work in the sex industry. So we have porn stars, porn directors and porn producers... and it’s grim and gritty but the real life angle is that the main protagonist Bella, is played by a newcomer to movies in pretty much her first feature film shoot. That person, who gives an absolutely amazing performance in this, is called Sofia Kappel and, certain parts of this shoot must have been quite gruelling for her. For example, while the BDSM suspension sequence is maybe toned down for the actress to a certain extent (although you can certainly see the rope marks on her body in a scene), with the edit allowing a certain amount of shielding going on in terms of the impact play etc... the rough sex scene where she’s dominated by two guys who lay into her with ‘abuse’ which is bordering on the thin line between consensual and non-consensual, must have certainly not been faked for certain moments, surely pushing the actress through towards some agreed limit edges.

And the really interesting thing is, according to the IMDB,  that this newcomer of an actress actually applied for the role to be deliberately placed out of her comfort zone in order to aid her own cognitive behaviour therapy. I guess it must have worked out for her because I notice she’s already completed her second movie, which looks to be a relatively high profile horror film that I hope I’ll get the opportunity to see at some point soon.

So, yeah, a great performance from the lead actress and also, I might add, some of the porn stars in this who do a really good job with the ‘straight’ stuff. But the other thing that makes it so watchable is some nicely lit, fluid photography and it’s coupled with some brilliant sound design which, actually, really elevates the film. So what the director will do is she’ll pitch dual pieces of audio content against each other in juxtaposition, sometimes even within the same scene. The opening credits is a give away for her modus operandi throughout the movie. Starting off with a piece of sound that obviously comes from the unseen part of the rough sex scene from later in the movie (deep throat gagging etc) it then lapses into some beautiful, ethereal music as a direct contrast to this and it’s something which happens throughout the film, when the surface ugliness of a scene is suddenly given a bit of tension release by almost religious, vocal stylings on the soundtrack.

Another thing she’ll do with the sound on a couple of occasions, is to suddenly drop it out completely. So a particularly intense sex scene, for example, would suddenly lapse into silence, as if to force the audience to concentrate on the purely visual aspects of the footage and thus reenforce the intensity of the visual experience in those moments. And it’s a technique that’s used in different ways throughout the film, which allows an agreeable aesthetic clash between the visceral nature of certain brutally chill moments and those which suddenly seem almost poetic in terms of the music and visual imagery. It’s a nice mix of aural and visual moments (not to mention oral and visual moments, I guess) and, along with the quite amazing performances from the cast... Sofia Kappel and porn star Zelda Morrison in particular (the latter coming across almost like a young Shirley MacLaine)... it serves to make the entire cocktail of elements quite a potent mix, it has to be said.

And that’s me pretty much done with this one. I should probably warn potential viewers that Pleasure might be quite raw and edgy to watch for some people, dependent on the amount of extreme, hardcore porn you’ve personally seen (is my guess). But it is an interesting movie with something to be said about the gradual reduction of a human being and the way in which a certain kind of personality processes the kinds of experiences shown in the story. Definitely worth a look. 

Gwendoline

Tawny Disposition

Gwendoline
aka The Perils Of Gwendoline
In The Land Of The Yik Yak
France 1984
Directed by Just Jaeckin
Severin Blue Ray Zone A (unrated)

Following the sad news a few days ago, of the death at the young age of 59, of actress/model Tawny Kitean, I decided to watch the recent Severin Blu Ray edition of the film which I first saw her in, back when I was in my teens in the heady days of VHS rental tapes in the 1980s. I remember catching sight of Gwendoline in the off licence one road over from where I still live (it's remained an off licence but, alas, it's no longer in the business of renting VHS tapes) and being drawn in by the cover showing a spiky warrior woman and I think there was some blurb that compared the movie to Barbarella, a film which I already loved. I don’t think the one I rented was the heavily cut down US release version of the time, which was re-titled The Perils Of Gwendoline In The Land Of The Yik Yak... the cover certainly was just called Gwendoline here in the UK and, revisiting it a few times over the years in its unrated cut, I’m pretty sure there’s nothing in that version which wasn’t in the UK rental release back in the VHS days. That being said, it would certainly have been a pan and scan version then so, a lot of the... well... ‘background kink’ might possibly have been either missing or very fleeting... but it still had all the famous scenes in tact.

So, yeah, in memory of what was probably Tawny’s most famous role (although I’m sure that a lot of people will also remember her for her appearances in 1980s hard rock videos), I thought I’d revisit this and I did so thinking that I must already have put a review of the film up on here at some point since I started NUTS4R2 but, yeah, it turns out I haven’t, so I’m rectifying that now.

Gwendoline is the last feature film (to date) directed by the famous filmmaker Just Jaeckin, whose first movie, Emmanuelle starring Sylvia Kristel, set the world on fire and probably did a lot for the prospect of respectable erotica in a commercial cinematic environment (he also did versions of The Story Of O and Lady Chatterly’s Lover but, I think they’re probably less famous to the majority of general public at large... whereas Emmanuelle started a whole cottage industry of sequels and copycat film series... such as the Emanualle series, where the name was spelled with a single M to avoid copyright issues). It’s based... and I can’t tell you how loosely or faithfully at this point because I’ve never read them... on the Sweet Gwendoline bondage comic strip of the late 1940s and onwards by John Willie, who also co-wrote the movie version with Jaeckin. Back in the days when the activity was just called ‘bondage’ and that word celebrated a number of sins and way before the term BDSM, first coined in 1969 but not, as far as I remember, that commonly used until the early 1990s, was dreamed up as a more descriptive but somehow more sterile moniker. And if you’re wondering, the strip and the film, like most BDSM literature which is almost always pitched, ironically, at odds with the majority of conscientious ‘players’ throughout the world, were quite a way from both SSC* and RACK** activities.

The film itself is actually pretty good. Starting off with colourful butterflies from Jaeckin’s own collection against a black backdrop which house the credits, we hear Pierre Bachelet’s synthesiser heavy score, very much of it’s time but also, actually, a score which still kinda holds up (somebody put a CD out please) accompanying it before we are thrown onto the docks of Shanghai in a period which... looks like it’s supposed to be the 1940s but I could be wrong. Here we find a bunch of thieves who are raiding the crates as they come off a ship, wherein they discover Gwendoline, played by Tawny Kitean, packed in a crate. Gwendoline is a nun who has run away from the convent to find her father, a collector of rare butterflies. Her friend Beth, played by the quite wonderful, Doe-eyed Zabou Breitman (billed here just as Zabou), misses her by minutes and Gwendoline is sold to a slaver who runs the local saloon bar/strip club/gambling den. However, she is inadvertently rescued by the hero of the piece, Willard, played by Brent Huff.

After lots of bickering with Willard and upon learning about the death of her father, who had pursued a rare butterfly into the perilous land of the Yik Yak, Gwendoline and Beth strike a deal with the fearless hero and he reluctantly agrees to be their escort, where they spend lots of time walking around topless and getting captured by natives until they enter what I can only describe as the female, bondage paradise of the Yik Yak queen and her gladiator looking dominatrixes, who capture men for their pleasure (killing them after they’ve been force mated with them to propagate their species) and punishing transgressors of the rules with various deadly bondage contraptions.

And it looks fantastic. I remember not thinking much of the acting back in the 1980s... when I was not as used to watching badly looped dubs but, looking back on it now, Kitean, Brietman and Huff all do pretty well in this and they certainly have good chemistry. This is all the more evident and necessary for some of the risqué scenes they have. Such as the one where all three are separately chained in some tribe's hut awaiting their death sentence and Willard uses his words to make verbal love to Gwendoline, accidentally arousing Beth too. Or the scene where, after winning a gladiatorial style combat in disguise, Gwendoline sits astride the bound Willard and ‘mates’ with him while the Queen and her warriors look on.

The film also doesn’t shy away from violence in this... comical or otherwise (well, comic book would be a more appropriate way of saying that I guess, given the source material). There’s a fair amount of blood spillage (for the time in this kind of fantasy scenario) and women being impaled on, to be fair, wobbly looking spikes... not to mention the tendency of Willard’s trusty grappling hook to lodge fatally in a person's neck instead of where he’s aiming. There’s also a quite brilliant moment when Willard pulls a jailor’s head through his cell bars near the start of the movie and does so with such force that the guy's ears are left on the bars above where he falls. Another scene with the use of a straw and a stray rose thorn as a makeshift blow pipe is similarly spectacular although, the continuity error in the same set of scenes, where the bound Willard’s hat is kicked off him but is suddenly lodged on his head again in the long shot is... a bit of a shame.

Talking of bars with ears on them and such like... the director uses a lot of foreground objects, natural or man made, such as the window openings of a cabin or a rock overhang in the desert to separate the actors from each other or to frame them within their environment. There’s some lovely shot designs here and you can see why this director is as well respected as he is. Not to mention the quite dazzling and obviously expensive, elabourate costume and set design in the film. The story ends on a happy note (against all odds) and, yes, if you do like films such as Barbarella or some of the cinematic excursions of Alain Robbe-Grillet, then you might find that Gwendoline is worth a look. It’s certainly a fun film, for sure but, do yourself a favour and don’t watch the truncated, censored version which runs something like 20 minutes shorter (if memory serves). It’s a little like watching a TinTin cartoon come to life with all the exaggerated characters but with nudity and people being tied up added into the mix.

The cut down Yik Yak titled version is also included on the recent Severin Blu Ray (not that I want to watch that version) and the main film is given the full treatment by Severin, who deliver a good transfer from a good print and include a wealth of interviews with key people from the time. If Gwendoline is your thing (or tied up young damsels in peril, for that matter), then the Severin version is a good one to pick up. And that’s me done with my memories of this film and I hope Tawny rests in peace, wherever she has gone.

RIP Tawny Kitean
August 5th 1961 to May 7th 2021.

* Safe Sane and Consensual BDSM play.
** Risk Aware Consensual Kink BDSM play.

Sunstone Volumes 1-5

The Long And Binding Road

Sunstone
Print Collections 1-5
Written and illustrated by Stjepan Šejić
Top Cow Publishing

I’ve only recently gotten into digital comics and they’re not really my best choice of reading materials when I much prefer the printed page to all this electronic gubbins. But price and scarcity trump that kinda consideration in the digital realm, I guess. That being said, I’ve noticed lately that the .cbr and .cbz files which can be downloaded from the internet (often for free, it seems to me) are nothing like, say, watching a comic or cartoon off of a DVD or Blu Ray, which tend to get a little pixilated, quite often. This file format is pretty good, when synced up to an iPad (or nearest equivalent tablet) at giving you something which is 100% the same, almost, as holding a comic in your hands... if not actually approximating the scent of a good old comic or giving you that feeling of paper rubbing against the fingers which is almost as much about the reading experience as anything else.

I do know comics a little, though. When I was either three or four, I started reading with comics such as Superman, Batman, Spider-Man and SHAZAM! (the original Captain Marvel) and it certainly a format that teaches you to read fast, I can tell you that. I was reading a lot of comics for the first 16 years of my life and then, back in July 1984, I read the serialised version of what was and still is, to me, the greatest single literary experience of my life. I never thought I’d say that about a comic but it’s true... within the pages of 2000AD, which I’d been buying and saving since its first issue, Alan Moore’s three book epic, The Ballad Of Halo Jones, first hit my brain and has never left it. Even with great works like the same writer’s Watchmen or Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns or Moore’s The Killing Joke... The Ballad Of Halo Jones has never been surpassed and it’s the standard I measure all comics against. It’s always been the greatest comic ever written and drawn and that’s still the case.

Sunstone is, therefore, not the greatest comic ever written and illustrated. At least to me. However... it is easily the second greatest comic ever written and I say that having read some really great masterpieces in my time. This comic is just about perfect... so it obviously makes it difficult to review, for sure.

Now, I think I may have heard of Sunstone before, a couple of years ago... or I may not have. It rang a bell but when I found a stash of the first six volumes of this book online I gave it a go and... well. What’s that you say.... there are six of these (so far) but you are only going to be talking about the first five here? Well, yes. That’s because... and much to my surprise because I wasn’t done with the main characters yet... the first main arc of the book comes to a close at the end of the fifth volume and it seemed, with only the sixth volume starting the next arc actually out there so far, a natural place to break from what has been an intense binge session of a great work of art.

Sunstone tells the story of Lisa and Allison, two bisexual turned lesbian characters who have an intense BDSM relationship which turns very quickly into an intense love affair... which neither of them wants to admit for fear of the other one rejecting that their friendship and sexual role play (Alli is the domme and Lisa is the submissive) is anything more than that. Now the book is told from the point of view of Lisa, who is a writer, telling her story and, also, the story of many of the friends they make on their journey. It tells of how they met, how they both grew up and how their appreciation of the BDSM scene came about and, also, how everything jelled for their friends too. In fact, the nice thing about this book is that it jumps off on a tangent and the various other characters become as much people to care and worry about as the two main protagonists.

It also explains, to some extent, some of the different guises and forms from the world of BDSM which, I have to say, would probably be fairly educational to some people. I’ve been interested in and participating in certain aspects of that in my life in different guises and levels for a while now so I'm fairly experience in a wide range of stuff but, I’m happy to say, the writer is pushing ‘safety’ and ‘limits’... and the extension of those limits... to the forefront of the occasional sexually charged scenes within the story (of around 600 pages of story divided between the first five volumes). Heck, even the title of the strip is the safeword Alli gives to her subs and lovers when she is playing with them. As the pages go on a newbie to the scene can learn about stuff like harnesses, rigging, S&M play and also, on occasion, some of the risks involved... such as the consequences of someone stupidly cutting off the blood circulation with ropes applied incorrectly or a nice throwaway comment about the use of gags and how you play with them when a sub isn’t able to utter a safeword.

There’s also a lot of humour in the pages and, absolutely, a lack of casting judgement on the practices on display here from the writer... not always from some of the characters but, hey, that’s how you create the drama and provide the path to enlightenment. For instance, on the humour front... and its hard to recreate this without showing the panels but... let me just put it in script form...

Lisa narrating: We had to employ advanced tactics to persuade her...”

Person A: Come on!
Person B: No!
Person C: Come oon!
Person B: No!
Person A: Come ooooon!
Person B: “No!”
Person C: “Come ooooon!”
Person B: “Fine.”

Or in another scene where Alli has worn out Lisa’s now sore tongue by having her bound body going down on her for an incredibly long session so all her ‘s’ sounds become ‘sh’... and when Alli’s best friend Alan shows up just after and calls them on it... “Of course you don’t. Lisa merely developed a mean case of Connery by diving for pearls.” This book is really, very funny and, quite smart while also having tonnes of nerdy references to stuff like Star Trek, Doctor Who and even a ‘Dildo’ Baggins joke (at one point Lisa likens Comic Conventions to Fetish Conventions and, yeah, with what Comic Conventions have become over the years, I totally see that).

And the art is gorgeous too. Painted stuff which constantly walks a thin line between exquisitely detailed realism and cartoony expressionism, which shouldn’t quite work this well when combined but it really does. Also, the way the panels are designed in the comic are amazing. There’s a lot of stuff where you see simultaneous things happening, where the action of two individual characters and situations are crosscut visually on the same page, for instance. But, the artist manages to pull off this kind of stuff which does, in some pages and spreads, include some elabourate designs, without throwing up any impediment to the way the eyes decode the flow of the material on the page... which is a difficult thing to get right and, believe me, I’ve seen in a lot of published stuff where this can sometimes go wrong and your eye is left not knowing which part of the page to read next. This didn’t happen to me once within the first five volumes and... well, what can I say? This guy nailed it. And bearing in mind how tangential and sometimes devilishly metatextual some of the content in this book is, that’s really no mean feat.

 I haven’t quite figured out how he’s able to write female characters so well yet but, it all seems pretty authentic to me and he does manage to explore a few different ‘character voices’ over the arc and none of them seem out of place or too overly like anyone else when they are talking or thinking. And this, I’m sure, is one of the things that makes this book so addictive. I seriously didn’t want to put it down and that’s why I’ve had to stop for a while now that Lisa and Alli are no longer going to be part of the next arc. I mean, yeah, I’m sure they’ll feature heavily in it, actually but, this is the majority of their story done I think (although there are some important bits hinted at that we’ll obviously see from a different perspective when the time comes, I am guessing). The book takes the form of a flashback to real events from Lisa, Alli and their friends’ life in the past but, occasionally, the past will be interrupted by a little intrusion from ‘the present’ where Lisa is writing from and, obviously, things are still moving towards where they are at in their lives now.

I am, of course, referring to these characters as real people because, very quickly (like from the first couple of pages) they became just that for me... and I’m telling you now it’s rare for me to get this attached to fictional characters, for sure. Presumably because the writer has a very good ear and there is a strong sense of 'the truth of things' coming across in the writing all the way through. This is just plain good writing. Period.

So, yeah, as you can probably tell, this comic totally had me hooked and I feel like I need to come down a little to exorcise the addictive hold it has on me... which is, of course, where me writing a review of it comes in. If you write about something then maybe it stops holding power over you, right? At the moment I’m not sure whether to go onto Book Six or wait until the next couple of volumes come out before getting back to it. Either way though, I’m guessing you can tell from my somewhat clumsy enthusiasm here that I’ll definitely be recommending it to pretty much anyone I meet who has an interest in either the format of the comic strip or the particular subject matter at hand. Sunstone is seriously a comic book that means a lot to me right now so... yeah... this one is something you should read, for sure.

Tokyo Decadence

Lost And Bound

Tokyo Decadence
Japan 1992 Directed by  Ryû Murakami
Region 2 DVD

Warning: Slight spoilers in here...
or at least an indication of a lack of them.

Tokyo Decadence is written and directed by Japanese novelist  Ryû Murakami and based on some of the short stories from one of his collections. I’ve not read any of this guys books (who I believe is no relation to famous novelist Haruki Murakami, who I like a lot) other than one by him called In The Miso Soup. I remember that book being quite raw in terms of its subject matter and, because of this, I guess I was expecting a little more edge to Tokyo Decadence than I found.

My prime reason for wanting to see this movie... asides from the obviously raunchy sexual content implied by both the title and the cover art... is because the film stars Miho Nikaido as the main protagonist. Miho Nikaido is, or possibly was (I’m never quite sure) the wife, or possibly just long term girlfriend, of my favourite living director Hal Hartley. I used to watch her in Hartley films such as Flirt (the first one I saw her in at a London Film Festival screening some years ago), The Book Of Life and Henry Fool (among others). She’s always been an actress whose work I respect, admittedly due to her being in films I love so much, and I knew that, if nothing else, she would certainly be able to carry whatever film she starred in, if necessary.

Here she plays Ai, a prostitute who specialises in aspects of BDSM... what used to be called good old S and M when I was a kid. Indeed, the madam who arranges her clients, along with the other girls working the same profession, refers to their clients as either wanting an S person or an M person... meaning they want to hire a sadist or a masochist (or top or bottom as they are known over here). All the girls switch between either role and the very first pre-credits scene of the movie is, in fact, the most intriguing...

We see Ai tied to a leather, adjustable chair. She is then, much to her anxiety, injected with something by her client. Once that is done she is blindfolded and gagged and then the man she is with does something to her off-camera, after taking his upthrust foot in his hand. We cut to a close up of Nikaido’s face as the blindfold and gag are taken away from her and we see her glazed and possibly uncomprehending expression as the shot is held and she discovers the reality of her situation, which is...

Okay, this is where it gets kinda strange as far as I’m concerned because the film then cuts to the opening credits sequence of Ai travelling the Tokyo streets. Since the tension created so skillfully in that first sequence was ratcheted up to an almost unbearable level, my immediate reaction to this was... oh, okay, so the rest of the film must be in flashback leading up to this moment and they’re going to reveal what happened at the end of the picture. Which is one of the main things that kept me interested in the film, to be honest.

Okay... I’ll come back to this a little later.

The shots of Ai travelling the streets of Tokyo at night in this are little visual gems of clinical menace, it has to be said. Everything seems blue lit and claustrophobic, the camera taking in the panorama as Ai silently observes the oppressive urban culture around her. It actually got me thinking, as I was watching, of the early cinema of David Cronenberg in the way it evokes a blue and washed out sense of hopelessness and, I have to say, that whatever else you might conclude about this film, you’d have to admit that it is, at least, deeply expressionistic in places.

For the rest of the film we follow little episodes of Ai’s daily life, mostly her encounters with various BDSM clients and I can only assume that each little vignette is culled from a different short story in Murakami’s source book. A really charming starting story, however, has Ai visiting a fortune teller who tells her she must do three things to avoid harm. 1. Place a telephone book under her television set, 2. Avoid any art galleries in the East and 3. Buy a pink, precious stone and have it made into a ring which she must wear on her middle finger. Of course, this scene is useful in two ways... primarily as an indication of Ai’s superstitious and wide-eyed innocent nature but, secondly, as a small plot device to almost get her into trouble when she goes back to a hotel room after leaving it behind... following an encounter with a particularly taxing and stern client and his girlfriend.

Actually, there’s a wonderful shot in this long sequence with her first post-credits client. She is on all fours in front of a mirror with a vibrator tied between her legs and her client is plunging in and out of his girlfriend, who is in a similar position behind Ai, playing with her as he does this. However, the reflection on the mirror is angled perfectly so that the client’s girlfriend is hidden by certain foreground elements and so, while we see this on our side of the mirror, the reflection makes it look like the gentleman in question is fucking Ai himself... which is a pretty impressive bit of camerawork, as far as I’m concerned.

The film is quite tame in its pervery, for the most part, but the way it's shot and the protracted nature of the sequences, much without dialogue, gives it a certain dark weight in places that you wouldn’t expect from this particular aspect of the modern BDSM scene. A lot of the shots are static set ups which also give it a more voyeuristic feel in certain scenes, although this is not an exclusive set of artistic decisions and there are plenty of shots where the camera roams a bit more freely. There’s also a lightness to certain sequences too, including a scene where Ai and another woman are doing a double domme session with a guy who likes to be strangled and they think they have accidentally killed him... until he regains consciousness and scares them both.

There’s a big tour-de-force acting sequence near the end of the movie where Miho Nikaido’s character takes a pill that a rich dominatrix gifts to her to give her Dutch courage as she goes through the streets under the influence of the drug, bottle in hand, and searches around for the address of her ex-celebrity boyfriend. Nikaido is pretty amazing in this, as she always is, and the whole sequence kind of reminded me, a little, of a kind of modernistic turning point in her life, similar to the less volatile but probably more potent ‘man with a sack’ sequence from Fellini’s excellent movie Nights Of Cabiria (reviewed here). It’s an interesting part of the narrative to end on and, frankly, the fact that the film does end on this sequence is what annoys me the most about this film...

At no time do we return to the truly powerful opening scene of the movie. Was this scene in Ai’s future or past? We don’t know. Do we know what her client did to her? We do not. It doesn’t come up again and I found this almost artistically criminal, in some ways, that the writer/director never returns to bring closure on this powerful opening set up. I could understand it if he’d given us a reminder of the scene and then refused to disclose what actually happened... that would have been a valid aesthetic choice and I could respect it. Here, though, we are just distracted away from the memory of the sequence all the way through the film and, in the end, it just wanders off into the closing credits. Very disappointing, as far as I’m concerned.

Ultimately, for all its good acting by the lead protagonist and some interesting shot designs and slick atmospheres evoked by the director, I wouldn’t be prepared to recommend Tokyo Decadence to a friend. It’s not something I feel I could revisit anytime soon but I am, at least, glad that I saw it. Another good thing is that it at least treats the BDSM scene in a, mostly, respectable fashion so there’s that but... no, not nearly as entertaining enough as indulging in the real thing. Maybe give this one a miss and use the cash you save to try something new instead.

The Image

Slaveheart

The Image

USA 1975

Directed by Radley Metzger

Synapse Films All Region Blu Ray 

Recently I saw two really great sexploitation movies by director Radley Metzger which made a big impression on me with their rich visual compositions and impressive, innovative editing techniques. These were called The Lickerish Quartet (reviewed here) and Camille 2000 (reviewed here). Alas, I have to say that this next film I chose to watch by this director, while still interesting in terms of its technical aspects, is less compelling than the other two films I saw... although it’s certainly not a disaster by any means.

The Image starts off with sedate intertitles, like those you would expect on a silent movie, telling the audience just the name of the movie, the director, and the fact that it’s an ‘adaptation’ of a novel by Jean de Berg... which is a pseudonym for Catherine Robbe-Grillet, who was the wife of French director Alain Robbe-Grillet and whose sympathies were, from what I can understand, alligned with the subject she was writing about. You can find my reviews of her husband’s films Eden and After here and Gravida here. These credits are followed by chapter splits under the following headings as the movie runs its course: 1. An Evening at the X...'s, 2. The Roses in Bagatelle Gardens, 3. Too Much Water and Its Consequences, 4. False Starts, 5. The Photographs, 6. An Expiatory Sacrifice, 7. The Fitting Room, 8. In the Bathroom, 9. The Gothic Chamber and 10. Everything Resolves Itself.

The main character Jean, played by Carl Parker, is a writer and the film opens with him attending ‘a literary party’ hosted by his friend Claire, played by Marilyn Roberts. Here he spots an attractive young model who he becomes very interested in called Anne, played by Mary Mendum. Things get unusual very fast when he is introduced to Anne and he discovers that she is owned as a sexual slave by Claire... as in she’s her sub, if you are familiar with current BDSM terms. Claire invites Jean to join in with their games and the whole rest of the movie is pretty much about having sexy and exciting times as they humiliate the willing Anne via ritualistic sex and pain practices, culminating in heavy whippings and a tame form of needle play by the end of the film. 

Now... there’s not too much going on here, it has to be said, at least not from the point of view of a contemporary audience looking back to this and, I suspect, neither at the time either... S & M is nothing new. I can understand how people whose tastes are purely vanilla might be somewhat taken aback by some of the content in this film, not because of the graphic nature (it does, though, slip into hardcore pornography territory in a couple of places) but because of the psychology of the attitude of the 'seemingly' non-consensual Anne in this movie... although logic surely dictates that no sub would stay in any kind of destructive relationship if he or she weren’t into pushing into that kind of head space in the first place and it's certainly implied that her consensuality is a given here. However, if you are familiar with this kind of sexually tinted power play to begin with, the film does reach levels of dullness I really wasn’t expecting from a director of Metzger’s proven flair and ingenuity.

That being said, there is some nice stuff in here at the visual level... asides form the obvious erotic pleasures inspired by the nudity of the actors. For example, in the rose garden sequence there is a beautiful shot of a freshly picked rose seen in juxtaposition to Anne’s genitalia although this in itself, not to mention the thorns, may be too much of an obvious visual metaphor for some people. In another scene where a half naked Anne is told to go and choose an instrument for her punishment, we follow her back to her ‘owners’ viewing her beautiful backside, which is filling the frame, with the coiled whip held in front of her butt cheeks, echoing both the shape of her body and the tapering curves of her garter belt from behind. 

Stuff like this is absolutely what keeps me watching a Radley Metzger movie but, although there are many such nice compositions and artistic flourishes to be found in this film... well, like I said, it’s nowhere near as overt or outstanding as the previous two movies I saw by this director. That being said there was just enough to keep me concentrating on it and one of the things I’ve noticed about Metzger and the way the actors bring his scripts to life, is little details of character that another guy helming the project might not want in or allow... but which give even the most minor of the characters an intelligence all their own.

For instance, when a shop fitting girl is asked to adjust the lingerie of Anne as a prelude to including her in a threesome in the shop between her, Anne and Jean, the girl starts off towards the changing room as she is called to assist, then pauses to think for second before returning to where she was... she then removes her pearl necklace (no, not that kind) before she goes ahead to help, her character obviously thinking of convenience, in case she might be willingly seduced by her two customers. So, yeah, fascinating details like this are quite interesting to spot and so, although I didn’t love this movie as much as the others I’ve seen by Metzger... I’m certainly not ‘done’ with him yet.

After all, he gives us in this film such visuals as a blindfold with bejewelled eyes and eyebrows inset into it... this is a really posh blindfold and not like one I’ve seen before. That being said, it doesn’t detract from the poe faced seriousness with which the BDSM relationship in this movie is relentlessly pursued... it’s a long way from the fluffy, play S & M party shown in the director’s earlier Camille 2000, for example. I'm not entirely sure that's a good thing and depends purely on an active participant's own temperament, I suspect.

The film climaxes with an extended torture scene but towards the end of it the power balance between the three players shifts out of the dynamic the characters are expecting. I won’t spoil the ending of this movie for you here but in the epilogue scene, when one of the characters is ordered to undress, I noticed that the long shot and medium shot which the camera kept cutting between didn’t match up. I don’t know if the director was having a bad day here because my previous experiences of his films shows a meticulous attention to such detail but... well there was definitely a continuity error created here, for whatever reason... possibly the choice of performance in one of the takes as opposed to another which didn’t quite match with what it was being cut against... but I did find this a bit of a shame. 

Ultimately, and although I am a fervent admirer of the BDSM scene as it is today (and its historic background), The Image really is my least favourite of the director’s films that I’ve seen to date. I may find it grows on me a little if I watch it again in a few years... some films do have that power... but for now, if you are wanting to get into the wonderful world of Radley Metzger, I would say this is not a very good jumping on point for this particular director. Not a terrible film but... not a great one either.

The Duke Of Burgundy

50 Shades Of Burgundy

The Duke Of Burgundy
2015  UK
Directed by Peter Strickland 
UK cinema release print.

I found Peter Strickland’s last movie, Berberian Sound Studio (reviewed here) somewhat disappointing.

Partially this was due to the publicity surrounding the film where various critics were, quite inexcusably, trying to describe the film in terms of some vague stylistic leanings to Italian giallo cinema which, seriously, the film fails to live up to... if anything it bears much more resemblance to mid-80s American surrealism via David Lynch than anything any of the great giallo directors (such as Mario Bava, Sergio Martino, Dario Argento etc) would have concocted. The same viewpoint the critics had of that film also seems to have been upheld by the director himself and I kind of wonder why a man clearly intelligent enough to make what are, at the very least, interesting cinematic experiences, is mis-selling his product like this. The various critics who jumped on this pseudo-giallo band wagon were equally inexcusable and, frankly, should have been educated enough about movies to know better considering their vocation. If you really want to see a modern movie which has some of the stylistic leanings of the great gialli, or at least uses the same cinematic syntax to fulfil a story idea, then check out movies like Amer (reviewed here), Tulpa (reviewed here) and The Strange Colour Of Your Body’s Tears (reviewed here).

Mind you, although I was disappointed in Strickland’s previous movie, I was still quite looking forward to his next feature because he is obviously a significant artist (whether I like his product or not) and he is bound to do something interesting when you let him loose with a camera and an editing suite. My interest was further compounded when I heard that the film would be tackling the somewhat volatile area of a D/s BDSM relationship with an all female cast. BDSM is, of course, the current ‘catch all’ term for what we, in the good old days, used to call S&M. It stands for Bondage, Domination, Sadism & Masochism (depending on which websites you read) and D/s is equal to dominant/submissive, the choice of upper or lower case signifying the apparent hierarchy of the two roles to each other... although that’s always a sticky question and it’s one I’ll come to in a minute because the film actually explores that duality as the trappings of its primary story objective.

First of all, though, I’ll tell you why I was so disappointed by this film... and it’s all down to the 'homage' inherent in the storyline. A couple of years ago I watched a classic 1969 movie called Scacco Alla Regina aka Check To The Queen and you can read my review of it here. The film deals with a D/s relationship between two women and it’s a light, possibly misleading but enthusiastic exploration of the subject matter. Unfortunately, The Duke Of Burgundy, while having a kind of small chamber concerto feel to it, compared to the orchestral deluge of the earlier film, seems pretty much to be an update of the former. So much so, in fact, that even the gorgeous score to the new film, by a group called Cat’s Eyes seems to me to be, shall we say... heavily influenced by Piero Piccioni’s score to Scacco Alla Regina. And when I say heavily influenced, there was even a scene in The Duke Of Burgundy when it sounds like the director had cut the sequence to a track from Check To The Queen (often called the temp track in film music) and the band had copied it almost note by note... I don’t know whether he did actually do that, of course, or whether the group was specifically influenced by that track on that score for that scene... but I do find it an amazing coincidence that the scoring should be so similar.

Of course, all this had the effect of breaking my concentration and popping me out of the movie I was trying to watch.

Now, to be far to Strickland, the movie does have a slightly different ending and the relationship between the ‘dominant woman’, or ‘top’ as it is often known in the BDSM lifestyle... and the ‘submissive woman’, or ‘bottom’, is such that it plays with the common notion of just who is in the dominant position in the relationship. The apparent top in the film is called Cynthia and played just beautifully by Sidse Babett Knudsen. Her apparent bottom is called Evelyn and played, also very well, by Chiara D'Anna. However, after the first ten minutes, it becomes apparent that the relationship is suffering from a very common malady in ‘the scene’ known as ‘topping from the bottom’. In any safe, sane and consensual (SSC) or even RACK (Risk Aware Consensual Kink) BDSM relationship, it’s recognised that the person who takes the submissive role is very much in control of the situation in reality, to a certain extent, due to the exploration of areas within a specific individual’s chosen limits (which he or she will have communicated to their top before hand) and the probable use, although not always, of a safe word to either immediately stop the activity in hand or, depending on how you’re playing, alter the flow of the session (referred to as a ‘release word’ in this film, presumably to cater to an audience who might be unfamiliar with the concept and named after a type of moth, Pinastri).

When this gets out of hand in real life is when the demands made by the submissive role get very specific, profuse and prescriptive in their nature. How much topping from the bottom is happening is basically based on just how much the dominant individual is comfortable with allowing their sub to shape the play... most dominants tend to nip this in the bud fairly quickly or just terminate the relationship (from what I’ve been led to believe, you understand, honest guv) but there are, equally, cases where this kind of dynamic in the relationship can work quite well. The one depicted in the movie, however, doesn’t seem to be working all that well at times and is more about the way the two central protagonists test their own limits and how it stretches and forces them to examine their love for each other.

This is actually beautifully done and the scenes of, for instance, Cynthia constantly drinking in order to ensure a timely supply of urine to pee into her subs mouth as a ‘punishment’ is one of a few little quirky details which make this film worth watching (although her constant drinking was making me very thirsty throughout the course of the film... couldn’t wait to get out of there and grab a bottle of water). The acting is truly tremendous and is especially comical and simultaneously revealing in a scene where Evelyn is demanding a stern narrative as she masturbates to orgasm and Cynthia can’t keep up and dries up in her monologue... watch Sidse Babett Knudsen’s face in the interchanges between the two in this scene and it’s absolutely wonderful acting.

The film is, like Berberian Sound Studio, a feast of gorgeous and, often, static shot compositions, beautiful experiments in sound design and with a truly amazing butterfly sequence towards the end of the movie. All the characters in this story are specialists in the science of lepidopterology, hence the title of the movie, and the use of various butterflies as a metaphor in the relationship between the two women comes to a kind of ‘visual and audio wipe out’ sequence which is truly dazzling and, quite possibly, very brave of the director in the current climate of audiences primed for movies with more dialogue (indeed, there are vast stretches of the film without the intrusion of dialogue and that’s quite refreshing).

So, yeah, lovely film to look at, brilliant performances, astounding sound design, competent editing and a dazzling score which really deserves a CD release rather than a stupid digital release. The downside for me, however, is it always seems to be a pseudo remake of Scacco Alla Regina (Check To The Queen) and, worse than that, does nothing unexpected or really provocative during its running time. There’s another film out at the moment dealing with BDSM, you might have heard of it, called Fifty Shades Of Grey... it’s been given short shrift by a lot of the BDSM community although I think the reasons given for that, in that it portrays and abusive and non-consensual version of BDSM, are not completely the main motive for that, since a large majority of BDSM literature and art portrays non-consensual activities as the main part of the fantasy (as opposed to the reality). I suspect the case with Fifty Shades Of Grey is more that, because it’s so popular and introduced the concept of BDSM to so many people, the negative portrayal has become a “poster gal” for the community and it’s a bit of a damning and unfortunate one... so I can completely sympathise with the hostile attitude towards it. The Duke Of Burgundy is a film that I was hoping would be the cinematic antidote to the ‘other’ film but, alas, although I suspect it’s more emotionally intelligent and more striking a sample of the art, I fear the attitudes explored in this one to give it the required dramatic weight, make this almost as bad an example, in some ways, of the lifestyle and its practice... although to be fair to Strickland and co, it’s at least a much more responsible exploration of the area.

Ultimately, I was disappointed in this movie, just like I was with his last feature, but I do have to stress here that it is a very beautiful film and if you are not already familiar with the big, broad stroke concepts of the BDSM lifestyle which are covered here, then I’m sure some viewers will get really wrapped up in it and enjoy it on a more visceral level than I myself was able to respond to it. So I guess, my recommendation would be, if you’re into BDSM then don’t expect to see anything you haven’t seen before. If you’re into European exploitation movies of the 1960s and 1970s then, again, don’t expect too much. If you are less familiar with these areas then you will probably have a blast with this movie... the texture and tone of which is like an incredible painting you’ll want to reach out and eat. Don’t expect ot see anything explicit in this movie (seriously, this should have been at most a 15 certificate, if not a 12) or you’ll be less disappointed for your expectations... that’s probably the best way to go into this one, I think. Without too many great expectations.

Tulpa (aka Tulpa - Perdizioni Mortali)

Mea Tulpa

Tulpa (aka Tulpa - Perdizioni Mortali) 
2013 Italy
Directed by Federico Zampaglione
LFG Dual BluRay ZoneB/DVD Region 2 + 
CD Soundtrack Limited Digipack

I’ve been wanting to see Tulpa for a while now. Giallo films have been all the rage again since the dawn of the DVD era, when multiregion machines have made Euro-horror, Gialli, Spaghetti Westerns etc accessible in countries like the US and here in England, where they may not have been so easily available before... especially in an uncut form.

Giallo movies are often mistaken by genre fans as horror films for some reason. They’re not and it seems to me to be a case of people either mistaking films about serial killers to be anything other than a thriller... or writers wanting to include some of their favourite giallo movies in books they’re writing about horror. However, for horror to work, you need an inhuman monster element (science created/mutation/black magic etc) or some form of supernatural threat like a ghost story. Most gialli have neither of these elements and they’re often not even scary... however there have been a couple notable exceptions.

Dario Argento’s fifth feature Deep Red (Profondo Rosso) for example, is an out and out giallo. However, the spate of killings that is initially perpetuated throughout that movie is actually caused by the supernatural foresight of the clairvoyant victim and the need to keep her silence. This supernatural element is used purely for that introduction into the story, to set in motion a specific chain of events and I can’t quite remember, off the top of my head, any other classic giallo which uses the genuine supernatural as a prelude to its main course like this one... although I'm sure there must be others which have slipped my mind.

There is, however, a famous red herring of a giallo movie by Sergio Martino called All The Colours Of The Dark (Tutti I Colori Del Buio) and that’s definitely a film which hides behind a supernatural setting and uses the language of horror films all the way through the movie until, at the eleventh hour, it’s revealed that... actually... no supernatural events have occurred after all and it was all very much a case of humans killing humans, like an old Scooby Doo cartoon ending. So very much a giallo and not a horror movie.

Tulpa, however, is definitely a modern giallo, or neo-giallo if you like, that carries on the tradition of the giallo films of the late sixties and onwards, but also adds a little hint of the supernatural into the mix at one point... but, again, although the significance of this moment is quite a high stakes one in terms of the denouement of the movie, it’s not an element which turns this into a horror film and Tulpa stays very much in the giallo camp in terms of... well... all the usual trappings actually. Trappings which are being lovingly homaged in this recent movie which, unbelievably, given the popularity of the form at the moment, has not had any release in either the UK or the US, at the time of writing this review (I eventually bit the bullet and bought a special limited edition German multi-disc set and I’m glad I did, actually).

Now there has been a definite upsurge in movies imitating the giallo style and, in some cases such as Berberian Sound Studio (reviewed here), films which say they are trying to be giallo but are actually more using the language of Euro-horror rather than the specific form of the giallo genre. It’s become a popular genre again among the humble cineastes who scavenge and forage for rare scraps at the various Film Conventions throughout the land... and that’s why we are getting films like Last Caress (aka Glam Gore) popping up in the market, which also hasn’t had a UK release at time of writing and which was reviewed by me a couple of years ago here.

Probably the collaboration of Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, with their brilliant movies Amer (reviewed here) and The Strange Colour Of Your Body’s Tears (reviewed here) are the leading exponents in the use of, at least, the visual and aural style of the giallo in modern film-making. Amer perfectly uses the style of the giallo to weave a puzzling narrative triptych of observations about a common central protagonist at various stages of her life but, although the stylistic traits of the movie are pure giallo, the film is more an exploration in surrealism. The Strange Colour Of Your Body’s Tears is similarly a study in surrealism but, in addition to using giallo signatures in the work, the opening narrative thread is also a gialloistic concoction (whoops, made a word up there) and it’s even closer to the form... while still being a million miles away on some level.

Although Tulpa isn’t as spectacular as either of these two examples, it’s certainly a lot closer in style to giallo in terms of the story structure and I know a few of my friends would probably prefer it over the two examples I just cited (although personally I am swept off my feet by Cattet and Forzani’s works of cinematic art).

Tulpa opens strong with a journey to a rendezvous which is right away lit with an intense, Bava-esque colour palette. We are introduced to a male and a female who are engaged in a BDSM lifestyle and the man secures the woman face down on a bed in preparation for their mutually consented expression of dark passion.

And then the typical giallo killer steps in.

And by typical, I mean just that... a dark figure in a mask, raincoat, hat and black gloves who stabs and slices into the guy before he has a chance to properly start up with his lover. After the killer has split him apart with one of many knife wounds (one of which, passing up through the chin, mirrors a similar moment in Argento’s Opera, if i’m not mistaken), the man’s genitals are sliced off and left in front of his lover who is still firmly secured to the bed. The woman is left alone by the killer... or at least that’s what’s implied.

Then we have the opening credits seaquence, comprising a series of typical establishing shots of a city in Italy (probably Rome?) which are all shot in fairly neutral colours. On one of the shots we pan down the front of a tall building and focus on a girl jogging. After this shot, all of the establishing montage features shots of her running against the city locations and we know from the end of this sequence that she is the main protagonist of this movie... Lisa, played by Claudia Gerini. After we follow her into a few scenes at work, witness a few more murders and also some sex scenes in the secret sex club, Tulpa, in which she spends some of her downtime, it becomes clear that all the scenes set in the club or involving the murderer, are lit in the brightly coloured and richer tones of a classic giallo in contrast to the “everyday life” shots which, though still shot quite cleanly and beautifully, are more neutral in tone. This, of course, makes the neon tinted, colour saturated tones of the movie’s underworld a much more palatable confection to the viewer and enhances the scenes of sex and murder in an almost subconsciously enticing manner. It’s like the colour schemes of two specific Dario Argento movies, Suspiria and Tenebrae, have been rubbed against each other and the resulting design style is Tulpa.

The fact that we first see Claudia Gerini’s character jogging is useful in her set up because that demonstrates to us, in no uncertain terms, that she is not out of shape and can run if required... a character trait we’ll later see in action when she is chased from the sex club by a female bodybuilder wielding a samurai sword. So the jogging isn’t gratuitous eye candy (although a lot of the movie surely is... and why not?) since this kind of thing clues us in that her character is not just a sedentary office worker and she can put some speed on if required.

As is typical in a giallo thriller, a lot of the murders are either quite spectacular or quite imaginative and Tulpa rarely fails to live up to the expectations created by the history of its genre. For example, a scene where a woman is securely fastened to an old fashioned carousel with passes by a strategically placed piece of barbed wire is a devious concoction for fans of blood and gore, as her face gets gradually and bloodily whittled down each time she passes it... until her left eyeball rolls onto the floor. When she comes to a ‘dead’ stop, her blood drips down onto her own eyeball. Warped but imaginative stuff for the demanding audience.

What is less typical of the genre is that the movie doesn’t incorporate a large element of the police procedural investigation that you would expect to see in these kinds of scenarios. Indeed, the police are relegated to a brief appearance at the end of the movie and are completely out of the narrative for pretty much all of the film. Instead, Lisa becomes our central Nancy Drew character in a solo adventure, which is fitting since, as the film slowly reveals its nature, you realise that there may be some link to her which is behind the recent spate of murders.

Or not.

I’m not going to tell you what really is going on here, in the interests of not wanting to spoil it for my readers. Suffice it to say that, another way in which the film follows in the footsteps of its predecessors, is in the ability to set up suspects and red herrings and then lead you on to try and solve the mystery when it could be almost anyone behind the killings. One particularly good red herring plays into the supernatural element. A Tulpa is a Tibetan manifestation or spirit person/demon ritualistically created out of the ether by someone. The way in which it manifests in this movie is fairly handy, actually, and the red herring comes in your expectations of this element... which are set up in the last act. That being said, most regular giallo watchers will probably realise the total insignificance of introducing a concept like this into a film of this nature by this point in the narrative. The Tulpa element does turn up, though... just not in the way you might imagine it would.

Adding to all this is a pretty great score by Andrea Moscianese, Federico Zampaglione and Francesco Zampaglione. It’s very much got a modern horror, sound design element to it but it’s mostly channeling the sound of the giallo, specifically using the Goblin stuff as a starting point for the rhythm, percussion and guitars... perhaps even more specifically it’s not a million miles away from Goblin’s last score for Argento’s Sleepless in its tone. Whatever the specific inspiration is, though, it works really well and it’s been hanging around as an earworm a lot for the past few days.

Tulpa - Perdizioni Mortali is a pretty great neo-giallo, it has to be said. I think the disappointment coming from a lot of reviewers of this movie may actually stem from a lack of sympathy or understanding of the original material which a film like this references as part of its genetic make-up. However, if giallo is your thing, then you’re probably going to recognise Tulpa for what it is, a very well executed modern take on the genre. If you’re expecting something else then you might be less sympathetic to the simplicity of the set up and the stylistic flourishes peculiar to the genre, to be sure. For me, though, this was a great little film and one I’ll be coming back to some day.

For my beginner’s guide to the giallo genre, check out my article Giallo Fever by clicking here. 

Check To The Queen (Scacco Alla Regina)

Ain’t Miss Be Slaving?

Check To The Queen (Scacco Alla Regina)
1969 Italy/West Germany
Directed by Pasquale Festa Campanile
Earls Court Collection DVD Region 0

Right. I think this is going to be one of my shorter reviews, I’m afraid.

Check To The Queen (Scacco Alla Regina) is a film of which I’d never heard of until a stall holder at a major London Film Convention recommended it to me. However, I’m pretty sure this is one of those films where the music has haunted me for quite a while now.

When I got the movie home I noticed a quite striking and what I would say is a fairly historically iconic visual image on the back cover of the front of a woman’s head projecting from a flat surface (actually a hole cut in a mirror, in the film proper). This is one of the more interesting shots from early on in this movie (although the more famous version is obviously a publicity shot) and I recognised it immediately as being the cover image for a current “best of” album for Ennio Morricone’s famous singer Edda Dell’Orso. It's also used these days as the cover of the soundtrack album. The compilation it's used on is actually called Edda Dell’Orso “Voice” and it contains a number of tracks by Morricone and other composers, including Piero Piccioni who scored this film. Check To The Queen is represented by no less than three tracks on that particular compilation. And I immediately knew from this that I was probably familiar with a lot of the music in this film already, since I have a number of Italian movie music compilations and, yeah, this film seems to get picked on a lot for those kinds of albums... and rightly so.

So, before I’d even got around to watching the movie, I put a request in to my major supplier of Italian scores and he sorted me out the expanded edition of the soundtrack, when I saw him at another film fair. I was advised that the score on this one was “really good” and, after having listened to the album a few times... I’d have to agree with that conclusion. It was also, obviously, very familiar.

But what’s the film like.

Well, there’s hardly any story and it’s the tale of a BDSM ‘D/s’ relationship between a Countess, Sylvia, who goes to work as one of the slaves of a famous film actress, Margaret. She goes there because she has strange and psychedelically lit fantasies of being whipped and humiliated by the lady in question and, once she accepts the ‘position’ given to her, most of her desires come true.

It’s fairly far ahead in terms of it’s time and the content being explored in a commercial venue such as cinema. Various forms of objectification play are indulged by the mistress before Sylvia starts to go along a path of almost topping from the bottom (in modern parlance) and as a result is auctioned off in a non-binding but ultimately worrying auction due to the tone of the film depicting the mindset of a submissive in such situations as suffering a form of mental illness which needs to be cured. Not the domination part, mind, just the submissive. I guess it was either a censorship issue or a bit of naivete at the time that any discussion of mental health rears its head at all in terms of this kind of relationship or lifestyle choice. Certain aspects of it wouldn’t be for all people in that kind of scene, I know, but it’s wrong not to be vocal about the lack of right one person or body of people has to question another person's sexual or power triggers and so forth, in that ‘closed to the general public’ lack of freedom. I thought the sixties were supposed to be a little more liberated than that. I always was, growing up in the late 60s to late 70s.

Of course, we’re not living in that kind of situation these days... oh wait... checks the clock and state of the British government and politics... oh no, the times we’re living in are much worse under a series of judgmental ruling parties who think that they know best. Thankfully, the modern BDSM community seems less judgmental about such relationships than the majority of governments... so there’s still hope that people are allowed to have any kind of Safe, Sane and Consensual relationship they want... for now.

So okay, sexual politics and power games out of the way... the film is shot really nicely. The psychedelic fantasy sequences I mentioned are heavy on the filters (to the point where some of the action is obscured or uncomfortable to look at) and there are some nice shot set ups which utilise the overemphasised vertical shapes of the mansion house in which nearly all of the movie is set. There’s a nice scene where Margaret rides a mechanical white horse (not dissimilar to the one in Korda’s The Thief Of Baghdad) which leads to some pony play fantasies in Sylvia’s head and there’s even some living statue play... Yeah. Whatever. I’m with Hot Fuzz on this one... the blight of the living statue.

And, of course, there’s Piccioni’s wonderful lounge score with Edda Dell’Orso’s amazing voice coming at you... you’re probably familiar with her from a load of Italian scores already such as A Fistful Of Dynamite and Once Upon A Time In The West and she is just as spellbinding working with Piccioni here as she is with some of the other famous composers she’s collaborated with in the past. Any film scored using her incredible vocal talents is going to elevate itself and the score glues everything together in this movie and makes it work. Even stops it becoming boring at times, which it threatens to do on a few occasions... like I said, not much happens.

I don’t think I’d recommend this film to many people, even less so to those who I know who are in the BDSM scene and who, like me, might become just a little enraged at the lack of intelligence and conscience applied to the subject matter in this particular area... which is pretty much what the movie is all about. On the other hand, the movie has some spectacular shots, competent editing, beautiful naked women and a truly classic lounge score which is obviously, due to its prominence on various compilation selections, considered very highly in the industry. So if you’re into all that stuff... yeah, give it a go.

Blind Beast (Môjû)

Sting In The Braille

Blind Beast (Môjû)
1969 Japan
Directed by Yasuzô Masumura
Daei/Yumi Region 2

Warning: I need to discuss this film properly... which means including the ending in my discussion. So definite spoilers here.

This is an odd little film which could have been really great if it didn’t stray too far the wrong way into territory that threatens to be controversial but which, instead, just highlights a certain naivety on the part of the writer. It is, however, worth watching because, although it doesn’t really cross over into die hard surrealism in its realisation of its themes, it is kinda interesting and, certainly, draws the viewer into a world which is wholly unique to the film.

It starts off with some quite racy, black and white S&M (as it was known in those days) flavoured still photographs of the central female protagonist Aki, as played by the lovely Mako Midori, which it turns out are part of an art gallery exhibit of shots of her. She is a model and, all through the film, her voice is heard as the narrator. When she goes to visit the gallery showing the controversial shots of her naked with chains and being stimulated by other women, she comes across a blind main exploring her sculptor quite enthusiastically with his hands. As she watches, fascinated, with the way he touches her ersatz naked body, she begins to feel a sexual connection to what he is doing which scares her and she rushes off.

After some time, when she arrives home from a photo shoot, she hires a masseuse and it turns out to be the same blind man who, it transpires, is our central antagonist (and also male protagonist, depending on how the viewer’s perception of him changes over the course of the movie), Michio (as played by Eiji Funakoshi). He chloroforms Aki and kidnaps her, with the help of his mother.

When Aki regains consciousness she is in darkness, for a while,  inside Michio’s giant studio. Giant is literally the word, too, as the landscape consists of walls made from Michio’s sculptors, which is his hobby and life’s work. Various walls and planes are made up of collections of eyes, ears, breasts, arms, legs, noses etc and in the centre, there are two giants sized torsos on their backs, where the characters in this movie spend most of their time.

Michio has kidnapped Aki to sculpt her from touch and will not release her until she co-operates. After trying to escape a few times, she does so and Michio continues his work of making art which is meant to be touched. However, after an escape attempt leaves Michio’s mother dead by his hand, Michio rapes Aki and has sex with her constantly and... here the narrative takes a turn.

After a while she falls in love with him and welcomes his caress.... and the two continue to make love all day and night long as their way of existence. Aki goes blind too, here eyesight atrophied by spending all her time in a darkened studio (actually, the film and set is lit with neutral greens and blues which makes for an interesting viewing experience in itself) and their sexual explorations continue until they both are sated and need more intensity. This continues with explorations of bondage and whips, then small steps into knife and blood play, followed by deep gouges with twisting knife wounds and eventually, to the point here Aki begs Michio to lop off her limbs... all in the name of sensual pleasure and the exploration of the senses. Michio stumbles his way to his tools, gets a big mallet and knife and obliges, before stabbing himself to death.

Now this is actually nothing new, of course, but maybe for late sixties cinema this was entering new territory. While the film, as I said, verges on surrealism... this is only a shallow surface surrealism which can be found in the set design and, possibly, in the fact that the tale is being narrated by somebody who is presumably dead... although the possibility of any spiritual or pseudo-religious ponderings do not seem to be what’s in the mind of the creative team here. There is visual metaphor to see the unseen removal of Aki’s limbs by having the correlating limbs of her sculptured figure drop to the studio floor with a heavy crash with each blow, but this is about as “loose” as reality is allowed to get in the film and, obviously, it comes right at the end. Also, I suspect the Japanese penchant for visual metaphor in their culture, especially cinema, renders the deliberate approach towards a surrealistic viewpoint redundant in the case of this particular movie.

The story of two people getting used to and jaded by the senses to the point when their harder explorations of these senses bring them the ecstasy of death is something I’ve already seen done before and, perhaps I should be angry that the director has irresponsibly assumed that a relationship which comprises, or indeed includes, a BDSM context, is something which two people would allow to keep going past their own limits to the point of serious injury or death. However, while it would be wrong for people to take this film with anything other than a pinch of salt and hopefully a realisation of the damage both to freedom of sexuality and the basic right to consensuality that is a must here, I have to say that this film mostly just comes off as a little naive in response to the areas within which its protagonists are purported to explore.

All that aside, though, it’s a really nicely composed  little movie on a technical level with some stunning camera set-ups, although I really am not sure about the acting. I’ve read that some people have found the performances in this riveting but, honestly, I found them just a little over the top and wide eyed to be honestly convinced that Aki would have such a sea change in attitude half way through. This wasn’t a set of credible performances for me but, that doesn’t really matter because, to be fair, the overall effect of the film is to drag you into the centre of it and not let you out until it’s done. This film has been compared to In The Realm Of The Senses and, although I haven’t seen that particular film, what I have seen of it leads me to believe that this could indeed be a good companion piece for it.

I can’t completely bring myself to recommend to anyone a film which so blatantly portrays the S&M content along such an ignorant and negative path (although the film doesn’t presume to make specific judgements, I am sure the majority of the audience would in response to the lack of specific conclusions) but, if you can get past this element, then on an artistic level the film is, well, not a masterpiece but certainly a visual triumph which any fan of cinema would want to see. Give it a go... if you’re not feeling too jaded.