Let’s be clear about something: the title of Pedro Almodóvar’s 1987 film Law of Desire is both emblematic and entirely cheeky with regards to this filmmaker’s singular body of work. There are no laws where Almodóvar’s characters’ desires are concerned—at least none that can’t be broken in the spirit of audacity, subversion, showing off, or compulsive plot-twisting—just an immaculately crafted blur of reptile-brain urge and wild ambition, a confusion of longing, desperation, memory and gender.
His latest film, an adaptation of Thierry Jonquet’s 1995 novel Tarantula, plunges into some as yet uncharted (by Almodóvar at least) and especially unsettling territory, with the innovative, fabulously resourceful and seriously messed up plastic surgeon Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas, back with the writer/director who made his name for the first time in two decades) plumbing the unexplored depths of posthuman sciences in his efforts to restore order to his shattered family. There’s a beautiful young woman sequestered and constantly monitored in his rural Toledo home and laboratory. She’s both a captive, stolen away from a whole other life, and something invented. The mad doctor is, in a sense, building himself a new wife. He is attempting to recover a dead life. Most interestingly, his endeavour is driven by the conviction that all that makes us who we are is infinitely malleable once we start to tinker with the outside. The external, he believes, determines the external. And to be sure, in Almodóvar, surfaces really do matter.
Given such a premise, The Skin I Live In (La piel que habito) is often extremely creepy. It’s also perhaps a little too cool and clean and clinical, too bogglingly plotty and over-calculated to truly love, but the highly composed grand design has things to ponder, revisit and re-admire. (Like Hitchcock, Almodóvar makes movies that even when flawed are tough to truly exhaust.) The source material aside, the obvious model for this macabre tale of obsession, isolation and transformation is the great 1960 French horror film Eyes Without a Face, directed by Georges Franju, who also made a movie about an abattoir that has to be seen to be believed, or has to be seen to know how much you probably wish you didn’t see it. Most Almodóvar has very clear roots in earlier, beloved, canonical films, but this one doesn’t accentuate homage with much warmth, and there are only a few fits of his characteristic humour. (One highly memorable and totally appalling example of this includes an uneasy reunion between Redgard’s assistant and some guy in a tiger costume.)
I feel like I keep wanting to warn you all about what The Skin I Live In lacks, but the truth is that despite all that I was still totally engaged with it, and some months after first seeing it, I’m easily lured into thinking about it, drawn into conversations about it. It’s fleshy, prompts goosebumps, and gets under the skin.
Seth Brundle, the tragic genius at the core of The Fly (1986), is motivated to crack the secrets of teleportation not only because such innovation will challenge established concepts of time and space, but also because he suffers from motion sickness—teleportation means never having to set foot in a propelled vehicle again. This bit of character eccentricity is one of the many ingenious details that have allowed The Fly to endure these last 25 years, not only as what may be the defining synthesis of every major theme in David Cronenberg’s filmography, but as the modern big-budget genre film that synthesized an intelligent query into the most vital and troubling issues faced by contemporary philosophers, scientists and policy-makers with an absolutely primal and inspired display of body horror theatrics. There is no other movie at once so smart and so disgusting. Indeed, The Fly features what remains the most astonishing vomit scene—wait, make that scenes—in cinema history. (A word of warning to the uninitiated: do not watch this movie while eating yogurt.)
Rooted in the 1957 short story by George Langelaan and, of course, the Vincent Price film of the same title (1958), The Fly is several things: a chamber love triangle between Brundle, a journalist (Geena Davis) trying to file and article for a magazine named Particle, and her editor (John Getz); a science fiction about a man who accidentally gets into a machine with an insect and pays the abysmal consequences; and a shock-meditation on aging, death, and what it means to be human. “Am I dying?” Brundle wonders after his successful self-teleportation with insect co-pilot begins to exact its gooey toll on his flesh. (“His” flesh? Or something else? Teleportation obliterates form in order to recreate it elsewhere.) This being a Cronenberg film, whatever existential terror or grief Brundle feels en route to becoming Brundle-fly is eclipsed by unquenchable fascination. Other versions of Langelaan’s ‘Fly’ had its protagonist lose his ability to speak relatively early in the story; Cronenberg insisted that his Brundle keep his tongue nimble as long as possible—he wanted Brundle to articulate what was happening to him until the very end, at which point a single, unbearably sad gesture is all that’s needed for the experiment to reach its dire conclusion.
Much credit has to be given to Goldblum, whose toothy, lanky charisma, dry humour and quiet showmanship rendered him one of Cronenberg’s perfect alter egos: a smart man of action; a geek with sex appeal; a guy who can endow the word "cheeseburger" with seductive magic. And Davis, Goldblum’s girlfriend at the time, is every bit his match, both intrigued and repulsed, in-love and loving and fiercely self-protective: her alarmed response to the possibility that she’s pregnant with Son of Brundle-fly is deeply affecting. Its fantastic narrative being awkwardly yet necessarily compressed, The Fly is not without its little flaws—a bit of boilerplate dialogue here, some garish lighting there; way too much showy pathos from Getz’s emasculated ex—but the immense power of its unnerving ideas, the complex dynamics of its tautly told story, and the nuanced performances of its two leads earn its status as some very peculiar sort of masterpiece.
It’s the middle of the night in the middle-1960s, and a handsome black stranger materializes in some backwater on the wrong side of the Mason-Dixon line right around the time a wealthy white industrialist is murdered. The scene seems set for a drama in which the undereducated but quietly noble negro escapes being chewed up in the wheels of injustice with the help of, say, a crusading white lawyer charged with the task of convincing the townsfolk to look past their racist presumptions. But In the Heat of the Night (1967), based on the first of John Ball’s Virgil Tibbs novels, does something much more interesting: it makes the black stranger a well-paid, nattily dressed homicide detective from Philly whose innocence is swiftly established and who winds up cracking the case the local crackers couldn’t. It was an ingenious reversal of expectations, with Mister Tibbs elegantly embodied by Sidney Poitier, probably the only actor who could have pulled it off. The film is screening at Edmonton's Metro Cinema this weekend, following Poitier’s Thursday night speaking engagement at the Jube.
It is no slight to say that In the Heat of the Night—one of Canadian director Norman Jewison’s earliest feature credits and still among his best—plays out like a very good cop show elevated by sociological innovation. (That’s why the film was eventually made into a cop show.) The murder mystery is something of a MacGuffin, making room for richer themes of tolerance, respect, professionalism, alpha-male competitiveness and the painfully protracted spread of the Civil Rights Movement. We keep watching not so much to find out whodunnit as to see how the unflappable Tibbs will finally find his way out of Sparta, Mississippi and make something like peace with its ornery, lonesome police chief Bill Gillespie. Gillespie’s played by Rod Steiger, who chews gum as a way to hold off from chewing up all the scenery—mastication keeps Steiger from shouting all the time, though this too becomes overly indicative and irritating in its way. Steiger won an Oscar for this part, despite the fact that Poitier’s cool approach—not to mention that of Warren Oates as a bumbling patrolman—seems to offer such a seductive, more intriguing alternative to Steiger’s bullishness in nearly every scene.
Historical significance and varying performance styles aside, I think that much of what keeps In the Heat of the Night fresh and worthy of repeat visits has to do with the many wonderful details that pepper the film: the plastic Jesus on Oates’ dashboard; the Dr. Pepper sliding between a young woman’s ample breasts as she lingers naked by her kitchen window; the masking tape repairs on an old vinyl-upholstered chair; or the positioning of the corpse discovered on a Sparta side street. The dead man lays on the ground like he was in middle of trying out a new dance—let’s call it the doggie paddle. There’s also sensitive editing from future director Hal Ashby, inventive shooting from Haskell Wexler, scoring from Quincy Jones, and a title tune sung by Ray Charles, an especially inspired choice to ease us into the picture. If Charles couldn’t get Americans of every colour to root for a black hero, no one could.
