BENEDETTA

Anyone cornered by an atheist at a cocktail party knows that militant denial can be just as tedious as blind piety. You don't have to be among the faithful to be bored by films that bash religion. I'm as mindful (and weary) of the centuries-long and still ongoing cruelties and violence inflicted in the name of God. I fear that Hollywood has embraced the same awareness, to the point that filmmakers are allowed to indulge in a form of religion-bashing that makes for uniformly lazy storytelling. Jo Brennan's carefully articulated review of Rose Glass' SAINT MAUD helped me understand why these movies have failed - for the most part, having made the observation that the church is corrupt, or that faith is the habitat of the delusional or the traumatized or the hypocrite, some filmmakers may be left sitting on a smug cushion of "oh did I just BLOW YOUR MIND?" while their movie just stops, having nowhere else to go.

To be sure, Paul Verhoeven casts a whole lot of aspersion on the church in BENEDETTA; particular attention is paid to the tight grip the church makes on finances (the Abbess even makes the blunt point that her convent is not a charity), as well as the naturally human impulses that fly in the face of religious comport, human urges that only intensify under the weight of religious duty. And the thing has willful, even giddy, irreverence all through it, from its basis in the story of a 17th century lesbian nun to the fact that it's, y'know, a movie by Paul Verhoeven (who announces his intent from the start with not one, not two, but three scenes of scatological eruption blasting forth in the first half hour).

But the movie benefits strongly from Verhoeven's masterful touches. The hypocrisy of the church is revealed with a great deal of earthy humor (there is legend-level nun-side-eye in nearly every scene - just because they're devout doesn't mean they lack opinions), and Verhoeven and cast are as uninhibited in delivering Benedetta's visions as they are her sex scenes. There are generous cinematic allusions as well, mainly to Verhoeven's movies (Benedetta's sexuality confounds authority as strongly as Rachel's in BLACK BOOK; oddly, we also get a few nods to ROBOCOP, especially in the first third) but also Hitchcock's (a nun's ascent up a tower leads to an earthly plummet, as in VERTIGO - and what else is the inspired dildo but 2021's best Macguffin?).

But where Verhoeven leaves the wanna-be-blasphemers in the dust is in his earnest appreciation for, and preservation of, the mysteries of faith. The ambiguity is what drives this thing, as are the questions it raises that it is too smart and generous to answer for us. The earnestness with which Benedetta's love for Bartolomea intertwines with her love for Jesus is palpable; like Jesus, she squares the human with the divine in perfect harmony, and the true hypocrisy of the church manifests in its inability to recognize or understand this (indeed, that Benedetta attains her divinity through embracing her pleasure scares THEE SHIT out of the patriarchy, aghast that she, not they, were chosen.) The mystery is preserved right through the final title card of the epilogue, after which Verhoeven's credit tags the thing as loud as a thump on a Bible. The movie is funny, raunchy, downright horny, human, and ambiguous; and only one truly possessed by faith could have made it. Hallelujah, and amen.

THE GRAPES OF DEATH

Some of the greatest horror films are the saddest, the ones that capture the melancholy of being far from what you know, and knowing you will never return. The empty train that takes you to a world you no longer recognize. The friend who disappears. The newcomer who, through the sheer oddness of his body language, seems to bring hell with him. The landscape that looks too, too calm, the unsettled emptiness that surrounds you, wide open and free and making you know that nothing you knew no longer exists over the horizon. The intensifying nightmare around you, as everyone you meet is either deranged and psychotic or as helpless as you. And even when you find the one person you were heading toward in the first place they too have changed, and are begging for death. You don't feel the event that triggers all of this, it's just a slow escalation, a feeling of drowning when there's no water in sight. The finality that arrives and settles, for good, now that everything you knew is gone. 

Zombie horror is rife with movies that explore this emptiness. There may be no modern cinematic zombie more iconic than the first: Bill Hinzmann's awkward but suited creeper shuffles in under thunder as NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD opens, wandering aimlessly through the empty cemetery before turning his sights on Barbara and Johnny. Hell does indeed come right behind him. And it explodes in George Romero's follow-up DAWN OF THE DEAD; the first third of the movie sketches in unforgettably economical terms how a zombie outbreak would lead to the absolute end of civilization, gelling nowhere so convincingly as when Fran's co-worker stares into space announcing, as he starts to truly grasp it, "Our work here is finished."

That horrible void literally spreads around the world, and a melancholy becomes pronounced in movies like Lucio Fulci's ZOMBI; there we start to feel that all bets really are off when dead people start moving and killing (the walking dead rarely feel so fundamentally wrong as they do in this film), and Fabio Frizzi's despondent main theme seems set to the rhythm of society's final heartbeat. Werner Herzog is more grandiose in NOSFERATU-PHANTOM DER NACHT; Klaus Kinski lends to his anti-human, parasitic Dracula an absolute helplessness to stop the feeding frenzy that is slowly murdering the world, and the victims can only live it up and get drunk even as the rats and coffins stack up around them.

With a resume that includes multiple surreal erotic vampire stories and hardcore pornography, Jean Rollin may not appear to be one who'd uphold this approach. To modern eyes used to the by now well-established tropes of modern zombie horror, THE GRAPES OF DEATH plays it surprisingly straight (indeed, it was Rollin's first critical and popular success.) The film makes more explicit the environmental threat that lurks in many of Romero's films: here, a new pesticide contaminates a remote French vineyard, infecting all who drink the wine made there with a disease that rots them physically and psychologically. The infected share with Kinski's Dracula an occasional terrible awareness that they are powerless to stop the violence they spread.

But the dream space Rollin actively investigated in his earlier work lends an expansiveness to THE GRAPES OF DEATH that only underscores its horrors. We experience the story largely anchored to Elizabeth (a sympathetic turn by Maria-Georges Pascal) and see this nightmare grow through her eyes. Though she weathers a number of one-on-one encounters with increasingly diseased and terrifying ghouls, many of the film's most striking moments see her isolated in expansive settings, airy but suffocating, as we see her options disappear around her.

Though Elizabeth's passivity is irksome to some viewers (just as Barbara's near-catatonia in NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD was, despite it being a logical response to the horror surrounding her), Pascal manages to hold our sympathies as her situation disintegrates. Anchored in the immediacy of her reality, her environment immerses us, and through her perspective we watch, we feel the world sliding beyond our control. Her reality becomes a nightmare, and we feel her hopelessness as that nightmare contaminates reality. Philippe Sissmann's sparse analog score feels even sadder than Frizzi's - it wouldn't surprise us to see him tinkering on a keyboard just out of frame, looking resignedly out into an abyss. The movie seems not to end as much as stop, and sticks with us so deeply that we feel that walking away from the movie will only take us deeper into its landscapes. I don't think we necessarily need to live in a world in which a pandemic continues to rage and keep us isolated from our loved ones to feel Rollin's void resonate powerfully post-experience, but it's sure as hell helping. 

the cat-turd on the cupcake

So late October 1993 I'm visiting a friend. Said friend is busy the weekdays I'm with him so I'm alone in his place. Waking up on my own damn schedule, I've time to myself. On two of those days, I figure, well I know he's a right-wing bogeyman but I've never actually seen his show directly so, in the interest of engaging alternative viewpoints to one's own, I spend the noon hour, on two consecutive days, watching The Rush Limbaugh Show.

I remember this was the time Al Gore was running around pushing hard for NAFTA, engaging the wiry H. Ross Perot in debate over the issue. To my surprise, Limbaugh credited Gore with winning that argument and laughed Perot off as an unhinged lunatic. So I thought well, alright what else does he have. My memories of specifics are hazy (by all means, if your recall of what you watched in October '93 is more crystalline than mine, please sound off), but I sure as shit remember how I felt at the end of both episodes: that for about the first two-thirds the man spouted rational, sometimes dull, occasionally-relatable common sense, but by the end of the episode he'd say at least one thing so heinous, at best illogical at worst out-and-out hateful, that just cast aspersions over even the agreeable shit.

You're at a buffet party, and you're walking along a dessert table upon which is placed a grid of totally passable, maybe even tasty-looking, cupcakes. You think yeah I'll give one of these a try but upon reaching the end of the table the cupcake you're about to grab has a cat-turd, placed oh-so-artfully, in the center of its icing. You draw your hand back, thinking, well, I'll grab another one but the cupcakes across the entire table (which are, at a glance, about 90% cat-turd free) now all seem suspect.

Anyone I spoke to about Limbaugh's show (aside from those who embraced all of it) noticed a similar ratio: yeah, anyone can be down with about 75% of it but that other 25% is just unconscionable. That 25% would be cherry-picked and soundbitten over the ensuing decades held up both as upright and correct straight-talk by rightists and lamentable dialectical evil by the left. (I'm positive the DNC raised thousands, if not millions, from those outraged by Limbaugh's excesses, and thus amplified his outrages among their consituents - it's why I'm convinced the Boeberts and MTGreenes of the Trump Republicans will never be ousted from their seats, as their hateful blathering provides too much easy copy for fundraising emails.)

And in fairly short order the inherent cruelty of that 25% became a political party's entire platform. More and more of the party faithful, confronted with that spread, went straight to the cat-turd cupcakes out of preference and chowed down. (Many, many more, who were initially more comfortable in the rational, common sense-fuelled 75% would eventually shrug and dive into those tainted cupcakes, out of loyalty or weird expediency. And they could no longer argue from a place of rationality without their opponents smelling the cat-shit on their breath.)

He should have been held at arm's length; instead he was amplified and held aloft. Discourse was coarsened and eroded, and his hatred and pettiness, his sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia etc. etc. etc, is now the standard of one of America's leading political parties. May he descend quickly, and may all who blindly parrot and echo his utter contempt follow in short order.

top two, 2020

It's too, too late for a list, and I'm not even qualified to make one, really; for most of the last year my movies have come through the same screen as my news, my work, my socializing, etc. etc. etc. and a certain amount of weariness has set in as I feel an exhaustion that is, at this point, universal. It is a small thing, indeed, to not have been able to dive into cinema as usual, and a smaller problem, still, in the face of so many others. But it's a facet of what's been lost this year, a calamitous toll that even a modest retrospective like this must acknowledge.

So what I haven't seen outnumbers what I have: FIRST COW, the SMALL AXE series, SOUL, POSSESSOR, MANK (though I've little interest in that one, oddly), and many of the other heralded masterpieces of the year have gone by. In these times of nonstop anxiety and no-small-problems, the pain of not having had the experiences necessary to make any kind of guess as to the state of current cinema just calls attention to the larger issues plaguing all of us. Year-end list-making, in the face of that, seems a trivial indulgence, at best. I can't and won't list my ten favorites of what I saw and call that an educated guess as to what went down on our screens this year.

But two movies mattered deeply to me:

Made in 2018 in the run-up to the ascension of Bolsonaro, the queer Brazilian western BACURAU perfectly captured the mood of this fractious year; its arrival on American screens about a month into lockdown was just the rallying cry many of us needed. The story of a small Brazilian village beset by imperialist forces bent on its eradication struck a blow for the representation of those Bolsonaro would suppress. But its political urgency was matched with a knowing savvy for the thrills of genre cinema; without wanting to be too specific, it was the rare movie that captured the spirit of the work of John Carpenter beyond a shallow name-check. Between the passion of its politics and the effective staging of its suspenseful moments BACURAU emerges as one of the finest, and most galvanizing, action movies of recent memory.

If Kleber Mendonca Filho and Juliano Dornelles captured something universal about 2020, then Gaspar Noe (of all fucking people) cast a spell to create brighter things for 2021. Noe's eight-minute SUMMER OF '21 promotes a forthcoming fashion line from the house of Yves Saint Laurent, so naturally is a feast for the eyes. But fashion houses are, perhaps unsurprisingly, generous in the leeway they give artists to present their work (indeed, a friend reminded me that Moschino observed social distancing by showcasing a 2020 fashion line through an astonishing puppet show). And even as YSL seem to have reined in Noe's more antisocial impulses the powerful cinematic sensibility he's honed over the years - his fluid camera, his breathtaking use of split-screen, his intrinsic grasp of the power of music (here a knowingly-deployed remix by SebastiAn of the Summer/Moroder smash "I Feel Love") - is used to powerful effect here (as is a silent but theatrically-present grande dame performance by Charlotte Rampling). With its fashion mansion in the middle of a dark and Gothic forest the movie feels as occult as SUSPIRIA, and one doubts that its COVID-resonant imagery is accidental (it begins with a heroine alone in a disheveled tower, then fleeing from an unseen menace - we can all surely relate). The models take their places in an audience, distant from one another but present together in their moment, and the image feels like a hopeful telegram from an immediate future. 

May we all remain safe, and eventually re-congregate to share such moments. See you in the dark, eventually.