As with his prior film Knife in the Water, which was fittingly set at sea and stitched together by jagged, knife-like, tetanus-inducing cuts, Roman Polanski’s Cul-de-sac is filmed like a pirate on a bad day. It’s as though the camera is a sword constantly teetering between literate, venomous pen and protruding phallus, both of which seek to do bodily harm to the characters in the film in their own respective ways. The film, like all of Polanski’s best cinematic scalpels, feels dangerous down to its very artistic construction – the way shots are not so much sewn together as they are stabbed into one another – rather than simply dangerous in its subject matter. That distinction between cinema with dangerous subject matter and cinema with dangerous form to test that subject matter is what separates a film with something to say and a film with a means to say it. It is what separates a mere provocateur from a truly demented, haphazard genius of the form. Roman Polanski laughs at us because he is proud to be both. Continue reading
Midnight Screening: Cul-de-sac
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Angel Heart begins as many film noirs do, with the grim patron of New York City – nominally in the 1950s but very much marinated in the nightmarish mental collapse style of noir so popular in comic books around the late 1980s. It’s a city with a death wish, but Angel Heart moves beyond the urban decay that so christened 1980s cinema and into the soaking wet juices and oils of sewage-filled Southern decay and centuries of forlorn backwater communities. For a decade of cinema so replete with misbegotten depictions of city life, Angel Heart is not only a lurid noir genre piece, but a trenchant reminder of the areas left unspoken and unanswered in industrial-focused American cinema. It quickly transplants its hero from the deathless New York to the backwoods of Louisiana, and the film follows him. It becomes a tale of Southern conjuration, a capsule of thought that reconnects the mystique of the urban nightmare with the cruelty and majesty of the rural areas of American imagination from whence those cities grew out of the earth. 
Italian cinema has always been a murderer’s row of contorted stylistic bravado. From elemental Western no man’s lands to diabolically garish horror cinema to rambunctiously loopy, absurdist comedy, Italian cinema has done it all. Yet the streams of neo-realism, the earliest well of Italian cinema, had largely dried up by the 1970s. Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s Padre Padrone nominally recaptures that spirit of earthen woe and low-to-the-ground cinema, but their style is more cosmically barren than it is naturalistic. The oppressively wide frames contrast with the grisly immediacy of the 16mm stock to evoke the sensation of peering into an empty limbo of human loneliness. The earthen hues of the piece reveal the contagious habits of the almost primordial landscape that infects the characters with its own unforgiving dejection. 
The Long Take 