Tag Archives: weird foreign film

That Obscure Object of Desire (1977)

I always knew I was not good with faces, but I didn’t realize just how bad I was until I watched That Obscure Object of Desire. It was only after I finished watching the movie and read a review on it that I found out that Conchita was played by two different actresses, Carole Bouquet and Angela Molina, in regularly alternating scenes. Once I read that, I could immediately remember the difference, though I had not noticed it at the time. In fact, there was even a scene in which a third woman, who happened to also be a brunette, made an appearance, and I thought she was Conchita too. Apparently the purpose was to have one actress play Conchita when she wants to have sex and the other actress when she does not.

Anyway, we see some terrorism.

Then, Mathieu (Fernando Rey), a middle-aged man, tries to seduce Conchita, his maid, on her first day on the job, which is creepy (today we would call it sexual harassment). She quits as a result, but he keeps pursuing her (today we would call it stalking).

And then we see some more terrorism.

Our disgust for him as a lecher soon turns to pity, because she keeps egging him on, promising, enticing, getting naked, rubbing her body on him, but he must not have sex with her, because she is virgin and she is saving herself for him and that ought to be enough for him and besides, what kind of girl does he think she is anyway?

More terrorism.

The movie proves there is no fool like an old fool, because he buys her a house to win her love, but she locks him out and has sex with her lover while he watches from outside.

You guessed it, some more terrorism.

He finally gets fed up and says he knows God will never forgive her. But then he forgives her, and they get back together. But wait! They start arguing again. Suddenly a bomb goes off in the marketplace blowing them to bits.

Thank goodness for terrorism.

Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932)

 

I suppose Boudu Saved from Drowning is a funny movie, if your idea of funny is someone behaving in an atrocious manner, while those around him keep letting him get away with it. The title character is saved from drowning (attempted suicide), and he is taken into the home of the bookseller who saved him. He then proceeds to deliberately wreck everything he comes into contact with, while exhibiting disgusting mannerisms. Thirty minutes into the film, you’ll wish the bookseller had let him drown. Forty minutes in, and you’ll be ready to hold his head under the water until he quits struggling.

The bookseller’s wife is a sourpuss, so Boudu rapes her and puts a smile on her face. I felt like a sourpuss watching this movie, and I felt violated by it. But unlike the wife, I did not smile.

Swept Away (1974)

In Swept Away, Raffaella (Mariangelo Melato), who is a rich woman, her husband, and their rich friends rent a yacht and go sailing in the Mediterranean. She and her husband carry on screaming arguments about political ideology, with Raffaella expressing her fascist views with much vehemence. We all expect Italians in movies to be passionate, but we have never seen anything like this. Gennarino (Giancarlo Giannini) is a deckhand and a communist, whom she treats like dirt.

When Raffaella and Gennarino get stranded on a deserted island, he decides to reverse roles with a vengeance. He beats her into submission, forcing her to call him Signor Carunchio, while calling her Raffaella (when not calling her a bitch or an industrial whore), instead of Signora Lanzetti, as he did on board the yacht. Then, when all this verbal and physical abuse has finally made her want him to ravish her brutally, he says that is not enough. She must tell him she loves him, kiss his feet, and worship him like a god. She actually does kiss his feet and submit to him totally, falling madly in love with him. But he still beats her whenever she misbehaves, as when she presumes to think instead of doing what she is told.

This may be a minor point, but it is odd that Gennarino, the communist, believes that women should be totally subservient to men, which we would be more likely to associate with fascism.

Anyway, the day finally arrives when a boat comes within sight of the island. Raffaella does not want to signal them because she fears being rescued might spoil their happiness. But Gennarino believes that only if they are rescued can he be sure that she truly loves him. Once rescued, Raffaella might have been able to thwart public opinion and marry Gennarino, but when she sees him being greeted by his wife, who talks about their children, she has misgivings. But given Gennarino’s attitude toward women, why should he care about what happens to his wife? He wants Raffaella to go back and live on the island with him, but she decides against it. He reverts to calling her a bitch and an industrial whore.

Because this is supposed to be a comedy, we hesitate to take all this Mediterranean misogyny too seriously, but there simply is not enough humor in this movie to overcome the revulsion we feel at the way he treats her, especially since the movie seems to prove he is right in believing that a man can make a woman love him by degrading her and beating her.

Cries & Whispers (1972)

Cries & Whispers, a movie by Ingmar Bergman, would have been a good one for Mystery Science Theater 3000 to take up. After all, if this movie is going to have characters stand around not saying very much, and then have them sit around not saying very much, and then have one of them lie in bed dying of cancer and not saying very much, and then have two women talk to each other without giving us the benefit of hearing what they are saying, the MST3K team might just as well have supplied some dialogue and commentary.

I can just imagine Joel Robinson, Crow T. Robot, and Tom Servo giving us the benefit of their riffing.

Two sisters seem to have a thing for each other.

[Joel:  Lesbian incest!  My favorite.]

A man plunges a dagger with a six-inch blade into his abdomen because his wife has humiliated him by having sex with another man.  Then, with the blade still in his gut, he asks his wife to help him.

[Crow:  “Could you give me a hand, Dear?  I’m stuck.”]

A woman tells her maid to quit looking at her just before she gets completely naked while her maid looks at her.

[Tom Servo:  “She’s just begging me to watch.”]

The maid gets half naked, gets in bed with the cancer victim, and holds her head to her breasts.

[Joel:  But she doesn’t do windows.]

A woman picks up a piece of broken glass and shoves it up her vagina.  Then she goes into the bedroom, gets in bed, raises her nightgown, spreads her legs wide open so her husband can view the bloody vulva, while she smears blood all over her smiling face.

[Crow:  “You don’t mind making love to me while I’m having my period, do you?”]

It would be just another fun-filled episode on the Satellite of Love.

Orpheus (1950) and Black Orpheus (1959)

Orpheus is a French film directed by Jean Cocteau.  It is based on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, set contemporaneously in France.  The movie begins in The Poet’s Café, where a bunch of hoodlum poets hang out. Orpheus (Jean Marais) is hated by the rest of the poets in the café, because his poetry is so much better than theirs. A fight breaks out among the poets, just the way you and I might get into a fight over some poems we had written. Other poets join in, and it becomes a riot. Orpheus is almost arrested, but the policeman lets him go when he realizes who he is. In fact, the policeman is surprised he didn’t recognize Orpheus, since there are lots of pictures of him in his wife’s room (Oh, brother!).

Anyway, Orpheus is a grouch who is mean to his wife, Eurydice (Marie Déa), but we are supposed to understand that he is a genius who has his moods, and so that makes it all right. Death (María Casares), in the form of a hot babe, kills Eurydice, and down she goes to Hades.  Instead of being grief stricken, however, Orpheus falls in love with Death. But he can’t get rid of his wife that easily. The old ball-and-chain is allowed to follow Orpheus back from the underworld to the surface as long as he does not look at her. Well, he never seemed to want to look at her when she was alive, so I don’t know why he would want to look at her now, but he does. In fact, he cares so little for her that I suspect he looked at her on purpose so he could be free to make it with Death, the hot babe.

And it almost works, except that we are then treated to an outrageous narrative rupture, in which Orpheus and Eurydice live happily ever after.

As for Black Orpheus, another French movie based on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, if you decide to watch this one, I hope you like dancing, because that is what half the movie is, and it is monotonous, repetitive dancing to monotonous, repetitive music.

In this version of the myth, set in contemporary times in Rio de Janeiro, Orfeo (Breno Mello) asks his girlfriend Mira (Lourdes de Oliveira) to marry him, and then on the same day, he meets Eurydice (Marpessa Dawn) and has sex with her. Then, instead of at least breaking off his engagement, he just dances with Eurydice at the carnival right in front of Mira. So, he’s a louse, right? Wrong. The movie wants us to like Orfeo and despise Mira. You figure it out.

Anyway, there is a guy running around with a death mask on who wants to kill Eurydice and eventually succeeds. We don’t know why, because she says she never had anything to do with him. I guess we are supposed to accept this as mythologically inevitable. Or, you can just assume the guy is wearing a hockey mask.

Murmur of the Heart (1971)

Set in France in the 1950s, Murmur of the Heart is a coming of age story about an obnoxious fourteen-year-old boy, Laurent Chevalier (Benoit Ferreux).  He has two brothers almost as obnoxious as he is and a father who is not bad in the obnoxious department himself. His mother is Clara (Lea Massari), who seems to be a nice, warm-hearted, loving person.She needs to ditch that family, but when she gets the chance to run off with her lover, who is just as obnoxious as her family, I guess she figures, “What’s the point?” and doesn’t bother.

There are a lot of miscellaneous plot points involving the First Indochina War, a priest, a brothel, and a heart murmur, all which manage to get Clara and Laurent into a situation where they will have to share a hotel room.  Because Clara is so affectionate and sensual, we quickly figure out that we are being prepared fora little oedipal hanky-panky. Now, if this were a Hollywood movie in which a boy had sex with his mother, he would turn into some kind of Norman Bates psycho.  But this movie was made in France, which means we are watching a weird foreign film, which means the incestuous affair will probably be a deep, meaningful, transformative experience for the lad. I assumed that as a result of this, he would stop being obnoxious and start being nice, warm-hearted, and loving, just like her. Nope. By the end of the movie,he is still his same old rotten self.

Before they have sex, his mother says that they will just do it one time, and then they will never talk about it again. Oh sure! For all her worldly experience, she does not seem to know much about men. You can’t give them a taste and expect them to go away and forget about how good it was.She had a husband who was very jealous when they were first in love, and she had a lover who was very jealous, and now she thinks her son won’t end up being a jealous lover too? Of course, the movie indicates that they will forget about the fact that they had sex, because Louis Malle, the writer and director,wanted it that way. But it’s not realistic, so don’t try this at home.

Not that I would know personally, but I suspect that having sex with your mother would be enough excitement for one evening. But as soon as Clara falls asleep, Laurent gets dressed and heads on down the hall for a little action with someone his own age. He wakes up one girl, comes on to her like an insufferable jerk, and when she runs him off, he heads on down the hall to the next one, where, for some mysterious reason, he actually scores.  The point of this is that he is now a man of the world who has a way with women.  I guess doing it with Mom was a transformative experience after all.

In a time when gender equality is the ideal, the double standard regarding the sexes is looked upon with disfavor. This movie makes us realize that in some respects, the double standard will never be completely eliminated, nor should it. Just imagine a similar movie, but one in which a man has sex with his fourteen-year-old daughter, which the movie would have us regard as being a meaningful act of love. Actually, you don’t have to imagine it, because the movie Beau Pere (1981) is pretty much just that, except that the man is her stepfather.  Needless to say, it was made in France.

Finally, because Laurent is Catholic, I could not help trying to imagine how his next confession is going to go. I wonder how many Hail Marys you have to say for having sex with your mother.

Jules and Jim (1962)

Jules and Jim is one of those foreign films that the critics rave about, directed by François Truffaut, one of those directors that critics rave about, and so, in keeping with the idea that I should be knowledgeable about such movies and directors, I decided one afternoon that it was high time I viewed this masterpiece.

Oscar Werner and Henri Serre are the Jules and Jim of the title.  They are friends.  They meet a woman named Catherine (Jeanne Moreau), whom they both fall in love with. She carries a bottle of sulfuric acid around with her to throw in the eyes of men who lie to her.

Stop right there. There is no need to go any further. You now know everything there is to know about Catherine. She’s insane! Long after I have forgotten the rest of what happens in this movie, long after I have forgotten who starred in it, and long after I have forgotten the very title of this movie, I will remember that. And yet, strangely enough, it appears to be the one thing that everyone else has forgotten. I have searched through the reviews of many critics, professional and amateur, but this all-important fact about Catherine hardly ever gets mentioned, let alone treated as having any significance. The question is, Why do so many people who watch this movie seem to think that this business with the acid is too unimportant to mention?

Had I been Jim, as soon as I found out about that bottle of acid, I would have walked right out the door and never had anything to do with her again. In fact, for the next six months, I would have been peeking out of my apartment window to see if she was lurking about with that bottle of hers, just in case she was holding a grudge against me for refusing to have anything to do with her again. Instead, Jim simply talks her into getting rid of it, figuring that will make everything all right. But that is like thinking that if you take the butcher knife away from Norman Bates in Psycho (1960), there is nothing to worry about anymore. Speaking of Psycho, the premise of a man-hating woman who carries around a bottle of sulfuric acid to splash into the eyes of any man who lies to her could be the basis of a pretty good horror movie, and maybe even become a cult film like Ms. 45 (1981), but that is not what we have here. In any event, with regret, saying, “I was really counting on using this bottle,” Catherine pours the acid into the sink. She does not bother to turn on the water so that the acid will be flushed out of the system, so we see the vapors rising as the acid eats into the sink as she and Jim walk out the door.

As I was saying, Jim is not worried, and Jules even marries her. In all fairness to Jules, he may not have known anything about that bottle of acid, because Jim seemed so unconcerned that he may not have bothered to tell him about it. Catherine cuckolds Jules again and again, but fortunately for her, he is a doormat, and not the kind of guy who would throw sulfuric acid in a woman’s eyes for cheating on him. Since she is having sex with other men, she naturally stops having sex with Jules, but the only thing he worries about is that she might leave him. In fact, he is so afraid of losing Catherine that he encourages Jim to have sex with her on condition that Jim will let Jules see her once in a while. Better than that, Jim moves right into their home and starts sleeping with her, so now Jules can see her all the time.

Catherine wants to leave Jules and marry Jim, but Jim gets fed up with her nonsense and refuses to marry her, so she pulls out a pistol and tries to shoot him. He manages to get away, but he still has not learned his lesson, which is to stay away from that nutcase, because when Catherine and Jules run into Jim some time later, all has been forgotten, and they are all best friends again. Catherine talks Jim into getting in a car with her, and then she purposely drives off a bridge and kills them both. Poor Jules, he probably feels all left out.

To return to my question as to why so many people seem to discount the bottle of acid, I think that it has something to do with the mindset of people who know they are watching a foreign film. In a Hollywood movie, something like that could never be ignored, and the audience would be horrified. But when it comes to watching a foreign film, people tend to think of everything as being symbolic, or as having some kind of deep, philosophical meaning, and so things like that are not really taken as having literal significance.