obsession

Deep End

by James McNally on November 2, 2011

in DVD

Deep End
BFI Flipside released Deep End in a combo DVD/Blu-ray package in the UK on July 18, 2011. The region-free package is avail­able from Amazon.co.uk.

Deep End (Director: Jerzy Skolimowski): Somewhat con­demned to art­house obscurity after its 1970 release, Skolimowski’s first film in English (prior to this he was best-known as the co-writer, with Roman Polanski, of Knife in the Water) is a fas­cin­ating time cap­sule of a period between the hope and energy of the 1960s and the rather more dark decade to come. A stylish exer­cise from a dir­ector who has at various times in his life worked as a poet and painter, its nar­rative of adoles­cent obses­sion ends up being far more visu­ally impressive than psy­cho­lo­gic­ally convincing.

Fifteen-year-old Mike (John Moulder-Brown) drops out of school and takes a job as an attendant at a slightly seedy public bath­house in London. Almost imme­di­ately he is smitten by his spunky and street­wise col­league. Flame-haired Susan (Jane Asher) is in her early 20s and engaged, but not in any par­tic­ular hurry to get to the altar. In fact, she’s car­rying on an affair with one of Mike’s former teachers, a mar­ried man who gropes and man­handles his female stu­dents at will.

Mike is imme­di­ately jealous of both of the other men, and car­ries out childish acts of sab­otage when he’s not stomping off in a sulk. Susan’s beha­viour doesn’t help, since her flir­ta­tion often has a cruel edge. She seems to enjoy drawing him close and then pushing him away. Meanwhile, at the baths, she instructs Mike to accept tips from the female cus­tomers for any “extra ser­vices” he can provide. We’re never quite sure that she isn’t doing the same for the men, and when, during a sur­real night in Soho, Mike seems to learn that his crush might also be working as a stripper, it pushes him closer and closer to the edge of accept­able beha­viour. It’s a line that we know is def­in­itely going to be crossed by the end.

BFI’s res­tor­a­tion of the film is remark­able, and since most of the film’s appeal is visual, it makes for a stun­ning present­a­tion, espe­cially on Blu-ray. Also enlight­ening is a feature-length (74 minutes) doc­u­mentary on the making of the film, with input from Skolimowski, Asher, Moulder-Brown and many others. There’s also a short film star­ring Asher exploring obses­sion from a female per­spective, as well as another short doc­u­mentary about scenes which weren’t included in the film. Finally, a sub­stan­tial booklet is included with essays from David Thompson, Yvonne Tasker and Skolimowski expert Ewa Mazierska.

While I appre­ci­ated the film’s daring visuals and the theme of adoles­cent sexual obses­sion, I found the script weak and the per­form­ances uneven. In a few places (par­tic­u­larly one scene with former blonde bomb­shell Diana Dors), the film played like a classic British sex farce in the manner of the Carry On films, making its third act turn into darker ter­ritory some­what jar­ring. But the leads are beau­tiful to look at, as is London (even though much of the film was actu­ally shot in Munich!) and the soundtrack (with songs by Cat Stevens and Can) evokes a time and place that per­fectly suits our protagonist’s tragic loss of innocence.

Tagged as: 1970, adolescence, obsession, uk

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Woodpecker

by James McNally on November 19, 2009

in DVD

Woodpecker
Woodpecker is avail­able on DVD from Carnivalesque Films. You can buy the film dir­ectly from their web site.

Woodpecker (Director: Alex Karpovsky): Hope, Emily Dickinson taught us, is the thing with feathers:

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I’ve heard it in the chil­liest land
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

— Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)

Perhaps it’s fit­ting, then, that the sub­ject of Johnny Neander’s quest is a bird: the legendary Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, last spotted in the 1940s. A rash of recent sight­ings near the town of Brinkley, Arkansas bring part-time house painter and ama­teur poet Johnny and his silent pal Wesley to town, where they will attempt to be the first people to obtain doc­u­mentary proof of the woodpecker’s return. Making a comeback when you seem to be gone forever turns out to be a central theme of this unusual film. Shooting in a documentary-fiction hybrid, Karpovsky gradu­ally moves from one to the other as we learn more about our central char­acter. When the film begins, Johnny is just one among a number of bird­watchers and locals talking about the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker. We hear from local people, many of whom are delighted that the atten­tion has brought tour­ists and busi­ness back to their dying town, but a few who resent the res­ulting pro­tec­tion of the bird’s hab­itat, denying them the right to hunt ducks there. Within a few weeks, how­ever, it seems like most of the searchers have given up and gone home. Well, except for Johnny and Wes.

We soon learn that this is much more than a bird­watching exped­i­tion for Johnny. It becomes a quest for per­sonal redemp­tion, and as he trudges through the bayou with the hap­less Wes in tow, we are treated to his incessant philo­soph­ical chat­tering and poetry read­ings. While they are indeed hil­arious, as the days go by, we begin to sense the des­per­a­tion and sad­ness in the men’s quest. Though Wes is strictly a sidekick, we learn that he’s there due to his own per­sonal tragedy. Johnny just doesn’t want to be a loser any­more, and his dis­com­fort with his own life makes him yearn for the freedom that birds seem to enjoy.

The clever thing is that the wood­pecker can so easily stand in for almost any other elu­sive thing that humans search for. Karpovsky could easily have set the film in, say, Roswell, New Mexico and had his prot­ag­onist searching for aliens. But that would have been going for easy laughs at his character’s expense. Instead, the film offers many poignant moments that allow us to identify with Johnny. By the second half of the film, we’re almost in Waiting for Godot ter­ritory, where the absurdity is tightly wrapped up with the over­whelming longing for tran­scend­ence that many of us feel. In fact, it’s no sur­prise at all that the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker’s nick­name is “Lord God Bird.” The mix­ture of comedy and mel­an­choly works better in my mind, in fact, than the hybrid of doc­u­mentary and fic­tion, which begins to feel a bit unwieldy as soon as we’ve formed an emo­tional attach­ment to Johnny and Wes.

Perhaps fit­tingly, Johnny is played by an actor (Jon e. Hyrns) whom Karpovsky dis­covered in a doc­u­mentary (Johnny Berlin) made about his career as a porter on a 1930s Pullman railway car. Hyrns, who co-wrote the script, is not sur­pris­ingly also a nov­elist, and his storytelling gifts serve the film well.

One of the script’s greatest achieve­ments, in my mind, is in the pitch-perfect poetry that Johnny writes about birds. Of course, the poems are hil­arious, but at the same time they pos­sess a heart­felt hon­esty that, while not on a level with Emily Dickinson, man­ages to convey the pain that Johnny is so des­perate to escape. The entire film is a suc­cessful blending of comedy and pathos that lets us cel­eb­rate hope, no matter how crazy.

Official site of the film

8/10(8/10)

Tagged as: birdwatching, hope, independent, obsession

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