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Tuesday, July 28, 2009
BD impressions: Switchblade Romance
11:40 AM / BD Impressions / 
21 Comments
Oh dear. The second of our Monday night horror movie BD double bill, Haute Tension (I refuse to call this film by its UK title) may be considerably better than Hush in every aspect of its execution, but ironically leaves a far more sour taste in the mouth because it falls so far from grace in its final 15 minutes, turning what could have been one of the best examples of the recent wave of French horror into one that assumes its audience consists of gullible idiots and propogates a nasty stereotype that reveals just how ignorant the director is.
Spoilers below (mouse over to view):
Yep, it's our old friend the mad homicidal lesbian, a cliché that turns up without fail in just avoid every genre of every artform. In a twist that I'm sure writer/director Alexandre Aja thought was highly original, it's revealed that the protagonist of the story, a young woman who goes to stay with her best friend's family in a secluded farmhouse and witnesses them being butchered by a maniac, is in fact the killer. That's right, forget everything you saw - that overweight, overall-clad, middle-aged man is in fact supposed to represent our heroine, a barely repressed lesbian who has a thing for her best friend and, when said friend doesn't respond to her advances, decides butcher her whole family in revenge. (She conjures up this doppelganger while having a wank after spying on her friend in the shower, in case you're wondering. This is one classy motion picture!) Never mind that none of this makes a lick of sense, given that the grand reveal completely contradicts everything that came before it - Aja clearly saw Fight Club and thought "What an absolutely wonderful twist! No-one will see it coming!" In a sense, he was probably right, because he doesn't play fair, not even for a second. At least you can rewatch Fight Club and just about see how Edward Norton and Brad Pitt could be different manifestations of the same person. Rewatching Haunte Tension and knowing in advance how it would turn out, I found myself mentally cataloguing every instance where Aja doesn't play fair.
More or less problematic, depending on how you feel about it, is what the film appears to be saying. Now, as my brother said to me last night (after we both calmed down and stopped shouting at the projector), I doubt any deliberate malice was intended, but appearances are everything. Reading between the lines, the film seems to convey that lesbians are in fact men trapped in women's bodies, a moronic notion that was supposed to have been laid to rest a century ago. Bloodthirsty, homicidal men who delight in killing men, women, children and dogs, at that. Luckily, of course (insert eye-roll here), order is restored and that crazy dyke is banished to an insane asylum. Whew! Thank God for that, eh?
Image quality: There's not much that can be said in favour of this disc, which, like the DVD before it, suffers from some of the worst dynamic range compression I've ever seen. Shadow detail is non-existent - just what we need with a film taking place primarily at night - and whites are clipped to hell too. Seriously, at times it looks like a camcorded bootleg, the greyscale is so bad... not that any of us have any idea what one of those looks like, eh? Detail isn't particularly impressive, either, making this a far less pronounced upgrade over the DVD than most of us would have liked. Oh, and to add insult to injury, Optimum have opted to drop all of the bonus features that accompanied the DVD. 4/10
Switchblade Romance
studio: Optimum; country: UK; region code: B; codec: AVC;
file size: 17.6 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 27.89 Mbit/sec
21 Comments
I didn't realise The Uninvited was the remake of A Tale of Two Sisters. I knew that such a woeful project was in the pipeline since shortly after I saw the original (excellent movie, incidentally), but wow, this just makes me even less likely to see something that was barely on my radar to begin with.
(Posted on Tuesday, July 28, 2009 at 4:35 PM)
Peter:
I'm afraid that doesn't really hold water for me. My problem is that there are too many moments which require the two characters to be in different places at the same time, the prime example being when Marie steals the yellow sports car from the garage and chases after the killer, then ends up crashing it. If she was the killer, she couldn't have driven the sports car. Therefore, she couldn't have crashed it. Therefore, she couldn't have got that cut on her face.
Likewise, where does the killer's old metal van come from? Did Marie happen to bring it with her for that purpose, despite seemingly having driven a considerable distance with Alex to get to her parents' house? If the killer had indeed butchered several other girls, as is strongly implied (including the decapitated one we saw him using for a blowjob), when did she do this? Why did the killer ring the doorbell before embarking on his killing spree? If he and Marie were the same person, then she would already have been in the house.
And so on and so forth...
(Posted on Wednesday, July 29, 2009 at 6:11 PM)
Kentai:
I still don't buy it, but that's a more plausible explanation than any I've heard before.
By the way, I should probably make it clear that I don't think the film is crap. I feel that the twist scuppers it completely, but what precedes it is incredibly gripping and tense, and well executed on just about every level. The problem is that the first 70 minutes are so good that everything, from the moment that heroine and killer are revealed to be the same person, feels like a slap in the face.
(Posted on Thursday, July 30, 2009 at 10:06 AM)
Tulipano:
"The movie doesn't cheat, it just tells the story mostly from Marie's point of view."
Well, that sounds like a cheat to me. Presenting the audience one version events without providing sufficient evidence for them to work out that it isn't the true version is, in my opinion, not playing fair. What's next? "I had the strangest dream last night"?
"And the homicidal lesbian theory...Yeah I'm sure that was on Aja's mind."
Ah, the "it wasn't meant to be a cliché" argument. What it was or wasn't meant to be doesn't change what it is. Artistic intent can only take you so far. For instance, I'm pretty sure directors like Uwe Boll don't set out to make dreadful movies, but they are nevertheless. Once a filmmaker commits his work to celluloid, it's out of his hands and therefore open to interpretation. As I said in my original post, I highly doubt that Aja set out to make such statements, but these statements comes across nevertheless. I don't see him as malicious, just ignorant of the stereotype he was disseminating.
(Posted on Thursday, July 30, 2009 at 10:48 AM)
Can you provide some examples of this evidence? The only instance that occurred to me was at the start, when she said she'd been dreaming about chasing herself, which is hardly sufficient. (And it in itself is also a cheat of sorts, because for some reason in the dream sequence Aja replaces Alex with Marie, which makes absolutely no sense narrative-wise.)
"So you can't use a lesbian as the killer cause it will send a message all lesbians are insane killers? Huh? I probably missed that class. Is an overweight, overall-clad middle-aged male ok for the killer or will that send a message as well? I better not buy any overalls ;)"
Last time I checked, overweight, overall-clad middle-aged males didn't have a history of being repressed, victimised and continually portrayed in films, television and literature as deranged, psychopathic murderers. Whenever you take an under-represented minority and continually portray them in the same (negative) manner, you not only reinforce nasty stereotypes, you also become boring and clichéd very quickly.
(Posted on Thursday, July 30, 2009 at 12:47 PM)
** Spoilers for Fight Club, Mulholland Dr. and Swimming Pool follow **
Thanks for the list, Tulipano. I can certainly buy some of these pointers; others are pushing it something rotten. I must ask this, though: how many of these are actually likely to be noticed by even the most observant individual on a first viewing? To me, the mark of a film that pulls off a twist successfully is one that has you going "Aaaaah! I get it!" in realisation once said twist is revealed. Very few of the items on the list are things whose significance could possibly be guessed by a viewer without prior knowledge of the outcome. Anyway, I'd argue that many of them reek of the same sort of "looking for 'hidden' messages" that you accuse me of. I mean seriously, the "Audaces Solum" bit? The phrase that spring to mind here is "over-analysis". "Desperately trying to make a square peg fit a round hole" is another.
In any event, these intances that support the theory of the heroine and killer being the same person are completely overshadowed by the vastly greater number of instances which imply the exact opposite. For instance, she conjures up the killer while pleasuring herself, and yet we've already seen him long before this, tossing the decapitated head of a prior murder victim out the window of his car. And I still contend that such misleads as having the killer ring the doorbell (or knock, I forget which) to be let in, not to mention introducing a sports car and playing out a car chase, collision and crash that we are expected to believe take place entirely within Marie's imagination, are complete cheats. In my opinion Aja simply wrote a bog standard (but highly proficient) slasher movie and then decided to tack on a twist ending because he thought it would make his script stand out from the pack, and perhaps win a few plaudits from the sort of viewers who were surprised by the outcome of movies like Secret Window and Hide and Seek (and both of these films play far fairer than Haute Tension). He may have gone back and added in the odd hint here and there that all is not as it seems, but they're half-hearted at best.
To me, if you're going to attempt a scenario in which two people actually turn out to be the same person, it's simply not playing fair to show the audience numerous instances that would require them both to be in different places, or interacting with one another on a physical level. The "It was all in her head" excuse holds little water for me, because in effect that gives the filmmaker licence to simply toss any old thing up on the screen and then say "Oh, but that didn't really happen." The result is that the film has no internal consistency - it simply shows us a collection of events and then disavows them completely. Fight Club pulls off the twist much better, because David Fincher creates a few core rules and doesn't deviate from them. Yes, we see Edward Norton and Brad Pitt arguing with one another, but every single scene in which they both appear can be re-watched with the knowledge that they are one person, and it still holds up. In doing so, Fincher treats his audience with some degree of respect and doesn't resort to portraying impossible situations only to brush them off with the old "get out of jail free" clause of claiming that the protagonist was simply imagining them. Likewise, David Lynch's Mulholland Dr., in its first half, establishes a dreamlike atmosphere and a fantasy view of the world, gradually introducing elements that don't quite fit, so that when the dream narrative ends and "reality" takes over, we don't feel that we've been diddled. Ditto with François Ozon's Swimming Pool, which is admittedly a little more tenuous but at least sets up the narrative device of the imaginative author (Charlotte Rampling) right from the beginning so that we can just about believe that she concocted Ludivine Sagnier's character rather than actually meeting her (and is ambiguous enough to allow multiple interpretations). In contrast, Haute Tension tries to both have its cake and eat it, playing out as a straight slasher movie until it gets bored and throws in a completely unnecessary twist so it can pat itself on the back for being so clever.
(Posted on Thursday, July 30, 2009 at 4:16 PM)
To clarify, my complaint isn't so much that they aren't obvious, it's that many of them are tenuous in the extreme. For instance, the "blood on the feet" moment is not one that I remember, but I'd be more inclined to suggest that this was a continuity error. Likewise, the song "Runaway Girl" - so what? And as for Maria striking the killer in the same place as her own injury... um, she strikes him everywhere. She beats his face to a pulp (and seems to suffer few ill effects herself). By the way, any theory as to where all the scars on her back, which we see in the opening scene in the asylum, come from? I doubt these could have been self-inflicted.
With regard to a number of the other points, I think you're right - there probably are more indicators than I cared to admit. As I've already said, though, this doesn't change the fact that all of this is grossly outweighed by evidence which strongly points to Marie and the killer being two different people.
In a sense, I agree with you: the main problem is that Haute Tension is so good as a straightforward slasher movie that it doesn't need a twist. It's why for me the twist, when it occurs, feels like such a slap in the face. And no, I don't think it's a case of "not getting it". What is there to get? We're presented with a scenario in which a girl witnesses her friend's family being butchered by a homicidal maniac, only for it to be revealed that she is the killer. It's not rocket science. In fact, it's a lazy plot twist that's as old of the hills. It's honestly no wonder that this film frequently tops polls for worst twist endings.
I didn't feel cheated by A Tale of Two Sisters or Audition. Actually, I dispute the notion that there is anything in Audition to feel cheated about. To be on anything approaching the same level as Haute Tension in terms of cheap twists, it would have to be revealed that the male protagonist and the young woman were the same person, or something equally asinine. (I haven't, as of writing, seen Jacob's Ladder.)
PS. Time permitting, I'd like to continue the Giallo Project at some point. I can't make any promises, though.
(Posted on Thursday, July 30, 2009 at 7:09 PM)
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1. Todd S. Gallows said:
I guess you must feel the way I did when watching The Uninvitied another bland horror movie with the "un" prefix, and another bland asian horror remake. The original film, A Tale of Two Sisters does use a lot of the typical elements of asian horror. But what makes it stand out is its excellent cinematography and cold and gothic atmosphere. It also manages to go beyond being horror and functions almost as a drama. The Uninvited throws everything that was good about the original and turns it into a Scooby-Doo mystery/CW Sitcom. But the most infuriating part of it was its ending which attempts to be clever, but if you think a little harder, it makes the events of the movie make no sense at all.
If it's on your list of films to see some time, I won't spoil it for you. And if it does make it your way, watch A Tale of Two Sisters first.
(Posted on Tuesday, July 28, 2009 at 4:25 PM)